Where the Veil Is Thin

by Alana Joli Abbott

  That scabrous, black-eyed thing flat-out delighted me. Too much Hans Christian Andersen as a child, I don’t know. I was so delighted with it that I spent a good two hours excavating the swan boat from its muddy grave beneath a sweet pepperbush shrub. The wildly fragrant white flowers were falling away to fruit now, none of the leaves yet blushing yellow.

  As I worked, digging away in the mud like a child, I wondered: who had the swan boat’s original owners been? Had they thrown out this whimsical, this retro, this highly metaphorical cygnine beauty for some sleek new kayak, color-gel-coated for their pleasure? Had they tired of this vintage white two-seater’s authentically distressed nostalgic novelty and gone in for a younger boat’s radiant orange fiberglass velocity instead?

  Poor unwieldy relic. It had my sympathies. Liam “the Rugger” Boyle had done me a similar turn recently. Now, not only was I experiencing pangs of fellow feelings for a swan boat, I also had an ex-boyfriend named “Rugger”—which was terribly embarrassing, really, and made him difficult to talk about, or even think about, because he was just like his name sounds.

  But back to the epic saga of my stupidity that day.

  Since I was already down there by the river, and already head to toe in mud, and it was an uphill hike back to the parking lot where I’d chained my bike, and I wasn’t ready to go home yet, what did I do next? Well, having now entirely excavated the swan boat, what was there left to do but grab it by the grimy neck and drag it down the embankment for a test run?

  (I know. I know. Choice by choice, inch by begrimed inch, there I was, Luz the Loser, cheerfully ticking off all five nomination requirements for my own personal Darwin Award. But wait. It gets worse.)

  Even pocked with white petals and riddled with dead-and-otherwise bugs, the swan boat seemed a sturdy enough article. My final theory on its origins was that it had hailed from the Enchanted Forest, an abandoned theme park just a few miles down the road in Hope Valley. Mamita and I had stumbled across some overgrown signage for the park on an exploratory drive together and afterwards looked it up on Atlas Obscura. Apparently, the Enchanted Forest was very popular back in the ’70s and ’80s, with its kiddy rides and fairytale theme. Perhaps the park had once included in its full complement of attractions a goofily mawkish Tunnel o’ Love, complete with a flotilla of swan boats, which, decades later, was thoroughly pillaged by various teenager raiding parties gone on the hunt for illicit keepsakes. Bet you anything Rugger would’ve done something like that in his high school days—and then, after burying it in the woods and sleeping off his hangover, would have forgotten all about it by morning. But that was something else I’d never know for sure.

  You see, I should have remembered the Preservation Trust Town Forest literature. Swans, however beautiful, were—like porcelain berries or kudzu—an invasive species in these parts, unwholesome and unwelcome. I should have remembered that swans were aggressive and full of bluster, and recalling this, been a little more wary even of a simulacrum. Hell, I should’ve remembered all those aforementioned fairytales (of which mamita and I were both so fond): that swans nearly always show up where dead girls drown.

  Last but certainly not least, I should also have remembered basic meteorology. Late August and early September had been hurricane-heavy. Now, at September’s close, the Pawcatuck River was engorged like a well-fed tick. When the swan boat capsized, so did I.

  It wasn’t long before all of this and my life flashed before my eyes.

  Mamita is a magpie for ephemera. When we first moved out east together, she immediately goes out exploring and comes home with bouquets of brochures, factsheets, flyers, leaflets, and pamphlets—whatever is on offer at the local tourist bureau. Whereas it takes me weeks simply to pop my head into a place and window-shop, feeling that I have no right to a place of business when I have no intention of actually buying anything, mamita will be on a first-name basis with its owners from day one. She’s always been adventurous. When I ask her how she does it, she only beams at me and quotes me one of her happy hippy songs: “I’m a summer child, lost in love.”

