The She

by Carol Plum-Ucci

  I thought she might lash back at me, tell me to leave. But she just kept laughing and crying at the same time. She took Jupe out of my arms, fumbling until he was cradled in her arms, and she held him, rubbing his fur: But her eyes met mine, cold and mocking.

  "What, you want me to sit here and blame it on my parents or something? You want me to say they were like that first? Okay. I guess they were. But I can still remember knives going through me when my mother used to sit talking on the phone, talking about one girlfriend to another when she'd just gotten off the phone with the first one. I can remember her laughing about blackballing some lady from one of her charities because the lady was obese. I knew her whole life was wrong. Sometimes I think you can see that most clearly when you're just a little kid. I made my choices. I'm not blaming anyone."

  It was the most disarming speech yet, but I think I liked best how she was treating Jupe. She was scratching him behind the ears, which was something he liked but that did nothing for her but make him relax and be heavier on her arm.

  "The, um, the accident last summer um..." She swallowed and wouldn't look at me. "It was more of the same ... if you can stand to hear it. Lydia Barnes—a summer friend from New York you wouldn't know—she and I were at the yacht club down in West Hook, fooling around on my Sunfish. The sailing director came down the dock, said there were some Girl Scouts coming over and he wanted to know if we would take them out sailing. Something about them earning a badge. We thought they would be little girls. They show up. These girls were our age. Our age, and still in the Girl Scouts. Lydia started in—No. That's wrong. Actually, I started in. 'We've got to flip the boat, scare the shit out of the one we take for a sail.'"

  Grey plopped down in the chair with Jupe, and I eased into the one across from her again. I wondered if I should go get her another Kleenex. Her eyes were still hard, but flooding over big time. "I didn't know she wouldn't be able to swim. And I don't see why ... why it is that Lydia and I could not have just accepted that. Girl Scout, our age. What's the big fucking deal? What is wrong with us? And not only that. But looking back? She really wasn't a big dork. She was really cute. Vice president of her class at Trinity. Looked like future college sorority material. I think that got under our skins even more. How dare this Girl Scout not fit with the mold we dreamed up in our heads?"

  I grabbed her a Kleenex and sat down again, watching her sniff and blow. I had to say my thought, being that I was human myself. "Grey, I think we've all made fun of people. Some people just make you twitch."

  "Yeah! Like the idea that you could actually become a dork yourself, if the tides turn just a little!" She pulled at her orange shirt with one hand, like she meant herself.

  I just went on, "And you said you didn't know she couldn't swim. I mean, how many people from West Hook, whether they're summer people or not, don't know how to swim?"

  "I didn't say she couldn't swim; I said she wasn't able to swim. Her parents said she did know how to swim." She stared off into space. My intuition went off big time. Seemed like some weirdness was about to fly, and I shifted around a little, looking down as Grey glanced into the darkening corners of the room.

  "So ... why are you saying she wasn't able to swim?"

  "Just ... the fact that she disappeared down the harbor so quickly, out to sea. She looked me in the eye for about a hundred yards, trying to swim back. She just wasn't making it."

  Her eyes were wide, staring over my shoulder somewhere. I knew she was seeing it, but I didn't think the guilt was so necessary.

  "She got caught in a riptide." I shrugged quietly. "Did you holler for her to swim sideways? Get out of the stream?"

  "No."

  "Did you swim after her?"

  "No." She looked at me long and hard. "Don't even say it. It's not what you think. When I say I didn't consider other people's feelings, I surely never looked to drown anybody. I'm just a bitch; I'm not a murderer."

  "So ... what was up?"

  She swallowed. "I was frozen to the side of the boat. I couldn't move. I was hearing this terrible shriek. It was coming out ... from over the ocean. This girl was being sucked, very quickly, toward the sound of the shriek. Lydia was right next to me, and she said she never heard it."

  FOUR

  The TV room was completely dark by now, save the little light coming in from the spotlights out the window and the hallway behind me. I wanted to reach for the lamp on one of the tables, but I didn't want Grey to see my face. I groaned and rubbed my forehead with my fingers hard, thinking how it seemed like bad luck—bad luck that I would share something with Grey Shailey, even if it was the possibility of weirdly shaped eardrums.

