The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “India. What a pleasant surprise,” she says. “You’re the very last person I expected to see tonight.” Her tone is warm and entirely cordial, as if we’re nothing more remarkable than two old friends, meeting by chance. It’s just a happy coincidence, that’s all.

  And I say the very first thing that occurs to me. I say, “You were in my head. A few minutes ago. You said, ‘Get it over with.’” There’s a tremble in my voice. My voice is a counterpoint to Eva’s, as is what I’ve said, implying that this coincidence isn’t happy. It may not even be a coincidence.

  Her smile doesn’t waver. “Was it, now?” she asks me, and I nod. “Well, you were dawdling. You were getting cold feet, weren’t you?”

  I don’t say yes or no. I don’t have to. She already knows the answer. Standing here before me, in such mundane surroundings, she strikes me as a thing taken out of context. The sight of Eva naked at the side of the road made more sense to me than the sight of her in the gallery, and in some ways she seems more naked here than she did when I first saw her. There’s a wooden bench directly in front of The Drowning Girl, and she sits and motions for me to do the same. I glance at the docent, and he’s still watching me. No, now he’s watching us. I sit beside her.

  “You came to see my painting,” she says. (I’m very sure that’s what she said. My painting. Not the painting.) “Where’s Abalyn?” she asks.

  “Home,” I reply, the tremble fading from my voice. “She doesn’t much like museums.”

  “I’ve been meaning to call and thank you. No telling what would have become of me if you hadn’t come along. It was rude of me not to call. Oh, and I still have the clothes you lent me. I need to get those back to you.”

  “It wasn’t an accident, was it? That night, I mean.”

  “No,” she says. “No, Imp, it wasn’t. But you didn’t have to stop for me. That much was left up to you.”

  She isn’t lying to me. There’s no hint of deception here. She isn’t denying anything, though I wish she were. I wish she would at least try to make it all less real. Do her best to render these events perfectly ordinary. I sit and stare at The Drowning Girl, and catch the familiar, comforting scent of the sea coming off Eva. It doesn’t strike me as odd, her smelling like the sea. If anything, it only seems appropriate, consistent, inevitable.

  “He was a sad sort of man,” she says, and points at the painting. “He was a melancholy man. It was a shame, him dying so young, but hardly unexpected.”

  “So you don’t believe his fall from the horse was an accident?”

  “That’s twice now you’ve used that word,” she says. “You seem preoccupied with causality and circumstance. But no, I seriously doubt it was an accident. He was a very accomplished horseman, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I tell her, and I don’t take my eyes off the painting. Ironically, it strikes me as the safest place in the entire gallery to let my eyes linger, even though the dark woods behind Saltonstall’s bather appear more threatful than they ever have before.

  “I didn’t have to stop,” I say. “You mean that. I truly had a choice?”

  “You did, Imp. You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one’s ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I’m afraid the time for choice is behind us both.”

  These words could have so many different meanings, and I don’t want to know precisely which meaning she intends for them to have. So, I don’t ask her to explain. I think, I’ll find out soon enough.

  “Was it because I’m crazy?” I ask, instead. “Is that why I heard you?”

  “You’re too hard on yourself,” she says, and I don’t really know what that means, either.

  “Can I ask what happens next?”

  She smiles again, but not the same way she smiled before. This smile makes her look frayed, and there’s a sadness about it that makes me think of what she said about Phillip George Saltonstall.

  “There’s no script,” she says, and straightens her spectacles. “No foregone conclusions. So, we’ll both just have to wait and see what happens next. Me, as much as you.”

  “I don’t want Abalyn to get hurt.”

  “You’re not the sort of person who wishes harm to come to much of anyone, are you, Imp? Well, except your father, but I can’t blame you for that.”

  I don’t ask her how she knows about my father. I’d figured out enough to understand it’s not important. Sitting there with her, I’m overwhelmed by an instant of déjà vu, stronger than any I’ve ever felt in my life. It makes me dizzy. It almost makes me ill.

  “I should be getting home,” I say, and shut my eyes.

