The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Did I dream—?” I began.

  “You dreamed about me,” she said.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked, my voice filled with sleep and the taste of the dreams she’d given me, and the dreams that were still to come.

  She looked over her shoulder at me, and she smiled. It was the saddest sort of smile. It was a smile that almost broke my heart. “Your heart is brittle, Winter India Morgan. Your heart’s no more than a china shop, and all the world’s that proverbial bull. Your heart’s spun from molten glass.

  “You should be asleep,” she said.

  “Something woke me,” I replied. I asked her what she was looking at, and she turned to face the window again.

  “Something woke me,” she said.

  I shut my eyes again, only wanting to sink back down to sleep, so tired, so happily, painfully worn from her ministrations and the songs and stories filling me alive. Then she said something more, and I’m not sure of what I heard. I’m only almost sure, which isn’t at all the same as being sure, right?

  I think Eva Canning said, “You’re a ghost.” But she wasn’t speaking to me. What she was looking at was her reflection in the bedroom window, and I’m only almost sure that’s what, whom, she was speaking to.

  I choose this next song at random. This dream,

  I believe I’ll choose it, then one more.

  Or two.

  I’m painting a picture of days that are all but lost, and yet they are the most real and immediate days I’ve ever lived. I’m trying to recall those precious dreams and stories she sang and whispered across my lips and teeth and into my throat.

  She knew hundreds of permutations of the story of how, in 1898, Phillip George Saltonstall came to paint The Drowning Girl. She told me most of them. She sang them to me. Some echoed his letter to Mary Farnum. Most didn’t.

  I remember this, whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that liminal space where she kept me most of the time. I sleepwalked through entire days.

  I was in the forest at Rolling Dam on the Blackstone River, and it was deep into winter, and there’d been a heavy snowfall. I was naked as Eva had been standing at the bedroom window, but I wasn’t cold. I didn’t feel the cold at all. I was on the western shore, looking out across the dam, at all that water the color of pickled Spanish olives spilling over the convex top and crashing to the rocks below. The water above the dam was black, and who knows how deep, or what it hid. (And, writing this, I’m reminded of Natalie Wood trying to drown herself above a dam in Splendor in the Grass, and of Natalie Wood drowning in 1981 off the Isthmus of Catalina Island. She was afraid of drowning all her life, because, as a child, she almost did. Drown, I mean. Anyway, in Splendor in the Grass, the water above the dam was dark, too. But, in the movie, it was summer, not winter.)

  The waters below Rolling Dam were rapids that roared and gurgled between snow-covered granite boulders. I walked down to the waterline, and saw that north of me, where the river bends sharply back to the west, it was frozen over, and the ice stretched away as far as I could see. A road of white laid between the boles and frosted limbs of paper birch, pines, maple boughs dappled with thousands of tiny red flowers despite the cold, oaks, willows, thick underbrush growths of rhododendron, hawthorn, greenbrier, wild grapes.

  My breath didn’t fog, and I suspected this was because I was dead, and so my body was almost as cold as the woods around me.

  “What did you see there at the dam?” I type. “No lies. What did you see?”

  I beg your pardon. I haven’t lied yet.

  There was a noise on my left, and I turned my head to see a doe watching me. She was so still I thought she might be dead, as well. Might be dead and taxidermied and left out here as a practical joke or a morbid bit of ornamentation. But then she blinked, and bolted, springing away into the trees. She should have made a great deal of noise, tearing through the forest like that, but she made no sound at all. Maybe she did, but the roar from the dam obscured it. The dam was so loud, like a wave always breaking and never withdrawing down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world. The doe went, her white tail a warning flash, but I thought I was alone. Except for crows cawing in the trees.

  “Crows mean lies,” Imp typed. “Don’t forget that. Don’t forget the plague doctors you never saw, the beak doctors.”

  Crows are not always lies. Sometimes, they’re only hungry, rowdy, rude, punk crows perched in the bare branches of February trees. That’s my soul up there. Sometimes, they’re no more than that.

  “Fine,” Imp typed. “But after the doe, what did you see after the doe? When you looked across the Blackstone River above the dam, what did you see?”

