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
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
''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
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
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.