Читать книгу Quin and Morgan Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - John Moss - Страница 9

Miranda dropped the girl off at a well-appointed house in Wychwood Park, the most exclusive but not the most expensive residential enclave in the city, a gathering of interesting houses nestled in a small ravine west of Rosedale that was originally conceived as a refuge for successful artists and their wealthy patrons. She made arrangements with the housekeeper to call back in the morning and gave the girl a warm hug in acknowledgement of the dark secrets they shared, then drove home. Somehow she would find provision for the girl in the will. In her mother’s lover’s estate there were convolutions where the welfare of a young girl could be sustained if the executor was sufficiently canny. Miranda knew that, and she suspected Eleanor Drummond knew it, as well. She felt quite certain, in fact, that she had been declared, by the curious deployment of circumstances, the girl’s unofficial guardian.

When Miranda got to Isabella Street, it was almost midnight. It was too late to check the car in at head-quarters. She parked in front of her building. Since it was a police vehicle, she didn’t anticipate a ticket, even though overnight parking was prohibited. It didn’t really matter; it had been a long day.

Miranda closed the door of her apartment behind her and felt a sense of relief. She had left the computer on all day, and she cranked it up, half expecting to find another message from kumonryu.ca, but there was only junk. Miranda deleted everything from the in box except Robert Griffin’s directive. Tomorrow she would have the tech people check it out, and she would call the fish man in North York, and get him on the case. She could delegate responsibilities; she had the authority and she had the funds.

She couldn’t remember whether she had eaten dinner or not. It was a hot evening, the last of Indian summer, and before she was completely undressed she wandered back into the kitchen, took a yogourt container out of the fridge, and scooped a few big spoonfuls into her mouth. Then she decided she wasn’t hungry anymore, resealed the plastic container, and put it back. Feeling the moral necessity for proper nutrition, she reached into a cupboard, lifted out a large jar of peanut butter, and ladled some into her mouth with a tablespoon. After she replaced the jar in the cupboard, she meandered back into the bathroom, pleased with her slovenly rebellion. Looking at herself in the mirror, with her mouth clacking from the peanut butter, she grinned. “I know better. I really do.”

With the ambient light of the city on a hot night washing through her apartment, Miranda left the bathroom, lay down naked on her bed, and covered herself with a sheet. She felt as if she were in an undersea grotto. On her back, with her head low on a pillow, her body fully extended, arms at her sides, hands folded in repose across her abdomen, she let her eyes wander through the depths of the bedroom, the walls wavering and indistinct, details obscure. Then, quite unafraid, she grasped the sheet and drew it aside so that she could lie in exact emulation of the body of the woman at the morgue. Eyes no longer moving, she lay perfectly still except for the tidal motion of her chest, rising and falling, perfectly quiet apart from the muffled throb of her heart.

Miranda was aware of what she was doing. It didn’t seem morbid but strangely comforting, as if she were connecting to another human being in an authentic way. She was naked and vulnerable, but there was no dread, only a sense of relief, as if she had discovered something about herself that couldn’t be expressed in words or images but was captured in a feeling that seemed to flood over her from outside, that wasn’t mystical and was vaguely erotic, that seemed to come from her memory of the dead woman in control of her own presence even in death. Miranda alive felt the immanence of death as a release and, smiling sweetly to herself, drifted into memory — dreams of when she was younger and the world was innocent.

The figure of a rampant gryphon resolved in her field of vision into the graphic design on sacks of feed. They were piled on the loading ramp at the side of the mill, and Miranda and her friend Celia were slipping by, out of sight of workers in the background who were filling bags at a chute. She could glimpse herself from a vantage overhead, and it seemed at the same time she could see through the eyes of the seventeen-year-old version of herself she observed.

The mill was up and over the hill from the village on a millrace diverted from a stream with a year-round flow. They had walked from the village. It was summer. The mill was among the oldest in Waterloo County; it had been there before the village spread along the banks of the Grand River above its confluence with the Speed River.

They were going to a special retreat, open and private, where the race and the stream diverged. There was a small head pond, a grassy meadow kept in trim by the folds of the land and the flow of the water. The remains of the original mill were close to a small falls and sluiceway — not much more than a two-storey shed of weathered boards and broken windows, with a rusting sheet metal roof and a dilapidated Gothic tower at one end looming over the dam.

