Watermark

by Christy Ann Conlin

  I heard Morgaine cry out.

  Or perhaps it was the crow cawing. She looked up and the bird was there in the sky. I glanced back down at her.

  “Come away from the cliff, Morgaine!” I yelled at her, I am sure of it. I told her only birds can fly, that she should come away. How she’d tricked me.

  I ran through the woods with the branches tearing at my face. I was at the fire, my cheeks streaked with tears and blood. When I saw them, I stood hypnotized as they danced and howled at the full moon, which hung low over the meadow. I called to them but they were gathered around the fire, faces ageless in the flickering orange flames, swaying to the bongo drums, murmuring, the woodsmoke mingling with the mists. They thought I was part of the ritual. My father kept drumming on, smiling at me.

  Finally, it was Wildflower who saw I was not singing but crying and pointing toward the water, toward the cliff. And she went running. Then Ocean put his drum down and ran after her. But it was already too late.

  * * *

  Years later, in Vancouver, the city where my mother was born, I was talking with my husband, who was at that point a psychology student. While it was rare for me to even mention my sister, I relentlessly interrogated my own memories. My husband always said I was not haunted by my memories — my memories were haunted by me, trying to understand what really happened that night. He said sleep deprivation was used as a form of torture — it distorts and reshapes memory. We never slept properly at The Mists, in the house or sleeping on mats in the meadow. We had no consistent bedtime or wake-up time. It was easy to think a dream was real, that the crow had perched on Morgaine’s shoulder croaking an ancient song.

  “With the mists you couldn’t have known how close to the edge she was, Eve,” my husband repeated.

  As an adult, I knew this. But when it happened I was only an eight-year-old child. And even at eight, our minds are not always able to form detailed memories. We have barely begun to encode memory at that time — what my husband calls “memory rehearsal.”

  “Childhood amnesia is what causes many adults to have trouble recalling complex memories and events which occur before the age of ten,” he explained. “Especially with trauma.”

  The adults at the fire were high, and they were drumming and singing and chanting — they paid no attention to us. This is the truth.

  When I was finally finishing my Ph.D. in civil engi­neering, I talked to an ornithologist from the biology department at a campus event and she assured me a crow would not imprint on a child, and certainly would not switch loyalties: the crow would be forever faithful to the adult who raised it.

  * * *

  I remember leaving in the back of a police car. There was a helicopter. They had to search the water. My mother was in the hospital having the baby and there were problems, they said. She had to stay in longer. Later, I found out they had kept her there, under observation. She had postpartum depression on top of it all. She was flooded with hormones and grief, but she held my little brother to her breast.

  My stepfather’s auntie took me to the city on the day of the funeral and we went to the Discovery Centre and took a ferry ride across Halifax Harbour to Dartmouth. She called it “the big city,” and it was to me — the first time I left the countryside. She kept me with her for a few days and when the first snow of the year came down she bought me a pair of snow pants and took me snowshoeing

  And life returned to normal, as it does. The days got very short, and then they got longer. I refused to visit my father again. As far as I know, he made no effort to see me. I would walk to school and back, and my stepfather would take me to the hockey rink. My mother stayed home with the baby and didn’t go back to work until he was in school. My little brother looked so much more like my father than he did my mother or my stepfather. But it might have been the way I studied him, looking for Morgaine but never finding her. I called my stepfather “Papa,” as my brother did. Papa said Ocean was right about one thing — life was full of mystery and things happen with no explanation. We couldn’t argue that one.

  My mother never discussed what happened. There was a picture of Morgaine on her dresser in a silver frame, but we never mentioned it or looked at it when she was in the room. My stepfather said my mother was always trying to do the right thing, always trying to please others and never herself. She finally learned that life was a fine and ever-changing dance to keep everybody in the circle. My stepfather wasn’t one who talked a lot, so when he did, we listened.

  * * *

  And then this email from my father, all these years later. He said he had heard on Facebook about a prestigious park I was designing. It was curious he was on Facebook — that social media wasn’t something he thought was part of the Big Conspiracy, like vaccinations. He was already in Vancouver for the conference, he wrote, and wanted to see me before he left in a few days. Maybe we could go for a walk on the beach, he suggested.

  It pissed me off that my father gave me so little notice and clearly assumed I would drop everything to stroll along the beach with him. My husband, who was now a psychologist, encouraged me to see him. “He’s getting old, Eve,” he said. “You’ll regret it if this is your only chance.”

  His email signature listed a website — The Mists of Avalon — and I clicked through on the link to prepare myself for our meeting. He’d started the site, no doubt with great excitement, but now it seemed rudimentary and out of date. There was a photo of him by a birch tree looking exactly as I remembered, with long blond hair and a tie-dye T-shirt with a black peace sign. And of course, his crow tattoo on his muscled arm. It was a photo from a long time ago, from when I was a young girl.

