The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  We sat down at a table in the back, a corner table, and neither of us said anything for a few minutes. We ate and sipped our drinks. I watched people with their laptops and iPhones. I didn’t see many people having conversations or even reading books or newspapers. Almost all of them were too absorbed with their gadgets to talk to one another. I wondered if they even noticed anything going on around them. I thought how strange it must be, to live like that. Maybe it’s no different from always having your nose in a book, but it feels different to me. It feels somehow colder, more distant. No, I don’t know why it strikes me that way.

  Finally, Abalyn put down her sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and said to me, “I don’t want you to think I’m pissed or anything. I’m not. But what happened last night, Imp, maybe we ought to talk about it.”

  “Last night you sounded angry,” I said, not meeting her eyes, stirring at my tea with a spoon.

  “Last night, well…” And she trailed off for a moment, and she glanced over her shoulder, and I thought maybe she was checking to see if anyone was eavesdropping. They weren’t. They were all too busy with their gadgets. “Last night I was sort of freaked-out, I admit. You brought a stranger home, a woman you’d found standing naked and soaking wet by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.”

  “She left,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound so defensive. “I’ll probably never see her again.”

  “That’s not the point. It was dangerous.”

  “She didn’t hurt me, Abalyn. She just played with the radio.”

  Abalyn frowned and picked at her sandwich.

  “I like you,” she said. “I think I like you a lot.”

  I replied, “I like you a lot, too.”

  “You can’t do stuff like that, Imp. Sooner or later, you keep picking people up, doing shit like that, something bad’s gonna happen. Someone’s not gonna be harmless. Someone will hurt you, sooner or later.”

  “I haven’t ever done it before. It’s not like a habit or anything.”

  “You’re too trusting,” Abalyn sighed. “You never know about people, what they’ll do.”

  I sipped at my tea and nibbled at my cookie. Turned out, a Cowboy Cookie was oatmeal and chocolate chips with cinnamon and pecans. Sometimes, I still go back and have them. I always hope that I’ll see Abalyn, but I never have, so maybe she doesn’t go to the Edge anymore.

  “She was helpless,” I told Abalyn.

  “You don’t know that. You shouldn’t ever assume stuff like that.”

  “I don’t want to argue about her.”

  “We’re not arguing, Imp. We’re just talking. That’s all.” But she sounded the way people sound when they’re arguing. I didn’t tell her that, though. By then, I was wishing I were back at home, in my own kitchen, eating a breakfast I’d made myself.

  “She might have been hurt,” I said.

  “Then you should have called the police and told them about her. That’s what police are for.”

  “Please don’t talk to me like that. It’s condescending. Don’t talk to me like I’m a child. I’m not a child.”

  Abalyn looked over her shoulder again, then back to me. Part of me knew she was right, but I didn’t want to admit it.

  “No, you’re not a child. It just freaked me out, that’s all, okay? It was seriously weird. Imp, she was seriously weird.”

  “Lots of people say that about me,” I told Abalyn. “Lots of people might say that about you.”

  I think maybe I was baiting her, and I know I shouldn’t have been. My face felt flushed. But she stayed calm and didn’t bite.

  “Just promise me you won’t do anything like that again, please.”

  “She might have been hurt,” I told her for the second time. “She could have been in trouble.”

  “Come on, India. Please.”

  I chewed a corner of my Cowboy Cookie. And then I promised her, all right, I wouldn’t ever do anything like that again. I meant it. But I would. In November, the second time I met Eva Canning, I’d do exactly the same thing all over again.

  After the coffee shop, we walked to a used bookstore around the corner. Neither of us bought anything.

  “Only write what you saw,” Imp typed. “Don’t interpret. Only describe.”

  That’s what I would like to do, but I already know exactly how I’ll fail. I already see that I’ll draw attention to parallels that I wouldn’t realize existed until long after the July day that Abalyn and I had our little brunch at Wayland Square. I’m too impatient to allow these events to unfold in a truly linear fashion. The present of that afternoon has become the past of my present moment, the precipice from which I survey the convoluted landscape of all the moments leading from then to now.

