The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “A review,” which is what I would have guessed, so it doesn’t seem like much of an answer.

  For a few moments, maybe for a few minutes, I eat my sticky sandwich and she types. I almost don’t ask about the drive again, because there’s something so peaceful about the rhythm of the evening as it’s playing out. But then I do ask the question, and from that everything else follows.

  “No, Imp,” she says, looking up at me again. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got a deadline. I need to have this piece finished in the next couple of hours. I should have finished it yesterday.” She tells me the name of the game, and it’s one I’d watched her play, but I’ve entirely forgotten what it was. “I’m sorry,” she says again.

  “No, that’s okay. No problem.” I try not to sound disappointed, but I’ve never been very good at hiding disappointment. It almost always shows, so I will assume she heard it that night.

  “Know what?” she says. “Why don’t you go, anyway? No reason you shouldn’t, just because I’ve got to work. Might even be better without me along. More quiet and all.”

  “It won’t be better without you.”

  I finish my sandwich and my milk and set the saucer and the empty glass on the floor beside the sofa.

  “I still say you shouldn’t let me keep you from going. It’s supposed to rain the rest of the week.”

  “You’re sure? It’s all right if I go without you, I mean.”

  “Positive. I’ll probably still be up when you get back, this one’s turning out to be such a bitch.”

  I tell her that I won’t be gone more than a couple of hours at the most, and she says, “Well, then I’ll definitely still be up when you get back.”

  Regardless, I almost don’t go. There’s a wash of apprehension, or dread. Some brand of misgiving. It isn’t so very different from what I felt back when the arithmomania was so bad, or the night I saw the raven-nuns in the park, or on innumerable other occasions when the crazy kicks into overdrive. Dr. Ogilvy has said repeatedly that whenever this happens, I should make a concerted effort to go ahead and do the thing that I’d meant to do, but was suddenly afraid of doing. Within reason, she’s said, I shouldn’t let the delusions and magical thinking and neuroses prevent me from living a normal life. Which means not locking up.

  Normal is a bitter pill that we rail against.

  Imp isn’t sure what that means. It just occurred to her, and she didn’t want to lose it.

  I dislike this language, the detached argot of psychiatry and psychology. Words like codependent and normal, phrases like magical thinking. They disturb me far more than crazy and insane. Let it be enough to say, There’s a wash of apprehension, or dread.

  Even so, I almost decide not to go alone. I almost reach for the book I’ve been reading, or go to my studio to work on the painting I’ve been trying to finish.

  “I think it would be good for you,” Abalyn says, not looking away from the screen, her fingers still tapping away at the keyboard. “I don’t want to become a ball and chain.”

  And this calls to mind another warning from Dr. Ogilvy, that if I ever should find myself in a relationship, not to allow my illness to let it drift into codependence. Not to risk losing my self-sufficiency.

  “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m totally sure, Imp. Go. Get out. It’s an order,” and she laughs. “If it’s not too late when you get home, we’ll watch a movie.”

  “I have work tomorrow,” I say. “I can’t stay up that late.”

  “Go,” she tells me again, and she stops typing long enough to make a shooing motion with her left hand. “I’ll still be here when you get home.”

  So I got my keys, and a summer sweater just in case the night was chillier than it had seemed coming home from work. I kiss her, and say I won’t be gone long.

  “Be careful,” she says. “Don’t drive so fast. One of these nights, you’re gonna get a ticket. Or hit a deer.” I reply that I’m always careful. I sound more defensive than I meant to, but Abalyn doesn’t appear to have noticed.

  “You have your phone?” she asks.

  It’s almost eleven thirty when I leave the house, but I don’t have to be at work until eleven the next morning. I pull back out onto Willow, turn onto Parade Street, then right on Westminster. I hardly think about where I might be headed. I hardly ever do on these drives. Any forethought or planning seems to defeat the purpose. Their therapeutic value seems to lie in their spontaneity, in the particular routes and destinations always being accidental. From Westminster, I cross the interstate and drive through downtown, with all its bright lights and unlit alleyways. I turn left, north, onto North Main Street, and pass Old North Burial Ground.