  We met at Jericho Beach. I didn’t recognize him until I heard someone calling my name. My father was balding. It happens to lots of men so I should have expected it. Why I thought he was going to look like that old photo I’m not sure. I guess he’d remained the same in my mind and heart, where time moved at a different pace. My father was very thin. He wasn’t tall anymore. He stooped, in the way that happens to us all. His skin was blotchy and jaundiced but he still strode along with that little smile on his face, as though he knew something no one else did, as though he possessed an important piece of information, the secret, which would bring us all together, which would unite us with the natural world, with ourselves. He had swapped out his driftwood talisman for a piece of jade on a sterling-silver chain.

  He gave me a big hug, as though we had been close all through these long years. I couldn’t help but stiffen. He didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he didn’t let on. But I took a step back and he didn’t try to hug me again. We sat on a bench and he gave me space. He wanted to see pictures of his grandchildren. I dug through my purse. He smiled when I said he could keep the photographs.

  I asked Ocean what he was up to these days. I didn’t mention The Mists. He was developing an algorithm, he said, a computer program, which would help him with currency trading, and he was going to make a fortune. Ocean wanted me to invest. He’d raised me right, he said. I was such a successful businesswoman.

  “That sounds like a pyramid scheme, what you’re describing.”

  He told me about the Rosicrucians, how they knew ancient secrets. Math was a language of the mystics.

  We stood up and walked slowly along the beach. I asked if he knew how Wildflower was.

  She was still at The Mists. She had her own house, another tall, slim house with four floors and a telescope on the top. She did the bookkeeping for The Mists and worked as an office manager in town as well. Sometimes men lived with her in the summer, but she mostly kept to herself. She had a child who was grown now, who came to visit. But she still believed in The Mists, the potential, the energy connected to its latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. They had studied Al-Khwārizmī’s medieval Book of the Description of the Earth. Surely I understood all this, being an expert in this field?

  I didn’t roll my
eyes, nor did I express any sort of wonder. He didn’t seem surprised.

  My father coughed and we stopped and sat on another bench so he could catch his breath. I asked him if he was sick and he said he was infected with some sort of fungus in his liver but he was taking a natural protocol to heal himself. I didn’t ask him what the protocol was.

  “Why do you think she fell?” is what I asked.

  My husband had said the same thing as my father did — Morgaine simply got too close to the edge, as children will do. Morgaine was playing bird in the wrong location. Nothing more.

  And she should have been supervised by adults, my husband had repeated over and over.

  My father had named the old bench after her. Morgaine’s Bench. So people could sit there and remember her.

  “I have a lot of regrets,” I told my father.

  He said people can’t live with regret. It poisons them. Everyone makes mistakes. We have to carry onward. Ocean said we were all sojourners here on the earth. Each one of us is a wayfarer.

  My mother had frightened us into staying away from the cliff, my father said. He had thought about it for years, and if she had not frightened us we would have had a natural caution and care. Morgaine would have taken instinctual precautions and she never would have followed a bird into the fog. He was quiet and then said neither Morgaine nor I had ever learned the right way to understand fairy tales.

  But I don’t think this is true.

  I’d talked with my husband about how Morgaine had held my hand and how we did not take the twisting path through the pines my father had created. She’d led me straight on her own path and I was disoriented with the blindfold. Her path led straight to the disintegrating precipice.

  In civil engineering we talk about the paths of desire that pedestrians take. People wear down pathways through grass when they take shortcuts, veering away from sidewalks for the most direct routes to their destinations. The desire lines. It’s instinctive, this desire to take the most expedient path, not the prescribed one. Planners learn from these behaviours and try to design better pathways accordingly. Sometimes we even wait and see exactly where people have trampled the grass down, to determine the best places to lay walking paths, or the places we need to erect signs and barriers to keep people from veering off the official route. I’ve never forgotten the path through the meadow or the path through the woods my father believed no one would ever bypass, his belief that none of his children would deviate from his sacred trail.

  My father said he had always been afraid of heights. It’s why he had never put any sort of trail or staircase down to the beach. It’s why he had a winding path through the trees, so he could compose himself before coming to that crazy plummet at the edge of the woods. Living in the tree house, which was really just a house with several stories, was as much as he could manage. He wasn’t into extreme sports, he said. He didn’t know how to rappel. There was nothing he could have done anyway, after she hit her head on the rocks. And the tide was in, so she would have drowned before they could reach her. Spirits choose how long they will inhabit the vessel we call a body. It’s just harder for us to accept that what we see as children are spirit forms in human flesh. She had already transitioned into the great energy plain when they found her. We create our reality, Ocean said, even as children.

  He hoped I hadn’t been blaming myself, because blame was a waste of life force. My father said we must live with the eyes of a child, because it is the only way to truly live. We can never know the answers of infinity.

  I didn’t say anything at first. How do you respond to something like that? Then I said, with more force than I was expecting, “I do know I was only eight.”

  Ocean’s eyes got watery and then he said he had to go meet a friend. He went off, striding down the beach now that he had rested, the sun shining on his bald head. It wasn’t raining, for once, in that rainforest of a city.

  I still think about my father when I look at the mountains here.

  And I see her still, Morgaine, at the edge of the ragged cliff by the splintered driftwood bench, her arms out, thrusting up and down. I see her lifting off, hear the flap of her wings and the harsh caw of the crow as black feathers disappear into the mists.

