Still Waters

by John Moss

  “Yes, I was.”

  “Well?”

  “What? I forgot losing my virginity, Morgan. If time heals, why didn’t I forget enough to remember? All these years I never thought about it. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Time doesn’t heal. It creates scar tissue. I remember.”

  “You weren’t there!”

  “Losing my own —”

  “I don’t want to hear about it. God, Morgan!”

  “Sorry. I’m not too smart sometimes, but I have good instincts, and I’m sensitive.”

  “You’re relentlessly intelligent, Morgan, with the sensitivity of a watermelon.”

  “And?”

  “The instincts of an aardvark.”

  “Now that’s funny. So what do you think happened? Why did Molly suddenly leave town?”

  Miranda seemed from her benign expression as she faced the breeze drifting over the millpond to be almost passive, sorting things out, following things through. It was difficult, Morgan thought, to connect the dots when they were swarming like gnats or mosquitoes. You didn’t want to rush the design; it was all in the perception.

  “Did you notice that Detzler’s mill closed in 1988?” she suddenly asked. “That was the summer she was sixteen. Griffin left. Oxley bought the abandoned mill nine or ten years later. Yes, well. Then. No. Yes! Yes, they did. They did it! That last summer, that’s what happened!

  “At sixteen I wasn’t a foundling, but I was sixteen. You want desperately to know the limits of identity from the outside in … from the immeasurable genetic sea, to know the current that flows through your veins. Know what I mean? So you endlessly analyze your parents, you find them wanting. Maybe they were exchanged at your birth. But she had no parents at all, not even an origin myth, just a girl at the door with a baby, and a self-professed spinster and her old friend who pooled their affection to make a place for her in the world, but it wasn’t a place of her own.

  “So she turns to Griffin. She’d been pushing and pushing. He was like a great ugly mirror, but she could see herself in the glass. She was exploring her awakening sexuality, maybe skinny-dipping or sunning on the grass between the mill and the house. She loved her old granny, but she needed to know who she was, from the inside out as well as the outside in.

  “After summers of playing him, not knowing whether he was walleye or pike, fresh fish or foul, she needed to connect. She walked in on him literally. He was her prince, and he raped her, Morgan. There’s a precedent, there’s a pattern. He raped her inside the mill, in the shadows, on a cot on the planks over the watercourse, inside the mill. I know he raped her. And then he closed down the mill and left.”

  “And next?” he asked.

  “She was pregnant.”

  “Pregnant!”

  “Pregnant with Elizabeth Jill.”

  “Named after Elizabeth Clarke.”

  “Molly Bray went to the city.”

  “What happened?”

  “She tracked him down to his Rosedale mansion. It would have seemed like a mansion to her.”

  “And?”

  “Griffin sent her packing. Maybe he gave her some money. My guess is she spent the next few months on the street learning Toronto.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “There had to be a period of metamorphosis. Where else could she go? I know about metamorphosis, Morgan. I can imagine what she must have endured. You don’t just shuck off one identity and unfold your wings to dry in the air. Transformation is traumatic. There had to be time. She didn’t just pass from being a girl to being a woman during the course of her pregnancy. She remade herself …”

  “Became her own creation.”

  “She worked on it.”

  “No one was looking for her.”

  “Even if they had been, she was invisible.”

  “Seven thousand, maybe ten thousand kids on the streets last winter, just in TO.”

  Morgan took the statistics as a personal affront. When he was a kid in Cabbagetown, he had never seen street people. There was one old guy called Bert Shaver who lived in a cardboard shack in a ravine and did odd jobs for the poor in return for a meal. He never talked except to say thank you. The poor looked after their own, and the rich after theirs. And the government looked after the addicts and the damaged and the defectives in institutions.

  “The RCMP figures there are fifty thousand homeless kids in the country,” he said, his words taking flight. “There are some wee little kids caught up in porn rings and prostitution, kept out of sight by the worst of the creeps, pervs who get them on booze and drugs, eight-year-old drunks, ten-year-old hookers, kids who can talk their way around lawyers and cops and social workers, and have energy left to roll a john, cut up a derelict, do themselves down with the drugs of their choice.”

  Sometimes Miranda thought Morgan should have been a professor or a politician, but she realized he was too restless for either. He might have been a preacher, except for the part about God.

  “So,” she said, “Molly was on the street long enough to know she didn’t belong there. She went back to Robert Griffin’s place, determined to hold him responsible. She was no butterfly, not the iron butterfly she would become, but she was on her way. That’s what I would have done if I were her, which I wasn’t … I’m not.”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  “You saw her, Morgan. That was a woman in control of her life.”

  “And death.”

  “So it seems.”

  “Did she blackmail him? Was it extortion?”

  “It’s not extortion when he’s the father. It’s just negotiation.”

  “You think she could wield that much power? She was sixteen.”

  “Sixteen can be tough.”

  “I don’t think a few months on the streets, no matter how bad, empowers anyone that much,” said Morgan.

  “Something did. Maybe something innate. He set her up. There might have been a transition before Wychwood Park, an apartment or condo, and he hired Victoria, or she did, and she became Eleanor Drummond. Without abandoning Molly Bray she brought up Elizabeth Jill to be a very together young woman.” She corrected herself. “Girl, she’s still a girl.”