Miranda was very much aware of herself in her bedroom lying perfectly still, and she was aware of the sun beating down and of Celia chattering beside her, hunched on one elbow, talking about school things and boys. Their last year in high school was coming up — dumb Ontario with its extra year. Celia was going into the nurse’s aide course at Conestoga College and didn’t really need the extra year. She was going to take it in case she ever wanted to go on to university or to be a registered nurse if Donny didn’t work out … It seemed to the dreaming Miranda as if all the girls in Waldron had a boyfriend called Donny. Anyway, Celia was telling her, she might as well do the extra year. She was the same age as Miranda and was in no hurry, so why not enjoy being one of the big kids at last? A senior, only they weren’t called seniors unless they were self-consciously imitating Americans. It was just called “last year” or Grade Thirteen, with capital letters implied by the way it was said.

Celia finally ran out of steam and lay back on the grass beside Miranda. They had stripped to their panties when they got there. They had been doing this for years, coming to this secret place, playing and sunbathing, just the two of them, and sun damage wasn’t yet an issue. On a verbal cue they both rolled to the right, giggled, and drifted off into separate dream worlds. After about ten minutes, on cue, they both rolled to the left, giggled, and settled back into their constructed reveries. And so on through the remembered afternoon.

All the times they had done that, over the summers of their youth, seemed to meld together in Miranda’s mind, and she nearly wept for the lost innocence while she lay still as a corpse in the heart of the city, knowing the world had never been innocent, fearing the illusion would collapse if she peered at it too closely, yet wanting to look closer and closer, to remember how it was. She couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to sleep, wished the images to return of the last time she and Celia went to their place by the old mill.

“Roll over, roll over,” Celia chanted, and they rolled onto their backs, glancing up into the bright cloudless sky of midsummer, listening to the cicadas sing, the hot grass singing.

After a while, Celia stood and walked to the water’s edge beside the small dam. Turning toward the pool at the bottom of the dam, she called to Miranda, “I used to fish here.” She walked back to continue her story. “Russell Livingston and I, can you imagine? When I was seven and eight years old, he’d come and get me the first day of trout season before sunrise. He’d just be standing out by the road in front of the house, waiting. I guess we would have arranged it. He knew I’d wake up. We’d come here and catch rainbow trout, one or two each, and he’d clean them and we’d cook them on sticks over the fire. Sometimes we’d catch a few shiners, but there’s nothing to a shiner but glitter, and he’d throw them back. Sometimes Russell would bring a can of beans and we’d eat from the can with a cedar spoon he’d split from the stump there, and we’d smell all of smoke and cooked fish and cedar, and he’d take me home. I wore a green sweater with diamonds one year. It was his sweater and I was cold and he let me wear it the whole morning, and when he took me home, he took it back …”

“What happened to Russell?” asked Miranda as if she had never heard the story before.

“He just moved away. Nothing happened to him.”

“I never had a brother,” said Miranda as if they didn’t know everything about each other.

“Neither did I,” said Celia, “unless you count Russell. Do you remember how poor he was?”

“Sometimes he came to school with rat bites from sleeping with his hands outside the covers. He said it was his own fault. There was no floor. Somebody tore their house down after they moved.”

“Condemned,” said Celia, thrilled by the word. “The place was condemned.”

Miranda watched as her friend waded into the pond. Celia had a grown-up body, not like Miranda’s, which still seemed new, like something she was wearing. Celia had filled out early — by the summer they were twelve, she was well on her way to being a woman, as if childhood had just been a gathering place to get the requisite parts in order, a prelude before real life began. For Miranda, who that earlier summer had revelled in her girlishness, striding and skipping and running and dancing everywhere that forward motion was possible, being nearly naked beside Celia then was an exhilarating revelation, for she had never seen a woman’s body. Her mother and sister were obsessively private, and this … this was what she would become, this would be her. She and Celia had always been alike, and she fell in love the summer she was twelve with her friend’s body, which she would fill one day with her whole irrepressible being.

Miranda stirred in the mottled light seeping in from the city. She couldn’t remember loving her body, just that she had. Miranda had long lived in a world where her body and mind seemed related only by common experience, not birth. The face of Jason Rodriguez intruded without words and swirled away. What had she needed from him, what couldn’t he give? He was a mirror that swallowed up images. When he came to mind, she couldn’t remember herself, her RCMP history, nothing of romance. Celia leered from the water’s edge and turned away.

