The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Note: Ashes in the water, Ashes in the sea, We all jump up, With a one-two-three. (or) She’s in the water, she’s in the sea. (or) husha husha, we all fall down. See Roud Folk Song Index, #7925 (Roud ID #S263898), and see the website for English Folk Dance and Song Society: ’Twas a dream : Father stay in room : Three beautiful angels : Around bed. (July 10th, 1908; Roud ID #S135469). Hidden meanings: Great Plague of London, 1665 (Ring a-ring o’ roses, A pocketful of posies, A-tishoo! a-tishoo! We all fall down; Iona and Peter Opie, The Singing Game, Oxford, 1985, pp. 220–227)—but this interpretation is controversial and hasn’t been widely accepted. There are problems. And also, wreck of the Scandia and North Cape at Moonstone Beach, 1996.

  Sunday (July 13th): This one is no better than a fucking cartoon. It’s cartoon silly. Abalyn is making breakfast, and she’s singing in the kitchen (I like the way she sings. Abalyn, I mean.), and I’m going to write down this silly cartoon dream that didn’t and won’t bother me because it’s no better than slapstick. It won’t feel like it’s stuck to me somehow, all day, or like it’s soaked me and I’ll need all day to dry off. Anyway, anyway, this time, I was on the road again, but the road was the river, Blackstone River Gorge rising up on either side, steep granite blacker than the night. The road was wild white water rushing through the gorge, and the car rolled and bobbed and listed this way and that way. I was afraid I would capsize.

  Eva Canning was in the car with me, messing with the radio, looking for a channel I don’t think even exists. I asked her questions she wouldn’t answer. Then the road was just a road, and I’m speeding back towards the city. There are animals watching me from the edges of the highway, and their eyes flash red and iridescent blue-green like Eva’s might have flashed (but couldn’t have, not really, just me being freaked-out). I saw rabbits, foxes, skunks, weasels, dogs, cats, minks, sheep, coyotes, a bear. Other things I can’t remember. When I glanced in the rearview mirror there were big black birds following us. They had Christmas-light eyes. Then it stopped, and I woke up. My chest hurt, like I’d been holding my breath in my sleep. It still aches a little. Dumb fucking dream.

  Monday (July 14th): In the bathroom, watching Eva Canning take a shower. The room smells like river water, shampoo, mud, turtles, soap. She is so beautiful. No one is supposed to be as beautiful as that. She shuts off the water and steps out, wincing when her feet meet the tiles. “I’m walking on needles,” she said. “I’m walking on sharp knives. The witch, the sea hag, told me that would happen, didn’t she? Did I listen?”

  I hand her a towel, and notice she leaves bloody footprints on the white tiles. She stands at the mirror above the sink and wipes away condensation from the glass. Eva has no reflection. “What was I to do? He sunk me in the green water below the bridge. They made a violin of my breastbone. They made tuning pegs from my fingers. In the winter, I lay below the ice and the sky was silver and glass.” I’m trying to write exactly what she said. It’s close, but not exact. This was the worst yet. Call Dr. Ogilvy?

  Notes: See Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Mrs. Henry H. B. Paull, translator. (London: Warne & Co., 1875). See also “The Twa Sisters,” The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Francis James Childs (ref #10; 1 10A.7–8), five volumes, 1882–1898.

  Tuesday (July 15th): Back to the stairs, only I was walking down. Not up, and the water was continually gushing from above. Several times, it almost knocked me off my feet. Abalyn was calling my name at the bottom of the stairs, but, get this, there wasn’t a bottom to the stairs. It was an endless stepwise waterfall. It was a cataract. This has got to stop. I want to tell Abalyn about the dreams, but I absolutely know that I won’t. I don’t want to tell her; I want them to stop.

  There. That’s the last of it. The dreams didn’t end after that Tuesday. I just didn’t write them down anymore. There wasn’t any blank space left at the back of Mansfield Park, and, besides, I was sick of writing them down. It started to feel like picking though my own vomit to see what I’d eaten. The dreams were making me sick, but I have always been good at hiding my craziness. On Tuesday morning, Abalyn and I fucked like there’d been no nightmare, and I tried to work on my painting. And drew Eva Canning, instead.