  She tried to pull my arm down. "Evan, Chandra was there when you were going through some of that remembering stuff last year, She told me you were talking about some shrieking noise ... and about your parents. You said Emmett couldn't hear it. It sounded to me like this shrieking had something to do with your parents when ... you know."

  I just groaned.

  "So you did hear it." She was pulling on my arm still, and I just let it drop, let her lace her fingers through mine and almost squash them with her clammy hand. "I need to know what that was! Have you ever looked into it? Have you ever tried to figure out how you could hear something that a person standing right beside you couldn't—"

  "No!" Actually, I had looked into it a little last year, but I hadn't gotten any answers that were worth repeating to your average, cynical person.

  "Well, don't you want to know?"

  "No." I was sure there was some scientific explanation having to do with how my ears are shaped slightly differently than other people's. "I don't believe in any Ella Diablo that haunts the Baltimore Canyon, Grey."

  "Me neither," She blew her nose and whispered, "But I can't stop hearing it. You go through your life, never giving any thought to stuff that you can't hear, see, smell, touch, or explain. You don't give any thought to those stupid beach bonfire stories ... except that they help break the ice, help you nuzzle up to some lifeguard you've been hot fon Now? I don't know. This sort of changes everything. There's all these stories about Saint Elizabeth's. There's a catacomb under this place. I asked the nun about it, and she says it's just a former wine cellar and now they keep files down there. But when I asked her if dead people really were buried under the floor; she avoided the subject. She told me ... the dead rise in Christ or something. You ever heard any of those stories, Evan? About the catacombs of Saint Elizabeth's?"

  I scratched my head for a second. "I heard the one about the crazy inmate who knifed all her dormies in the 1920s."

  "Yeah, well, I lie awake in the middle of the night ... listening, wondering if I just heard a scream from down there—from where the administration buried them to cover up the scandal. Or was it my imagination? Or am I rehearing what I heard at the shore?"

  A curse rose right up to the top of my throat, but I didn't let it fly. She would know then that I could relate all too well, and I was still hearing Emmett's wise advice on not getting myself involved.

  I shook loose of her hand while she laughed. "I mean, if I've heard Ella Diablo screaming, why not a ghost, too? Why not the whole schmear? Why not just believe in the bogeyman? How do you know there's not something lurking in a dark corner around here? Do you believe in being haunted?"

  I hadn't given a lot of thought to stuff like that since I left the shore. I mostly listened to Emmett and believed what he said, because he'd spent so much time studying reality. "I think stories about hauntings and spirits and monsters have always been used to ... control people. Keep the masses in line. It's a form of oppression. And if you're afraid of being haunted, it's really something about yourself that you're afraid of."

  "Sounds educated."

  "I live with one PhD and a brother who's about ten pages shy of a complete dissertation," I reminded her.

  Her tone was a little sarcastic again when she said, "Well, maybe you can quote them to help me explain this."

&n
bsp; She set Jupe down on the chair beside her, walked over to a table, and turned on the lamp. The room changed from mysterious and threatening to warm and glowing, just like that. I shook my head, smiling to myself as she brought over a big book. It looked like a library book.

  "Since I'm not a drug case, and since I checked myself in here, I get to go certain places now that I've been here for three weeks. I got an aide to take me to the Philadelphia Free Public Library a couple of times this week. Please don't be passing that around school. If anyone finds out Grey Shailey has been spending hours in the library of her own free will, they'll drop over dead. Like I said, I'm not yet a murderer. Anyway..."

  I cracked a grin as she turned over the cover page. "I went there to try to explain that shrieking. I looked for articles on pitches and tones and ears and stuff. All I can find is that dogs and cats and mice can hear tones that humans can't. I guess I'm half cat. I looked for articles about, maybe, tidal waves or earthquakes sucking the ocean out, creating riptides or waves that would explain my Girl Scout and the shrieking. I looked for something about whirlpools in the Atlantic with far-reaching suction, creating shrieking wind pockets, whatever: The Pacific? Now, that's where to live if you want stories about tidal waves or earthquakes or typhoons or suction. We, unfortunately, live on the mid-Atlantic. Our water does nothing. Except be black, reasonably predictable, and toss up good waves during a storm, according to science."