  “We can’t even be certain Robert Griffin was the father.”

  “You can bank on it, Morgan.”

  11

  Shiners

  They talked very little on the way back from Waldron. Miranda needed to assimilate her imagined account with the facts. Morgan was uneasy about how her assumptions made her seem vulnerable. There were still the circumstances of a suicide-murder to be resolved. He feared for her if she turned out to be at the centre.

  Cutting down from the 401, Miranda asked if he wanted to be dropped off at his place in the Annex. He told her yes if it wasn’t out of her way.

  “I’ve never understood why people say that, Morgan. Since I’m going to check in on Jill before I go home, it’s considerably out of my way.”

  “Margot Kidder.”

  “What?”

  “Lois Lane — that’s who would play you in the movie. When she was quite a bit younger.”

  “What movie?”

  “Don’t you cast yourself in movies?”

  “Yes. But I cast myself. I’d play me. Isn’t that the point?”

  “Sandra Bullock?”

  “You just want to wear tights.”

  “Tights?”

  “Lois Lane, Superman, changing in phone booths. Maybe Kate Nelligan.”

  “If you couldn’t be you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t it sometimes feel like you’re watching yourself in a film, like someone else is calling the shots?”

  “It’s called dissociation, Morgan. Or Calvinism. And who would be you? Gene Hackman, right? All men want to be Denzel Washington or Gene Hackman, no?”

  “You might as well be someone you like.”

  “Aren’t you already?” As soon as she spoke, she realized she was offside. As comfortable as he was with hi
mself, that wasn’t who he wanted to be. No one really wanted to be himself, or herself, she thought.

  She wheeled up in front of his house. There were still a few kids hanging out, playing hopscotch, two girls and a boy skipping rope. In the heart of the city and down-at-heels trendy, the Annex tried its best to be a neighbourhood. “Here we are, Morgan. Home is the hunter.”

  “You want to come in?”

  “Not on your life. No, I’ve got to check in on Jill. She’s too calm.”

  “It’s her Eleanor Drummond side.”

  “She’s pure Molly Bray.”

  “I hope so for her sake.”

  “Would you help me put the top up?”

  He got out and undid the snaps on the tonneau cover, folded it, and tucked it behind the seats. The car looked black in this light. In the sunlight it was racing green. He hauled the top out of its well, and Miranda reached up and pulled it over and down, clinching it into place.

  “Thanks, Morgan,” she said through the window. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  He surprised them both by getting back in the car.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. Are you?”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  He gazed at her in the ambient light of the city, in the glow of the instrument panel. Dark illuminated circles in the burled walnut exuded a faint violet that caught in the highlights of her eyes.

  She reached over and touched his hand. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Miranda, the girl, Molly Bray, whatever she did, and you’re only guessing, she didn’t learn anything from you. And neither did Griffin.”

  She looked startled, as if Morgan had exposed something she hadn’t yet confronted herself.

  “Whatever happened between you and Griffin, you in no way, no way, empowered him to try it again.”

  Miranda realized pattern formation was a way of taking the blame on herself, using her own sense of guilt to obscure Griffin’s depravity, which she felt was somehow her fault.

  Morgan observed her watching him, the violet highlights in her eyes cryptic, as if she were waiting to hear him out before passing judgment, which could go several ways. She could be angry or hurt, or possibly relieved, or resentful for being exposed.

  “Listen,” he said, “you had similar needs. That doesn’t mean you were the same.”

  At first she thought he meant her and Griffin.

  “You talked about the absence of parents catching up on her. Miranda, your father left you just when you hit puberty.”

  “He died, for goodness’ sake.”

  “At fourteen you held him responsible. No amount of love or anger could bring him back, no amount of crying or wishing changed anything. I know from how little you talk about it how much it hurt you, his leaving. Your mother and sister had each other. Your father left you alone.”

  The violet in her eyes glistened.

  “By the pond …” He hesitated.

  “You didn’t know you were being watched until that summer when you were seventeen. You didn’t know if anyone was there for sure, but the possibility excited you. What was Celia’s reaction? She got married. Donny was her way of proving she was normal. Griffin scared her into doing what she was going to do, anyway.

  “You went back there on your own. Why? It wasn’t about sex. For the first time since your father died your behaviour, Miranda, determined the quality of existence of someone else, an adult, a male. It was no more sexual at first than a teenage girl’s love for her father. Intimacy, without any threat of encroachment. You went back again and again. It gave you the sense you could make anything happen.

  “Lying there butt-naked, bare-assed in the grass, you were celebrating being Miranda. You were cavorting, disporting, with fate. Robert Griffin was essential to the scene. That he was Robert Griffin was irrelevant, or maybe not. Maybe if you knew he was the mill owner, it was even better. It gave you more power. He was a grown-up, a man, at your mercy, and you were merciless. You were merciless that August challenging death.

  “But you were also afraid you were being manipulated by your unseen observer, that it was his desire making you return to play out what must have seemed a charade in a foreign language, afraid that it was your desire to please him. You were merciless, Miranda, merciless in judging yourself, your brand-new sexuality.