  “Yes, you should. She’s waiting for you. She worries when you’re out alone.” And then Eva leans near and whispers into my right ear. Her breath is warm, but the smell of the sea grows cloying with her face so near mine. She exhales, and I think of mudflats at low tide. I think of mud and reeds and crabs. Quahogs waiting to be dug from their snug burrows. Stranded fish at the mercy of the sun and the gulls. Her words are drops of brackish, estuarine water, dripping into me, and I bite my lip and keep my eyes squeezed closed as tightly as I can.

  “‘Turn not pale, beloved snail,’” she whispers. “‘But come and join the dance. Will you, won’t you, won’t you, will you join the dance? I’m waiting to hold you.’”

  Her lips brush my earlobe, and I flinch. And I want to kiss her. I imagine those lips prowling over every inch of my body. The words drip, and I wonder how much water will fit inside my ear, inside my skull. How much before it spills out into my mouth and down my throat and I drown in the gentle flow of Eva Canning’s words.

  She whispers, “‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied. ‘There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.’”

  Then she isn’t speaking anymore, and I can no longer smell the tidal flats. I can only smell the clean museum air. I know she’s gone, but I keep my eyes shut until the docent walks over and asks me if anything’s wrong, if I’m okay. I open my eyes, and see that Eva’s no longer sitting there beside me.

  “Where did she go?” I ask. “Did you see her leave?”

  “Who do you mean, ma’am?” the man wants to know, and he looks confused. He has that quizzical expression people get when they begin to realize there’s something wrong with me.

  I don’t bother asking him a second time.

  I’ve been thinking about what I wrote earlier regarding the word thing, and how a thing imperfectly defined, only half-glimpsed, has the potential to be so much more fearful than dangers seen with perfect clarity.

  I spent a day and a half composing that sentence. I must have written twenty-five or thirty versions of it on various scraps of paper before letting myself type it here. I’m not a careful writer, not usually, and I’ve been especially lackadaisical writing this all out (another word Abalyn kidded me for using: “Imp, no one actually says ‘lackadaisical’”). I’ve made little or no effort to rein in my disordered mind. As long as I set down the events, to the best of my ability, it hardly matters whether or not this manuscript is orderly.

  But—the word thing. The vague concept of a thing, versus the concrete image of any given thing. I started thinking about the movie Jaws. I’ve already mentioned that I’m not particularly interested in movies, and I haven’t seen all that many of them. Not compared to most people, I would think. Not compared to Abalyn, who often spoke in dialogue borrowed from movies, who peppered our conversations with allusions to films I’d never seen, but which she seemed to know by heart. Anyway, I have seen Jaws. I saw it before Abalyn and before Eva Canning. I’m still not sure whether or not I liked it, and that doesn’t really matter. I’m sure it was one of the many things that inspired me to write “The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean.”

  The film begins with the death of a young woman. Unlike the later victims, she isn’t killed by a shark. No, she’s killed and devoured by a thing we never see. She leaves her friends and the warmth
of a campfire, leaves her friends and the safety of the shore, and she enters the cold sea. The sun is rising as she strips off her clothes and enters the sea. The water is black, and anything below it is hidden from our view. Something under the water seizes her, and she’s hurled violently from side to side. She screams and desperately clutches at a bell buoy, as though it might save her. We hear her cry out, “It hurts.” It, a word as terrible and empty of specificity as thing. The attack doesn’t last very long. Less than a minute. And then she vanishes, pulled down into that black abyss off Amity Island, and we can only guess at what pulls her down. The sea is an accomplice to her attacker, concealing it, though this unseen force must lie only inches below the surface.

  Later, when I encountered the story of Millicent Hartnett’s having been bitten by something in the Blackstone River at Rolling Dam, a something her friends never saw, I thought at once of this scene. I thought about how lucky Millicent Hartnett was that day in the summer of 1951. She might have been that girl who was pulled under in Jaws.

  I didn’t find the rest of the movie scary. It’s only about a very large shark, which we are shown again and again and again. We are shown the shark, and then nothing is left to the imagination. A shark can only kill a woman. And a shark can be understood and reckoned with. A shark is only a fish that can be tracked down and destroyed by three men in a leaky little boat. It’s nothing even as remotely unsettling as the opening scene’s villain.

  I shouldn’t have written villain, so I’ve struck it out. After all, whatever mauled and pulled the unlucky girl down to her death, it was only being whatever it was. She was the interloper. She came to it, invaded its world, not the other way round.

