play, as if there’s an unseen audience applauding, or being horrified. Kids play to ghosts, before they grow up and lose them.”
“They just lose them?”
“You were a kid, too, you know. We lose our familiars when we get big enough to know they can’t possibly exist. That’s what makes them go away. We stop unbelief.”
While she talked she wondered how she had avoided immediately connecting the green sports car in Rosedale with the car parked by the mill. No one in Waldron drove a Jaguar. She would have known. Would she have known it was him in the tower?
“No one would want to stay innocent forever,” she said. “But after the Fall, amnesia settles in. We forget what Eden was like.”
“No,” said Morgan. “We forget the Fall, not the Garden.” He paused. “Pre-lapsarian nostalgia,” he said, just to see if the words worked, out loud. Then he added, “When we start talking like televangelists, at least one of us is being evasive …”
“Maybe that’s what I want.”
“We came here to deal with things, Miranda. You brought me here.”
“It’s still beautiful, isn’t it? An interlude from the world.”
“A strange sanctuary.”
“Strange sanctuary,” she repeated, listening to the sounds echo deep in her mind.
“He was probably up there wanking all day.”
“Is that anatomically possible?”
“Only if he was really bad at it.”
“I imagine it was creepier than that,” said Miranda. “I mean, you wouldn’t come back day after day through the long hot summer to ejaculate in the shadows.”
“I don’t know.”
“Not for sex. It’s about needing to watch to prove you exist. Like taking photographs of Niagara Falls to confirm you’re there. Making connections.”
“The connection, of course, is illusion. Even for non-voyeurs. An orgasm is the most solitary act in all of creation.”
“Speak for yourself, Morgan. He must have loathed us, you know, in direct proportion to how much he despised himself. We’re lucky the bodily fluids being spilled weren’t blood. Not ‘we.’ The summer I was eighteen, Celia was getting legitimately laid. I was on my own.”
The car, she wondered, had Celia and she gossiped about the Jaguar? It was always there. It had seemed as if it had always been there. If they had known who had owned it, they had known he was older, an outsider, and rich. From another world. They were trespassing technically. It was his property. Perhaps they wouldn’t have given it much thought.
“We cooked some of them once — the crayfish. Celia said her friend Russell Livingstone used to roast them on a stick when they didn’t catch any trout, and the shiners weren’t worth bothering with. Russell was like Celia’s brother, but he moved away. It was like he died.”
“Did you eat them?”
“No. I don’t think so. We let them go. But don’t you see? We didn’t release them out of kindness. We were cruel. We just didn’t know what else to do with them.”
“You weren’t cruel. You were just kids.”
“Innocent?”
“Innocent. In Toronto we used to hunt along the ravines with slingshots and BB guns.”
“Did you ever kill anything?”
“Not even close. I had a friend who cut the tail off a road-kill raccoon and we took it to school as a trophy, but everyone knew it was road kill and that we’d get rabies or leprosy. The teacher made us throw it out in the big garbage bin and then wash our hands in boiling water and go home and change.”
“In boiling water?”
“Near enough. The teacher was really scared of dead things.”
“I can see Molly Bray as a girl catching crayfish,” said Miranda, changing the subject. “She’s wading in the shallows. You can see her. Scrunch up your eyes and stare into the sun.”
Morgan thought perhaps he could, by shielding his eyes from the light.
They sat close together beside the dam, both with their knees drawn up, gazing out over the pond, feeling the soft autumn breeze on their faces.
Morgan envisioned a grown-up Eleanor Drummond, realizing she had never been a child. She was dressed in city clothes, her tailored skirt hiked up and tucked into a black leather belt, her Jimmy Choo boots set neatly on shore. She was wading with slow, deliberate movements through water up to her calves, with a small net in her hand, staring intently through the fractured glare, able to see down among the rocks where her own reflection rippled the sun.
At first it seemed she was just across from them, with the sun at her back, then she was in the shallows by the house where the old woman lived. Every few minutes she would reach down and fastidiously turn over a rock, careful when she straightened not to let water drizzle along her arm into the sleeve of her blouse. She had a crystal bowl in one hand. He couldn’t see her pluck crayfish from the bottom. The net was gone, maybe there had been no net, but the crystal bowl was slowly filling with crayfish.
She turned and looked at him, directly away from the sun, so that her face was haloed in light, and yet it wasn’t in shadow but softly radiant and he could see her features clearly. Her expression was serene. She bore the look of composure he had seen on the lovely dead face of the figure in the morgue, but she caught his eye and smiled. She gazed into her bowl with satisfaction, then back to the water, peering intently into the shallow depths for her quarry.
The old woman sat on the porch of the farmhouse off to the side, rocking in a painted chair near the railingless edge, watching Eleanor Drummond gradually fill up her bowl with small scrambling creatures.
Miranda saw Molly Bray splashing in the shallows across from them, spraying sunlight into the air. There were no sounds. It was a silent vision, but vivid in every detail. Molly was thirteen, old enough to have abandoned crayfish hunts, still wanting to play, refusing to submit to the maturity her body was taunting her with this summer for the first time, like a promise and threat rolled into one unnerving sensation that wouldn’t recede except when she played fiercely, as she was now, at childish games.
She was between her grandmother’s house and the mill. She was swinging an old metal grain bucket, scooping up water and swinging it around so that the stream-lets of water leaking out the bottom bent through the air in fine splattering rainbows. She would suddenly stop and look down, drive her hand through the surface, and come up with a crayfish caught between pincers of her thumb and forefinger. Then she would wave it around to her grandmother back on the porch, toward the old wooden mill like a talisman, warding off evil so trivial that it was funny.
Miranda felt what the girl felt. She was her emanation, not her likeness or double, but connected as if they were joined in another dimension, two minds not yet born into the world that would drive them apart. Miranda looked through Molly’s eyes and thought she could see eyes staring back between the boards by the flume. The mill was rumbling against
