The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “It shouldn’t have. I overreacted.”

  “It was damned creepy. It’s even worse if you stop to consider he had to look at it every day for who knows how long it took to finish. Months maybe. Months coming back to the same grotesque subject day after day, and all the research he would have needed to do. I read there was a feminist victims’ rights sort of group out in California tried to get the exhibit banned because of that sculpture. Hell, I almost halfway don’t blame them.”

  “I’m not for censorship,” I said, “no matter how awful art gets.”

  Abalyn frowned and stared at a lemon-yellow Trix held between thumb and index finger, only halfway to her mouth. “You know I’m not in favor of censoring art, Imp. I was only saying I can see how that sculpture could elicit so strong a response.”

  We were talking about Phases 1–5, of course, the grotesque pinwheel Perrault made using life casts and taxidermy to depict Elizabeth Short transforming into a werewolf. The last piece we’d seen before I couldn’t stand seeing any more and we’d left the gallery.

  “If writing a story would help you sort through that second Eva you remember, it might help,” she said. “I’m here to help, you know. If you want me to help. I didn’t mean to be presumptuous.”

  “I know.”

  “And I’m sure Dr. Ogilvy would help.”

  I told Abalyn that I’d never talked to Dr. Ogilvy about Eva Canning, and she looked kind of dumbfounded.

  “Imp, whatever really happened with her, don’t you think that’s sort of a big thing not to tell your psychiatrist? Isn’t that what you pay her for?”

  “I don’t think she believes in ghosts. And certainly not werewolves, or mermaids.”

  “Does it matter what she believes in? You gotta figure she’s heard weirder shit than this.”

  I told Abalyn I seriously doubted she had.

  “Okay, but what’s the worst she can do? Have you committed? From what I saw, and what you’ve told me, I think if she was going to try to do that, she’d have already done it.”

  I wanted to say, let’s please stop talking about this. Possibly, I was getting angry, and, possibly, I wanted to tell Abalyn she simply didn’t get it, that there’s crazy and then there are crazy people who believe in mermaids and werewolves and unicorns and fairies and shit. But I didn’t. Surely, she’d earned the right to speak her mind. I’d be in the hospital, or worse, if she hadn’t found me when she did. If she hadn’t cared enough to come looking, and then cared enough to stick around. And, anyway, down inside, I knew she probably wasn’t wrong about Dr. Ogilvy.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, I’ll talk to her. I’ll try to consider writing a story.”

  “And I’m here, if you need me.”

  “Because you don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “Jesus, Imp. No, not because I don’t have anywhere else to fucking go.”

  “Well, you don’t, do you?”

  She didn’t answer me. Conversation ends here. She shook her head and sighed, then took her cereal bowl and the box of Trix, stood up, and went to the kitchen. I sat on the floor in front of the blank television, trying to imagine what I was going to say to my psychiatrist, if that’s what I was going to do. How I would say what Abalyn thought I ought to say, because I realized it wasn’t so much the what of Eva as it was finding the necessary words.

  We didn’t talk much the rest of that day. Aunt Elaine called sometime after dark, and I worked on a painting until I was tired enough to try to sleep.

  I’m piling contradictions upon contractions, building myself a house of cards or a deadfall jumble of pick-up sticks. I told Abalyn that I’ve never spoken with my psychiatrist about Eva Canning, but that’s not true. Just look back at pages 115 and 166, where I wrote: “I’ve not mentioned that I’m writing all these things down, though we [Ogilvy and I] have spoken several times now of Eva Canning, both the July Eva and the November Eva, just as we’ve talked about Phillip George Saltonstall and The Drowning Girl (painting and folklore) and ‘The Little Mermaid.’ Just as we’ve talked about Albert Perrault and The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (in Hindsight) and ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’”

  When I told Abalyn I’d kept it from Dr. Ogilvy, was I mistaken, or was I simply lying? Why would I have lied? Was it misremembering? Also, I wrote that Abalyn told me she and I went to the exhibit together, but we didn’t. My friend Ellen from the used bookstore, she asked me to go, not Abalyn, and that was in late September, after Abalyn says she’d already left.