  I saw Jacova Angevine (I didn’t know her name; I wouldn’t learn her name for another two years and four months). I saw Jacova Angevine, leader of the Open Door of Night, the Prophet from Salinas, leading dozens and dozens of women and men into the river. They were all dressed in robes as white as the snow. None of them even tried to swim. They walked in, went down, and none of them came back up again. No air bubbles. It went on for a long time, and I was starting to think there’d be no end to that procession, when there was, and only one woman was left standing on the opposite shore. No, not a woman. A very young girl. She wasn’t dressed in a white robe, but jeans and a sweater and a bright blue coat with a blue fur collar. She stood on the bank and peered into the tannin-stained river. It’s only fifty yards or so across at Rolling Damn, and I could see her very clearly. She looked up, finally, and for an instant her eyes met mine. And then she turned and, like the doe, bolted into the forest.

  “You’re a ghost,” she told her reflection.

  I wanted to follow the girl, but I didn’t dare enter that river, not with all those drowned men and women. I was certain they’d reach up and drag me down with them. Instead, I crouched in the snow, wild as any doe or bobcat or coyote. I crouched and watched the river. I pissed, and so I knew I must be alive, because I don’t think dead women piss, do they? I huddled in the trees, beneath a cloudy Man Ray kind of sky almost as white as the snow. And, before the sun set, I began to feel the cold, and my body turned to ice. I was crystal, and the moon shone through me.

  Imp types, “In ‘Werewolf Smile,’ you named yourself Winter.”

  We’re sitting together in moonlight, and there are no lights on anywhere in the apartment. We’re sitting together in front of the turntable and speakers, and I’m playing one of Rosemary Anne’s records for Eva. She has told me she is always fascinated by the music she doesn’t make, the music of man, the music above the sea, the music of the world above, though she’s heard very little of it. So, I’m playing Dreamboat Annie for her, because I remember that’s the one that Abalyn liked the most. Eva listens, and occasionally says something. The music is loud (she wants it that way), but I have no trouble at all hearing her words clearly above the guitars, the drums, the pianos and synthesizers, and the vocals.

  I’ve just asked her, again, what she meant that day in the museum about The Drowning Girl being her painting. One song ends, another begins, and finally she says, “You see it, and are obsessed with it. But haven’t you ever made it yours? Haven’t you ever found yourself within it?”

  I admitted I’d not.

  She kissed me, and the music faded. In a few moments, I found myself standing on the riverbank again. This time I was not Winter it was not winter, but late summer, and the trees were a riot of green. There was very little I could see that was not one or another hue of green. But I noticed at once that I could only see a few feet in any direction. I couldn’t see the sky, or very far along the bank to either side. I’d stepped into the cool, welcoming water, and when I look over my right shoulder, the space between the trees is impenetrable. There is above me no hint of the sky. It’s not that I can’t see the sky; it simply isn’t there. And I understand then that I am not actually back at the river. Eva has kissed me, alchemical kiss, and now I am in the painting. No, I am the painting.

 
; I inspect everything more closely, and there is about every surface—the river, the forest, the bark of the trees, the underbrush between them, even my own skin—there is about it all the unmistakable texture of linen stretched and framed. And this is when I feel the camel’s hair brush and the oil paint dabbing tenderly, meticulously, at the space below my navel.

  “You see?” Eva asks. And I am back with her in the moonlight. The record has ended, and the phonograph’s pickup arm has automatically lifted and returned to the armrest. “It’s as simple as that. Now it’s your painting, too. It’s only another way of singing.”

  It was a while before the disorientation passed, and I could speak. I said, “I wish there were something I could give you. You’ve given me so much.”

  She smiled, and kissed my cheek. “It’s coming, love,” she sighed. “Be patient. Soon enough now, it’s coming.”

  As I’ve said above, there are countless other songs and stories Eva sang into me. Though, I see they’re all variations on a theme. At most, distinguished one from another by disparities that seem far less important, less profound, to me now than they must have seemed then.

  “You’re a ghost,” Eva told herself.

