Lost Girls (46 page)

There's no satisfaction in seeing it go aside from the warmth it gives off. In fact it's this burning that makes the entire cottage feel suddenly animated, revived from a long sleep. The floor creaks as it expands against the foundation, shadows moving at the edges of my sight that could be figures embracing against the wall, running in through the door from outside or rising from the sofa after a nap.

Build up the flames until they arch high into the mouth of the flue, then pull a couple of my father's books off the shelves and sit down at the end of the sofa to read. I limit myself to final chapters. Endings pulled apart from the stories they belong to, some tidy and hopeful, others drifting off enigmatically with people staring out of windows over autumn fields or driving away from gravesite visits. Moments vibrating with significance because they're the last thing we're told. Decisions can now be made, morals drawn, characters designated as villains or heroes or mere comic relief. But I keep myself to the endings so that I don't have to judge, so that all I'm left with is the final moment, expansive and mysterious. And on every page my father's coded marginalia. The brace brackets and arrows of his private thoughts, working to pull all the threads together.

Try to keep reading but the light's already fading, the fire big enough to warm a yellow circle before it but no longer bright enough to read by. Check all the pockets, but no. Didn't bring my coke. I've gone all day and until this moment hadn't thought of it, and now that I have I expect at any second to begin the sweating, burn-headed process of becoming chemically upset, but nothing happens. Outside, the dark of early winter evening falls across the glass as a purple curtain.

I dream of my father. Working at his desk with books splayed open on top of each other, holding selected pages to the air. Lifts his head to smile at someone he hadn't realized was there. Walking across the room to where my mother stands against a window stippled with rain. Kisses her once, steps back, raises his hand. Then carefully begins drawing on my mother's mouth with his pen, coloring her red lips blue with ink.

I'm awakened by the cold. The fire now nothing but a circle of papery embers, a single pair of red eyes still glowing out. The room poured full of night. Feel around the floor at my feet for more wood but it's either all been used or is farther than I can reach. The air a vapor of wet smoke that would make you choke if it weren't so cold. Sit unmoving in the dark for a time, a ball in my throat I can't swallow away and the dried crust of sleeping tears below my eyes.

It takes three attempts before I finally get to my feet. Everything held stiff like a plastic doll with movable parts but only if you make them, one at a time.

Must be awake. You can't feel an upturned beer cap screw into the sole of your foot in a dream. You don't bend down to pull it off with a smear of your own blood that you lick from your fingers without thinking, leaving the taste of rust and crunch of sand on your tongue.

Takes half the night to lift my head up straight enough to look out the window, squint down to the scissored line of trees around the body of the lake. No wind and nothing moves. It could be a painting. A flea-market oil canvas where all the colors come from some combination of perfect blue and black. I think of how often Nature presents itself as cheap art, nothing more than the paintings over Holiday Inn beds. Sunsets, distant hills, the subtle degrees of night. It could all just be a picture if nothing ever moved.

Then something moves.

The bloom of fear in my chest before anything else, before I blink my eyes dry to make sure. Something standing, pulling up crooked and pale from the lake's edge. Faceless but facing me. A single blanched figure under the starless dome of night.

Rising up from the weeds that grow out of the sediment along the shore and squishing onto the mud, the thin grass that aprons the jutting stones and roots. Up the slope toward my place at the window, legs brushing through the grass, its shape enlarging with every step. Slow as the scream in your throat that could wake you from a dream if it could find its way out.

So cold.

The sound it makes fractures over the lake, through the woods, the walls, so that it comes from all places at once. A woman's voice that could be a half mile off or whispered in my ear.

When it reaches the top of the slope and pauses in the tall grass that reaches to its waist I shut my eyes hard, think for a moment of escape, of turn and hide. But the order doesn't go out. Nothing works.

The watery slide of bare feet on the deck outside coming to a stop outside the door. Then for a time there's no sound at all.

When I open my eyes I move forward to the window but I can't see around its frame to whatever may be there. Wait for the doorknob to turn, for its hands on my throat, the knowing crack of its laughter. But there's only my own warm air blown blue over the glass.

I'm so cold.

I don't want to. I'd rather wish myself into a dream. But I know I won't do anything now but float away from the window, cast the shadow of my hand across the wall to open the door.

Please.

Standing there. A young woman with long hair smoothed over bare shoulders, water beading down over the perfect white of her stomach. Candied freckles across her chest. Hair covering the whole of her face except for lips puffed blue with cold.

Hold me.

And I do.

Pull her icy skin to me, the bones light within her. Breathe in her skin until I'm full. All of it real as pain. Real as touch, the taste of copper and salt tears on my mouth.

When I stand back she raises her hand and lifts the blond strands away from her face. Ashen, pleading, and something else. Eyes fixed on mine, mouth parted at soft corners. Something like mercy. A face in its shape and features not unlike my own.

It's only just past eleven according to the illuminated clock outside Steele's Funeral Home by the time I make it back to town and park the Lincoln in its place in front of the hotel. There's nothing left to do but go inside, but I can't move toward the door. Bend back my head and look up at the dark windows, the gargoyle heads of the founding fathers, the dripping letters of the Empire's electric sign. Then I walk.

Just like one of the stupefied street mumblers I've watched passing below the honeymoon suite's window, talking to myself loud enough that I can hear but if one were to pass beside me they'd catch only discrete syllables, left to wonder at what the smartly dressed young man in the mud-stained overcoat could be saying to himself. Traffic braking hard as he crosses against the lights, hands rising to his mouth as though he believed a cigarette might be wedged between his fingers but when they got there they were empty, so instead he rubs them over his lips, over the words that pass through them, out and up into the air.

Caroline Rosemary Crane.

I used to love saying her name. Caroline, with the
i
always long, because to make it short left it sounding like
crinoline,
a sweatstained, mothballed Sunday hat pulled from an attic trunk. But Caroline with the
i
long created a sound roughly equivalent to the idea of
girl
. The echo of a song in its three syllables, an age-old lyric not yet faded from memory.

I say her name aloud.

A plastic captain's telescope that showed a tumbling kaleidoscope of painted sand.

A set of watercolors used to paint a fairy landscape on the wall over my bed.

A train set that never worked.

It was summer. Me and Caroline. Limbs loose and achy from swimming, long walks into town to buy some indigestible licorice or sugar crystals that exploded painfully on the tongue, lying out on the dock, whispering meaningful nonsense to each other in the sun that made us drunk. Our skin reaching a brownness that left us perfect, smooth as peanut butter. Freckles across Caroline's nose that, if stared at too long, caused prickles behind the eyes.

Somewhere in the background, so far off that only their voices could reach us, were our parents. Two sets of Cranes, Patricia & Stephen and Liddy & Richard, polished and lucky and content. Donning silly aprons (PROFESSORS DO IT . . . ACADEMICALLY!) to cook meals for the six of us but making enough for twelve. Grown-up couples that kissed on the lips, threw arms around waists, squeezed bums. Sometime after four the drinks appearing in congratulations for having spent another day in the place they thought about the rest of the year and being able to forget about their children, off playing secret games in the trees. Nobody much bothered that they were first cousins and quite evidently in love.

Once or twice I pass someone lifting a garbage can to the curb or opening the side door to let the cat in, but the sidewalks are mine alone. A town of drawn curtains, blue TV light flickering behind them, old sofas and tricycles collected on front porches. The smell of smoking fat and boiled bones. The insulated vibrations of marital argument. All of it falling away, the last leaves the wind pulls from the tree.

We rarely saw each other outside of Christmas, Thanksgiving, and those six weeks every summer. The sole explanation for this was that we went to different schools. She had her friends, I had mine. Ground to be lost if we turned our backs on our home turf for a moment. We imagined we belonged to distant, unbridgeable worlds.

It's ridiculous now, of course, given that my parents and Caroline's lived in nearly identical neighborhoods only three subway stops apart in Toronto. Although our place was regarded as ''downtown'' and theirs ''uptown,'' you'd have a hard time telling them apart just from walking their streets. Houses like the ones I walk by now. Brick cubes containing
families,
minisocieties existing within the boundaries of a three-bedroom fortress, the walls protecting the valuables within, if not love then at least privacy. That's where I grew up, where Caroline Rosemary Crane grew up: in red-brick, no-nonsense, single-family-dwelling Ontario. Where the streets are named after British generals and the neighborhoods little more than consistent rows of distinct privacies, families separated from each other by politeness and indifference and the cold.

All around me Murdoch sends its children to bed.

It was my idea.

Our parents a little drunk in the luxurious way of those who know that no real harm will come from their drinking, that this is their just reward for being born with the right name at the right time and with enough brains to capitalize on it. Uncle Stephen stumbling around at the barbecue with the tin of lighter fluid held above his head and everyone thinking that surely this time he will light himself into flames, they even say so out loud, laughing. My parents and Aunt Patricia rolling cold gin-and-tonics over their brows, looking out across the water from their foldout canvas chairs as though a show were about to begin. And it was. In fact the setting of the sun had already begun, lazy and hesitant in the way of August afternoons.

We liked the way our parents were at this time of day but never said so. Instead, what I whispered into Caroline's ear as we let the screen door slam behind us was ''They're going to start
necking
soon if we don't get out of here.''

A canoe ride before dinner. Permission from our parents like taking candy from a baby after a couple of stiff Gordon's. But of course they couldn't leave it at that, according to the adult tradition of always saying too much. It could never only be
Have fun!
or
Don't be too late, we'll be
eating soon!
There had to be
embarrassment
. So as we push ourselves out into the water they're calling after us with their stupid joke of the season that they all find so hilarious.

''Kissin' cuzzins!''

Ringing out from each of them, it seems, as though they'd come up with it for the very first time on their own.

''Kissin' cuzzins!''

Big laughs and glasses raised high in salute as we cut into the patterned ripples of the wind.

At first we head toward the island. Our standard adventure is to climb the cliff peeking out from the trees at its center and take in the view. Kiss in the name of marked occasions. Maybe kiss for a while after that for its own sake. But I decide that today's the day for a new destination. The beaver dam at the lake's far end where there are no cottages, no sun hats or beer bellies waving at us from their docks.

Caroline telling me she's going to miss me after the summer ends, that she wishes it never would. Tell her I know what she means. But what I don't tell her is that I already miss her. That days like this are gone even as they happen.

We pull the canoe in at the opening to the beaver's stream, plunge bare feet into the muck. When we reach it I walk out onto the dam (I have to, we've come here for a show of boyish courage, after all) and Caroline tells me to get off it (she has to, she's come here to protest shows of boyish courage, after all). I tell her the beaver won't mind, he's left this place to build another. She asks me if this is true and I tell her it is, grateful she didn't ask how I could tell. Above us the sun falling in a three-count. A cloud of fireflies emerging from the trees. The desire for a kiss.

I take us back out on the water far enough that the mosquitoes think twice about following. In our wake the water whirlpools, then flattens again so that after a second or two you'd never know anything had just passed through it. Caroline so beautiful and I tell her so. Tell her twice and it's the truth.