The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I wish I could be merciful, and leave Abalyn out of the ghost story entirely.

  But just like Rosemary and Caroline, Phillip George Saltonstall and Albert Perrault, she’s part of the tapestry, and I can’t tell my story without telling part of hers. She’s part of mine. If Abalyn ever writes her own ghost story, I’ll have to be part of it, and I’m pretty certain she knows that. I wouldn’t hold it against her.

  We drank our tea and ate our breakfast, and the conversation turned to video games, and how I’d never owned a computer. When the kitchen began to get too warm (no air-conditioning), we moved to the sofa. She lectured me on MMORPGs and the pros and cons of various consoles, and the relative merits of PCs and Macs. She patiently explained glitches and gigabytes and how she regretted having been too young in the eighties to have been in on the Golden Age of the Video Arcade. It went on like that for hours. I kept up, for the most part. And I began to understand why Abalyn lived the way she did, writing reviews for video games, avoiding conventional workspace. She felt safe cloistered in front of her monitor or television screen, with no prying, uninvited eyes studying her, drawing unwelcome, uninformed conclusions. I would never begrudge her that privacy. Not ever.

  Back to Phillip George Saltonstall.

  Back to The Drowning Girl.

  My ghost story is filled with significant moments that I would only become aware were significant moments in hindsight. Perhaps this is always the way of it. I can’t say, because I’ve only ever lived my one haunting. I have a single data point. Still, I would stress mine’s not a simple haunting, obviously. The sort you usually read about or hear around a campfire. I didn’t merely feel a sudden and inexplicable chill in a dark room. I didn’t wake to the sound of rattling chains or moaning. I was not shocked at an ectoplasmic woman drifting down a corridor. Those are only cartoons, caricatures of phantoms, invented by people who’ve never suffered (or been graced by) an actual, true, factual haunting. Of that I’m very certain.

  So, this, then, is a significant event, and, in time, its significance would be made plain to me. But first it was only an anecdote or an interesting story that my grandmother told me.

  L’Inconnue de la Seine.

  I don’t speak French. I had a year of it in high school, but I wasn’t very good at it (as with so many other subjects), and I’ve forgotten almost all I did manage to learn. But Caroline, she spoke French. When she was a young woman, she’d gone to Paris and Mont Saint-Michel, Orléans and Marseille. She had photographs and picture postcards. She had a box of souvenirs. Sometimes she’d take them out and show them to me. She had stories of France. She told me one when I was nine years old.

  I treasure her stories of France, as I seriously doubt I’ll ever be able to go there myself. Travel isn’t as cheap or easy as it once was, and I don’t like the idea of being on an airplane (I’ve never flown).

  I was in Girl Scouts, working on my first-aid merit badge. One day, a woman came to our scout troop, from a hospital in Providence, and she taught us CPR with a rubber dummy she called Resusci Anne. We learned how to properly administer chest compressions, and how to press our lips to the dummy’s lips and breathe our breath into it. How we would breathe into the mouth of someone who’d stopped breathing after a heart attack. Rosemary was busy that day—I don’t recall why—and Grandmother Caroline picked me up after the meeting.

  Caroline drove this huge car, a Dresden blue 1956 Pontiac Star Chief, and I loved riding in the wide backseat. That car was the antithesis of my crappy little Honda. The speedometer went all the way to something like 120 miles per hour. It glided so smoothly along the road that you hardly ever felt a bump or a pothole. Rosemary sold it to a collector in Wakefield right after my grandmother committed suicide, and I’ve often wished she hadn’t, that it had been passed to me. Of course, gas is so expensive now, and I’m sure the Star Chief got lousy mileage, so I probably couldn’t have afforded to drive it. I can’t afford to go to Paris, or to drive Caroline’s lost Star Chief.

  We went back to her house, and while I was trying to make sense of my math homework, after I’d told her about Resusci Anne, she told me about l’Inconnue de la Seine.

  “The dummy had a very distinctive face, didn’t it?” she asked me, and I had to think about the question for a moment. “Not just any old generic face,” Caroline added. “Not like a face someone made up, but a face that must have been the face of a real human being.” In hindsight, I realized that she was right, and I told her so.