  In Phillip George Saltonstall’s painting, the threat is completely shrouded. It is a thing only implied. The nude woman stands in murky river water, the same murky river where, fifty-three years after the painting was finished, Millicent Hartnett would be bitten by something no one ever saw. The same murky water said to be haunted by “the Siren of Millville.” The woman in the painting is glancing back over her shoulder towards the shore and a shadowy forest that imply threat. She has turned away from the placid water in the foreground, which may be as charged with menace as the trees. The trees might only be misdirection, an act of prestidigitation fashioned to distract the woman from a hazard that doesn’t lurk behind the trees, but beneath the deceptively calm water.

  She stands poised between Scylla and Charybdis, having waded naively into a makeshift New England equivalent of the Strait of Messina.

  It isn’t what we see. It’s what we are left to envision. This is the genius of The Drowning Girl, and the genius of so many of Albert Perrault’s loathsome paintings. We are told that the hulking forms surrounding the kneeling girl in Fecunda ratis are wolves, but they don’t exactly look like wolves. They might be anything else. This is Jaws’ and Saltonstall’s trick reversed, but to the same effect. The summoning of the unknown.

  It isn’t the known we fear most. The known, no matter how horrible or perilous to life and limb, is something we can wrap our brains around. We can always respond to the known. We can draw plans against it. We can learn its weaknesses and defeat it. We can recover from its assaults. So simple a thing as a bullet might suffice. But the unknown, it slips through our fingers, as insubstantial as fog.

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), a reclusive writer who lived here in Providence (and to whom I am distantly related), wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” I’ve never much cared for Lovecraft. His prose is too florid, and I find his stories silly. But Abalyn was a fan of his writing. Anyway, he’s not wrong about our fear of the unknown. He hits the nail on the head.

  “What are you getting at?” Imp typed. “You’re losing me. You were sitting on a beach bench in a museum with Eva Canning, and first she was there and then she wasn’t anymore. First, the docent saw her, and then he hadn’t. And she wasn’t hidden. You saw her plain as day. A pale, blonde woman in a red dress and leather sandals. A pale woman with cornflower blue eyes, who sat next to you, who leaned in and touched you. She hid nothing.”

  No. No.

  That’s a lie. What she let me see was something like the tangible, ordinary, vulnerable flesh of the shark we finally see in Jaws. She showed me that to conceal the scene at the beginning of the movie, to mask the unknown swimming below the surface of her. That evening was the third time she came to me clothed in the skin of a woman, because, I think, she knew I wasn’t yet ready to see the truth of her. The truth of her was then and always will be, ultimately, unknown. Very soon, she would show me things I could only halfway comprehend, but no mystery I’d ever actually penetrate. The unknown is immune to the faculties of human reason. Eva Canning taught me that much, if she taught me nothing else.

  “Will you walk a little faster?” said a whitingto a snail.

  “There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’streading on my tail.”

  Imp types, “That evening in the museum, even if she hid her true face, she didn’t lie to you. She answered all your questions. She warned you what was coming, even if the warning was veiled. This is, at best, a paradox.”

  Imp types. I type. “I see that, too.”

  “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?”

  Perhaps I should rip up these last few pages. Maybe I have no idea what I’m trying to say. Or I should have spent many more days working out each and every sentence on countless scraps of paper, not daring to fit them together until every word had been unerringly selected.

  I am not even sure I can hear my own voice anymore. Very soon now, as I tell my ghost story, that’s what I’ll say to Abalyn, that I’m not even sure I can hear my own voice anymore.

  Did you join the dance, Rosemary Anne? That last night in the hospital, did a siren come to you and tell you how delightful it would be when they take us up and throw us with the lobsters out to sea? Did you listen?

  “So, Saltonstall went to the Blackstone River, and he saw something there, something happened there, and it haunted him.” I wrote that sentence many pages ago, back when I was pretty sure I’d never get this far with the story of my ghost story. I need to return to what Saltonstall saw before moving along to the worst of it. I mean, the worst of this first incarnation of my haunting.

