The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  By accident, cleaning up after herself, Abalyn knocked a folder off the kitchen table. I shouldn’t have left it there, but I wasn’t used to having someone else around. I wasn’t accustomed to concealing my fixations. It wasn’t her fault. Gravity took over and the pages spilled out, and she read what was on them. What was there, it would have struck her as odd, and we are curious animals, people are, human beings. The folder held an assortment of photocopies from newspapers, magazines, and library books, some of them going back almost a hundred years.

  Had she asked, I might have shown them to her.

  Or not. She didn’t ask, so I can’t know.

  I never learned which of the pages she read and which she didn’t. I never asked, and Abalyn never volunteered the information. She may have read them all, or only a few of them. Those sheets of paper are only butterflies trapped in a killing jar. They’re only the feathers of broken, fallen birds. I did wonder, though, which she read. Sitting here in my blue room, I still wonder. But that’s only natural, right? It’s normal to wonder, even if knowing doesn’t matter and wouldn’t change anything.

  That evening during dinner neither of us said very much. Afterwards, she went to the parlor and the sofa and her laptop, her digital, pixeled worlds. Her time displacement. I went to the bedroom, where I sat reading back over my “clippings” (I think of them that way, even if that’s not what they are). I scanned headlines and notes I’d scribbled in the margins. There are two photocopied newspaper articles, in particular, I can remember reading that night. Reading start to finish, I mean.

  One bears the headline “Search for Mystery Woman’s Body Halted, Hoax Suspected,” from The Evening Call (Woonsocket, Friday, June 12th, 1914). It describes how two fifteen-year-old boys had been paddling a canoe along the Blackstone River near Millville, Massachusetts, when they’d happened upon the body of a woman floating facedown in the murky water. They prodded her with an oar, to be sure she was dead, but didn’t try to pull her from the river. They went at once to a local constable, and that same afternoon, and again the next day, men from Millville probed the river with poles, and used a fishing net to drag the area where the boys claimed to have sighted the corpse. But no corpse was found. Finally, everyone gave up and decided there’d never been a dead woman, that the boys were bored that summer day and fabricated the story to get everyone stirred up.

  And the other article I’m fairly certain I read back over that night comes from the Worcester Telegram & Gazette (“Bather Claims Attacked and Injured by Unseen Animal,” Tuesday, September 4th, 1951). Three girls (their ages aren’t given) were swimming above Rolling Dam in Blackstone, near Millville, when one screamed and began thrashing and calling out for help. Her name was Millicent Hartnett (Millicent from Millville); her friends’ names aren’t given. When the girls reached the shore, they were horrified to see a deep gash in Millicent’s right leg, just above the knee. The wound was serious enough it required twenty stitches. Authorities suspected a snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) was responsible, or that the girl had caught her leg on a submerged log. Millicent claimed otherwise. She said she’d seen what had bitten her, and that it wasn’t a turtle or a log. But she refused to say what it had been. “I saw it up close, but no one will believe me,” she said. “I don’t want people thinking I’m crazy or lying.” Millicent’s mother told reporters that her daughter was a good student, that she was practical, trustworthy, and not the sort of girl given to tall tales. Swimmers were advised to avoid the dam, and the three girls were said to have been so upset they swore they’d never swim in the river again.

  Both boys became soldiers and died in France four years later. Millicent Hartnett grew up, got married, and lives with her oldest son in Uxbridge. It wasn’t very hard to find these things out. I’ve often thought about contacting Millicent, who would be seventy-six or so, and trying to get her to tell me what she saw in the river that day. But I don’t think she’d talk to me. She might not even remember, though she must still have a scar on her ankle.

