The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “You mean the story?”

  “Yeah. We don’t have to, if you’d rather not.”

  I stared at the cover of the magazine, which was a photograph taken inside an abandoned, decaying schoolroom. There were upturned desks and chairs, a chalkboard on which was written “Here I am. Here I am.” There were holes in the walls and the roof, exposing plaster and lath.

  “I don’t mind,” I told her. And then I asked if she’d liked it, even though I’d promised myself I wouldn’t.

  Abalyn stepped around the counter that divides the kitchen from the parlor, carrying the huge coffee mug she brought with her when she moved in. She came and sat on the sofa with me, and the copy of The Massachusetts Review lay between us.

  “I think it’s sad and awfully grim,” she said. “Not the sort of thing I usually read, left to my own devices. But that’s really neither here nor there. Mostly, reading it made me want to know why you don’t write more. If I could write that well, Imp, I would.”

  “You write. You write your reviews.”

  “You don’t seriously think that’s the same thing?” she asked, then sipped at her steaming black coffee. When I didn’t answer her, she said, “I write content. I get paid, when I get paid, to fill space, and that’s about it. I tell geeks and nerds what I think of video games, and mostly they ignore me, or worse.”

  “I haven’t even read this one since I finished it. Most times, I’d much rather be painting. Stories occur to me, and every now and then I sit down and make myself write them. Mostly because Rosemary liked my writing. But I only got fifty dollars for that story. It’s easier to make money with my paintings. They sell for a lot more. Well, I mean the paint-by-numbers, the ones the summer people buy.”

  “Those summer-people paintings, they’re like my gaming reviews,” Abalyn said. “Just content you churn out by rote to make a paycheck. You know there’s no art in them, and you don’t pretend there is. You told me that much yourself.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I know,” and suddenly I found myself not wanting to talk about “The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean” and half-wishing I hadn’t let Abalyn read it. That I hadn’t brought it to her attention. Suddenly, it seemed like my act of atonement was entirely out of proportion to whatever wrong I imagined I’d committed the day before.

  I was about to try and change the subject, maybe tell her about my walk, maybe show her my chestnuts and bottle caps, when Abalyn said, “It left me wanting to ask you a question.”

  “What did?”

  “Your story,” she sighed, and sort of rolled her blue-green eyes before taking another swallow of coffee.

  “Isn’t it better with milk and sugar?” I pointed at the mug.

  “It is when I want it with milk and sugar,” she replied. “When I want black coffee, it’s better black.” The tone in her voice made me afraid she was going to roll her eyes again. I hate when people roll their eyes at me. But she didn’t. Roll her eyes, I mean. She said, “I won’t ask it, if you don’t want me to. I’m not going to push.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll just always wonder. What your question was. When someone tells someone else they have a question, then it sort of has to be asked. It would be indecent, otherwise.”

  She thought “indecent” was a strange choice of words, but didn’t explain herself. I think I know, though; it was an echo from the story. Abalyn asked her question. Then I sat staring blankly at the cover of The Massachusetts Review (Volume 47, Issue 4, Winter 2006), and at the floor, and at my shoes. From the kitchen, I could hear the clock ticking loudly, like this was some sort of game show and any moment there would be a buzzer or bell and I’d be told my time was up.

  “You really don’t have to answer it,” she reminded me.

  But I did. To the best of my ability, I did. I think I’d rather not write her question down. Or my response. Not now. Maybe later, but not now.

  Whichever day was the next day of the week, the next day of the month, I called in sick. I wasn’t sick, but I called in sick, anyway. Abalyn and I got up early and took the train to Boston, to Cambridge. We had noodles and miso soup, and then went to a comic-book shop she liked. She knew someone who worked there, a tall, skinny guy named Jip. I don’t think Jip was his real name, no, but I never learned any other. Jip and Abalyn had dated briefly, and he always gave her the employee discount. We got ice cream and watched the punks and goths and skater kids. Halfway through the afternoon, I splurged and ponied up eighteen dollars so we could get into the Harvard Museum of Natural History on Oxford Street.