  Imp typed, “You are a liar. You are a filthy, wicked little liar, and you know it, don’t you?”

  Yeah, I’m a liar.

  I’m a filthy, wicked little liar.

  And I know it, sure as shit.

  July grew old, as months always and will forever do, and on a day late in July, just before the death of the month and the birth of August, Abalyn and I almost had an argument. Almost, but not quite. In all the time we were together, I don’t think we ever had a genuine argument. That sort of thing isn’t in either of our natures, and, looking back, I’m grateful for that much, at least. At least we didn’t fight and bicker and stab at each other with ugly words we’d spend the rest of our lives regretting, but unable to take back.

  So, this is an afternoon, a late afternoon, early evening, almost at the end of July. Which means six weeks or so had passed since Abalyn had come to live with me. The day was exceptionally hot. The sort of day when I really wish my apartment had air-conditioning, even if it costs too much, more than I can afford, and even though I don’t need air-conditioning for most of any given summer.

  But I did that day. Need air-conditioning, I mean. I had both windows open, in the room where I paint, and I had the box fan running in one of the windows, but it wasn’t doing any good. The air was like soup, and the smells of turpentine, linseed, and oils—which I usually found comforting—only added to the oppressiveness of the air. I’d had to take off my smock. I had a bandanna on my head to keep the sweat out of my eyes, but that didn’t stop it from dripping off the end of my nose onto my palette. My sweat, mixing with my paint, which struck me as somehow wicked (there’s that word again), and somehow dangerous. Painting myself into the canvas, all the minute specks of me trapped in those surface-tension beads of sweat. Locking my physical self up within my paintings. I sat there, sweating, sweating, trying to blend a very particular shade of yellow, which I could see plainly in my head, but which kept eluding me. I tried to work, and tried not to think about my sweat in the paint, tried not to think about voodoo and magic and how an artist might become bound to something she’s made. How she might lose her soul inside it.

  I think it might have been around seven thirty when Abalyn knocked very gently at the door. The sun was getting low, but the room wasn’t getting any cooler. She asked if she could come in. If it would bother me if she came in and talked while I was working. I wanted to say no. I probably should have said no, but I didn’t. I’d been alone in that room for hours, mixing yellows and sweating into my paint, but not actually putting anything new on the canvas. I couldn’t stop working, but I didn’t want to be alone in there anymore.

  She came in and eased the door shut behind her, careful not to slam it. She sat down on the floor not far from my stool, her back to the wall. For a moment, she stared silently at the window nearest her, at the rooftops and trees and birds.

  “Are you getting hungry?” she asked, after a minute or two. “I was thinking I’d make something cold for dinner. Maybe a big salad or something.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I told her, squeezing the tiniest dab of naphthol crimson. I watched as the wrong yellow became an entirely wrong orange. “It’s too hot. I can’t eat when it’s this hot.”

  “Later, then,” she said.

  “It isn’t going well?” she asked.

  “It isn’t going at all,” I told her. “I can’t get this color right. I keep fucking it up, and I’m wasting paint.”

  “Then maybe you ought to stop for now.”

  “I don’t want to stop for now,” I replied, and I heard how my voice sounded, almost snapping at her. I apologized and told her the heat was making me irritable.

  There was a cigarette tucked behind her left ear, like she was a greaser or a mechanic in some old movie. I thought it was sexy
, but I didn’t tell her. I just kept stirring at my palette, adding more paint, getting it wronger and wronger.

  “Hey, Imp,” she said. “You okay?”

  “No,” I said without looking up. “I’m hot. I’m hot, and I’m wasting paint.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I mean, more like, are you okay, in general?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I can’t remember if I didn’t want to answer, or if it was because I was so distracted, so intent on finding the right yellow and all.

  “I don’t know,” I told her eventually. “I guess so. I guess I’m all right as I ever am.”

  “If you weren’t, would you tell me?”