From the perspective of seventeen, she recalled the girl she was that summer with fond regret, and as she watched Celia stepping gingerly about in the shallows, she felt a strong affection for this young woman whose life, Miranda now realized, would be so very different from her own. She lay back, and after a while, Celia joined her, flicking water from her hair across Miranda’s outstretched body, then reclining beside her.

After a few minutes, she whispered, “Miranda.”

“What?”

“There’s somebody watching us.”

Miranda sat bolt upright, drawing her knees tightly against her chest, wrapping herself around what she called her private parts, between her legs and breasts.

“It’s okay,” said Celia. “It’s nothing. I just had a feeling. There’s no one around. Anyway, who cares? There’s still plenty of sun.”

They both scanned the horizon, their gaze coming to rest on the ruins of the old mill not forty feet away on the other side of the dam.

“That’s the only place anyone could be,” said Miranda. Then she got up and purposely without retrieving her clothes, wearing only her panties, she walked over to the base of the mill. “Anyone there? Hey, pervert, you there? You, there, pervert!” There was no sound, nothing stirred. “The hell with you!”

As she walked back to where Celia was still sitting on the ground, she let her hips swing and thrust back her shoulders to lift her breasts, each step delivering her entire frame into the next exaggerated motion and the next, a woman, she felt, and she experienced an unfamiliar and vaguely embarrassing sense of empowerment.

They agreed that if it had been boys from the village, the boys would have whooped in triumph and run off, allowing the girls to giggle and fuss. If it had been mill workers, who were older, it would have been more awkward; they would have whistled to give themselves away and then stood boldly watching while the girls covered their nakedness and fled. But Celia had only sensed an intruder, and Miranda had spontaneously concurred. They had seen no one, heard no one — both thought of it as a single person, which was more sinister.

They stretched out in the sun again, self-consciously languid, their nakedness now an act of defiance. They talked with a certain urgency about private things, as if they could cover themselves from prying eyes under a mantle of intimacy. They were reasonably certain no one was watching but shared a vague apprehension that their first instincts had been right. They talked about sex — Celia and Donny were lovers; Miranda was technically a virgin. At that point in her life Miranda delighted in her mother’s massager and liked boys better as friends. They both agreed that nothing beat a long lingering gentle mouth-watering bodice-busting kiss. They would be friends forever, but it would be these last moments that they would carry with them. They both knew that. When they got dressed, they were a little self-conscious. And when they parted at the top of the hill, they hugged as if they were each going on such a long journey that they had no idea when it would end.

Celia spent the rest of August with Donny, and in October she dropped out of school and got married. Miranda was a bridesmaid. “I’m not pregnant, Miranda,” she said. “I just want to get married. When you know you’re going to do something sooner or later, you might just as well do it now.”

Miranda thought that argument would be a logical justification for suicide, but said nothing. She was disappointed when the baby came, mostly because Celia had lied to her. She went to the baby shower, but the only ones there were Donny’s sisters and their friends, and she left early.

Twitching and withdrawing uneasily from her funereal pose on the bed, Miranda raised herself and went into the kitchen. She took a cold cider from the fridge. Celia was a grandmother now, she thought. They were both only in their thirties, and yet Celia was two generations older than Miranda. Celia had looked happy at the funeral for Miranda’s mother. Her friend had never really known her mom; she had come to the funeral to see her. Celia had looked good, so had Donny — Donald, he had corrected, giving her his card in front of her mother’s casket. Insurance.

Miranda guzzled half the cider and walked back into the bedroom. Placing the unfinished bottle on her night table, she stretched out again in state and waited for the memories to return.

It wasn’t until that night, twenty years ago, when she was lying in bed much as she was now, so that the two times merged and she could feel the chill of recognition as if it were happening for the first time, that she realized what she and Celia had sensed earlier in the day was an absence.

In her mind now she saw a flurry of grey feathers swirling about the eaves of the tower as pigeons darted about, swooping and squabbling, but there was no sound, only quietness reinforced by the soft, liquid hush of water sheeting over the dam and sliding down the flume into the trout pool. There was always the sound of birds, and today there was none. They would have heard someone in the tower unless he had been there first, unless he had been waiting. And the birds stayed away. The power she had felt that afternoon dissipated, and she fell asleep in the arms of her older self, who recognized the feelings clutching at their insides as the feeling of violation. The waking Miranda was afraid. She had to go back there, to finish the summer out, to remember what had happened.