  And she sang into me for days and days, nights and nights, making of me the vessel of a ghost’s memories. She hid me, sequestered in her arms and my apartment, apart from all distraction, that I would have eyes and ears and touch and taste for her and her alone. I breathed her into me. I breathed in a ghost, insubstantial and ectoplasmic, a woman who believed herself a ghost, and a siren, and who was not a wolf and never had been. We spoke, somewhen in all that time, of Albert Perrault, and she said, “My mother…,” but then trailed off.

  I wrote that I’d choose one story, and then another. But there are too many choices, and too little distinction. And I have. The girl standing at the riverbank, and then turning away. Not following the others into the river and so missing that chance forever. Not joining, so evermore apart. I can understand that. Caroline went in merciful hydrocarbon fumes, and Rosemary Anne, she’s gone, too, and I am alone, in an exile of my own choosing, or of my own fear. I could join them, and, yet, I can’t. I can’t follow. Eva can’t follow, but the sea has her heart and soul forever. “The Little Mermaid,” and never “Little Red Riding Hood.” Never Gévaudan. Always The Drowning Girl, and never Elizabeth Short. But I’m racing ahead of myself. Stop. Retrace your steps, Imp.

  Eva didn’t love me. I doubt she ever loved anyone. She loved the ocean. Trapped in a dark river in Massachusetts, she was only seeking her way home, the path flowing to the tide of a lover’s arms. In “Werewolf Smile,” I wrote of that fictionalized Eva, “…because I knew that she never loved any of them, any more than she loved me.”

  I’ve told about the river in winter, and becoming the painting, but I’m not going to write down all those story-songs, the mutable, unchanging permutations: a child on a merry-go-round, spinning round and round while her mother watched, and never getting anywhere at all; an emaciated creature with golden eyes and needle teeth lying hungry and watchful in the mud at the bottom of the deep water in back of Rolling Dam; the wrecks of ship after ship, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-century drownings; a beach leading down to the submarine Monterey Canyon, ninety-five miles long and out of soundings, almost twelve hundred feet deep; a beautiful, charismatic woman with an ancient idol of a god-thing she called Mother Hydra; an intricate mandala on the floor of a temple that had once been a warehouse, and the supplicants praying there for deliverance from terrestrial damnation; Phillip George Saltonstall climbing into the saddle; the rape of my mother by a man I have called Father; all those men and women marching into the sea; the hand of hurricane demons. See, Imp, they’re all the same story, seen through the eyes of the ghost whom they haunt, and that ghost is Eva, and that ghost is me.

  She showed me the face I needed to see, and that she needed me to see, to complete a circuit. It would end her haunting, even as it made mine worse. I couldn’t have known this at the time, lost in her and off my meds.

  There are no monsters. No werewolves. No sirens.

  But she showed me her truest face, and it hardly matters whether it was ever factual.

  The Siren of Millville writhed in her variegated coils upon my bed, the murdered, transformed soul of Perishable Shippen, who had surely perished, true to her name, even if she’d never existed. Eva writhed in the vermiform coils of eels and sea snakes, hagfish and lamprey. She fastened that ravenous, barbeled mouth about the folds of my labia, rasping teeth working at my clit. She writhed and coiled about me, wrapping me in a smothering, protective cocoon of slime, thick translucent mucus exuded from unseen glands or pores. Across her rib cage were drawn the gill slits of a shark, a deep row of four crimson slashes on either side of her torso, out of water and gasping, opening and closing, breathless but undying. Her breasts had vanished, leaving her chest flat except for those gills. I gazed into black eyes, eyes that were only black and nothing more, and they gazed into me.

  She flowered, and bled me dry.

  She took my voice, and filled me with song.

  Unloving, she left me no choice but to love her.