  I’m not trying to lie.

  I’m lying.

  I tell you this, India Morgan Phelps, daughter of Rosemary Anne and granddaughter of Caroline, you don’t even guess your own motives. You obfuscate and deny and spin falsehood (consciously or unconsciously), and you can’t say why. It’s deranged, and it’s all deranged. No, it’s worse than that. I’m beginning to lose the threads of my ghost story. I’m no longer even certain that it is a ghost story, and if it’s not, I don’t know what else it could be. Or how to proceed.

  I’m setting aside the questions I posed last time I sat down at my grandmother’s typewriter. Not because they’re invalid questions, but because…because. Maybe, they’ve been answered, and that’s the because. I choose to posit that’s the truth of it.

  Yesterday, I saw Dr. Ogilvy for the first time since the episode, and I want to write about that this evening, about seeing her, what I said and what she said. What was said. But I woke up this morning with a headache, and it’s only gotten worse. My usual cocktail of Excedrin and aspirin hasn’t helped. There’s a railroad spike in my left eye, and there are gremlins running around in my skull banging on pots and pans. Skull goblins. Abalyn has a bottle of codeine that a friend gave her, and she offered me one. But I don’t like to take other people’s prescriptions (evidently, Abalyn has no such qualms), so I said thank you, but no thank you. It might have helped, but I didn’t know if it would interact with my meds, and I didn’t feel like calling the pharmacy to find out. Abalyn offered to look online for any information regarding the possibility of negative interactions, but I don’t trust stuff about drugs posted on the internet; how do you know if whoever wrote it knows what he or she is talking about?

  Dr. Ogilvy is in her fifties, probably close to sixty. I haven’t ever asked her age, but I’ve always been pretty good at guessing how old people are. Her hair is long, and she wears it pulled back in a ponytail. Where it comes free of the ponytail, it sticks out, sort of crinkly or kinky. It’s almost all gray, except for a few stubborn streaks of auburn. Those streaks aren’t crinkly. Her eyes are kind and alert. They’re hazel, closer to hazel green than hazel brown. There are fine wrinkles all around her kind, alert, hazel-green eyes. She smiles a lot, but it’s a soft smile that doesn’t show her teeth. She doesn’t grin, and that’s good, because it unnerves me when people grin. Her nails are usually polished.

  I’ve mentioned all the insects in her office, right? And how she almost studied to be an entomologist in college? Well, her office, where the walls are painted a dark red that’s more comforting than most people might expect it to be. Dark red, but not maroon. There’s something of purple in maroon, and there’s nothing of purple in the red of her office walls. The first or second time I saw her, I asked about all the insects in their frames, and she told me about a lot of them. Many, many beetles, and she said that beetles really were her favorites. She called her passion for beetles “avocational coleopterology.” Coleopterology (koˉ-leˉ-op-ter-ology) being the branch of entomology that studies beetles. She said that twenty-five percent of all species on earth are beetles. “God,” she said, “if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” She told me she was paraphrasing a British biologist named Haldane.

  She was especially proud of a gigantic four-and-a-half-inch black-and-white beetle called the Goliath beetle (Goliathus goliatus), which she collected herself on a trip to Cameroon, which is in western Africa.

/>   “It wasn’t a safe place to go,” she told me. “It’s even less safe now. You’d probably be better off not ever visiting Cameroon. It’s a beautiful country with beautiful people—and beautiful beetles—but too much political unrest. Don’t go to Cameroon, Imp.”

  I replied it was unlikely I ever would, that I’d ever be able to afford to even if I wanted to go. Then she showed me dozens of butterflies and a praying mantis that looked like a leaf. “I didn’t collect most of these,” she said. “There’s a shop in New York—Maxilla and Mandible, on Columbus, just around the corner from the American Museum of Natural History—and I buy many of them there.” I asked why she had no spiders on her walls, and Dr. Ogilvy reminded me spiders aren’t insects, that they’re arachnids, like scorpions and ticks. “I don’t collect arachnids,” she said.