  We left the used bookstore, and briefly thought about ducking into the little junk shop in the basement next door. It’s called What Cheer, as in “What Cheer, Netop?” Netop is supposedly a Narragansett Indian word meaning “friend,” and is supposedly the greeting Indians shouted out to Roger Williams (who founded Rhode Island) and his cohorts as he crossed the Seekonk River in seventeen thirty-whatever and such and such. “What Cheer” are magical words in Rhode Island, which is pretty ironic when you pause to consider just how bad things would go for the Narragansetts not too long after they welcomed white men into their lands. No, I wasn’t thinking any of this as we stood there on the hot sidewalk trying to decide if we wanted to go down the stairs into the junk shop. They have antique postcards, vintage clothes, and huge antique apothecary cabinets. The drawers are filled with countless random, inconsequential treasures, from doorknobs to chess pieces to old political-campaign buttons. What Cheer also sells a lot of vinyl, by the way.

  I still visit the shop sometimes, though I never buy any of those records. Or much of anything else. Mostly, I just like to browse through the records and try to figure out why Rosemary bought the albums she did, instead of this one or that one. We never really talked about music, though she played her records a lot. I love the way What Cheer smells, like dust and aging paper.

  But we didn’t go in that day. Abalyn needed to get back to the apartment, because that night she had a deadline on a review she’d not even started writing. And I’d forgotten to bring my one o’clock meds with us. It was still a couple of hours before I had to be at work. I remember how it was an especially hot day, up in the nineties, and we stood together in the shade of a green canvas awning, sheltered but sweating, anyhow.

  Abalyn turned back to the Honda, and that’s when I saw her watching us from the other side of Angell Street. Eva Canning, I mean. It took me a few seconds to recognize her, and at first it was just this blonde woman. (Have I said Eva had blonde hair that first time she came? Well, she did, even if I haven’t said it already.) She wasn’t wearing the clothes I’d given her. She was wearing a long red dress with spaghetti straps, and sunglasses, and a straw hat that kept her safe from the sun the way an umbrella protects you from rain. It was one of those cone-shaped Asian hats, tied at her chin with a blue silk ribbon. In Vietnam, those hats are called Nón lá, and in Japan they’re called sugegasa. Japan has now made three appearances in this “chapter,” and maybe that means something, and maybe it’s just my arithmomania rearing its ugly head. My grandmother called those hats coolie hats, but also told me I couldn’t call them that, because it was racist.

  So, Eva in a red dress, sunglasses, the straw hat with a blue silk ribbon. And she was barefoot. One, two, three, four, five, and I suddenly knew it was her. It was her, and she was watching us. I don’t know how long she’d been standing there, but when I realized who she was, at the same instant I recognized her, she smiled. I reached out to take Abalyn’s arm, to tell her. I also started to wave to Eva Canning. But I didn’t actually do either of those things. Abalyn was already walking away towards the car, and Eva had turned her back on me. Just as quickly as I’d recognized her, I thought maybe it wasn’t really her after all. Whoever it was, I lost sight of her, and then I followed Abalyn back to the Ho
nda. It was so hot inside the car (black upholstery) that we had to stand with the doors open for a while before we got in.

  I wish I were a writer, a real writer, because if I were, I expect I wouldn’t be making such a goddamn mess of this story. Rambling, tripping over my own feet. I wish I were sane enough to always distinguish fact from fancy, but, like Caroline used to say, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Rosemary, she used to tell my grandmother…

  “Cut the crap and tell the story, Imp,” Imp typed. I typed. “Tell the story or don’t, but stop stalling. Stop procrastinating. It’s annoying.”

  It is. I know it is.

  I know it is.

  I know.

  On the July afternoon after the night I found Eva Canning the first time, and brought her back to my apartment, I saw her watching us at Wayland Square. She didn’t wave or call out to me or try to get my attention in any way. She saw me, and when she was sure I knew it was her, she turned away. I never told Abalyn.

