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,