  If Abalyn didn’t read either of those articles, there are others just as peculiar she might have read, instead. About eleven o’clock, I closed the folder and slipped it under my side of the bed. I switched off the lamp and lay in the dark, listening to the noises rising up from the street and the sounds from the apartments above and below mine. Abalyn slept on the sofa that night, and in the morning we didn’t talk about the folder. Mostly, more than anything, I was embarrassed, and was glad I had to be at work early. She was gone when I got home, but had left a note saying she was with friends. The note promised she wouldn’t be late, and she wasn’t. I didn’t tell her how it scared me, coming in and finding she wasn’t there, how I’d thought maybe she’d left for good. How I checked to make sure all her stuff was still there. When she got home, Abalyn was a little drunk. She smelled like beer and Old Spice aftershave lotion and cigarette smoke. She told me she loved me, and we fucked, and then I lay awake for a long, long time, watching her sleep.

  “The next day,” Imp typed, “I apologized.”

  I’m not sure if I really did. Apologize, I mean. But I like to believe that I did. Regardless, I am sure that was the day I asked her to read a short story I’d written and that had been published a couple of years earlier in The Massachusetts Review. If I didn’t apologize in so many words, letting her read that story was another and more personal sort of apology. I no longer have a copy of the magazine, but I’m attaching the typescript, because I know it’s part of my ghost story. It’s a part that I’d already committed to paper well before I met Eva Canning, the first time and the second time, in July and in November. The story’s not factual, but it’s true. I’m stapling it to this page because I can’t find a paper clip.

  The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean

  BY INDIA MORGAN PHELPS

  T he building’s elevator is busted, and so I have to drag my ass up twelve flights of stairs. Her apartment is smaller and more tawdry than I expected, but I’m not entirely sure I could say what I thought I’d find at the top of all those stairs. I don’t know this part of Manhattan very well, this ugly wedge of buildings one block over from South Street and Roosevelt Drive and the ferry terminal. She keeps reminding me that if I look out the window (there’s only one), I can see the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems a great source of pride, that she has a view of the bridge and the East River. The apartment is too hot, filled with soggy heat pouring off the radiators, and there are so many unpleasant odors competing for my attention that I’d be hard-pressed to assign any one of them priority over the rest. Mildew. Dust. Stale cigarette smoke. Better I say the apartment smells shut away, and leave it at that. The place is crammed wall to wall with threadbare, dust-skimmed antiques, the tattered refuse of Victorian and Edwardian bygones. I have trouble imagining how she navigates the clutter in her wheelchair, which is something of an antique itself. I compliment the Tiffany lamps, all of which appear not to be reproductions, and are in considerably better shape than most of the other furnishings. She smiles, revealing dentures stained by nicotine and neglect. At least, I assume they’re dentures. She switches on one of the table lamps, its shade a circlet of stained-glass dragonflies, and tells me it was a Christmas gift from a playwright. He’s dead now, she says. She tells me his name, but it’s no one I’ve ever heard of, and I admit this to her. Her yellow-brown smile doesn’t waver.

  “Nobody remembers him. He was very avant-garde,” she says. “No one understood what he was trying to say. But obscurity was precious to him. It pained him terribly, that so few ever understood that about his work.”

  I nod, once or twice or three times; I don’t know, and it hardly matters. Her thin fingers glide across the lampshade, leaving furrows in the accumulated dust, and now I can see that the dragonflies have wings the color of amber, and their abdomens and thoraces are a deep cobalt blue. They all have eyes like poisonous crimson berries. She asks me to please have a seat, and apologizes for not having offered one sooner. She motions to an a
rmchair near the lamp, and also to a chaise lounge a few feet farther away. Both are upholstered with the same faded floral brocade. I choose the armchair, and am hardly surprised to discover that all the springs are shot. I sink several inches into the chair, and my knees jut upwards, towards the water-stained plaster ceiling.

  “Will you mind if I tape our conversation?” I ask, opening my briefcase, and she stares at me for a moment, as though she hasn’t quite understood the question. By way of explanation, I remove the tiny Olympus digital recorder and hold it up for her to see. “Well, it doesn’t actually use audiotapes,” I add.

  “I don’t mind,” she tells me. “It must be much simpler than having to write down everything you hear, everything someone says.”