  In a letter Phillip George Saltonstall wrote to Mary Farnum, in December of 1896, he mentions “a most curious and absurd dream.” He describes waking late at night, or thinking that he’d awakened. He eventually decided that he’d only gone from one nightmare to another, the illusion of having woken up acting as a sort of “dreaming transition.” He crossed his bedroom and stood at the window, gazing down on Prince Street. This was in Boston, of course, because he lived in Boston. He looked out the window and saw that it was snowing very hard, and “on the street below there was a tall woman in a red coat and a red bonnet. She wore no shoes. I thought how cold she must be, and wondered to what end she was tarrying below my windowsill in such a storm. It happened that she glanced up at me then, and I beheld her eyes. Even now, dear Mary, writing you by the cheerful light of a bright winter’s day, I am chilled at the memory of her face. I cannot place my finger on how that face was rendered so demonic, for it was a fair face. A beautiful face, but it was a beautiful face that filled me with a singular dread. It was a face almost as blanched as the fresh snow, and she smiled at me before turning and strolling slowly away. She left no footprints, and I thought she must surely be a phantom.”

  My fairy tales are beginning to blur together here. I can see that, yes. Eva’s red dress, a barefoot woman in a red coat with a red bonnet, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. But I never said there wasn’t overlap, even if I forgot to say there was. There was. There is. This may be one of those places where I should draw a distinction between the truth of my story and its facts. I don’t know. Eva who was a mermaid and Eva who was a wolf are blurring together, even though I wish it were all more cut-and-dried.

  I don’t think hauntings care one whit for my need to keep things neat and tidy. I think they have a disdain for shoe boxes.

  In an interview that I have in my manila folder on Albert Perrault, he talks about a dream he had not long before he began painting Fecunda ratis, that hideous image of the child surrounded by wolves, the wolves surrounded by ancient standing stones. I’ve highlighted what he said with a yellow marker. “Oh no, no. Never suppose there’s but one source of inspiration. I might just as well claim that I had a mother and no father, or a father without having a mother. True, I had already conceived the painting, that’s true, after visiting the Castlerigg Stone Circle just outside Keswick. But a dream played a significant role, as well. I was staying with a friend in Ireland, in Shannon, and one night I dreamed I was back in California. I was on the beach in Santa Monica, within sight of the pier, and on the sand was a young woman in a crimson cape and a crimson cloche. There were black dogs walking in a circle around her, nose to tail. I say dogs, but maybe I ought to say beasts, instead. They seemed like dogs at the time. The woman was gazing out to sea and seemed not to notice the beasts, the dogs. I don’t know what she saw in the water, or what she was trying to see.

  “Sure, sure. You may conclude it was my obsession with the painting I’d not yet started, but which was congealing in my mind’s eye, that inspired the dream. You may conclude it was not the other way round. But I do not think of it that way.”

  Wolves or beasts walking nose to tail in a circle. But snow is crystallized water, right? And the woman in the cloche was watching the ocean.

  So, it all bleeds together. It gets messy.

  I try to force it not to, and it gets messy nonetheless. I’m sure stories don’t care what I want from them.

  Stories do not serve me. Even my own stories.

  If I owned a laptop, if I could afford to buy one, I would. Then I’d sit in a coffeehouse or a library and write my ghost story, safely surrounded by other people. It’s too easy to scare myself in this room with its blue-white walls. Especially when I write after dark, like I’m doing now. If I could call Abalyn and borrow one of her laptops, that’s what I’d do. I don’t think ghost stories should be written in solitude.

  The house is so quiet tonight.

  I’ve never liked quiet houses. They always seem to be waiting for something.