  “Well, you’ve got a lot of bugs.”

  “This is nothing. You ought to see my house.”

  I’m not supposed to be writing about Dr. Ogilvy’s insects, so I must be stalling.

  “It’s what you do,” Imp typed. “You procrastinate, like it’ll ever get easier. Like, if you wait long enough, it’ll be a breeze.”

  It won’t be. Not ever. It’ll be a hurricane.

  Here’s what I “know,” after yesterday’s session. I have been talking with Magdalene Ogilvy about Eva Canning, on and off, since December 2008—so for the past twenty-two months. That’s what her records indicate, which would be long after July Eva, and during November Eva (whom, increasingly, I’ve begun to dismiss as…well, I’ll get back to that). Dr. Ogilvy was aware I’ve wrestled with the paradox of the two Evas and Abalyn having left me twice. She showed me the notes to prove it. It’s a very thick sheaf of notes. Does she believe in ghosts, werewolves, and/or mermaids? She said that wasn’t relevant, and I suppose I see her point.

  However, she didn’t know I’ve been writing this manuscript. She was surprised to learn of it, I could tell, though I think she made a concerted effort not to appear surprised. The first thing I did yesterday was show her what I think of as the “7 pages,” what I wrote during the episode. She asked if I minded her reading them aloud, and I said I didn’t (which definitely wasn’t true). When she was done, I was almost shaking, and I wanted to leave.

  “It’s very powerful,” she said. “It reads almost like an incantation.”

  “An incantation against what?”

  “Depends,” she said. “These ghosts of yours, and perhaps your illness. The anomaly you’ve been struggling with so long now. The contradictions. But it also reads like a declaration. It’s a bold thing you’ve set down on paper. Obviously, you shouldn’t have stopped your medication, but…” And she trailed off. I was pretty sure I knew how she would have finished the sentence.

  “Do you believe these events happened?” she asked, and tapped at the pages. “As you’ve written them?”

  I hesitated a moment, then said, “I don’t. I freaked, and I was hammering at what Abalyn claimed, the existence of only one Eva. I was clutching at…I don’t know. I can’t see how, if I somehow invented the second Eva, it could have been any sort of consolation.”

  “So maybe that’s the question we need to find the answer to.” Then she corrected herself. “No, the question you need to answer for yourself, Imp.” And she brought up that Joseph Campbell quote I wrote down earlier (or did I?), about being permitted to “go crazy” and find your own way out again. “This is your journey, and if it’s ever going to let you rest, I believe it’s a problem you should try to solve for yourself. I’m here, of course, if you need me. I can be a guide, maybe, but it feels like you’re beginning to put the pieces together. I think Abalyn’s helping.”

  “She wants me to write a story. About the second part, Albert Perrault and the exhibit and all.”

  “Do you think you can?”

  We’d already discussed the Perrault exhibition, and how it did, or didn’t, fit in with my garbled chronology of the events between late June and the winter of 2008–2009. July and November and what have you. I told her that Abalyn said she hadn’t gone to the exhibit with me, but that I was sure I hadn’t gone alone. I wouldn’t have dared to go alone.

  “That’s where I want to begin,” Dr. Ogilvy said. “Where I want you to begin.” And she stared down at my thick file lying open in her lap. “There’s a reason you fabricated the second story, assuming you fabricated the second story, and, more than anything, you need to know why that was.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “I know, but I think you can learn why. Or relearn why. It’s there in your mind, somewhere. You haven’t lost it, even if you have repressed it. You’ve just hidden it from yourself. Maybe you’re trying to protect yourself from something.”

  “Worse than two Evas, and worse than mermaids and werewolves?” I asked, not making much of an effort to hide my skepticism.

  “That’s your question,” she said. “Not mine. But I have an exercise I’d like you to try. I’d like you to make a list for me. I’d like you to list those things you are starting to believe are false, that you previously thought were part of the truth.” (She meant factual, not true, but I didn’t correct her.)

  “About Eva Canning,” I said.

  “Yes. About her, and these events which seem associated with her. Are you up to that?”