  I looked up at her then. Maybe I narrowed my eyes. Maybe I frowned. Her expression changed, as if whatever she saw on my face bothered her or was unexpected.

  “I wouldn’t lie to you, Abalyn. I wouldn’t have any reason to lie to you, right?”

  She took a deep breath and let it out in measured exhalations. It made me think of swimming, the way she exhaled. I used to swim a lot, but not anymore, not since Eva. Abalyn breathed in and out and then she glanced at the open window again.

  “I know you wouldn’t lie, Imp. That’s not what I meant. But sometimes there’s something wrong, and it’s easier not to talk about it.”

  “That would be a lie by omission,” I told her.

  “I wasn’t accusing you of lying,” she said, and I think she held her breath for a moment then. I thought of swimming again. “Maybe I should leave you alone,” and Abalyn’s beach-glass eyes drifted from the window to the floorboards. Sometimes, my mother used to call beach glass “mermaids’ tears.”

  “No,” I said. I probably said it too quickly, with too much urgency. “No, please. Stay. It’s okay, really. I’m just irritable from the heat. I don’t mean to be.”

  “Yeah, it’s hot as Hades in here. What color of yellow are you after, anyway?” It was obvious she was just pretending to be interested. The words sounded awkward, but she probably believed the silence would be more awkward. It felt like she had to say something to stop the silence from coming back, so that’s what she said.

  “Don’t you mean what shade of yellow?” I suggested. I was busy trying to dilute the unfortunate consequences of the naphthol crimson, and it didn’t even occur to me this might be a picky, even rude, sort of question until it was already out of my mouth.

  “Sure. I guess that’s what I meant.”

  “Well, bright,” I replied, chewing my lower lip, stirring at the palette. “Sort of like a canary or goldenrod is yellow. But not too bright, right? Titanium yellow more than Aureolin yellow.”

  “I don’t know what either of those are.”

  “That’s okay. You’re not a painter,” I said. “You don’t need to know. I do. I’m supposed to be able to do this, and if I can’t do this, I can’t paint.”

  “I’m worried about you,” she said. I want to say “she blurted,” but I won’t.

  I laughed and told her that was ridiculous. “I’ll figure it out sooner or later. I almost always do. Sometimes it just takes a while, and the heat isn’t helping.”

  “Imp, I’m not talking about the painting,” she said.

  I stopped stirring at the glob of oil paint, and stared at the canvas. “Okay. What are you talking about, then?”

  “You talk in your sleep,” she said. In retrospect, I imagine she’d worked out precisely what she intended to say, and I also imagine this wasn’t supposed to be where she started. But it was hot, and maybe none of it was coming out right. I glanced her way, then quickly back to the canvas. So far, it was still mottled red and black, without even a speck of yellow. Abalyn was looking out the window at dusk swallowing Willow Street.

  “Abalyn, lots of people talk in their sleep. You probably talk in your sleep sometimes.”

  “It’s what you’ve been saying in your sleep.”

  “You lie awake listening to what I say in my sleep?”

  “No,” she protested. “Usually, it wakes me up.”

  “Sorry,” I said, without a hint of sincerity. I was too annoyed to be sincere. The heat had made me irritable, and now Abalyn was making me angry. “I’m sorry I talk in my sleep and wake you up. I’ll try not to do that anymore.”

  “You talk about her,” Abalyn said. “You always talk about her.”

  “Her who?” I asked, even though I knew exactly what her answer would be.

  “That Eva woman,” she replied. “You wake me up talking about Eva Canning. Talking to Eva Canning. A few times, you were sort of singing.…” And she trailed off.

  “I most certainly do not sing in my sleep,” I laughed. “No one sings in their sleep.” I had no idea whether people do or don’t sing in their sleep, but when she said that, it gave me a heavy, gelid feeling deep in my belly.

  Rosemary Anne, did you sing in your sleep? When they tied you down to your bed in your room at Butler Hospital at 345 Blackstone Boulevard, did you sing in your sleep?

  Grandmother Caroline, did you ever dream of songs and sing them to empty rooms where no one could hear?

  “Why do you answer the phone when it hasn’t rang?” she asked me.