  Beyond All Things is the Sea

  Birdie says to go tits to the wind.

  And I am going tits to the wind.

  When the utility van whips around the corner, I crash from one hard side of the vehicle to the other, Birdie at the wheel, yelling too late, “Brace yourself, girls!” I am ripping off my poufed wedding dress when Birdie makes the turn. The wheels lift up for a second and bits of lace fly through the air. The van tires smash down hard on the road and throw me again.

  I don’t crash forward. Somehow, I flip in the air and smash my back against the metal wall of the van. My whole life has been about crashing backwards, an effort to exist in perpetual motion. I live for the thrill of the bolt. It’s the only way I can throw off the past. Cast away what I don’t understand, run from a life which has felt like a tunnel collapsing on me.

  An hour to the airport. The flight is leaving in an hour. I look at Elizabeth sitting across from me, trying to grab the round black suitcase on the floor by her feet. It sailed to the other side of the van, too, when Birdie took that last turn. Birdie and Elizabeth, the Bail-out Squad. And I know that it’s the last bail-out.

  * * *

  Birdie and Elizabeth were my childhood friends, my best friends all through high school before I went to university where I almost finished my master’s — classical studies. I enjoyed the Greeks and Romans. The classical studies department was located in a series of grey Victorian houses that ran along a quiet street with huge, sweeping trees. I still don’t know the name of the trees. There is oblivion in the blur, a relief in the skewering of the everyday, keeping truth distorted so there is no worry of ever really seeing it.

  My need to move my anxious feet first became urgent when I was reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. It was as though Seneca himself appeared behind the kindly professor at his desk who was holding forth on my thesis. An antique glass paperweight sat atop the stack of paper which was my graduate work. The same kind of paperweight that my mother had made me sell to disgusting Mr. Burgess at his antique shop. The glass twinkled in the sunlight.

  The past found me there and it was unbearable. It was time to dash. It seemed like a hallucination, a voice speaking which I alone heard: Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come . . .

  The professor was a cloud of frizzy grey hair and a soft English accent. Behind him Seneca appeared like a stray cherub, a rotund man in a toga. He was there before me, hovering a bit to the left like the great Gazoo, the tiny wizard in The Flintstones. At first I thought I might still be drunk — it had been a long, late night drinking at the Seahorse. Only I could hear him as he began a recitation. But nothing will help quite so much as just keeping quiet, talking with other people as little as possible, with yourself as much as possible. For conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor. Letter CV — the Roman numeral for 105. I knew it. Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium. Seneca’s moral advice to the young Lucilius. I had read the book over and over again the previous year.

  I blinked and Seneca was gone. My professor too. I was alone in my mind’s eye. In the ramshackle Victorian house at the edge of the Mountain, the house my mother had inherited from an old spinster great-aunt. But not the rare antiques inside. Long-lost relatives who did inherit the antiques but who were never located by the lawyer. Surrounded by wealth we couldn’t touch. Encircled by the tower of bills and collection notices. Relentless phone calls. We would lose the house. Nowhere to go. Haggard mother with red eyes sending her daughter with antique paperweight to an
tique dealer. Do whatever he asks. He’ll give you the best price. Do whatever he asks, Seraphina.

  I did.

  I bolted out of the gentle professor’s office. I vamoosed down to the harbour. I scampered along the waterfront watching container ships. My heart was pounding. The past was creeping from the Valley to the peninsula, finding me in the harbour city. I flashed up the hill and fled home. Panting, out of breath, going so fast my thoughts scrambled. My mind’s eye could not see but my mind heard me chanting, “Never look back, never look back. Only forward, only forward.” It’s my own little aphorism, my mantra, to keep my mind whirring.

  Seneca was at my apartment that night after my class, when I lurched into the bathroom and threw up in the sink, tossing my head back and looking in the mirror as I brushed my teeth. Seneca quoted again: For the only safe harbour in this life’s tossing, troubled sea is to refuse to be bothered about what the future will bring and to stand ready and confident . . . Some unknown part of myself looking for help in outlandish places. Every hour of the day countless situations arise that call for advice, and for that advice we have to look to philosophy.

  They were supposed to be Letters to Lucilius but they had become Letters to Seraphina.

  Off I hurtled, for the first time. No more classes, no more paperweights reminding me of what I did, what my mother asked me to do.

  The exhilaration of running from yourself, of fleeing your thoughts, your guilt, the sweet momentum you gain when imagination sends a phantom philosopher in pursuit. Never look back, only forward.

  * * *

  Birdie whips around another corner and I start to fly but now my bra is caught on a hook on the van wall and so I snap back and dangle there, arms flapping. Clarity is my enemy, the inflictor of pain. What comes before or after doesn’t matter. My own life spiralling me into vertigo, mixing it all up. My haggard mother driving me to the antique shop in Seabury. To slimy Mr. Burgess. Do whatever he asks. He’ll give us the best price. My mother’s eyes red from lack of sleep, sorting through the mass of bills and collection notices.