  The year I turned thirty (last year), we’d decided to try living together for the first time since I was eighteen. I’d moved out of state for college and had been working in Minneapolis ever since. Between phone, internet, and annual visits, mamita and I had managed to stay close, but after twelve years of that, we were missing each other, feeling our mortality, and on the whole, ready for new horizons and new adventures. Adventures being easiest with a companion, we’d opted for each other, and settled on a date and a destination. Mamita left New Mexico, I left Minnesota, and we struck off for Rhode Island with a few thousand dollars in savings and not much of a plan.

  Mamita is an ideal roommate. She loves cooking, does more than her fair share of dishes, doesn’t mind that I randomly burst out singing at the top of my lungs and dress in outlandish crinolines and combat boots. I keep my bedroom tidier than she does, but she deep-cleans things I ignore for months on end. She’s intensely project-motivated and forgets to take breaks; I’m really good at gently haranguing her when she’s been working non-stop. I force her to lie down and put her feet up and read a book for pleasure, even though it always makes her feel guilty.

  “Look, Teresita Floracita,” I tell her, using her own nickname for herself from back when she was a good Catholic child and was totally convinced she would grow up into her glorious martyrdom and eventual sainthood, “you and I work whatever part-time jobs we can get, all at minimum wage, just to make ends meet. We’ll never retire. That age has passed. Retirement is for rich baby boomers. So we have to take our semi-retirement wherever we can get it.”

  “Semi-retirement” is an optimistic way of viewing a work schedule wherein, if we are lucky, we are each given a couple of half-days a week. No one is hiring full time around here, not even fine women with English degrees and years of experience behind them. With the hours we’re given, we have enough to pay rent—if we never ask our landlord for little things like repairing the leak in the roof or fixing the holes in our floor; and utilities—if we mostly do without light and heat; with a little left over to set against the ever-accumulating interest on my college debt. But it is definitely not enough to replace the Honda’s transmission, which has just failed, or buy the next round of bus tickets, which are are running low, or buy mamita’s migraine meds, which are so expensive she always cuts each pill into thirds to make the bottle last.

  Heigh-ho, and so this week’s grocery shopping will be done at the Pawcatuck Neighborhood Food Pantry, but they are always kind and generous and cheerful, and the pasta is abundant. And the library, we love to remind each other, is still free!

  Corkers, unlike the library, is very much not free. It is the town’s very hip (and only) café-cum-bar, where Rugger bartends and occasionally plays gigs with his band, the Flying Wedgies. When we are first eyeballing each other with mutual interest, he woos me by giving me drinks on the house. Later, when I am out of the picture, Rugger immediately starts dating a dark-haired poet girl who makes her own t-shirts and binds her own books. She gets the free drinks now, and I am cut off from Corkers and the society of my peers. Mamita never goes there anyway; caffeine and alcohol both bring on her migraines, and the music is too loud. But I miss it. I don’t harbor any real rancor toward either Rugger or his new lady. Only, the idea of seeing them together irritates me, like willfully rubbing my eyeballs with nettles.

  As I walk through the Town Forest—yea, verily, right up to the moment when I decide to take my newfound swan boat out for a little Lady of Shalott re-enactment!—I am just starting, very slowly, with the profound relief that comes from resentment finally lifting, to sweat off my sour attitude towards my break-up. That’s what had sent me off on my bike ride in the first place. Mamita yet retains some of her childhood saintliness: she has a vast and compassionate patience for her beloved only child. I, however, heathen and atheist that I am—that she, in all fairness, raised me to be—have been more than a bit
snappish with her since Rugger and I—politely, via text message—decoupled ourselves. And no adult should have to live of her own free will with another adult who snaps at her.

  Despite our poverty, despite being two strangers come from the far west to try and scrape up a living in a small New England town, I adore cohabitating with her. I want her to love cohabitating with me too, in our bright, shabby, darling third-floor apartment, where we are within biking distance to all the woods and rivers and salt marshes and coastlines our too-long-landlocked hearts could desire. I do not want her to flinch at the sharpness of my voice or shrug off the fiery glare I am hasty to throw at her.

  And so, I think, climbing into my swan boat: I shall go home directly after this, and apologize, and offer her oblations in the form of a foot rub.