  “Through the next year you found your kissy-face boyfriend who didn’t like sex. Perfect. Daniel Webster kept you safe among words, gave you a context to let your confusion run free.

  “And you got older, fall, winter, spring, and nothing was resolved. When you returned the next summer, it was a very deliberate act. You were eighteen, a young woman, you walked by the mill, you knew he would see you, you went back to prove once and for all you were responsible for your own fate. It wasn’t sexual that day. It was all about contesting the limits of power, maybe defining the limits of being.

  “And he followed you. He was supposed to be your necessary witness. It wasn’t meant to be a trial by fire, nor law, but he became judge and executioner. He intruded in the negotiations with yourself. He violated your relationship with your father, what was left of him in your heart. And he brutalized your capacity for being open to love. He raped you, Miranda, and left you bleeding inside, with a great wound, a gap in your life that only began healing in the last few days since the predator died.”

  “David.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “G’night, Miranda.”

  “G’night, David. See you tomorrow. It’s buck-naked, Morgan, not butt-naked. And I wasn’t.”

  “Good night, Miranda.”

  “Good night.”

  As he unlocked his front door, Morgan was startled by his reflection hovering within the depths of paint in the evening light, and then reassured. He had given the door fourteen coats of midnight blue, sanding lightly between each coat until the depthless patina gleamed like a Georgian doorway in Dublin. He had done that a dozen years ago, and still approached it like a welcoming friend, whatever his mood, whatever time of day or night he came home.

  His house was red brick, a neighbourhood sort of home that had been bought by a contractor and turned into an agglomeration of condos that related to each other like disparate planes in an M.C. Escher drawing. His own place was partly on the second floor but extended via an open-concept stairwell with a wrought-iron staircase up to a third-floor loft. That was his garret bedroom. His kitchen, toward the back of the building, dropped half a storey to accommodate the entryway into another apartment from cantilevered steps up the side of the building over the driveway. He prided himself on not knowing just what fitted where or how many people actually shared the house with him. Not that it mattered. The building was well constructed, the renovations were sound, and his place was sepulchral, unless the shared furnace was running, which sent a hush through the air.

  Morgan walked across the living room without turning on the lights. The two-storey window that dominated the front wall, between the foyer and the far-side wall of exposed brick, let in enough city light that he could see his way through the intricacies of modular spaces envisioned by the builder fifteen years ago as urban chic. Two banks of vertical blinds had been installed, but since Morgan first moved in while reconstruction was still going on, neither set had worked. The upper bank stayed permanently closed, which was fine, giving him privacy in his garret loft and a modicum of darkness for sleeping. The lower bank was irreparably open. His neighbours could look in if they wished, just as he could see them, but by urban convention they lived their lives as if neither could observe the other, as if their pre-dawn and evening activities were privy to themselves alone.

  He picked up the remote in the darkness and flicked on the television, then without waiting to see what was on went into the bathroom, which doubled as a laundry facility. Shucking his clothes into a basket, he plucked pajamas from a hook on the back of
the door, sniffed them, and without showering put them on, splashing a bit of cold water on his face before going out into the hall. He turned abruptly back into the bathroom, clicked on the light, and brushed his teeth. Then he flossed. He always flossed. Even though he hadn’t had dinner yet, he flossed to subdue the bacterial detritus of the day.

  In the kitchen he whipped up a quick spinach salad from pre-washed leaves and took it with two bagels and a beer back into the living room, where he settled in front of the television. Reaching over, he turned on a table lamp. Morgan always found it depressing to walk past houses at night and see only the light of a television flickering against the ceiling and walls like some sort of primordial campfire. He watched television with the lights on, though he often listened to music in the dark.

  When Harry Meets Sally was playing, or was it When Harry Met Sally? He couldn’t remember, but he recognized the scene immediately. Meg Ryan was just beginning her tumultuous orgasm in the restaurant. Billy Crystal was bemused. Meg was awesomely sexy. Billy was quizzical, unmanned. Meg was frightening, ecstatic. Morgan set his bagels down on the side table.

  The most amazing thing about the scene was how erotic it was. There was no other scene to compare, not since Marlene Dietrich snapped her legs apart at the Blue Angel. Sharon Stone was primal, but predatory. And yet Meg Ryan was faking. The whole point was that she was faking. The turn on wasn’t the unrestrained and voluptuous display of sex, but the fact that she was in such awesome control.

  Morgan sank back into the sofa, clutching his beer in one hand and reaching for a bagel with the other. The salad sat on the table untouched.

  He was restless. He turned off the television and climbed to his bedroom as if he were looking for something, sat down on the edge of the bed, then got up and went back down the spiral staircase. Settling on the sofa, he clicked on the TV again and switched to CNN, with the volume so low that he couldn’t make out what was being said but could follow parallel stories in the subscript scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

  The bastard had never lost track of her, he thought. That was the part that made his skin crawl. He lived as a reclusive lawyer, he played in his mills, he amassed his fabulous collection of koi. He did what he did with Molly Bray, and with how many other young girls, as well. But all the time he shadowed Miranda.