  “Much,” I say, and switch the recorder on. “We can shut it off anytime you like, of course. Just say the word.” I lay the recorder on the table, near the base of the dragonfly lamp.

  “That’s very considerate,” she says. “That’s very kind of you.”

  And it occurs to me how much she, like the apartment, differs from whatever I might have expected to find. This isn’t Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond and her shuffling cadre of “waxwork” acquaintances. There’s nothing of the grotesque or Gothic—even that Hollywood Gothic—about her. Despite the advance and ravages of ninety-four years, her green eyes are bright and clear. Neither her voice nor hands tremble, and only the old wheelchair stands as any indication of infirmity. She sits up very straight and, whenever she speaks, tends to move her hands about, as though possessed of more energy and excitement than words alone can convey. She’s wearing only a little makeup, some pale lipstick and a hint of rouge on her high cheekbones, and her long gray hair is pulled back in a single braid. There’s an easy grace about her. Watching by the light of the dragonfly lamp and the light coming in through the single window, it occurs to me that she is showing me her face, and not some mask of counterfeit youth. Only the stained teeth (or dentures) betray any hint of the decay I’d anticipated and steeled myself against. Indeed, if not for the rank smell of the apartment, and the oppressive heat, there would be nothing particularly unpleasant about being here with her.

  I retrieve a stenographer’s pad from my briefcase, then close it and set it on the floor near my feet. I tell her that I haven’t written out a lot of questions, that I prefer to allow interviews to unfold more organically, like conversations, and this seems to please her.

  “I don’t go in for the usual brand of interrogation,” I say. “Too forced. Too weighted by the journalist’s own agenda.”

  “So, you think of yourself as a journalist?” she asks, and I tell her yes, usually.

  “Well, I haven’t done this in such a very long time,” she replies, straightening her skirt. “I hope you’ll understand if I’m a little rusty. I don’t often talk about those days, or the pictures. It was all so very long ago.”

  “Still,” I say, “you must have fond memories.”

  “Must I, now?” she asks, and before I can think of an answer, she says, “There are only memories, young man, and, yes, most of them are not so bad, and some are even rather agreeable. But there are many things I’ve tried to forget. Every life must be like that, wouldn’t you say?”

  “To some extent,” I reply.

  She sighs, as if I haven’t understood at all, and her eyes wander up to a painting on the wall behind me. I hardly noticed it when I sat down, but now I turn my head for a better view.

  When I ask, “Is that one of the originals?” she nods, her smile widening by almost imperceptible degrees, and she points at the painting of a mermaid.

  “Yes,” she says. “The only one I have. Oh, I’ve got a few lithographs. I have prints or photographs of them all, but this is the only one of the genuine paintings I own.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I say, and that isn’t idle flattery. The mermaid paintings are the reason that I’ve come to New York City and tracked her to the tawdry little hovel by the river. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an original up close, but it is the first time outside a museum gallery. There’s one hanging in Newport, at the National Museum of American Illustration. I’ve seen it, and also the one at the Art Institute of Chicago, and one other, the mermaid in the permanent collection of the Society of Illustrators here in Manhattan. But there are more than thirty documented, and most of them I’ve only seen reproduced in books and folios. Frankly, I wonder if this painting’s existence is very widely known, and how long it’s been since anyone but the model, sitting here in her wheelchair, has admired it. I’ve read all the artist’s surviving journals and correspondence (including the letters to his model), and I know that there are at least ten mermaid paintings that remain unaccounted for. I assume this must be one of them.

  “Wow,” I gasp, unable to look away from the painting. “I mean, it’s amazing.”

  “It’s the very last one he did, you know,” she says. “He wanted me to have it. If someone offered me a million dollars, I still wouldn’t part with it.”

  I glance at her, then back to the painting. “More likely, they’d offer you ten million,” I tell her, and she laughs. It might easily be mistaken for the laugh of a much younger woman.

