The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Obviously, the second article was written before the first. In an article from a website devoted to suicide cults, the names of most of the people who drowned themselves are listed. One of them is a thirty-year-old woman named Eva Canning from Newport, Rhode Island. The website speculates that she was Jacova Angevine’s lover, and listed her as a priestess in the Open Door of Night (which some journalists called the “Lemming Cult”). The name Eva Canning appears in the acknowledgments of a book, Waking Leviathan, that Jacova Angevine published several years before, and something somewhere said the book was written before the cult was actually formed.

  I sat and listened and wrote in my notebook while Abalyn read the articles to me. When she was done, there was a long silence, and then she asked, “Well?”

  “I don’t know what any of that means,” I replied. “It can’t be the same Eva Canning.”

  “I showed you the photograph, Imp.”

  “The photograph isn’t very clear.” (That’s true. It wasn’t.) “It can’t be the same Eva Canning, and you know it. I know you know that.”

  Abalyn pointed out that one of the articles mentioned many of the bodies being in “an advanced state of decay” by the time they were recovered by the Coast Guard. Some appeared to have been fed upon by sharks (id est, tiburón).

  “Maybe she didn’t drown there, Imp. Maybe they made a mistake when the bodies were identified, and she came back East. That’s practically murder, leading those people to their deaths like that. She’d be hiding.”

  “And not using her real name,” I pointed out.

  Abalyn stared at me, and I stared at the parlor window, the moon, and the headlights of passing cars down on Willow Street. There was a question I didn’t want to ask, but finally I asked it anyway.

  “Did you ever hear of this cult? Before today, I mean. I never did, and wouldn’t this have been a pretty big deal? Wouldn’t we have heard about it before now?”

  Abalyn opened her mouth, but then she shut it again without actually saying anything.

  “I don’t know what any of this means,” I said again. “But it can’t be the same Eva Canning. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense neither of us ever heard of this before.”

  “We were just kids,” she said.

  “We weren’t even born when Jim Jones made all those people poison themselves, or when Charles Manson went to prison. But we know all about them. This sounds at least as awful as both of those, but we’ve never heard of it. I think it’s a hoax.”

  “It’s not a hoax,” she said, but then dropped the subject. She threw the printouts away, but later, when she wasn’t watching, I fished them out of the kitchen trash and wiped the coffee grounds off them. I added them to my file devoted to the Siren of Millville, the file I’d also labeled “Eva Canning.”

  The sun is a white devil, the broiling eye of a god I don’t believe in, gazing down at all the world. The Honda’s tires hum against the blacktop. We drive north and west, following the heat haze dancing above 122, through Berkeley, Ashton, Cumberland Hill, Woonsocket. We cross the state line into Massachusetts, and we cross the Blackstone River, and we drive slowly through Millville. I see a black dog at the side of the road. It’s busy chewing at what I think might be a woodchuck that’d been hit by a car as it was trying to cross the road.

  “You’ll have to show me where,” Abalyn says. She sounds hot and scared and tired. I know she’s all those things. I’m only hot and tired. My head is too filled with Lewis Carroll to be scared. “The Lobster Quadrille” rattles and bangs through my head, like church bells and thunder.

  I showed her the place where I’d found Eva, and the spot where I’d pulled over that night. She turned around in someone’s drive, so we wouldn’t have to cross the highway, and she parked my car almost exactly where Eva was standing, naked and dripping wet, when I first spoke to her. It’s so hot I can hardly breathe. I think I’ll smother, it’s so hot. It’s a little after two o’clock, but sometimes the clock set into the dash runs slow, and other times it’s fast. You can’t ever trust that clock. It’s fickle.

  “This is such a bad idea,” she says again, before we get out of the car. I don’t reply. I take my notebook with me. We leave the windows rolled down.