  I don’t play the radio. I never play the radio on my night drives.

  So, past North Burial Ground, and I continue on through Pawtucket, North Main becoming Highway 122. There’s more traffic than I would like, but then there’s almost always more traffic than I’d like. It’s long after midnight by the time I get to Woonsocket, with its decaying, deserted mills and the roaring cacophony of Thunder Mist Falls, there where the Blackstone River slips over the weirs of the Woonsocket Falls Dam. I pull into the parking lot on the eastern side of the dam. When I get out of the car, I look up and see that there’s a ring around the moon, reminding me of Abalyn’s warning that rain was on the way. But rain tomorrow, not tonight. Tonight the sky is clear and specked with stars. I lock the Honda’s doors and cross the otherwise empty parking lot and stand at the railing; I try hard to concentrate on nothing but the violent noise of the water crashing down onto the ragged granite island below the dam.

  “Wouldn’t it be interesting,” Imp typed, “if there were a third version of the truth, one in which you met Eva at this dam? It would be poetic, wouldn’t it?”

  No. Things are quite complicated enough already, thank you very much. Let’s not make it worse with obvious lies, no matter how pretty they may be.

  I’m standing there, wanting only to hear the wild torrent against those water- and timeworn Devonian rocks. But, instead, my head’s filling up with distracting trivia about the dam’s history, minute clots of fact that intrude and push their way unbidden up and into my consciousness. It was completed in 1960, this present dam, after the terrible floods of 1955. But there were dams before this dam, and as long ago as 1660—before there was any dam and only the natural course of the falls—a mill stood on this spot. The mood is broken, and I turn away from the dam and the falls and the roar, crossing the street back to the parking lot and the car.

  I continue north, leaving Rhode Island behind me and crossing into Massachusetts. I ford the river on Bridge Street, just east of the rusty railway trestle from which the lifeless body of Perishable Shippen might have been dropped, if those stories are true. I slow down in Millville, recalling what Abalyn said about speeding tickets. I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket. I’ve never even gotten a parking ticket. Millville is small, and I think of it as a village or hamlet, not a town. But still there are so many sodium-arc or mercury-vapor streetlights that they blot out the stars. Who needs all this light? What are they afraid of? There’s no point to being out in the night, beneath the night sky, if I can’t see the stars. But Millville is small, and soon I’m on the far side of it, heading northwest on 122. Soon, I can make out a few twinkling stars again.

  Imp—nervous, fretting, skittish little Imp—typed, “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s not too late to stop, you know? You can stop right here, or say that you turned around and drove home to Willow Street. Or, if you insist, that you drove on to Uxbridge or wherever most suits you, but that nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever happened that night or any other. Not in July and certainly not in November.”

  And I could never use the word insane again, and also I would pretend that Rosemary Anne died of a seizure, that she didn’t commit suicide. I could go through all the rest of my life in denial, always evading what makes me uncomfortable for fear of triggering uncomfortable, di
sturbing, appalling thoughts. I could do that, right? I could always call something one thing when, in fact, it’s the exact opposite. Lots of people do it, and it seems to work for them, so why the hell not me?

  Hesitantly, Imp typed, “But we both know better, don’t we?” The persistent clack of the keys against the paper rolled into the carriage was pregnant with resignation.

  But point taken.

  I know better.

  Stop.

  Yesterday, I honestly did try to make it through that all at once. I wanted to spit it out and be done with it, put it at my back, that first version of the night on the road. I wanted to follow Dr. Ogilvy’s advice and proceed despite my anxiety. But then I was talking to myself, talking at myself, questioning myself, heaping aspersions upon my resolve and casting those aspersions into the cold, hard default Courier black-and-white of this typewriter. And, even though I immediately called myself on it, that was that. I had to step away. I find today that I’m still not ready to return to the events of that night, what occurred after I left the parking lot in Woonsocket, after I drove through Millville. But I also need to write, so I’ll write this, instead. Before sleep last night, I was thinking again about the night I saw the raven-nuns, and about relating that story to Abalyn, and I remembered what Caroline once told me about the meaning of ravens, and those birds closely related to ravens.