  The detached sliver of my mind that is acting as The Reader is eager to know what happens next, even though she ought to comprehend that I’ll only divulge the narrative in my own time, as I find the courage to do so. I didn’t set out to appease the Tyranny of Plot. Lives do not unfold in tidy plots, and it’s the worst sort of artifice to insist that the tales we tell—to ourselves and to one another—must be forced to conform to the plot, A-to-Z linear narratives, three acts, the dictates of Aristotle, rising action and climax and falling action and most especially the artifice of resolution. I don’t see much resolution in the world; we are born and we live and we die, and at the end of it there’s only an ugly mess of unfinished business.

  There was no resolution for me and Abalyn, and as for Eva Canning, I’m still chasing closure. That’s such an idiotic word, such an idiotic concept, closure.

  Saltonstall died still searching for closure. Albert Perrault died before he ever got that far.

  It’s just an accident that I found out exactly what Saltonstall claimed he saw at Rolling Dam that inspired The Drowning Girl. It’s something else buried in his correspondence with Mary Farnum, letters that’ll likely never be indexed or published, and that are scattered between three different institutions. That afternoon in August 2002, the day I found a brief mention of Saltonstall and the phantom said to haunt the Blackstone River in Smithfield’s A Concise History of New England Painters and Illustrators, a librarian at the Athenaeum who knew I was trying to dig up whatever I could on Saltonstall mentioned that some of his letters had ended up in the John Hay Library at Brown University. She had an a
cquaintance there and volunteered to give him a call and schedule a time I could examine them. I went to the Hay a week later, and this is what I found (in a letter to Mary, dated March 7th, 1897):

  My Dearest, Darling Mary,

  I hope that you and your mother are well, and that your father is doing better than when last I visited. In three short days, I’ll be leaving for Baltimore, and I felt I should write once more before my trip south. If I am very fortunate, the journey will prove a success and I’ll return with some measure of financial security guaranteed for the year to come! I wish you were coming with me, as I feel certain you would love that city and all its delights.

  In your last letter you asked about my fright last summer at the dam, and I admit I’d not intended to elaborate on that strange day. Indeed, I do now regret ever having mentioned it to you. I’d prefer you not spend your evening dwelling on such morbid, uncanny affairs, which would be more at home in a story by Poe or Le Fanu than in our exchange of letters. But you were so insistent, and you know that I have yet to discover the resolve to deny you that which is within my power to grant. And so, I will relent, but have you know I’ve done so reluctantly.

  That particular afternoon I’d decided to move farther away from the dam (on the Millville side). A man in town had been kind enough to inform me of a level, stony patch of bank much favored by local fishermen and by the boys who come down to swim. I found it a most agreeable vantage point, affording me a clear and unobstructed view of the last bend in the river, just past the boggy slough. I would say there is an eeriness about the spot, but my opinion has undoubtedly been colored by the occurrence I’m about to relate. Still, being in that place made me uneasy, despite the amenable field of vision, and I wondered that the spot was said to be so popular.

  It was quite late, and I was catching the last good light, finishing up one last sketch before packing away my charcoal and easel. My attention was occupied by the forest directly opposite where I stood. The river is, at this spot, fifty feet across, hardly more than the breadth of the dam. So what I saw, I saw clearly. There was a rustling in the underbrush on the farther shore, which I at first took to be a deer coming down to drink. But instead a young woman emerged from the thick growth of maples (uncommonly dense there, I’d add). She was attired very plainly, and I imagined her a woman from Millville or Blackstone. She looked my way, or seemed to, and I waved, but she showed no sign of having seen me. I called out to her, but still failed to get her attention, unless, of course, she was purposely ignoring me. Supposing her business to be none of mine own, I quickly added her to my sketch. I took my eyes away from her no more than the space of half a minute, but when I looked again, she’d undressed and stepped into the water far enough that it reached her knees. I do not wish you to think me a man of dissolute morals (though I know all artists are generally supposed to be just that), but I didn’t immediately look away. She glanced back at the trees several times, and it occurred to me how very deep the shadows were beneath the maples. The shadows there seemed almost possessed of a solidity, a quality more than the mere absence of light caused by their boughs blocking the daylight. Returning to my earlier mention of a deer, it struck me that she had about her the same wariness as a doe, having heard the approach of footsteps in the moment that she raises her head before dashing away to safety.