  The first time I went to the museum was with Rosemary and Caroline. I think I must have been ten. It really hasn’t changed much since then. I don’t think it’s changed much since it was founded in 1859 by a Swiss zoologist named Louis Agassiz. Lou-ee Aga-see. Especially the enormous Hall of Mammals, with all its tall glass cases and rickety, narrow balconies (or they might be catwalks) and wrought-iron filigree. It smells like dust and time. You can sit on a bench, surrounded by taxidermied giraffes and zebras, a rhino skull, primate specimens arranged to illustrate human evolution, and gigantic whale skeletons suspended from the ceiling high overhead. You can just sit there and marvel and be at peace. I have thought, on more than one occasion, that my great-aunt Caroline, the one who kept dead sparrows in stoppered bottles, might have loved this museum. But I don’t think she ever visited. It has a fossil sand dollar collected by Charles Darwin in 1834.

  Abalyn wanted to see the dinosaurs first, so we did, but then we walked through narrow hallways filled with hundreds of moth-eaten birds, fish, and reptiles mounted in lifelike positions. Abalyn said she’d never much cared for museums, though she’d been to two or three in New York City and Philadelphia when she was a kid. She told me about the Mütter Museum, which she said has to be one of the weirdest places on earth. I’ve never been myself, but her description made it sound that way. It’s a medical museum filled with slivers of malignant flesh from very famous people, deformed fetuses in jars (she taught me the word teratology), and antique wax anatomical models. We sat together beneath the bones of a right whale (Balaena australis), and Abalyn told me about seeing the skull of a woman who’d had a horn growing from her forehead.

  When no one was looking, we kissed while all those blind glass eyes watched on. I tasted her mouth in that silent reliquary.

  I think it was one of the best days we ever spent together. I would press it between wax-paper pages like a rosebud or a four-leaf clover, if I knew how to capture and hold memories that way. But I don’t. Know how, I mean. And memories fade. I have no photographs from that day. I have the odd little plastic tag they gave me to wear to show that I’d paid to get in. I have that in a box somewhere. Right after Abalyn left, and after Eva (first and second time), sometimes I would wear that tag.

  On the way back to Providence, I dozed. I’ve always liked sleeping on trains. The steel-wheel-on-rail rhythm of trains lulls me to sleep. I leaned on Abalyn and slept, and she woke me when we were pulling into the station.

  I just wanted to write something about that day, because whichever day of the week it was, it was the last day that things were all right that summer. It was the last day, that summer, that I thought Abalyn and I might last. The calm before the storm; sometimes we speak in clichés because there aren’t any better words. Anyway. If I manage to tell the story of November wolf Eva, in that version we had many more good days than in this first version of my ghost story.

  Abalyn made spaghetti with marinara sauce for dinner, and we watched cartoons.

  Sometime past midnight, I was getting sleepy and telling her childhood stories, stories about my mother and grandmother and my asshole father. I promised to show her my “how Daddy should die” list (I never did). She found the idea of the list very funny. I asked her why, as I’d never thought it was funny, and I said so.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I have my own Nightmare Father tales. At some point, I had to try to stop letting them gnaw at me and try to laugh at how awful
and idiotic it all was. Is. You know. I mean, he’s still alive.”

  “Mine might be,” I told her. “I have no idea. I don’t want to know.”

  “Good for you,” she said, and switched off the television in the middle of an episode of Ren & Stimpy. (Abalyn maintained that no good cartoons had been made since the mid-nineties, and wouldn’t even talk about SpongeBob. I’d never watched very many cartoons, so I didn’t argue.) She set the remote down and folded her legs into a sloppy sort of lotus position. We were sitting on the floor, because she said you should always sit on the floor when you watch cartoons. We were eating Trix cereal, dry out of the box, which she said was another important part of her cartoon-watching ritual.

  Abalyn talked about her dad, whom she called the Holy Grail of Douchebags. She told me how he’d punched her in the face when she came out, and she showed me a scar above her left eyebrow. “From his class ring,” she said. “Mom, she just said how she wished I was dead, or that I’d never been born. Or, at least, that she wished I was only gay. I was sixteen years old, and that was the day I left home.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Here and there, couch surfing. Was homeless a couple of times, which wasn’t as bad as you might think. It was better than life under the Holy Grail of Douchebags and my mother. There’s an old warehouse on Federal Hill where I used to crash with some other kids. We panhandled, Dumpster-dived, turned tricks, shit like that. Whatever it took to get from one day to the next. Things got a lot better later on, when I hooked up with a guy and he asked me to move in with him.”