  “Well, that’s because it wasn’t a made-up face,” she said. And then she told me the story of a drowned girl who’d been found floating in the river Seine in the 1880s or 1890s. The body was discovered near the quai du Louvre, and taken to the Paris Morgue.

  “The woman was very pretty,” Caroline said. “She was beautiful. Even after all that time in the river, she was still beautiful. One of the morgue assistants was so smitten with her that he made a death mask. Copies of the beautiful girl’s face were sold, hundreds and hundreds of them. Almost everyone in Europe knew that face, even though no one ever did learn who she’d been. She might have been anyone. Maybe a girl who sold flowers, or a seamstress, or a beggar, but her identity is still a mystery. No one came forward to claim the corpse.”

  By this time, I’d completely forgotten about the confusing tedium of my homework, and was listening with rapt attention to my grandmother. She said she’d seen a copy of the mask when she was in Paris in the 1930s. Stories and poems and even a novel were written about l’Inconnue de la Seine (which she translated as “the unknown woman of the Seine,” although Babel Fish tells me it should be translated as “the unknown factor of the Seine.” It also tells me that “the unknown woman of the Seine” in French is Le femme inconnu du Seine. Maybe it’s right, but I don’t trust a computer program as much as my dead grandmother). She said one story had been written from the point of view of the dead girl, as she floated down the river. In the story she doesn’t remember who she was when she was alive. She can’t even remember her name. She’s become a new sort of being, one that must live always at the bottom of the river, or in the sea. But she doesn’t want to live like that, so she lets herself rise to the surface, where she quickly drowns on air.

  Grandmother Caroline didn’t tell me the name of the story or its author, or if she did, I forgot. I found it many years later. The story was written by a poet named Jules Supervielle, who was born in 1884 and died in 1960. First published in 1929, the story is titled simply “L’Inconnue de la Seine.” I found it in a library at Brown University, in a collection of Supervielle’s work called L’Enfant de la haute mer. I brought it home, though like I said, I can’t read French. I copied the story down by hand. I still have it somewhere. And I’ve found other poems and stories about the drowned girl. Vladimir Nabokov wrote a poem about her, a poem that was also about the Slavic rusalki. Man Ray took photographs of that face.

  One thing I have come to comprehend about true ghost stories is that we rarely know they’re happening to us until after the fact, when we’re haunted, but the events of the story proper are over and done with. This is a perfect example of what I mean. The first woman I ever kissed was l’Inconnue de la Seine, the likeness of an unidentified suicide who was born over a hundred years before me. That day, I pressed my lips gently to hers, again and again, breathing gently into her lifeless mouth. And I felt a peculiar tingle in my belly. I know now, in hindsight, this was one of my earliest sexual experiences, even though it would be several years yet before I fully admitted to myself that I would only ever want to make love to women. My lips brushing those silicone lips, and there was a…a what? A frisson, I think. A shudder of pleasure that came and went so fast I was hardly even consciously aware of it.

  I’ve sat staring at photographs of the death mask. I have a book on sculpture with two black-and-white photographs of it. She doesn’t look dead. She hardly even looks like she’s sleeping. There’s a wry sort of a smile (which is why she’s sometimes called
the “drowned Mona Lisa”). Her hair is parted in the middle. You can see her eyelashes clearly.

  It’s all a perfect circle, in hindsight. A mandala of moments that are possessed of great significance, in hindsight. I only say that now, state it as a fact, but maybe it will become clearer farther along in my ghost story. Or maybe it won’t, and I’ll have failed.

  Two years later, on my eleventh birthday, I would see Phillip George Saltonstall’s painting The Drowning Girl, hanging at RISD. Eleven years later, I would take a drive one night in July and find Eva Canning waiting for me near the banks of the Blackstone River. Beautiful, terrible, lost Eva. My ghost who was a mermaid. Unless she wasn’t. She would kiss me, and her lips were no different from those of the CPR dummy, or the lips of l’Inconnue de la Seine. And so I would fall in love with her, even though I was already very much in love with Abalyn. Did the morgue attendant kiss those dead lips, either before or after he made his mask?