  The forest became a siren. Matsumoto wrote his book, and when he did that, Aokigahara on the shores of Lake Sai became the Suicide Forest. Matsumoto sounded the first note in a song that is still singing out to people, still drawing broken, hurting people to take their own lives in that Sea of Trees. And the world is filled with sirens. There’s always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there’s always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we’re lucky we’re Odysseus tied up to the ship’s mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we’re not at all lucky, we’re another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea. Or a girl wading into the Blackstone River.

  Dr. Ogilvy and the pills she prescribes are my beeswax and the ropes that hold me fast to the mainmast, just as my insanity has always been my siren. As it was Caroline’s siren and Rosemary’s siren before me. Caroline listened and chose to drown. Rosemary drowned, even though there were people who tried to stuff her ears and did tie her down.

  I don’t think it much matters what shape the siren assumes. No, I believe that doesn’t matter at all. It may as well be a woman with the wings and talons of birds, or a mermaid, a rusalka in her river, or a kelpie drifting in a weedy pool. All those patient, hungry things. A siren may be as commonplace as greed, grief, desire, or passion. A painting hung on a wall. A woman found standing naked at the side of a dark road, who knows your name before you divulge it to her.

  The first time I went to see Dr. Ogilvy, she asked me to describe the one symptom that caused me the most difficulty, that seemed to lie at the root of everything that shut me down and made it hard to be alive. She admitted it’s not that simple, that there might be a lot of symptoms like that, but it’s a place to start, she said. She asked me to tell her what it was and then to describe it as accurately as I could. She told me to take my time. So I sat on the sofa in her office. I shut my eyes and didn’t open them again or say anything for ten minutes or so. Not because I hadn’t known right off what the answer was, but because I hadn’t known right off how to describe it to her.

  When I opened my eyes again, she asked, “Can you tell me now, India?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “It’s okay if you don’t get it right the first time. I only want you to try, okay?”

  I’ve always been very good with metaphors and similes. All my life, metaphors and similes have come to me effortlessly. I used a simile that day, to try and explain to Dr. Ogilvy what that one worst thing in my head was, or one of the worst things. I wasn’t trying to be clever. I’ve never thought of myself as especially clever.

  I explained to her that, “It’s like I put on a pair of headphones, and at first there’s no sound at all coming through them. No music. No voices. Nothing.”

  (I do have a set of headphones. They came with Rosemary�
��s stereo and records. They’re big and padded and nothing at all like the tiny white earbuds that Abalyn used with her shiny pink iPod. I don’t use them much. I prefer to have a room filled with music, instead of silence all around me and only music in my ears.)

  “But then,” I said, “way in the background, so soft maybe you only think you’re hearing it, there’s static. White noise. Or someone whispering. And slowly that sound gets louder and louder. At first, it’s easy to ignore. It’s hardly even there. But, eventually, it grows so loud you can’t hear anything else. In the end, the sound swallows the whole world. Even if you take the headphones off, that noise won’t stop.”

  She nodded, and smiled, and told me I’d eloquently described what are called intrusive thoughts. Involuntary and unwelcome thoughts that can’t be shut out no matter how hard someone tries. Later, we’d spend a lot of time talking about exactly what sorts of intrusive thoughts I have. That day, she told me I was clever, to have described it the way I did. She said my description was apt. But, like I said, I’ve never imagined myself to be a clever woman. I took it as a compliment, even though I happened to be of the opinion it was a mistaken compliment.

  Sirens are intrusive thoughts that even sane men and women have. You can call them sirens, or you can call them hauntings. Doesn’t matter. Once Odysseus heard the sirens, I doubt he ever forgot their song. He would have been haunted by it all the rest of his life. Even after his terrible twenty-year journey, the archery competition, even after he gets Penelope back and the story has a happy “ending,” he must still have been haunted by their song, in his dreams and when he was awake. Every time he saw the sea or the sky.

  After that afternoon at Wayland Square, Abalyn and I went home. And everything seemed okay for a few days. But all that time the white noise through the headphones was getting louder and louder, and eventually it was all I could hear. Eventually, all I could see was Eva, barefoot and in her red dress and straw hat, watching us from across the street.