  “When it hasn’t rung,” I corrected.

  “Why do you do that? I never saw you do it before you brought her home.”

  “How long had you known me before then, Abalyn? Maybe a week, that’s all. I’ve probably been doing it all my life. You wouldn’t know.”

  “No, I probably wouldn’t,” she sighed, speaking and sighing in a single reluctant breath. I could tell she wanted to stop, but now that she’d started this, she wasn’t going to. Stop, I mean.

  Caroline, didn’t you ever happen to pick up the telephone when it wasn’t ringing?

  I thought to myself, Please don’t ask me anything else, Abalyn. I can’t mix the right yellow, and I’m sweating like a pig, and please don’t keep asking me these questions I can’t answer.

  “I found something,” she said very softly. I didn’t turn to see if she was still gazing out the window. “It was an accident. I wasn’t snooping. There was a folder on the kitchen table, and I accidentally knocked it off.”

  Of course, it was the manila file I’d begun keeping years earlier, the one labeled “Perishable Shippen.” What I’d learned about “the Siren of Millville” and The Drowning Girl. A day or two before, I’d added Eva Canning’s name to the tab. I’d written it in green ink.

  “My hand hardly brushed against it.”

  I kept my eyes on the palette; the paint there had turned a very pale and sickly orange.

  “Everything inside spilled out across the floor,” she continued. “I was gathering it all back up, to return it to the folder, Imp. I swear, that’s all that I was doing.”

  “You read it?” I asked, biting down on my lip hard enough to taste a faint hint of blood, like iron in water.

  She didn’t respond.

  I set my palette down among the scatter of paint tubes and brushes. “That stuff is private,” I said, and my voice wasn’t any louder than hers.

  “It was an accident,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to knock the folder off the table. I was cleaning up after lunch yesterday.”

  “But it wasn’t an accident, reading what was in it. No one reads by accident.” I didn’t sound angry anymore, and I realized that I wasn’t. The anger had come and gone quick as lightning, and now I just felt sort of tired and weary of the color yellow.

  “I’m worried about you, that’s all. I wouldn’t have brought any of this up, except I’m worried about you. You’re obsessed with this woman.”

  I turned towards Abalyn, and when I moved, the stool wobbled, and I reached out for the easel to steady myself. She wasn’t still staring out the window; she was staring at me. She looked concerned. She almost looked frightened. All I wanted to say was that she shouldn’t worry, that sometimes I get a thing stuck in my head, but it eventually passes. Just like I always find the colors I need, stuff that get
s stuck in my head always gets unstuck, sooner or later. But I didn’t say any of that. What I said instead was only meant to make Abalyn stop talking and leave me alone again, not to reassure her.

  “I pay a doctor to worry about me,” I told her. “Frankly, it seems kind of presumptuous, giving me the third degree when you hardly know me that well. This really isn’t any of your business. You’re not my keeper. You’re only just barely my girlfriend.”

  She sat there a moment, watching me, before she nodded and stood up. She dusted off the seat of her blue jeans.

  “If that came out harsh, it wasn’t meant to. But I don’t want to discuss this with you.”

  She nodded and said, “Tell me when you get hungry, and I’ll make us something to eat. Or I’ll go for takeout. Whichever.” She left, easing the door shut, the same way she had eased it open when she came in. I went to the window and stayed there until it was dark.

  I’m almost done here. With the pretense of a fourth chapter. Soon, I know, I’m going to quit, and when (or if) I come back to this manuscript, I’ll type “5” seventeen lines down a new piece of paper. No particular reason. The events of that summer are flawless in their continuity, and a more honest woman wouldn’t divide it up into episodes. There wouldn’t be section breaks, pound signs, and numbers denoting new chapters. If I were telling my ghost story the way I should, there might not even be punctuation. Or spaces between one word and the next. I don’t hear punctuation marks in my head. My thoughts all run together, and I slice them apart and nail them into place here. I might as well be a lepidopterist neatly pinning dead butterflies and moths onto foam boards. These words are all corpses now, corpses of moths and butterflies. Sparrows in stoppered jars.