She got up and put on pajamas. She poured back the rest of the cider in a couple of swallows, then went to the fridge and got another. Taking it with her, she curled up in the comfy armchair she had brought from her mother’s. It had been her father’s chair, and she sometimes sat in it for security. She missed him more than her mother. It was as if his not being there through her teens was just beginning to catch up with her, as if she were grieving retroactively. But that, of course, didn’t make sense; there was no time limit on grief. Maybe she was only ready now to deal with it. Back then it just seemed as if he had let them all down, especially her. Her sister and her mother had each other; she was his special person. It scared her that she couldn’t remember him clearly — more the emotions he invoked than the man himself. He must have been her age about now when he died. She had never worked out the equation.

“I went back,” she said suddenly, then looked around as if embarrassed that she might have been overheard. “Damn,” she declared to the room, “I’ll talk out loud if I want.”

But she had nothing more to say and sank back into the cushions. Almost immediately she was engulfed in a silent fluttering of pigeons, and then through the billowing grey, the crisp orange image of a rampant gryphon loomed forward, divided, and swooped by on either side of her. Still at some level awake, she recognized the Waldron Feed Mill logo, as familiar to everyone in the village as their own names.

Again she was perceiving the world from multiple perspectives. Her primary vision was through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old, but she could recognize herself from a distance, as well, walking along the millrace on her own, a day or two after last being there with Celia. And she was also aware of being in her chair, caught up in dream memory, feeling the urgency to commit, to follow the young woman who had once been her.

When she reached the grassy spot by the dam, she put down her bag and laid out a towel, books, and a bottle of lotion. She and Celia always lay down in the grass, usually on top of their clothes, and they never used lotion. Still standing, she could observe herself from the vantage of the tower, looking up in her direction. She could see herself walk deliberately toward the tower. Then her vision shifted and she watched her hand reach out and push open the door.

Inside, the light was sliced by the sun’s rays streaking between the wallboards. There were great wooden cogs lying askew and a large wheel hanging from an axle at floor level into a watery trough. A narrow wooden stairway was outlined in shadow against the back wall. Carefully making her way through the accumulated detritus from ages of neglect, she reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Is there anyone there?” she called into the shadows of the ancient rafters. “Are you there?” She took a few tentative steps. “I’m coming up. It’s just me. I’m coming up.”

She ascended slowly into the gloom of the second floor, intuitively chilled by the absence of cobwebs, then edged over to the base of the ladder steps suspended from the floor overhead, leading up into the tower itself.

“If you’re there, it’s okay,” she said. There was a sudden rush, and she screamed. But it was only a loose tread slipping out, and she regained her poise. She clambered up the last two steps into a small, empty space no bigger than a tool shed. There would hardly have been room for both of them if their voyeuristic secret lover had been there.

“Gone,” she said. “Nancy Drew wins again.”

A single grey pigeon fluttered against the eaves and disappeared.

There was clear evidence someone had been there and left. What looked like a pile of rags turned out to be a down-filled sleeping bag, and it wasn’t the least bit musty. As far as Miranda could tell without actually pushing her face into the material, it was more or less unused. She stretched out on it to see what she could glimpse of their sunbathing spot, knowing she would have a perfect view. Still, when she lined up the appropriate chink, she was shocked at how close she was — practically looming over where she and Celia had disported themselves like wood nymphs. She started to giggle at the notion of wood nymphs.

It all seemed so perverse and so innocent. Miranda hunched over in the slanted light and prepared to write a note with the pen and paper she had brought, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. She sniffed the air. If he was a masturbator, he was tidy. The only thing she could smell was the dry, dusty scent of aged pine. She searched for words adequate to the occasion, a quotation, an astonishing turn of phrase, a searing double entendre. Finally, she wrote down “Words are never enough,” folded the paper, and left it where his head would be, near the gap in the boards that revealed her world.

From the tower she watched herself walk back across the dam, spread out her towel all over again, remove her clothes with thoughtful deliberation, and lie down in the open sunlight.