  And as I float further from the slippery pebbles of the shore, paddling away at the pedals of the swan boat, I start actually looking forward to the post-breakup peace and quiet. Mamita and I can go back to watching weird independent foreign films together on Friday nights. She has been missing that, missing our closeness, these last few months I’ve been dating Rugger. She’s pretty cool and independent and all that, but we’ve always agreed that popcorn nights are better with two…

  What will she do, now that I was drowned?

  So, right. Yes. Yes, the swan boat, as I may have mentioned previously, capsized. Of course it did. The current was a sea-swift rush to the belly of the giantess Atlantic, and the boat—rotten, water-logged, unworthy—drifted a bit, overturned, and sank, taking me with it.

  And where, you might ask, was I in all of this? What did I do? How did I act? Did I fight the mighty current? Did I thrash and rage and cry out? Was I pinned beneath the swan boat? Bashed in? Bewildered? Knocked out cold? Was my leg caught? My arm? Did I succumb to weariness or hypothermia? We must both of us be forever curious. I did not recall.

  I did remember a certain topsy-turviness. A mirror-flip of sky. My world of air funneling as through an hourglass, emptying into a world of water. But I was aware that at some point transition had occurred. That I had gone from human person to something else, plonked right there at river’s bottom. My scarlet frolic-in-the-wood frock, courtesy of the Groton Goodwill, dragged at me like plate armor, exerting a tidal pull and spreading around me like a dark stain. But I was not in any discomfort. Even the enormous wooden agent of my demise, with its DayGlo orange beak and unholy black eyes, which sat atop me, crushing my legs beneath it, did not so much hurt as frustrate me. There I sat, stuck, seething, contemplating everything that had brought me there. Silt and stone beneath me. Everything rushing by. Water in all directions.

  But no direction was up.

  What worried me most was this: I’d left my red Converse high tops on the riverbank, my bike locked up in the parking lot. Sooner or later, someone would find them and report back to my mother that they were all that was left of me. I could not stop imagining what her face would look like when they brought her my shoes.

  I was down there in the rushing dark ferdays. “Ferdays” was a word that Rugger had taught me while describing my ass as “cake ferdays.” I liked the word—the whole phrase, really—despite myself. It was almost Shakespearian in its poetry and vulgarity, and I have a weakness for the Sh’peare. (See above, re: English degree, college debt.)

  To be fair, it wasn’t really days. Or, okay, it might have been. Might have been forever for all I knew. I wasn’t wearing a watch after all, and I’d lost my iPhone with its map of the woods—not that it would’ve worked underwater. I didn’t even have a heartbeat to count by. They say you lose all sense of time in a sensory deprivation tank. They say the same about Faerieland. Wherever I was, it was a little like both. My katabasis tank. My fairy holding cell.

  After some time, I realized I missed breathing, and I sighed, unhappily. Water rushed out of my nose and mouth. There was no air in me anymore. Then I heard another sigh, not my own. Like a new pressure on the ears, a new direction of current.

  I turned and saw him.

  His hair drifted around his head like several surprised squirts of octopus ink. Looking at the direction of all that floating hair, I thought to myself, “Ah, that must be up,” but couldn’t do anything about it, pinned as I was.

  He was sitting not far from the swan boat: cross-legged, elbows on knees, chin on hand, all angles, on the top of a very slick, very green, very large rock. Watching me. A lifetime of deep current rushed between us. We were in no hurry to do much more than observe each other. He reminded me of a cormorant.

  Cormorant, I recalled, meant “sea-raven.” At least, that was what it said in the Preservation Trust Salt Marsh brochure, one of the plethora of brochures mamita used to bring back to our apartment (in those halcyon days of yesteryear or perhaps a minute ago when I had both a mamita and an apartment) and stuff into a basket, labeled in her best calligraphy-on-notecard style, “Ephemera & Realia, Tra-La!”

  “Sea-raven,” I’d told my mother, looking up from this newest brochure, enraptured at the alien etymology. “Isn’t the very name thrilling and wonderful and wildly romantic?”

