Lost Girls

chapter 44

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.

Knees astride, leaning forward to meet her lips. A kiss that's meant to be different, to communicate solemn, adult intentions. Eyes closed in the living dream of her skin.

She was Caroline. She was the dark-nippled girl ripped out of a basement bookshelf National Geographic and kept between mattress and bed frame. She was that poster of Marilyn Monroe in a sequined evening gown, eyelashes lowering as though a drug were taking effect. She was my aunt Patricia stepping out of the lake from a late-night skinny-dip, pushing her arms through a bathrobe left in a pile on the pale stones. Not women but a single, shifting composite. Desire as a slide show viewed from too close for all the particulars to be visible at once.

But she was real.

She wanted to be a vet when she got older. She sang solo soprano in her school choir and won silver at the Kiwanis music festival in grade eight. She was so ticklish, the mere mention of the word and the waving of spidery fingers before her eyes would bring on a reflex of laughter, then screams for help, then tears. She was clumsy and broke many glasses, grape Kool-Aid left in a pool of Martian blood on the floor. She could swim like an otter, slipping below the surface and breaking through forty feet away, water beading off her skin as though she were coated in an invisible oil. She had secrets--staying up late to watch her parents have sex ''like hogs'' from their bedroom doorway, discovering the blood of her first period trickling down her legs at a pool party with boys in attendance, cheating on her final math exam with the formulas written at the top of her thighs--and shared them all with me.

But in the canoe that afternoon she wasn't even there. In her place someone silent and yielding, a mannequin with cleverly warmed surfaces. I wished for her stillness and she gave it to me. Yet for the time I hovered and pressed and searched I wouldn't have known her name. I wouldn't have known my own.

When it finally arrives the sound of her fear comes from across the lake. It comes from underground.

Her body plank-stiff but fists pounding against the sides, water lapping in and collecting in a luminous green pool at the bottom. Told her I'd stop. And did, shushing her with promises and hey, heys and sorries. But instead she did the one thing you're always told never to do in a canoe. She stood up.

When I make it back to the air it takes me a second to realize Caroline isn't beside me. A second more to think of what to do.

Then I'm under. So deep, there's no way I'll make it back with only this one held breath but I can tell she's there just below me, her movements a buffeting current against my skin. Grab her arm with eyes closed and start to kick the other way. But she's heavy. Heavier than she should be, as though attached to a sack of wet sand. A dozen sacks of wet sand.

It's then that I feel a tug from below. Pulling Caroline down. I know this, I'm certain it's true, there's no question about it, it might have been nothing. A weed licking about Caroline's ankle that a single pull could have freed her from. A twinge of cramp in my legs. Something alive from below taking her for itself.

Whatever it is it's strong enough to finally pull her from my grasp. That, or I let her go after a swift calculation of time and distance and possibility. Reach for her again but she's gone deeper--I've floated up--and I can't find her hand.

I tell myself not to. That it will be too horrible and do no good and I will never be able to forget. But I do anyway. I look.

Both our eyes open to each other. Mine to glimpse her bloodless face pull into the dark. Hers to watch the shadow of her cousin kicking up toward the dancing light at the surface.

That fall I started back at school but my friends from the year before could tell right away that something was wrong. High school kids can sniff out emotional disturbance using the same instincts with which hunting animals smell fear in lesser creatures. Within days concern (''Hey, Crane, are you okay? You seem weird'') had shifted to aggressive curiosity (''What the fuck is wrong with you, man?'') and then finally hardened into strict isolation. I could clear a cafeteria table as I approached with my tray of synthetic cheeseburger and fries with the effectiveness of a putrefying leper or grinning airport evangelist seeking converts. Hallways widened before me. The walk to the bus stop now free of flirtation, shared cigarettes, and rumor. And with this standing outside of things I came to hate them. The good-looking ones with a genetic license for casual cruelty, the rich ones with lazy eyes already bored by unquestioned privilege, the clever ones with an obsessive pursuit of good grades that left them like the seals at Marineland, performing tricks in order to have dead herrings tossed into their mouths by whistle-blowing keepers. Each one of them deserving it in their particular way.

Not that I've been antisocial as an adult. That wouldn't be practical, given that one must deal with people in order to get things done. I simply decided to despise them all so viciously I wouldn't even let them see it. Like magic. Or science. A simple, terrible equation: If you hate the rest of the world long enough, eventually you can make it disappear. Or make yourself disappear. One or the other.

A beagle too new to have been given a name running under the wheels of an Eaton's delivery truck.

Three goldfish--Snap, Crackle, and Pop--that functioned as appetizer, main course, and dessert on the new piranha's first day.

A toad kept in a grass-filled jar that I thought was singing to me with his mouth wide open until my mother told me I'd forgotten to put air holes in the lid.

My legs take me to a park bench next to the creek that runs below the prison. The sky a glaze of gasoline on the slow water. Slides over the rocks and passes on out of town through the system of connected rivers and lakes to Georgian Bay. I listen for voices in it but there's only my own, picked up and carried on the water in its constant motion to join itself.