  Where there had been clean cotton sheets, there was a blanket of polyps, a hundred different species of sea anemones, the stinging embrace of their stinging tentacles planted there to keep us safe. We were immune to their neurotoxins, I understood instinctively, like the tiny clownfish that nest within anemones to escape the jaws of bigger fish are immune. To my eyes, the anemones were no different from a field of wildflowers. She flowered. And there were minute blue-ringed octopuses and sea snakes, nestled between those flowers, each sparing us its fatal bite. She called them all with melodies no mortal woman’s throat may ever replicate. Crabs scuttled across my belly, and a razor rash of barnacles flecked my arms and legs. I questioned none of this. It was. It simply was. The room was filled with the darting, sinuous shadows of fish.

  I came again and again and again.

  Orgasm is too insufficient a word.

  She held me tightly in arms the same bottle-blue as her eyes had once been, hands and webbed fingers and arms dappled with scales and photophores that glowed another shade of blue to illuminate the abyssal gloom of my bedroom, which must have sunk as deeply as anything has ever sunken. Her chitin claws drew welts on my breasts and face. Her lionfish spines impaled my heart and lungs.

  She drew me down.

  “Promise,” she whispered with that lipless mouth. “Promise me, when we are done here.”

  And I did promise, barely half-understanding the pledge I’d made. I’d have promised her I’d fight my way through all the hells in which I’d never believed. I’d have promised her every remaining day of my life, had she asked.

  “You are my savior,” she whispered, coiling and uncoiling. “You are the end of my captivity.”

  “I love you,” I told her.

  “I’m wicked. Remember?”

  “Then I love your wickedness, and I’ll be wicked, too. I’ll become an abomination.”

  “There’s not an ounce of wickedness in you, India Morgan Phelps, and I’ll not put it there.”

  “If you leave me,” I said. “You leave me, I’ll die,” and I was trying so hard not to sob, but there were tears on my cheeks, tears instantly lost to the ocean filling my bedroom. “I’ll drown if you ever leave me.”

  “No, Imp,” she replied, her voice all kelp and bladderwrack. “You’re not the girl who drowns. Not in this story you’re writing. You’re the girl who learns to swim.”

  “I want to believe you.”

  “Oh, Winter India, everything I’ve ever told you or ever will tell you is a lie, but this, this one thing is true.” (I don’t tell her I would one day write those words and put them in her mouth in a story titled “Werewolf Smile.”)

  She kissed me again, tasting all of brine, and her lips the lips of l’Inconnue de la Seine.

  And then I began to sing. It was my song, and my song a
lone, never voiced since the dawn of time. It was everything I was, had been, might be. I swelled with song, and I sang.

  “Like the fortune cookie said, ‘Don’t stop now,’” Imp typed. “You’re almost at the end of it.”

  It’s true. There’s not that much more left to tell, though, possibly, what remains may be the most important part of the ghost story. I could draw it out, perhaps. There is so much more I haven’t told, moments that transpired between myself and Eva Canning, and I could sit here and record all of them that I can remember. That would take many days more, many pages more. Even though there’s not that much more left to tell. I have the time, I suppose. Still unemployed, I have quite a lot of time on my hands. So, yeah, I could draw it out, how I was seduced and romanced by my mermaid (who never was a wolf), my lover who would be a melusine, a daughter of Phorcys, the Siren of Millville trapped in the Blackstone River ages ago by a hurricane, who would be all these things and innumerable things more. In her way, and in my way, she bewitched me as surely as Circe, though her tinctures worked on my eyes and mind. The physical transformations she worked all upon herself.

  Early one morning—and I cannot say how many days had passed since she’d crossed the threshold, since Abalyn had left, only that we’d remained in the apartment all that time. I had no need of food, or no need beyond whatever was already in the pantry and the fridge. So, early one morning in August I woke, and I was alone in the bed. The sheets were only sheets. All her anemones had melted away again. They came and went as they wished, or as she summoned and dismissed them. There were only the sheets, which smelled of sweat and sex and, so, faintly of the sea. I’d been dreaming of the day that Abalyn and I had gone to the river and seen nothing much at all, only in the dream, we did see something. I won’t say what. What is not important. I woke from the dream, and lay blinking, immediately aware that Eva wasn’t there beside me. I slept in her arms, or her in mine. We curled fetal as any unborn beast in one another’s arms. We wrapped ourselves together as though all we were depended on those embraces.