  I asked if he was the same guy who’d paid for her reassignment surgery.

  “Nah, not him. This was another guy. Phil from Pawtucket.”

  “You lived in Pawtucket?”

  “No, but Phil had, before we met. He always used to introduce himself to people as ‘Phil from Pawtucket.’ He was sort of a skeeze, but it beat living on the street. And he had a wicked stereo.”

  “I’m sorry it had to be that way.”

  “Hey, knew lots of kids had it worse.”

  “But to have your mother wish you’d never been born?” Which, frankly, shocked me a lot more than getting punched by your father. “How does someone just stop loving her child?”

  “No fucking idea. Maybe she never loved me to start with. I always figured that made the most sense. Anyway, that was years and years ago. I don’t dwell on it. The past is the past. Let it lie.”

  I apologized if I’d been the one who’d brought it up, the whole transsexual thing, childhood, parents. I wasn’t sure if it had been her or me. She ate a handful of Trix and said not to worry about it, then added, “Like I said, I laugh as much as I can. I laugh to keep the wolves at bay.”

  I laugh to keep the wolves at bay.

  Did you laugh, Mr. Saltonstall? Did you, Mr. Perrault, to keep your wolves at bay? Did you, and then did you each forget how, or did the wolves get too big? Too big, too bad, so they huffed and puffed and, my, what big eyes you have until you fell off that horse and wrecked that motorcycle. Mother, did you have wolves? Caroline, did you?

  “Stop it,” Imp typed, hitting the keys just a little too hard so that the “O” key punched tiny holes in the paper. “This isn’t the wolf ghost story. This is the mermaid ghost story. Don’t mix them up.”

  Don’t mix them up.

  That’s like trying to keep day and night apart with no twilight or dawn in between. I might as well try that. I’d be just as successful.

  Now, I’m well aware that Abalyn’s earlier claim to have graduated high school, then attended URI to study bioinformatics, seems to conflict with her story of leaving home at sixteen and living on the street. But it never seemed to matter to me if somehow both were true, or if one was a lie and she was just a lousy liar, mixing up her tales like that. Or if she didn’t care what people thought, and maybe she changed her biography as often as she changed her clothes. It was none of my business.

  Anyway, “Like I said, I laugh as much as I can. I laugh to keep the wolves at bay.”

  “I shouldn’t have brought it up. We can change the subject if you’d rather not talk about it. I won’t mind.”

  She smiled at me, a very slight sort of smile, and ate another handful of Trix. “It’s cool,” she said. “It happened. The stuff that happens to you makes you who you are, for better or worse. Besides, you let me read your story. So, it’s sort of like reciprocation.”

  “No, it’s not. This is much more personal than my short story.”

  “I’m a tranny, Imp. Usually, I don’t try to pretend any different. If I do, when I have, it just tends to make matters worse. This is me. I live with it.”

  “Well—and I hope this doesn’t sound too freaky—but I think it’s kind of neat. I mean, how many people ever experience physical transformation on the level you have? Starting off one thing and becoming another thing. Making that choice. You’re brave.”

  She stared at me a moment, then said, “I’ve always been a woman, Imp. The hormones and surgery, they didn’t change me from one thing to another. That’s why I hate the phrase ‘sex change.’ It’s misleading. No one ever changed my sex. They just brought my flesh more in line with my mind. With my gender. Also, not so sure there really was a choice. I don’t think I’d be alive if I hadn’t done it. If I couldn’t have done it.” She didn’t sound angry or put out with me. She spoke patiently, though there was something weary in the back of her voice, and I wondered how many times Abalyn had explained this, and to how many different people. “I don’t think it even means I’m brave,” she added.

  I felt stupid, and started to apologize, but I didn’t. Sometimes, apologies don’t help at all.

  When Rosemary killed herself, the hospital apologized to me. When Caroline killed herself, Rosemary didn’t apologize, and it was better that way.