  Maybe I was six or seven. I’m not sure. Rosemary had left me with my grandmother while she went shopping (she often did this, as I had a peculiar aversion to grocery stores and such). Caroline was sewing, and I was watching her sew. She had an antique Singer sewing machine, the sort you work with a foot pedal. I loved the rhythm of it. The sound of my grandmother’s sewing put me at ease; it was a soothing sound. We were in her bedroom, because that’s where she kept her sewing machine, and she was making a shirt from calico printed with a bright floral pattern.

  What happened might seem strange, if you’re not me, or Caroline, or Rosemary. If you’re not someone or something like Eva Canning was, for that matter. It’s never seemed odd to me, but, then, I’m keenly aware how my perceptions are so often at odds with those of most other people I’ve met in my life. Maybe it wouldn’t seem strange, but only quaint or foolish. I don’t mean charmingly odd when I say quaint. I mean strange.

  I was sitting on Caroline’s bed, which smelled of fresh laundry and tea rose perfume and very slightly of the Ben-Gay ointment she used when her bad shoulder was hurting her. Comfortable smells, all of those, in perfect harmony with the chuga-chuga-chuga of the old Singer. And I was telling her about Rosemary taking me down to Scarborough Beach just the week before. It was autumn, so there weren’t a lot of people at the beach, no tourists, no summer people, and we’d walked back and forth for a couple of hours, filling a plastic pail with shells and a few unusually shaped cobbles. And, sitting on the bed, telling my grandmother about that day by the bay, I said:

  “And then Rosemary looked out across the water, and she said, ‘Oh, baby, look. Do you see it?’ She was awfully excited, and she pointed at the water. I tried very hard to see what she was seeing, but I didn’t, not at first.

  “‘You can’t see it, because the sun’s reflecting off the water,’ and she told me to shade my eyes with my hand and try again.”

  “Did that work?” Caroline asked, stopping to fiddle with the machine’s bobbin. “Could you see what she was pointing at?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “And what was it you saw?”

  And, thinking that I’d delivered the yarn without a trace of guile and that she’d believe every single word, I said, “I saw a great sea serpent slithering about in the waves. It was the color of kelp. It looked smooth and rubbery like kelp. I thought that if I could touch it, it would even feel the way kelp feels.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t kelp?” Caroline asked me. “Sometimes there are pretty big tangles of kelp in the bay. I’ve seen them myself. At a distance, they can look like all sorts of things besides kelp.”

  “Oh, absolutely sure,” I told her. “Kelp doesn’t have a head like a snake and red eyes and a tongue that flicks out the way a snake’s tongue flicks out. Kelp doesn’t turn and stare back at you and open its mouth to show how many teeth it has, so you’ll know it could eat you if it wanted to, if it decided to swim towards you and you weren’t fast enough to get out of its way. Kelp doesn’t slap at the water with its tail like a whale does, now, does it?”

  “Not in my experience,” she said, and went back to working the Singer’s pedal and feeding the bright calico beneath the needle. “Doesn’t sound much like kelp.”

  “It must have been at least as long as a school bus, however many feet that is. Mother was afraid, but I told her it wouldn’t hurt us. I told her how I’d read about a sea serpent that was in Gloucester Harbor in 1817—”

  “You remember the date?” Caroline wanted to know.

  “I most certainly do, and it’s rude to interrupt.” She apologized, and I continued. “I told Rosemary that lots of people saw that sea serpent in 1917, and it didn’t attack any of them.”

  “You said before that it was 1817, didn’t you?”

  “Does it make any difference? Either way, it didn’t attack anyone, and that’s what I told Mother. We stood there and watched the sea serpent swimming around, and it watched us back, and we even saw it stretch out its long neck and try to snatch a seagull out of the air.”