It was early that October when the Murdoch detachment of the OPP called and said they wanted to ask me some questions. Nothing too serious, no lawyer necessary, no, no, but could I come up sometime soon and have a word? Dad canceled his lecture, I was pulled out of class, and both my parents drove me up early the next morning, so that by noon I was sitting in front of a desk with a cop behind it, his face so empty of color that his head appeared as a cheesecloth sack packed tight with rice. Behind him, half sitting on the two-drawer filing cabinet against the wall, a younger cop with a mustache who said less than the older one but whenever he did speak asked the tougher questions. Any problems with handling feelings of aggression? sexual appetites? you're a good swimmer, right? His crossed arms and the noise he made through his nose after I gave him an answer suggested he believed in a foul-play theory. Believed I was a murderer.

The interview seemed to go on well into the night, but by the time they let me go it wasn't yet five o'clock and the sun still blanched houses and trees from its position behind low, seamless clouds. My parents were silent as they led me out to the parking lot, my mother offering an uncertain smile but my father too embarrassed for any show of emotion right there on the tidy grounds of the police station. They remained silent for the first part of the trip home, talking only after night had fallen over everything and the green dashboard light turned them into phantoms in the front seat.

''So, what did they have to say?'' my father begins, as though the question had only just occurred to him.

''Nothing. They just wanted to know about Caroline. How it happened.''

''And you told them?''

''The canoe tipped. I tried to save her. She drowned. I told them.''

''And what now?'' my mother asks, turning around to face me. ''Is it over now?''

''Yeah, I think so. They don't have anything.''

''Any what, son?'' My father, a little too innocently.

''Evidence,'' I say.

A brief look passes between them and with this the conversation ends. The car rushes south to join the highways that increase in breadth as the city gets closer, two lanes to four lanes to six to eight, my mother and father dim silhouettes in the oncoming headlights. Somewhere in there I fall asleep.

Were there dreams? Did I hear them cry out, or was it the shriek of metal torn by metal? Was I awake or did I only later imagine the suspended moment of impact, of flight and spiraling darkness?

I'm being lifted up. Careful, orchestrated hands levitating me onto a varnished wood stretcher and strapping my head still to protect me from any further spinal injury. Being asked what my name is and if I could count the number of fingers the paramedic waved before my eyes (four) as they settled me into the back of an ambulance with buffed stainless steel all around. The line of cars stopped in both directions for what seemed several hundred miles. White lights and red lights, not going anywhere.

A tractor trailer carrying electric blankets to the downtown department stores for the Christmas rush, four cars in front of us when it lost one of its eighteen wheels. Just shredded right off its rim, bounced over the cars ahead to finally bring its two hundred pounds down against the front windshield. Our car spun out of control, was struck from behind, rolled end over end into the grassy median. The chain reaction caused by our flipping across three lanes resulted in a smoking pileup that was pictured in the Toronto papers the next morning but, ''miraculously,'' only my mother and father ended up as fatalities. Their son, outside of a few nasty cuts, was fine, partially because his parents' bodies in the front seat absorbed the better part of the impact. Everyone agreed that it was a tragedy, shook their heads, and said no more.

Then the years of boarding school and holidays with legally obligated aunts and uncles (with the exception of Caroline's parents, who I was told ''thought it best'' if I stayed away). All of them doing what they could at first before finally surrendering, feeling that I could have made their jobs a little easier if I'd only made a bit more of an effort, tried to be somewhat more responsive, instead of the unreadable kid who was a cause of great concern to the headmaster, who suspected me of ripping the last pages out of novels in the library. But in the end nobody could say much about it, given the nature of the tragedy the boy had endured. So the aunts and uncles addressed their checks to Upper Canada College at the beginning of each term, looked forward to the day the kid headed off to university (thank God his marks were good), and, aside from the annual charade of good-natured congeniality at Christmas, could be left completely to his own devices once and for all. And the whole time the kid looked forward to the very same thing himself, feeling that once he'd gained his own space he could refine all the mechanisms that would allow him to wipe his hands of himself forever.

On this point it turned out that hate alone wasn't enough, although it certainly helped in dealing with the world, the right poses to strike. But hate wasn't so good with managing the past. What I had yet to discover was the simple fact that the best way to get around memory is to forget. That forgetting is not the absence of memory but a thing in itself, with its own mass, shape, and texture. The process calls for initial encouragement but then a standing back to allow it to run its own course. A weed gone wild in the garden that will bring about the death of all other things around it if left alone long enough.

The more difficult part was to rid the body of memory. The trick is to convince it that it's not really there. Treat it like a stupid machine and let it rust. Dull it with drink and opiates. Never step on a scale. Avoid mirrors.

It worked.

Hadn't thought of it, any of it, for a long time. Almost two decades of nothing. And now it's come back out of nowhere. Phoning up in the middle of the night, rising from the water, asking to be held.

Evidence,'' I say.

A look that passes between them in the front seat, quick and ashamed.

Neither of them ever told me they believed me. I never told them she was pulled.

Sitting next to my father on the arm of his chair and pretending to read the same page he was reading, each word a soldier, each paragraph a battalion following the one ahead of it into war.

Proposing marriage to Caroline under her father's billiards table, the twist-tie from a loaf of bread for an engagement ring.

Carried, asleep, at my mother's neck.

I smell the morning before I see it: bagged leaves, pine sap, and coffee. Then the gray light you don't believe at first, pushing color into the shadows. From the block behind me a car refuses to turn over, a screen door whinges open, a child is told to stop it right now and begins to cry. Without raising my eyes the morning lifts up from the sidewalk, the dead grass. Every step slow but sure. My body a solid, living thing in the growing light.