  “Wouldn’t make any difference if they did,” she says. “He gave it to me, and I’ll never part with it. Not ever. He named this one Regarding the Shore from Whale Reef, and that was my idea, the title. He often asked me to name them. At least half their titles, I thought up for him.” And I already know this; it’s in his letters.

  The painting occupies a large, narrow canvas, easily four feet tall by two feet wide—somewhat too large for this wall, really—held inside an ornately carved frame. The frame has been stained dark as mahogany, though I’m sure it’s something far less costly; here and there, where the varnish has been scratched or chipped, I can see the blond wood showing through. But I don’t doubt that the painting is authentic, despite numerous compositional deviations, all of which are immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the mermaid series. For instance, in contravention to the artist’s usual approach, the siren has been placed in the foreground, and also somewhat to the right. And, more importantly, she’s facing away from the viewer. Buoyed by rough waves, she holds her arms outstretched to either side, as if to say, “Let me infold you,” her long hair floating around her like a dense tangle of kelp, and the mermaid gazes towards land and a whitewashed lighthouse perched on a granite promontory. The rocky coastline is familiar, some wild place he’d found in Massachusetts or Maine or Rhode Island. The viewer might be fooled into thinking this is only a painting of a woman swimming in the sea, as so little of her is showing above the waterline. She might be mistaken for a suicide, taking a final glimpse of the rugged strand before slipping below the surface. But, if one looks only a little closer, the patches of red-orange scales flecking her arms are unmistakable, and there are living creatures caught up in the snarls of her black hair: tiny crabs and brittle stars, the twisting shapes of strange oceanic worms and a gasping, wide-eyed fish of some sort, suffocating in the air.

  “That was the last one he did,” she says again.

  It’s hard to take my eyes off the painting, and I’m already wondering if she will permit me to get a few shots of it before I leave.

  “It’s not in any of the catalogs,” I say. “It’s not mentioned anywhere in his papers or the literature.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be. It was our secret,” she replies. “After all those years working together, he wanted to give me something special, and so he did this last one, and never showed it to anyone else. I had it framed when I came back from Europe in ’forty-six, after the war. For years, it was rolled up in a cardboard tube, rolled up and swaddled in muslin, kept on the top shelf of a friend’s closet. A mutual friend, actually, who admired him greatly, though I never showed her this painting.”

  I finally manage to look away from the canvas, turning back towards the woman sitting up straight in her wheelchair. She looks very ple
ased at my surprise, and I ask her the first question that comes to mind.

  “Has anyone else ever seen it? I mean, besides the two of you, and besides me?”

  “Certainly,” she says. “It’s been hanging right there for the past twenty years, and I do occasionally have visitors, every now and then. I’m not a complete recluse. Not quite yet.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you were.”

  And she’s still staring up at the painting, and the impression I have is that she hasn’t paused to look at it closely for a long time. It’s as though she’s suddenly noticing it, and probably couldn’t recall the last time that she did. Sure, it’s a fact of her everyday landscape, another component of the crowded reliquary of her apartment. But, like the Tiffany dragonfly lamp given her by that forgotten playwright, I suspect she rarely ever pauses to consider it.

  Watching her as she peers so intently at the painting looming up behind me and the threadbare brocade chair where I sit, I’m struck once more by those green eyes of hers. They’re the same green eyes the artist gave to every incarnation of his mermaid, and they seem to me even brighter than they did before, and not the least bit dimmed by age. They are like some subtle marriage of emerald and jade and shallow salt water, brought to life by unknown alchemies. They give me a greater appreciation of the painter, that he so perfectly conveyed her eyes, deftly communicating the complexities of iris and sclera, cornea and retina and pupil. That anyone could have the talent required to transfer these precise and complex hues into mere oils and acrylics.

  “How did it begin?” I ask, predictably enough. Of course, the artist wrote repeatedly of the mermaids’ genesis. I even found a 1967 dissertation on the subject hidden away in the stacks at Harvard. But I’m pretty sure no one has ever bothered to ask the model. Gradually, and, I think, reluctantly, her green eyes drift away from the canvas and back to me.