  “I still think it’s neat,” I said. I said lamely. “Even if you had to, even if there wasn’t really choice, and if they didn’t really change your sex.” Truthfully, though, I didn’t understand, but I would. In the weeks and months to come, surviving Eva and surviving Eva, I’d learn a lot more—too much—about being one sort of being on the inside and another on the outside. About being held prisoner by flesh, and wanting to be free so badly that death finally becomes an option, the way it became an option for my mother and grandmother. Trapped in a body, trapped in a mind. I don’t think the one’s so different from the other. No, I am absolutely not implying that Abalyn’s being transgender was the same as Caroline and Rosemary and me being crazy. There are traps everywhere I look, and I’ve read the stories about coyotes chewing off their paws to get out of traps. Coyotes and bobcats and raccoons and wolves. And wolves. And wolves. The steel jaws clamp down, merciless, unforgiving, and you hurt until you do what has to be done if you mean to survive. Or leave the world. Which is why, even now, I can’t hate Eva Canning. Or any other ghost.

  “Maybe,” Abalyn said. “I’m not insulted if that’s how it strikes you. Someday it’s not going to seem so strange to people. At least, I like to hope it won’t. I like to believe that someday it will be generally understood it’s just how some people are. Gay. Straight. Transgender. Black. White. Blue eyes. Hazel eyes. Fish. Fowl. What the hell ever.”

  “Crazy or sane,” I said.

  “Sure, that, too,” and she smiled again. It was a less reserved smile than the first time, and I was glad to see it. It made me feel less awkward.

  “Have some more Trix,” she said, holding the box out to me. “You know, for kids.”

  “Silly rabbit,” I said, then sat picking out a bunch of the lemony yellow ones.

  She began talking again, and I just crunched my handful of cereal and listened. She hated her voice, but I miss it so badly some days I don’t want to hear anyone else’s.

  “When I was a child, I used to have this dream. Back before I was even sure what was going on. I must have had it a hundred times before I got the message. I’ll tell you, if you really want
to hear.”

  I nodded yes, because I don’t like to talk with my mouth full.

  “Okay, and this is at least as personal as your short story, and don’t try to tell me it isn’t.”

  I swallowed and promised her I wouldn’t.

  “Okay, when I was a child, before I figured out I wasn’t a boy, I used to have this dream. I’m not gonna call it a nightmare. It was scary, but it never struck me as a nightmare.” Abalyn reached for her pack of cigarettes and took one out, but she didn’t light it. She never smoked in the apartment. “You know the story of Phyllis and Demophoön?”

  I did, because I’ve always loved Greek and Roman myths, but I lied and told her I didn’t. I figured it might ruin her story somehow, if she knew that I was familiar with Phyllis and Demophoön.

  “Demophoön was an Athenian king, and he married Phyllis, who was a daughter of the king of Thrace. Right after they were married, he had to leave to fight in the Trojan War. She waited and waited for him to come home again. She stood at the seashore and waited, but years passed and he didn’t return. She finally hung herself, thinking he’d been slain in battle. But the goddess Athena took pity on her, and brought her back to life as an almond tree. But Demophoön hadn’t been killed, and when he came home, he embraced the almond tree and it bloomed.”

  “That’s not how I heard it,” I said, and she stopped and glared at me.

  “Imp, you just said you didn’t know it.”

  I was annoyed at myself for slipping and blurting out the truth, but I told her I’d forgotten I knew it. “Hearing you tell it, I remembered.”

  “All right, well, anyway, I think we’d studied the story in school. Bulfinch’s Mythology, or whatever. Maybe that’s how it began.”

  “You dreamed about them?” I asked, wishing I’d stop butting in, but interrupting anyway.

  “No, I didn’t. And maybe that wasn’t even the right place to start telling about the dreams. It’s just the first thing popped into my head. But I did dream that I was a tree. I’d been walking through very narrow city streets, the buildings so close together I could hardly see the sky when I looked up. It was hard to even be sure if it was night or day. I think it was usually day. It was an ugly city, garbage and rats everywhere. The air was so filthy it made my nose sting. The sidewalks were packed with hundreds and hundreds of people, and they were all going one way, and I was trying to go the other. I was terrified that I’d fall and they’d crush me. I knew they wouldn’t stop and help me up, or even go around me or step over. They’d just stomp me. I came to an alley that was even narrower than the street, and I managed to get loose from the crowd and hide there.”