  I threw up my hands, admitting something I didn't want to. "Emmett has said too often over the years that the day before my parents' last launch, he was down on the Goliath with Dad trying to fix a faulty hatch. It was one of the center ones that can bust and crack the hold if you're in a storm. And I think your Girl Scout is a riptide case."

  "So you're saying they're not related? Then where'd the noise come from?" She opened to a page marked by a torn piece of paper. "This is why I ask if you believe in hauntings. I started looking for books in general on the South Jersey coast. And I came up with this." She pointed to a pen-and-ink drawing of a horrible sea hag rising out of the black ocean. At her belly was an enormous whirlpool, and a ship was being broken in two and sucked down. She had one sailor in her mouth and one in her hand, which, I suppose, she was going to eat next. I heard myself laugh as I shifted in the chair.

  "Here's another," She flipped to another torn piece of scrap paper sticking out of the top. A screaming swimmer was being sucked out of the harbor and the end of a giant tentacle was wrapped around her ankle. Over the water was The She, with many other tentacles billowing up from her waist. The hag in the first drawing hadn't had any tentacles. Different artists, I guessed. She looked hungry.

  I closed the book and looked at the title. Ella Diablo, She Devil of the Hole, and Other Terrifying Tales of South Jersey.

  I stood up. It was cold in here, all of a sudden. I walked over to the window. They had put the night-lights on out on the grass. There was no cemetery associated with Saint Elizabeth's, except maybe the one said to be under the building itself. But there were two gravestones at the far reaches of the property, over by the wrought-iron fence, which belonged to the man and his wife who had donated the place at the turn of the century. A spotlight had been respectfully cast onto the two stones, so they stood out in the surrounding darkness. The wind was kicking up outside. The grasses blew in front of the stones, and the trees rustled, and it made those stones look so incredibly still and upright.

  Grey read, "'Residents of the Hooks and neighboring barrier islands tell tales of the Ella Diablo of the Baltimore Canyon, eighty miles off the coast, who will rise out of the deep when certain rules that she established have been broken. If husbands and wives sail on the same vessel, she will become jealous and seize them. If people swim in odd numbers, she will make it an even number. Dogs chasing sticks at low tide are her favorite delicacy, and numerous dogs, bathers, and even sizable sailing vessels have been disappearing around the canyons for hundreds of years.'"

  She turned the page. "Here's one eyewitness account, taken from a crewman's diary at the turn of the century. Want to hear it?"

  I forced myself to nod, just because she seemed in need of telling it. Her voice was wound up.

  "He says, 'She came in nothing but a small rainstorm. I was looking over the stern, as my job on our ship was to watch a following sea. I could see her rising out of nowhere, so black in the blackness, only because the stars behind her were disappearing. And then she revealed her face. Two white eyebrows cracked the blackness, then a hideous mouth opened and thrust itself out at me. I turned and ran for the captain, but he was on his knees paralyzed by a noise I myself could not hear. Shally was with him, the bowman. Since no one else was on deck, and since he was my captain, Shally and I knelt and prayed over him. I kept my eyes tightly closed, so as not to contaminate myself by the sight of this hideous abomination. But she sent driving spit and hiss all over the deck, all over me and my captain, sending us to a port list where the mast almost touched the water. But she failed to devour me and my captain, possibly because I was reciting my captain's prayer, It was a strong and good one. She took her cursed form back into the deep where she came from, and spared our vessel. Unfortunately, Shally was lost. We lit every torch lamp and searched the surface into the day, but nothing was seen that night except her belches of sea foam, and the following day, the surface was as if she had never come.'"

  I had my hands on my lips, pulling on them like it might ease my sudden case of gut ache. I had my back to Grey, staring out the window, so I'm not sure she noticed. She just went on.