  It’s easy to find the trail leading down to the river, though it’s half-hidden between the brush. I go ahead of Abalyn, and we’re careful to watch for poison ivy. I cut my ankle on creepers and blackberry briars. The trail is steep, and no more than two feet wide. Here and there, it’s deeply gullied from rain. The farther we walk from the road, the more the air smells like the Blackstone River and the plants growing all around us, and the less it smells like the road and melting asphalt. There are monarch butterflies and clumsy, bumbling bumblebees.

  At the bottom of the winding trail, there are a couple of trees, but it’s not much cooler in the shade than in the sun. I’ve counted my steps from the car, and I took fifty steps. We’ve come to a wide rocky clearing. There are patches of mud between the granite boulders. The river’s the color of pea soup, and the water’s so still it hardly seems to be flowing at all. I spot three turtles sunning themselves on a log, and I point them out to Abalyn. Iridescent dragonflies skim low over the pea-green river, and the air throbs with the songs of cicadas and other insects. Every now and then, a fish causes ripples on the surface. I will wonder, hours later, if this is the same spot where Saltonstall was sketching the day he saw the woman come down from the woods on the other side.

  Abalyn sits down on one of the boulders and uses the front of her T-shirt to wipe the sweat from her face. She takes out her cigarettes and lights one, so that now the air also smells of burning tobacco.

  “So, just what are we looking for, Imp?”

  “Maybe we’re not looking for anything,” I reply. “Maybe we’re just looking,” and she shakes her head and stares out across the river.

  “This is bullshit,” she says. She almost hisses the last word. She sounds like an impatient snake would sound, if impatient snakes could talk. Sibilant, as though a forked tongue is flicking out between fangs. She sits on her rock, and I stand near her. I’m not sure how long, but no more than twenty minutes, I think. Yeah, twenty minutes, at the most.

  “Imp, there’s nothing to see,” Abalyn says, in an imploring sort of tone that also says, Can we please get the fuck out of here? Out loud, she adds, “I think I’m about to have fucking heatstroke.”

  And then I see the footprints in the mud. They must have been there the whole time, but I was too busy searching the river and the trees on the other side of the river to notice them. They’re small, slender, long-toed. They might have been left by a kid who came down to swim. Anyway, that’s what Abalyn says when I point them out to her. They lead out of the water, then back in again, making a half circle on the shore. They don’t seem to lead back up the trail towards the highway. But, I tell myself, maybe the dirt trail is too hard and dry for bare feet to leave footprints.

  “Come on, Imp. We’re going home. You need to get out of this heat,” she says, and flicks the butt of her cigarette into the river. She stands and very gently touches my left elbow.

  I clutch my notebook to my chest and stare at the footprints for a couple more minutes, “The Lobster Quadrille” louder than the cicadas screaming in the trees. I think of seeing Eva (or only thinking I was seeing Eva) that day at Wayland Square, and how she hadn’t been wearing any shoes.

  “I’m sorry,” Abalyn says. “If this didn’t help you, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry I dragged you all the way out here,” I reply, and my voice has the odd rhythm that comes from taking great care to insert each word between the syllables of “The Lobster Quadrille.”

  “When we get home, promise me you’ll call your doctor again, okay?”

  I didn’t. Promise, I mean. But I let her lead me back to the car.

  CLIMAX

  Act Three: 7 Chinese Brothers

  It didn’t get any better after the dri
ve to the river. The earwig, I mean. That’s what Caroline used to call getting something stuck in your head—a song, a jingle from a television commercial. I’m sure she would have called getting “The Lobster Quadrille” stuck in my head an earwig, too. Also, I remember an episode of a TV show called Night Gallery, one I saw when I was living with Aunt Elaine in Cranston. In the episode, a man pays another man to place an earwig in the ear of a third man, a romantic rival. But there’s a mix-up. The earwig is mistakenly inserted in the ear of the man who paid the man, and it lays eggs in his brain. Earwigs don’t really do that, tunnel into people’s brains and lay eggs in their heads. But it scared me all the same, and for a while I slept with cotton stuffed in my ears. In the Night Gallery episode, the man with the earwig in his head was in unspeakable agony as the insect ate its way through his brain. I don’t think it was all that different from what Eva Canning did to me, when she leaned close that day in the RISD Museum and whispered in my ear.