  In my head, this all makes a perfect circle, an elegant and inescapable circuit. But seeing it on paper, it comes across confusing. I’m afraid it isn’t clear at all, what I mean. What I want to take from my mind and put someplace outside of me. I don’t know the right words, and maybe that’s because there are no right words to pull a haunting out into the light and trap it in ink and paper.

  In his painting, Saltonstall hid the face of The Drowning Girl from view, by having her look over her shoulder, back towards the forest. But the painting was done in 1898, right? So…he might well have seen l’Inconnue de la Seine. He was in love with his first cousin, and if Mary Farnum is the girl he painted, it could be that’s why he hid her face. But also maybe not. Eva Canning didn’t ever wear the face of l’Inconnue de la Seine, though she wore at least two faces that I know of.

  I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It’s entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

  The drugstore closes in half an hour, and I have to pick up a refill.

  Am I repeating myself? Bah. Dah. Ba-ba.

  I don’t mean, when I ask this, repeating myself in a useful sense that underscores and makes manifest the ways in which all these occurrences and lives are bound inextricably together to create the ghost story that I’ve lived and am now trying to write down. I mean, am I repeating myself (Bah. Dah. Ba-ba.), and I also mean to ask, am I doing it to avoid moving forwards towards the terrifying, sad truth of it all? Am I dragging my feet because I’m a crazy woman who knows damn well she’s crazy, but who doesn’t want to be reminded just how crazy she is by having to tell two stories that are true, when only one can be factual? I feel as though I’m doing just exactly that. That I’m acting out Rosemary’s old joke about a man in a rowboat with only one oar, rowing in endless circles and never, ever reaching shore. But how can I do otherwise, when the story is a spiral, or spirals set within spirals? Am I panicking because I think I need or I wish to force a straight, sane line, a narrative that begins here and proceeds to there by a conventional, coherent route? Am I too busy second-guessing myself and pulling my insecurities up over my head—like the blankets when I was five and afraid of the dark, afraid of what might be in the dark, afraid of wolves—to stop procrastinating and relate these events straightforwardly?

  Am I a crazy woman only transferring her delusions and disordered consciousness into the written word?

  Dr. Ogilvy dislikes the word “crazy,” and she dislikes “insane,” as well. She probably approves of the way Butler Hospital changed its name. But I tell her these are honest words. Fuck the political or negative connotations, they’re honest words, and I need them. Maybe I’m frightened at the thought of being committed, of the antiseptic sterility of hospitals and the way they rob people of their dignity, but I’m not frightened by these words. Nor am I ashamed of them. But I am frightened by the thought that I’m caught in a loop and am incapable (or so unwilling I may as well be incapable) of communicating in a straightforward manner. And I would feel shame if I couldn’t muster the courage to tell the truth.

  “Nothing is ever straightforward,” Imp typed, “though we lose a lot of the truth by pretending it’s so.”

  Stop the questions. Just stop it. It makes me angry when I’m afraid. It makes me almost indescribably angry. I can’t possibly finish this if it makes me angry to try, and the only thing that makes me more angry than my fear is my failures. So, I have to do this, and I won’t stop me.

  Abalyn and I didn’t really ever discuss her moving in. She just did. I had the space, and she needed someplace to live. Almost right from the start, I wanted her to be near me. I wanted to be in love with her, or it was the beginning of love. It never felt like a crush. I wasn’t a virgin. I’d had lots and lots of crushes, and it didn’t feel like that. It wasn’t that…what? Insistent? But I wanted her to stay, and she did stay, and I was glad of it. I do remember how she slept on the sofa the first few nights, out there with all her video game stuff, before I finally convinced her that was foolish when there was so much room in my bed. I wanted her in my bed. I wanted her close to me, and it was a relief when she accepted the invitation. The first time we made love, which was the first night she slept in my bed, that was a magnificent relief.