  “Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t certain if I was.

  She handed me a yellow legal pad and a number two pencil (#2, hexagonal in cross section, Palomino Blackwing, high-quality graphite), and said she’d leave me alone while I wrote my list. “I’ll be right outside in the hallway. Just let me know when you’re done.” And here’s what I wrote (she made a photocopy for herself, then let me take the original home):

  Eva Canning only came to me once.

  It was July when I found her, not November.

  Abalyn left me early in August.

  It may be impossible for me to set forth a strictly accurate chronology/narrative of these events.

  There was a siren. There was no wolf.

  Abalyn didn’t go with me to the Perrault exhibit. Ellen did. And that was after Abalyn left me.

  I created the wolf/2nd Eva/Perrault exhibit as a defense mechanism against the events of the July Eva.

  There was only one Eva Canning.

  And then I stood up and opened the door to find Dr. Ogilvy just outside, talking with a nurse. She came back in and I sat again. She sat and read my list two or three times. “This last one,” she said. “I want to focus on this last one before you leave,” and she looked at the clock. I had five minutes before my time was up.

  “Okay,” I said, and reached for my shapeless cloth bag, one of Rosemary’s old purses, and held it in my lap. Holding the bag made me feel safe, and, besides, I didn’t want to forget it.

  “This is admitting to a lot,” Dr. Ogilvy said. “And it shows a considerable amount of understanding of what may have happened to you.” She seemed to expect me to say something then, but I didn’t.

  “Why, Imp, do you suspect you’d have needed a defense mechanism or coping strategy against the July Eva?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Maybe, but I’d like to hear you say it.”

  I stared at her for a minute. I probably mean that literally. I stared at her for a full minute. Probably, she saw reluctance and unease in my eyes.

  “Sirens,” I told her, “sing you to drowning or sing you to shipwreck. They sing, and, if you’re listening, their song compels you to do things you wouldn’t do otherwise. They manipulate you to their own ends. I despise the idea that I was manipulated. But the wolf, the wolf was helpless and only a ghost that needed me to remember it was a wolf, so that it could also remember it was a wolf.”

  She smiled a little wider than usual, and I glanced down at my bag.

  “What do you think July Eva made you do, Imp?”

  “I can’t say that. Later, maybe, but not now. Don’t ask me that again, please.”

  �
�I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to push.”

  And then I pointed out that my time was up, and she tapped at her computer and made my next appointment, and wrote prescriptions for my refills, writing in that secret language only doctors and pharmacists can decipher.

  “Think about number seven,” she said, just before I left. “Just think about it.” (7/7/7)

  “I think about it a lot,” I replied. It was raining when I left, and the rain falling on the mounds of dirty snow was ugly, so I watched the sky, instead.

  On the bus home, there was an elderly Portuguese woman with ill-fitting dentures and a very large mole between her eyes. There were three thick white hairs growing from the mole. Despite the cold, she was wearing lime-green flip-flops and a T-shirt. She was like me, not sane, except I don’t think she was on any sort of medication. She was sitting across from me, talking to herself, and it was annoying other passengers, who kept glaring at the woman.

  “Are you cold?” I asked her. She seemed startled that anyone would choose to speak to her.

  “Isn’t everyone, this time of year?”

  “You ought to wear a coat. And better shoes.”

  “I should,” she agreed. “But, you know, shoes and coats hide too much skin.”

  “You need to see your skin?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’ve never thought about it.” I asked her name, and she squinted at me, as if trying to puzzle out some devious ulterior motive for my having asked.

  “Teodora,” she said. “When I had a name, it was Teodora. But it went away one day when I forgot to watch my skin. Now, I don’t know. But once it was Teodora.”

  “My name is India,” I told her, and she laughed, which made those loose dentures slip around a bit.

  “That’s a strange name, little lady.”

  “My mother got it from Gone with the Wind. It’s a book, and there’s a woman in it named India Wilkes.”

  “It’s a book,” she repeated. Then added, “It’s your name. You’re a book,” and stared out the window for a while at the storefronts along Westminster.