  This earwig of mine, these intrusive, echoing thoughts, she set them in motion. She said the words that turned the Aokigahara into the Suicide Forest. She laid her eggs between the convolutions of my cerebellum. She honeycombed the living gray matter, reshaping it to her own ends. I knew that, though I didn’t dare tell Dr. Ogilvy or Abalyn or anyone else. I was crazy enough without telling tales of a siren who’d bewitched me because I’d not had the good sense to follow the example set by Odysseus’ crew and fill my ears with wax. Or even cotton balls. I brought her home, and she rewarded me with a cacophony of Victorian nonsense.

  I didn’t call Dr. Ogilvy when we got home. Abalyn kept asking me to, but I didn’t. I told her it would pass, because it always passed. But it wouldn’t, not this time, so I knew that I was lying.

  And then there was another day, and I filled up my notebook and then bought another. I used up two ballpoint pens and started on a third. It had never, ever been even half this bad, the unwelcome, deafening thoughts clanging about my mind, not even before my meds. I don’t suffer from migraines, but maybe migraines are like having the same string of words running on an endless loop through your skull day and night and even when you dream. The compulsion to set the words to paper, and the inability to stop. I doubled my Valium dose, then tripled it. Abalyn watched, except when she was trying not to watch. She tried to get me to eat, but the Valium was making me sick to my stomach, and, besides, it was hard to eat while writing in my notebooks.

  Finally, on the day after the day after the day at the Blackstone River, she grew so scared and angry, she threatened to call an ambulance. But she didn’t. Instead, she started crying and went for a walk. I’ll say that this was the third of August, even if it wasn’t. The sun was down, and the apartment was stifling, though all the windows were open and the fans were running on high.

  Abalyn slammed the door, and the very next second the telephone rang. Not my cell phone, but the old avocado-colored phone mounted on the kitchen wall. The one I hardly ever use. It’s so old it has a dial. Hardly anyone ever calls me on that phone, and I’ve often wondered why I keep paying not to have the service shut off. The door slammed; the phone rang. I was sitting on the sofa, and I stopped writing halfway through the line about how delightful it will be when they take us up and throw us with the lobsters out to sea. The phone rang at least a dozen times before I got up and crossed the parlor to the kitchen and answered it. Maybe it was my boss, calling to tell me I was fired. Maybe it was Aunt Elaine, or even Dr. Ogilvy, though they both always called my cell number.

  I lifted the receiver, but I don’t think I heard anything for a whole minute. Sometimes I believe I did hear something, the same sound you hear when you put a conch shell to your ear. So, either there was silence or there was a sound that imitated the sea and wind. When Eva Canning spoke, I wasn’t even a little bit surprised. I don’t know what she said. I’m pretty sure I forgot it as soon as she stopped talking and I hung up. But it seems as though she talked for a very long while. It seems she told me great and wonderful secrets, and also secrets that were ugly and malicious. When it was over, “The Lobster Quadrille” was still reverberating in that constructed space between my eyes and pounding at my temples and slithering in through my ears. But I no longer needed to write it down, and that may have been the greatest relief I’ve ever known (at least in the July version of my haunting).

  I walked back to the parlor and went to the window and stood contemplating Willow Street. There were chimney swifts swooping low above the roofs, chasing mosquitoes. Several Hispanic teenagers had set up a table across the street and were playing dominoes by streetlight and listening to loud Mexican pop music. There was no breeze whatsoever. Far off to the north I heard a train whistle. It might almost have been any summer night in the Armory. Maybe I was waiting for Abalyn to come home. Maybe I was standing there watching for her.

  Beneath the waters of the sea

  Are lobsters thick as thick can be—

  When Abalyn didn’t come back, I shut the window and locked it. I didn’t go to any of the other windows to shut and lock them. It was only important that I shut and locked that one. There was something symbolic in the gesture. Closing a window was shutting a door. The Open Door of Night? It was Caroline turning on the gas, and Rosemary Anne growing tired of fighting her restraints and finding the resolution to swallow her own tongue.