  “Wildly!” she’d agreed. “I can’t wait to see one! I’ll have to dig out my binoculars!”

  But when I’d confided our fond ambition of cormorant-spotting to him, Rugger just laughed and asked, “What, those armpit birds?” with the hard shine in his eyes of a tried and true Rhode Island tease. “They’re ridiculous,” he assured me, with the authority of someone who had lived in New England his whole life.

  They were a little, maybe. The way those gawky black water birds perched on telephone wires or on rocks in sheltered coves, wings outspread, awkwardly drying themselves. But the look on mamita’s face when she witnesses her first cormorant! The love beaming out from her. That bright grin. The unguarded eyes of a newcomer to the miraculous. She kept that look even after seeing hundreds of cormorants, hundreds of times. After her first encounter, she would always take the scenic Route 1A on her way home from work instead of the expressway, even though it added twenty minutes to her drive, just so that she could pull off to the side of the road and watch them dry their wings—proud and patient, like they were practicing for the day they would finally become heraldic achievements.

  Mamita was a cormorant for last Halloween. We didn’t have any money for costumes, so she dressed all in old black clothes, and made herself a plague-doctor’s beak from old newspaper and flour and water, and flapped around our kitchen raggedly, joyously, armpits exposed and neck extended, making big, honking, cormorant-like pig grunts as I laughed and laughed and laughed.

  You will know from having read such things that weeping underwater after drowning results not in tears but freshwater pearls. These baroque beauties were large and pinkish and irregular, and tumbled away from me, disappearing into the silt they’d disturbed.

  When I blinked my eyes clear again, I went immediately back to observing my new companion. Our gazes met a second time, and he lifted his head as if surprised I could see still him. Maybe he always looked surprised; he had those kinds of eyebrows.

  He was like a cormorant in more than just coloring. Raggedy and ridiculous, barely more than a silhouette. A Rorschach blot in the water. Shy and worn, with thin arms. Thin everything. My mother would have loved him on sight, loved him forever, adopted him as her own. Me, I didn’t know what to think. It was enough, for the moment, not to be alone.

  I tried out a smile. It was shockingly easy, as if my face had just been waiting for me to ask.

  He smiled back, dazzlingly. His teeth blazed. Small white stones. Quartzes. Ground to smoothness by the running water. Immediately he pushed himself off his rock and launched himself toward me, hooking his arms beneath mine the minute we made contact, and heaving. The swan boat toppled.

  Up we went. Straight up and fast. An eruption from the riverbed. A geyser. Up.

  Or maybe down.

  The riverbank we ended up on wasn’t the riverbank I’d left. Not the bottom of the Preser
vation Trust Town Forest in our small Rhode Island town. Nor was the river water I was puking up the Pawcatuck river. It was not even really water but mouthfuls and mouthfuls of small white stones, water-worn glass, ammonites. It occurred to me that maybe I was only puking because I thought I had to. As soon as I was ready to stop, I did.

  The man—or whatever, thing—my companion from the river bottom was still there, crouching near me, watching, just as he had been when we were underwater. All knees and elbows and worried forehead, with eyebrows that rose so far into his hairline they kept winking out of existence. His face was absurd, sort of scrunched and whimsical, like a long-eared bat or a baby monkey. Heaps of wrinkled shadows piled on top of the other, black-on-black, smoothing out like onyx cabochon or contracting like crumpled crêpe depending on his expression. It was more like a dozen paper puppets all collaborating to form features than an actual face. Eyes as crystal-white as his teeth.

  I realized my hands were shaking. Or perhaps the right word was rippling. I held them out and examined them. I had known, when pinned under the swan boat, that I had changed, but now I saw how. My skin was become all the colors of hurtling waters: clear, silvery brown, with flecks of sunlight, glints of sky and tree, and deep cold shadows the farther down I peered. As soon as the ripples calmed, I watched a rainbow trout swim up my left elbow and into my left shoulder, where it disappeared behind my clavicle.