  The Thursday after we met, I got off work early, and we walked together down Willow Street to the park, to Dexter Training Grounds, which, as I’ve said, isn’t a military training grounds anymore, though it’s still called that. On Thursdays, every week from early June until October, there’s a farmers’ market. Even if I don’t buy anything, I enjoy going and seeing all the produce heaped in colorful, fresh piles, arranged in woven wooden baskets, and in those little cardboard cartons, waiting to be purchased. Early in the summer, there are sugarsnap peas, green beans, cucumbers, many varieties of peppers (hot, mild, sweet; scarlet and yellow and green), apples, strawberries, kale, turnips, crisp lettuce, spicy radishes, heirloom tomatoes, and big jugs of cider. In June, it’s too early for good corn, and the blueberries aren’t ripe yet. But there’s bread from local bakeries. Sometimes, there’s fresh sausage and bacon sold from coolers by the same men who raised and killed the pigs. All of this is arranged on long folding tables beneath the chestnut trees.

  That day I bought apples and tomatoes, and when I had, Abalyn and I sat on a bench beneath the trees and each ate one of the apples, which were just the right blend of tart and sweet. The next day, I used the rest to bake a pie.

  “Want to hear something creepy?” I asked, when I was done with my apple and had tossed the core away for the squirrels and birds.

  “Depends,” she said. “Is this where you tell me you’re an axe murderer or into furries or that sort of creepy?”

  I had to ask her what furries were.

  “No. It’s something I saw about a year back, something I saw here in the park.”

  “Then sure,” she said. “Tell me something creepy.” She was eating her apple much more slowly than I had (I often eat too fast), and she took another bite.

  “I was driving home from work one night. Usually, I take the bus, right? But that day, I drove because, well, I don’t know, I just felt like driving. On my way home that evening, passing by the park, I saw four people walking along together. They were away from the streetlamps and under the trees, where it was the darkest, but I still saw them pretty clearly. When I first spotted them, I thought they were nuns, which was strange enough. You never see nuns around here. But then they didn’t seem like nuns anymore.”

  “Nuns are creepy enough,” Abalyn muttered around a bite of her apple. “Nuns freak me out.”

  “I saw that they weren’t wearing habits, but long black cloaks, with hoods that covered their heads. Suddenly, I wasn’t even sure they were women. They might just as well have been men, from all I could make out of them. And then—and yeah, I know how this sounds—and then I fancied they weren’t even people.”

  “You fancied? No one actually says they fancied.”

  “Language is a poor enough means of communica
tion as it is,” I told her. “So we should use all the words we have.” It wasn’t really an original thought; I was paraphrasing Spencer Tracy from Inherit the Wind.

  She shrugged, said, “So the nuns who weren’t nuns might not even have been people. Go on,” and took another bite of her apple.

  “I didn’t say for sure that they weren’t people. But for a moment they seemed more like ravens trying very hard to look like people. Maybe trying too hard, and because they were so self-conscious, I could see that they were actually ravens.”

  Abalyn chewed her apple and watched me. By then, she already knew why I take the pills I take. She’d seen all the prescription bottles on my nightstand, and I’d told her some stuff. Not everything. Not anything about Caroline or my mother, but I’d told her enough that she understood about the state of my mental health (a phrase Dr. Ogilvy does approve of). Still, that day, she didn’t say she thought I was nuts. I’d expected her to, but she didn’t. She just ate her apple and considered me with those blue-green beach-glass eyes of hers.

  “Sure, I know they weren’t ravens, of course. I don’t know why it seemed that way. I think they might have been Wiccans. There are a few witches around here, I suspect. Maybe they were on their way to a ritual or witches’ sabbat or potluck or whatever it is Wiccans do when they get together.”

  “Frankly, it’s a lot more interesting to imagine they were ravens trying too hard to pass themselves off as human beings,” Abalyn said. “It’s a lot creepier than if they’re just Wiccans. I’ve met witches, and, unlike nuns, they’re never creepy. They tend to be rather humdrum, in fact.” She finished her apple and tossed the core so that it landed in the grass near mine.

  “Whatever they were, they gave me the willies.”