  They love to dance with you and me,

  My own, my gentle Salmon!

  I recall all those little details about what I saw outside the window, but I can’t remember walking to the bathroom. I don’t remember anything between the window and being in the bathroom, flipping the light switch (on and off seven times) and turning the cold water (on and off seven times). I remember the bathroom smelled like Abalyn’s peppermint soap, and that I could still hear the music coming from the street, even over the singsong drone of “The Lobster Quadrille.” I sat on the rim of the tub and watched as the cast-iron tub filled. The heat was so unbearable, and I knew the water would be heaven. I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t thought of taking a cold bath earlier that day. I blamed the notebook and the pen and Abalyn being so upset.

  I held my hand beneath the tap, and it was like dipping my fingers into liquid ice, almost too cold. I undressed, and let my clothes lie where they fell on the blue and white tiles. When the tub was full enough it might slosh over, I shut off the faucet and stepped into the water. It burned, that’s how cold the water was. But I knew it would only burn at first, and then I would be numb, and I wouldn’t have to be hot anymore or ever again. I stood in the burning water, thinking how this water had come all the way from the Scituate Reservoir, seven or eight miles to the west. In the winter, the reservoir sometimes freezes over and there are skaters. In the summer, it is the darkest dark blue. I thought about the many streams that flow into the reservoir, and the water that comes from underground, and about the rain, and how, in the end, it all comes from the sea. And how, in the end, it all goes back to the sea, one way or another.

  “You really have no notion how delightfulit will be

  When they take us up and throw us, with thelobsters, out to sea!”

  I lay down in the tub, and gasped and tightly clutched the edges until the initial shock passed.

  “See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtlesall advance!”

  My hair flowed out around my shoulders, across my breasts and belly like seaweed floating in a tide pool. As I sank deeper and deeper, the tub began to overflow and splash the floor.

  “What matter it how far we go?”

  I didn’t shut my eyes. I didn’t want to shut my eyes, and I knew Eva wouldn’t want me to. I sank in the shallows of the tub. I pulled my head under, and marveled at the silvery mirror above me. It might as well have been mercury spilled across the sky, the way it shimmered.

  “There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.…”

  The first breath was easy. I just opened my mouth and inhaled. But then I was choking, my entire body fighting the flood
pouring down my throat and into my lungs and belly. I fought back, but I almost wasn’t able to manage the second breath.

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

  I was taking the sea inside me, even if I couldn’t taste salt. I was taking the sea inside, and as my lungs caught fire and my body struggled against me, the earwig died. It died, or it merely faded away, and there was no noise remaining in my head except the sloshing of water and the stubborn, insistent beating of my heart. The mercury sky swishing to and fro above was going black, and I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth.

  FALLING ACTION

  Act Four: Try Not To Breathe

  And then Abalyn’s strong hands were digging into my shoulders, hauling me up and out of the ice, lifting me from the tub. Maybe I don’t truly remember this part. Maybe I was unconscious for this part, but if these aren’t genuine memories, they’ve fooled me for two and a half years. Abalyn set me down on the bathroom floor, and held me while I coughed and vomited water and whatever I’d had for lunch until my throat was raw and my chest ached. She was cursing herself and cursing me and sobbing like I’d never heard anyone cry before or since. I’ve never cried the way she was crying, never been so wracked with sorrow and anger and confusion that I had to cry that way. Sorrow and anger and confusion. It’s presumptuous of me, acting like I know what she was feeling while I puked and sputtered in her arms.

  When there was nothing left inside me, Abalyn picked me up again and carried me to bed. I’d never realized she was so strong, strong enough to carry me like that. But she did. She bundled the sheets and comforter about me, and kept asking what the hell I thought I was doing. I couldn’t possibly have answered, but she kept asking me anyway. Imp, what the hell were you trying to do?