  "I read somewhere in here that the number of ships that disappeared off the Jersey coast over the past three hundred years is something like nineteen."

  "I've heard Aunt Mel talking about that," I told her. "She says you can't count any that disappeared before the days of radios. Anything could have happened in the old days. The captains could have been toting stolen goods or pirate treasure and lived out their lives having fun in Madagascar."

  "Whatever. I went to the library to find out about tsunamis, tidal waves, and the shape of the human ear, and I come out with this book. I couldn't find anything else on the South Jersey coast. It's like any book of science in that library was hidden. It's almost like ... something intended for me to have this."

  "Don't get carried away," I muttered. I'd been pretty calm, though that picture and stern watcher's story had rocked me up for a minute or two.

  "And I felt so strange asking Mrs. Ashaad to see if you could come up here and tolerate me for an hour. My thought was that I had brought some terrible memory surge ordeal down on a kid who lost his parents in a boating accident ... then I have a boating accident? It's too creepy, too Ella Diablo-ish."

  This time I laughed, holding back from saying, "If anything, it's more evidence of a just God than a wailing she-devil." I understood her little hell. I didn't know what to say.

  She snapped the book shut. "I thought you might be a little more helpful. Or at least supportive. As I understood it, you were no calmness king last year at this time."

  "No, I wasn't," I admitted, and thought back on it. "I'd heard my parents' boat going down on their ship-to-shore radio, and I must have made myself forget that whole night somehow. When it's too much for a kid to stand, what's that called?"

  "Repression?"

  Sounded right. "For years, all I could remember was waking up in Emmett's bed the next day, and him and Opa coming in and telling me the folks had gone missing. Last year some of the night before came flying back."

  She walked over to me, put a hand on my arm, and her forehead hit my shoulder as I stared into the little spotlights outside. I could feel actual sympathy and regret wafting off her I didn't look at her but I put a hand on top of hers. I might even feel sorry for Jack the Ripper if he had heard that shrieking.

  "What did it sound like to you?" I couldn't help muttering.

  "Like a thousand cats in a fight, only higher," She'd whizzed out that answer kind of fast, which l
et me know she'd given some thought to it.

  "Not bad, Grey." I turned and walked back to the chair again, plopping into it. "Look. I was helped. But it was probably not in any sort of way that would help you."

  She pulled her chair right up close and grabbed my upper arm again. "I heard you took a trip to West Hook that's been, like, shrouded in secrecy. You won't even tell Bear what happened down there."

  I sighed. Why would I tell what would sound ridiculous, even to my best friends?

  "Look at me, Evan. I'm a waste! Whatever it is, I believe, okay? Right now, I would believe anything. So don't think I'm going to laugh at you. What did you do, go see Bloody Mary? Did you drink some of that rotgut stuff she serves up to people so they can talk to their dead relatives? I'll talk to a dead Girl Scout. Maybe her body is caught under some shoal, and that's why it never turned up. Maybe there's not any she-devil, not any hole. Maybe that screeching we heard is just ... some funny wind pocket that weirdly shaped ears can hear. I do believe in talking to the dead. I mean, I would ... probably ... if Bloody Mary could tell me—"

  "Bloody Mary." I laughed up some scorn. "She's easy to believe in. She uses tonics and powders and potions. She throws bones and reads cards and charges real money. And there's people who have heard this or that impossible-to-know detail from her about the dead. I suppose Bloody Mary might have a little real power of some sort. But, also, I don't know anyone who spends summers in the Hooks who has ever been to her sober: She's like a giant giggle. Except that there are some local islanders my grandfather cringes over; who went to her about an actual dead person. Supposedly, she's got no problem telling the gory details if she's asked about somebody who died a horrible death. I haven't stooped that low yet."

  Grey watched me like a hungry cat. I got scared she would drool on me. She said, "Some people think you went to see Edwin Church."

  I turned my head slowly and looked at her trying to gauge what she would be thinking. She didn't look too impressed. She shook her head. "The sailing director at the yacht club says he's just an old burnout who was a POW in Vietnam for too long and came home to drop too much acid. In spite of all the education."