Why did she do that? Miranda wondered now, squirming in her father’s chair in her apartment. She had forgotten that, but how could she have forgotten? She had gone back by herself almost every day for the rest of the summer. Somehow she had let it all merge together — summertime and Celia and sunbathing and swimming. She remembered swimming by herself, she remembered the feeling of being watched, and she remembered lying in the sun. Celia hadn’t been there, and sometimes she was sure she was being watched and would lie very still for hours or roll over onto her stomach and read until she had to go home, not sure if anyone was there, knowing he wouldn’t be able to leave until she did. How could she have forgotten? Where did she lose the memory of that summer? How could she lose all of that?

Miranda got up from the chair and went to the bathroom. When she returned to the bedroom, she crawled back across the top of her bed and curled around herself like a small child. It was the next summer, she thought. Something happened out there. Not that summer.

She recalled the last time she had gone out to the pond. It was the end of August, and the mill was working overtime, farmers were lined up with their tractors and wagons, and one elderly man, the only one not wearing a hat, had a pair of Clydesdales the others admired. There was a sports car they all liked, too, and she had walked by them and gone along the millrace. She must have climbed the tower — the sleeping bag was gone. There was a note: “Sometimes that’s all we have.” Not too cryptic, given what she had written. Then what? She had never gone out to the pond again.

The next summer? No, she had never gone back.

Danny Webster? After Danny Webster, the summer she was eighteen … Miranda hovered between the suppressed knowledge that she had returned to the pond and a gaping abyss in her recollections of how she had spent her final months before leaving for university.

She had gone to the formal dance with a friend of Danny’s who was going off to the United States on a track scholarship. Danny was away or didn’t want to go. He started Bible College in July. That summer she attended a few nostalgia parties in Preston, where she had travelled by bus each day to attend high school for the preceding five years, but she was never really part of a crowd. She got her course list from the University of Toronto and bought some of her books. Her sister was home for the summer, so the three of them, her sister and her mother and herself, spent a lot of time watching television. She remembered great bouts of reading as the high-school experience petered out … and watching television reruns. That was about it.

How had she endured it? Miranda knew herself well enough to know she must have sneaked off from time to time just to be on her own. She remembered walking down along the Grand River on the way to Galt and clambering up into the Devil’s Cave in a long skirt hiked around her waist, her peasant blouse covered in grime. Once there, she cracked open a pack of cigarettes she had stolen from her sister’s purse. By evening she was sick with a vile nausea that lasted three days, and was addicted to a habit she wouldn’t break for a decade.

She had been alone a lot that summer. Flashes came back to her of long walks on back country roads and along the river, images of walking and smoking. The summer began to reconstruct in her mind with surprising clarity. But there was nothing about the millrace, the tower, or the dam.

The whole summer took shape in her mind as an idyllic interlude before she left home. Once she got to university, she threw herself into a new world of study and essays and earnest discussions and raucous parties without partners. When she went back to visit, Waldron had quickly become a foreign place, and her mother was someone she had known long ago. They were on cordial terms, but there was no intimacy in their relationship, and Miranda realized there never had been. They had just played the roles of mother and daughter, and now the roles had changed. When she moved into her apartment, after a year in residence, this was her home.

She absolutely didn’t trust the notion of an idyllic last summer. It had all been so vague in her mind until now; she assumed she had shuffled it into the back of her memory precisely because it had been unmemorable.

Miranda stretched out across the bed, rolled over onto her back, and thought immediately of Molly Bray. She decided Eleanor Drummond was the persona; the real woman was Molly. Eleanor Drummond was an elegant corpse, human remains on a slab in the morgue. Molly Bray was a person. She had peered out at Miranda through the mask of Eleanor Drummond, watched her through Eleanor Drummond’s eyes.

What did she see? What did she think Miranda could do for her daughter? There were connections between Molly Bray and Miranda that the dead woman counted on being revealed.

Tomorrow, first thing, after she arranged for the koi, she would track down Molly Bray, find out who Jill’s mother was, where the woman had come from. As executrix? As a detective? For Jill or herself? Why should Jill be the concern of the executor of her moth-er’s employer’s estate? Why should a policewoman be responsible for the survivor of a suicide-murder? Jill would become a ward of the court — that was how these things normally worked. There were people to look after the details.

The problem, Miranda realized, was that she was one of those people. God, she thought, she needed sleep. She needed to sit down with Morgan and talk the whole thing out. She was part of the problem.