  No sooner had I mentioned the gull than a large crow appeared at the bedroom window and perched there, gazing in at us with its beady black eyes. Caroline stopped sewing, and I stopped telling my story about the sea serpent off Scarborough Beach. The crow pecked once at the window screen, cawed once, then flew away again. My grandmother stared at the window for a moment, then turned and looked at me.

  “Imp, now I know you made up the story about the sea serpent.”

  “How?” I asked, still watching the window, as if I expected the crow to return.

  “It’s something that crows can do,” she said. “Tell whenever someone’s lying. If you’re listening to a story, and a crow shows up like that, you can bet the storyteller is making the whole thing up.”

  “I’ve never heard that before,” I protested, though I think by that time I’d decided it was wise not to press the issue of my fabulous sea serpent.

  “Imp, there’s lots of stuff you’ve never heard before. You’re just a kid, and you’ve got a lot to learn. Anyhow, it’s not just crows. Same goes for ravens, too, and also rooks, magpies, and pretty much any sort of corvid, even blue jays and nutcrackers. They’re damn smart beasts, and it’s their special ability, to know a lie when they hear one. And what with their troublesome dispositions, they have an annoying tendency to show up and remind someone when they’ve strayed from the facts.”

  “You’re not just making this up?”

  Caroline nodded towards the window. “Did you see a crow?” she asked.

  “What’s a corvid, anyway?” I wanted to know, as it was a word I’d never heard before.

  “The family Corvidae, into which ornithologists place ravens and crows and all their close relatives.”

  “You read that in a book?”

  “I most certainly did,” she said, and started sewing again.

  “And you also read the part about blackbirds showing up when people are making stuff up?”

  “Strictly speaking, Imp, blackbirds aren’t corvids, though most corvids are birds that are black.”

  By this time I’m sure I must have been quite entirely confused. Caroline had this habit of talking in circles, so maybe that’s where I got it from. The circles almost always made sense, which is why they were so frustrating, especially to a six- or seven-year-old girl who’d not yet learned for herself the trick of talking in meaningful circles, conversational mandalas that resist scrutiny and refutation.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Caroline. Did you read it in a book, that part about corvids showing up whenever people tell lies?�
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  “I don’t remember, Imp, but it doesn’t make any difference. Lots of things are true, but no one’s ever bothered writing them down in books. Lives are filled with true things, things that really happened, and hardly any of it ever shows up in books. Or newspapers. Or what have you. Maybe my mother told me about crows and ravens. But I might have read it somewhere.”

  “I really did read about the Gloucester sea serpent,” I told her, somewhat sheepishly, I expect.

  “I don’t think that’s what the crow was objecting to, India Morgan.” Grandmother Caroline rarely ever called me by my first and middle name like that, but when she did, it got my attention. And then she said:

  “I have fled in the shape of a raven of prophetic speech. That’s something I read. It’s from a Welsh poet named Taliesin. You ought to look him up next time you’re at the library.”

  And then she recited, rather dramatically:

  Crow, crow, crow God,

  Send Thee a black thraw!

  I was a crow just now,

  But I shall be in a woman’s likeness even now

  Crow, crow, crow God!

  Send Thee a black thraw!

  Then she laughed and jiggled the bobbin again.

  “More Taliesin?” I asked.

  “Nope. That’s something I read in a book, an invocation Scottish witches used when they wanted to turn back into women, after having turned themselves into crows.”

  I asked what thraw meant, because I’d never heard the word before.

  “To throw,” she replied. “To twist, turn, distort, and so forth. It’s an old Scottish word, if I’m not mistaken.” I still didn’t quite understand what it meant in the context of the incantation, but I didn’t say so. I already felt foolish enough over the sea serpent.

  “Oh,” she said, “here’s one more, from Shakespeare, from Cymbeline.”

  “At least I’ve heard of him.”

  “I should hope so,” she scowled, and then recited: