The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Now, Mary, this next part I shall not be offended if you discredit completely, writing it off to the heat of the day, to my having taken too much sun, and to my general exhaustion. In fact, I’d prefer you did just that. All at once, there was a commotion in the water only a yard or so from the woman, as if a large fish were thrashing about just below the surface. You are no doubt familiar with that sight, a very large carp or salmon breaking the surface in pursuit of an unlucky dragonfly. But this disturbance persisted beyond the duration one would expect to be produced by a hungry fish. The initial splash grew into a froth. I can think of no more apt word for what it was than that. And a few seconds later, the unclothed woman turned to face the churning river. I stood up, alarmed, believing that surely she’d back away, returning to the shore lest the commotion prove a threat. But she did not. Rather, she appeared to stare at it most intently.

  It was then that a pitchy shape leapt up from the river. I know that is a vague description, but I can do no better. It was visible only for an instant, and it never coalesced into anything more distinct. Still, it left me with the disquieting impression that I’d beheld not any manner of fish, but possibly a great serpent, thick around as a telegraph pole and greater in size than any serpent I’d imagined lived anywhere outside the African or Amazonian tropics. Not a genuine serpent, but that’s the nearest comparison I can draw, if I attempt to fashion of it anything more substantial than the shadows beneath the maples. I made to shout to the woman to move away, but by then the shape had vanished, as had the woman, and the water was so calm I could scarce believe I’d actually seen anything at all. At once, I began packing my things, genuinely disturbed and desiring nothing more than to be clear of the river with all possible haste.

  There. Now you have it, Mary. The entirety of my macabre episode by the river, and I should think your curiosity duly satisfied and ask you to put the affair out of your mind. It is wholly absurd, and I do not credit my senses with having been faithful to me on that day. On my way back through Millville, I did happen to mention what I thought I’d seen to a man at the mercantile, and clearly he suspected me unhinged and he politely refused to speak on the matter. I’d not have people regarding you with the same dubiety!

  I will close, but be assured I shall send, at the least, a picture souvenir card while in Balt. Be well.

  Fondly,

  PG

  Had Saltonstall heard the tales of the ghost of Perishable Shippen? I’ve found nothing in any of his letters to indicate he had. If he had, wouldn’t you think he’d have mentioned the tradition here?

  My eyes are smarting, and my fingertips are sore. These keys are sticky and need oiling. Anyway, I don’t have the heart, or the stomach, or whatever, to write about the things that happened after Eva came to me at the museum. Not just yet. Tomorrow, maybe. Maybe tomorrow.

  “Imp, it won’t be any easier tomorrow than it would be today. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it will.”

  I didn’t say it would be easier. I said I’m just not up to it right now. I want to get this over with. I want to spit it out so I don’t have to dread spitting it out. It’s a goddamn lump in my throat. It hurts, and I want to cough it up, please.

  6

  (A PLAY IN FIVE ACTS)

  RISING ACTION (1)

  Act One: Hairshirt

  Abalyn and I didn’t go to the Blackstone River the day after Eva Canning came to me in the museum. Usually, it seems that way, but then I stop and think, and realize there were days in between. There was a visit to Dr. Ogilvy in between. I didn’t hear the receptionist when she said I could go in. I was too busy scribbling in the margins of pages in a year-old issue of Redbook. Eventually, Dr. Ogilvy came out to see if there was something wrong, and she found me writing in the magazine. I’d written lines from “The Lobster Quadrille” over and over again, over and over, out of order. She asked if I was okay, “Imp, is something wrong?” and when I didn’t answer (I was trying to, but my head was too full of Lewis Carroll) she asked if she could look at what I’d written. I blinked a few times and relinquished the copy of Redbook.

  She stared at my messy handwriting, and then wanted to know what it meant. Not what it was, but what it meant.

  “I don’t know,” I said, tapping my pen against my leg and reaching for another magazine (Cosmopolitan, I think). “But I can’t get it out of my head.”

  She said it would be better to talk in her office, and she said if I needed to take the magazine in with me, that was perfectly okay. By then, I was fifteen minutes into my hour. Dr. Ogilvy’s office is small, and decorated with butterflies and beetles and other colorful insects pinned inside glass frames. She once told me she almost studied entomology in college.

  “India, when you say you can’t get this out of your head, I assume you mean the thoughts are involuntary and unwelcome.”

  “I wouldn’t want them to go away if they were welcome, would I?” And I wrote

  They are waiting on the shingle—will youcome and join the dance?

  in the margin of an article about spicing up your sex life by learning the secret sexual fantasies of men.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “I’m not sure,” I lied. It started when Eva whispered in my ear, of course. But I knew better than to start talking to Dr. Ogilvy about Eva Canning.

  “More than a day?”

  “Yeah.”

  “More than two days?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Have you told anyone?” she asked, and I told her that my girlfriend had caught me writing the poem on the back of a napkin the day before. We’d gone out for hamburgers.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said it was nothing, and I threw away the napkin.”

  I scribbled

  Beneath the waters of the sea

  Are lobsters thick as thick can be—

  They love to dance with you and me.

  My own and gentle Salmon!

  in the copy of Cosmopolitan.

  “It’s been a long time since it was this bad,” I said. “I couldn’t go into work yesterday. My manager’s not happy. I’m afraid he’s going to fire me, and I can’t afford to lose my job.”

  “You’ve been missing a lot of days.”

  “Some,” I said. “I keep telling him I’m sick when I call in, but he doesn’t believe me anymore. I’ve always been a good employee. You think he’d cut me some slack.”

  “India, would you like me to call him and explain?”

  “No,” I replied. I said no seven times, and didn’t look up because I didn’t want to see Dr. Ogilvy’s expression. I knew what it was without having to look. I wrote

  Salmon, come up! Salmon, go down!

  Salmon, come twist your tail around!

  Of all the fishes in the sea

  There’s none so good as Salmon!

  and she asked if I’d stopped taking my meds. I told her no, that I hadn’t missed a single dose. That was the truth. Then she asked if I would give her the magazine. I clutched it tightly, so tightly I tore the page I’d been writing on, but then I gave it to her. I apologized for ruining it, and offered to replace it and the copy of Redbook.

  “Don’t worry about that. They’re not important.” She stared at the page a moment, then asked, “You do know what this is, I assume?”

  “The Mock Turtle’s song. From the tenth chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, first published in London in 1865 by Macmillan and Company.”

  I was tapping the pen very hard against my knee, tapping seven times, then seven times, then seven times.

  “We’re going to adjust the levels of your medications,” she said, and passed the magazine back to me. “Are you okay with that?”

  She scrawled illegibly on a prescription pad, and I scrawled almost as illegibly in Cosmopolitan:

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

  “When did you memorize that poem?” Dr. Ogilvy asked me, and before I
thought better of it, because I was too busy writing, I said, “Never. I never memorized this poem or any other poem.”

  She tore two pages from the pad, but didn’t immediately hand them to me. “If I send you home today, will you be safe? Can you drive?” I told her I’d taken the bus from Willow Street, and she said that was for the best.

  “You’ll be safe?” she asked again.

  “Safe as houses,” I answered. When I glanced up, she was staring at me skeptically.

  “Your girlfriend knows about your condition?”

  “Yeah. I told her right after we met,” and I wrote:

  When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark.

  And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:

  But when the tide rises and sharks are around,

  His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.

  She handed me the prescriptions, and asked me to please be careful, and to try to go to work, and to call her if it got any worse, or if I wasn’t better in a couple of days. I could tell she didn’t want to let me leave, that she was thinking about the hospital. She knows, and she knew back then, that she’d have to force me to spend even a single night in a hospital. She knew almost everything there was to know about Rosemary Anne. She knew it would have to get a lot worse than obsessively copying Lewis Carroll onto napkins and old magazines before I’d go, and that even then I’d go kicking and screaming.

  I said, “St. Ignatius of Loyola had obsessions. Intrusive thoughts, I mean. He was terrified of stepping on pieces of straw forming a cross, because he was afraid it showed disrespect to Christ. I don’t know where I read that. I must have read it somewhere. I think a lot of people that got to be saints were really only crazy.” I pressed too hard and tore the page.

  Dr. Ogilvy was silent for a while.

  “You know I’m not religious,” I said. “You know I’ve never believed in God and all that.”

  “Will you sit in the waiting room for a couple of hours?” she wanted to know. “You can leave anytime, but I think it would be a good idea if you stuck around for a bit, just in case.”

  “No,” I replied, and shut the magazine. I rolled it into a tube and squeezed it. “I need to get home. I’ll be fine, I swear. I’ll call you if it gets worse.”

  “And you’re sure you don’t know what triggered this episode?”

  “I’m sure,” so there was my second lie.

  “Will you call when you get home?”

  I told her I would. It was a small enough price to pay to escape her office and get out of the clinic and away from her scrutiny and questions. She followed me back out to the receptionist, and I wrote a check for the cost of the session. We said good-bye. I had to pee, and I ducked into the restroom before I left the building. I sat on the plastic toilet lid and wrote

  Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but comeand join the dance.

  and I even drew a snail beneath the verse. I almost missed my bus. But only almost. I was home by four o’clock, but Abalyn had taken the Honda and gone to the market. She’d left a list explaining that she’d gone to get milk, coffee, cereal, peanut butter, “feminine hygiene products,” AAA batteries, Red Bull, and carrots. I called Dr. Ogilvy, but she was with another patient, so I had to leave a message with her voice mail. I sat on the sofa and waited for Abalyn to come home. I tossed the magazine at a wastepaper basket and missed. I’d left one of my drawing pads on the sofa the night before, and so I wrote lines from “The Lobster Quadrille” in it, instead. When my pen ran out of ink, I stopped long enough to find another.

  RISING ACTION (2)

  Act Two: Find the River

  Abalyn and I are sitting together at one of the long oak tables in the downstairs reading room of the Athenaeum. The library, as usual, is noisier than most libraries, but I’ve never minded. The voices of the librarians have always comforted me, just like the building comforts me, the stones and mortar set in place one hundred and seventy years ago, fifty-eight years before Saltonstall saw what he saw in the Blackstone Gorge. Do the math. Draw the parallel lines and abrupt angles, then mark the intersecting points. The library comforts me. I am wrapped in the aroma of antique books, dust, everything that has aged and is still aging. The Athenaeum is a shroud I hide within. I’m sitting across from Abalyn. I have a college-ruled notebook open in front of me. I bought it at the Walgreens on Atwells Avenue the day before, and the first seventy-four pages are filled, front and back, with lines from “The Lobster Quadrille,” written down in no particular order. The number seven appears at the four corners of every page. I write in my notebook, and Abalyn talks, not quiet whispering.

  “It’s a bad idea,” she says, staring at my notebook. She’s afraid. I would say that I can smell her fear, but I can’t. Maybe I feel her fear, or only see it in her green eyes, the color of mermaids’ tears. She keeps trying to take the notebook away from me, even though that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Last night, she called Dr. Ogilvy’s emergency number, but Dr. Ogilvy apologized and refused to speak with her about me. I haven’t signed a release form permitting my psychiatrist to discuss my case with anyone.

  “It might work,” I say, not looking up from the notebook. I come to the last line; then I carefully place the four necessary sevens before turning to the next page. Seven, seven, seven, seven, twenty-eight.

  “You don’t know that, Imp. You might only make this worse. That could happen, couldn’t it?”

  “Almost anything could happen,” I say. “Almost anything at all. You don’t have to go with me. I keep telling you I can go alone.”

  “The hell you will,” she says. “I’m afraid to let you out of my sight.”

  I glance up at her then, and it hurts to see her so frightened. “Don’t say things like that. Please don’t. Don’t make me feel trapped.”

  “You know that’s not what I’m trying to do.”

  I go back to scribbling, because I have to, and so I don’t have to look at the expression on her face. “I know. But that’s what you’re doing.”

  We leave Providence about one o’clock. It’s hot that day, up in the nineties. The wind through the open windows does nothing much to keep us cool, and the smell of sweat puts me in mind of the sea, which puts me in mind of Eva Canning. I write in my notebook, and Eva Abalyn drives and stares straight ahead. She never takes her eyes off the road.

  The night before, Abalyn googled Eva Canning. It’s weird all the words I never knew existed before Abalyn came to live with me, words like “googled.” I told her it was amazing how much she’d found, and she said, “Yeah, well. I was going to open a private-detective agency, but the name Google was already trademarked.” She got 473 hits, almost all of which were clearly other people and not my Eva Canning. But there was one thing. I have Abalyn’s printouts here beside me. One article from the Monterey County Herald and another from the San Francisco Chronicle, a few others, all from April 1991. They connect a woman named Eva Canning to a woman named Jacova Angevine. In one of the articles there’s a photograph of Eva standing beside Jacova Angevine, who was the leader of a cult, a cult that ended in a mass drowning, a mass suicide in the spring of 1991. Angevine led them into the sea at a place called Moss Landing in California, not far from Monterey. I’ll quote a short passage from the Herald and then one from the Chronicle article here:

  “The bodies of 53 men and women, all of whom may have been part of a religious group known as the Open Door of Night, have been recovered following Wednesday’s drownings near Moss Landing, CA. Deputies have described the deaths as a mass suicide. The victims were all reported to be between 22 and 36 years old. Authorities fear that at least two dozen more may have died in the bizarre episode and recovery efforts continue along the coast of Monterey County” (Monterey County Herald).

  And:

  “The protestors are demanding that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) end its ongoing exploration of the submarine canyon immediately. The 25-mile-long canyon, they claim, is a sacred sit
e that is being desecrated by scientists. Jacova Angevine, former Berkeley professor and leader of the controversial Open Door of Night cult, compares the launching of the new submersible Tiburón II to the ransacking of the Egyptian pyramids by grave robbers” (San Francisco Chronicle; note that tiburón is Spanish for shark).