Summoning Morgan into the scene made her feel better, gave her a feeling of solidity, as if she weren’t adrift in a slow-motion maelstrom, as if she were no longer swirling underwater, rushing through a flume into the darkness of some strange satanic mill. Morgan was real. He was someone she could count on, and she folded herself over onto her side and went to sleep with him stretched behind her, the warmth of his imagined breath on the back of her neck.

At five-thirty Miranda awoke with a start, responding to a click in her alarm clock that wasn’t set to go off for another two hours. She woke up with Sigmund Freud on her mind.

As an anthropology major, she held Freud so far down her list of significant theorists that she usually thought of him with derision, condescension, or anger. Claude Lévi-Strauss didn’t like Freud. Jacques Lacan murdered him and made a monster of the dismembered parts. None of her professors had a kind word for the simplistic, neurotic projections of the Doctor from Vienna.

Yet there he was in early morning in late September in Toronto crowding into her bed. Go bother Americans, she thought. You should be in New York, not Toronto. They love you in New York. She was with Ferdinand de Saussure. She was a structuralist, a post-structuralist, a post-structural deconstructionist. Saussure begat Martin Heidegger begat Jacques Derrida. She was a post-deconstructionist! The terms rattled through her mind, nearly emptied of meaning. The only lord of the dark-side she loved less than Freud was Carl Jung. She would take Freud over Jung, Mephistopheles over his insufferable messenger. What do I do now? she asked herself. Go away!

Then there was a flurry of feelings and images. The tower. The dam. That summer she had lost her virginity.

Miranda began to cry. She didn’t remember losing her virginity. She recalled the pool, the trout catching edges of light. The dam. She remembered the dam. She wept blood. She recalled the tower and it falling, being under it falling. But she didn’t remember losing her virginity.

She saw herself walking up over the hill. She saw the feed mill. It was midsummer, her last in Waldron. The heat rose in waves from the steel roof. There was no one around. Close by the mill, she heard cool water running underneath. She reached out and touched the side of a sports car parked by the loading dock with its top down, ran her fingers along the edge of the cockpit, read the insignia, XK 150, Jaguar. It was British racing green. She touched the back of the worn leather seats. She heard a door slam on its spring, heard voices. She moved on past the mill and up the incline where she disappeared into the dark tunnel of cedars that had been planted a hundred and fifty years before to shore up the mounded banks of the race. She saw herself walking, saw through her own eyes as she walked step by step under the canopy of trees, the depths of shadow opening in front of her, myriad bits of light falling through the foliage to illuminate the path in the still, hot air. She heard twigs snap under her feet and heard the dry grasses brush against her legs. She heard the sound of her blouse rushing against her skin as she walked, and she heard the hush of her own breath through her nostrils. She felt sweat slide down her legs and the inside of her arms. She inhaled the deep metal smell of water slipping along the race to the mill, and the lovely dry sweet smell of the withering cedar. Then she caught the scent of the shallows at the edge of the pond and the resinous odour of pines by the dam, and the dark tunnel opened into the glittering meadow.

Miranda watched herself carefully spread a towel on the grass beside the dam. Then, without looking at the ruined mill, consciously ignoring the tower, she slipped off her blouse and shorts and spread lotion on her arms and legs. Standing, she unhooked her bra and stepped out of her panties, dropped them into the small pile of her clothes, bent to pick up the lotion again, began to sit down, changed her mind, straightened and walked over to the shallows, moved along to the dam where it was deeper, stood tall, addressing the sun, dived into the pond, swam to the shallows, and waded to the shore where she walked back to her towel, sat down, picked up the lotion, tossed

it aside, and without drying herself, lay back with her eyes closed in the beating sunlight.

Back in her bedroom, Miranda felt the rising light of day against her skin and twisted in bed to shield her eyes. She wasn’t awake and she wasn’t asleep. She didn’t want to leave the pond. She knew she had to stay, and some mechanism inside her, the impulse for survival that had expunged this episode from her memory, now insisted she see it through. She waited, the city stayed distant in her mind, the sun beat down on her, and perhaps she slept in its heat. When the sun suddenly disappeared, she opened her eyes and a dark figure loomed over her, outlined in fire. At first she thought it was Celia; they often scared each other or shook water across each other. She didn’t move; it wasn’t Celia. It was a male, his outline, a man, not a boy. He was naked, but she couldn’t see his penis, not with the blinding sun behind him. She tried to see it — that seemed to be the centre of the unfolding drama. He was moving slowly, his face in shadow. He leaned down. His hands grasped hers and held her against the ground. She didn’t struggle. He seemed to be manoeuvring between her legs.

“Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

He settled back on his knees between her legs, watching her carefully, releasing her arms which lay dead at her sides. He reached out and touched her breasts, first with his fingertips, and when she lay perfectly still, he cupped them against his palms.

“Please,” she said again, “don’t hurt me.”

He responded to her voice, kneading her breasts as if he expected her to respond, but he wasn’t passionate. He was methodical. He ran his hands down the sides of her body and drew one hand across her pubic hair, letting his fingers play in the curls at the top. She shuddered, for the first time beginning to shake, and whimpered. She lay as rigidly as she could. His fingers feigned innocence and toyed with the soft curly hairs, fluffing them out in the sunlight, gradually dropping down into the cleft of her vagina. She froze, but he seemed not to notice.

He reached under her hips and lifted her pelvis toward his own kneeling body. She felt the earth press through the towel against her back, her arms at her sides, powerless through fear and wonder. He dropped her bottom against the towel and leaned forward. With one hand he guided himself and spread the lips of her vagina with his other hand. Then, after a brief pause, he thrust deep inside her. She howled — one low deep-throated bewildered utterance that trailed off into a sob and finally silence.

The pain was intensely focused for a moment, then spread in waves through her entire body. He kept thrusting and thrusting, driving her against the ground. She felt the towel abrading her skin, the pebbles in the grass. She felt him large inside her, and it was strangely familiar, like the feeling after orgasms with her mother’s massager, though she had never put anything inside herself. Suddenly, a tremendous shuddering of the man’s weight ran panic into her like a weapon, and for the first time she pushed up against him, trying to throw him off, to escape.

He raised himself on his arms, crushing against her pelvis. He seemed to be smiling, but she couldn’t make out his features. Then he began again, grinding into her, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t shrink away. Pressed from underneath by the solid earth, she could only adjust her body to his so that his pelvic bones didn’t grind against hers, his rib cage didn’t crush her chest. Several times he stopped, slid down so that he could mouth her breasts without his penis slipping out, sucked at her, nibbled, trying to give her pleasure, she thought, and felt no pleasure but didn’t feel disgust, only fear. When he came this time, he lifted her as if he were trying to bring her along with him, and when he was spent, he lowered himself gently against her.

Time passed, and he leaned back on his knees. “Turn over,” he said, lifting one of her legs awkwardly in front of him, across his body, pivoting her around.

She felt horribly exposed. “Don’t hurt me,” she said. On her stomach she clenched her buttocks and whispered hoarsely into the earth. “Don’t. Please don’t.”

“Stay just like that.” His voice was dispassionate. “Look at the ground.” With a curiously gentle caress, he drew his hands slowly across her thighs and cupped her buttocks, awkwardly giving them a lingering massage, perhaps imitating affection. “Just stay like that until I’m gone. Give me lots of time.”

He stood and walked a short distance to the edge of the shadowy cedars. From the sounds she heard, she figured he was dressing. Then she heard nothing. He must have approached her naked, she thought. He must have felt ridiculously vulnerable. What if she had laughed? Would he have run off, would he have hurt her?

Slowly, Miranda rolled over. She didn’t know whether to cry. Her whole frame shivered violently and then became very still. She was confused by the strange diffusion of pain that spread from a sharp centre between her legs through her entire body. She wasn’t revolted, and if she was stunned, she conveyed this by acting with deliberation, as if everything were the same. She got up and walked over to the dam, dived cleanly into the dark water, swam to the shallows where she squatted and splashed waves of water against herself. Then she went back to where her clothes were still neatly piled on the grass beside the towel, got dressed, folded the towel, opened it again, shook it out, spread it in the sunlight, stained and ugly, and left it there. She walked out along the race, past the mill, where the green sports car was gone, strode up and over the hill and down into the village, into her house where her mother and sister were watching Days of Our Lives, into her room where she changed her underwear and threw her panties into the disposal bag in the bathroom reserved for used sanitary napkins. After a scalding shower, she dressed in a loose shift, went back into the living room, sat beside her sister and mother, and watched the rest of the soap opera, never admitting to her innermost self until now that the incident had happened, or that she might have known who her first sad lover had been.