The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  To say today has been unsettling doesn’t do it justice by half. And, here, Imp types, “You’ve had stranger. Far stranger, India Morgan Phelps.” And yes, I have. But it was strange, still, and unsettling. That’s the word that keeps coming back to me. Unsettling. Doors have swung open, and doors have slammed shut. Truths (or, rather, facts) I had half convinced myself of have been cast into doubt all over again. One step backwards, as Caroline might have said.

  Abalyn didn’t want me to go, never mind she was the one who set this in motion by showing me that book and the obituary. “What good can possibly come of it?” she asked. “Whatever there is to know is here, right here in the obit.” Then she pointed out that the toll across the Newport Bridge would be four dollars each way, going and coming back, and, still being unemployed, I shouldn’t be throwing money away like that.

  “I’ll go alone,” I told her. “If you won’t go with me, I’m not afraid to go by myself. It’s something I need to see, and I mean to go.” I was standing at the window, looking down at Willow Street. Have I mentioned it snowed last night? No, I haven’t. I was standing at the window looking down at the two inches or so of an early snowfall that had fallen the night before. The snowplow had just rumbled down the street, heaping mounds to either side, half-burying the sidewalks. The end of the drive was blocked now, and I’d have to shovel it before I could get the Honda out. I hate shoveling snow.

  “India, it’s already two o’clock,” she said.

  “That’s not so late,” I replied. “The roads should be clear, and I don’t care what time it is.”

  She asked me to please at least call Dr. Ogilvy and tell her, and ask if she thought going to the cemetery was a bad idea. Abalyn said she’d go with me, if I called my psychiatrist and if Dr. Ogilvy didn’t disapprove.

  “She said I should find my own answers,” I said. “She said I have to find my own answers. Dr. Ogilvy isn’t my babysitter. She isn’t my mother. I don’t need her permission. I’m a grown woman.”

  “You are a fragile woman,” Imp typed. “How long now since you cowered naked and filthy and delirious in a corner of your bedroom, raving about the wolf who cried girl on a snowy night in Connecticut?”

  “Please,” Abalyn pleaded. And after all she’d done for me, and all she’d lost on my account, I really couldn’t tell her no. It’s not as if her request were truly unreasonable. It’s not like I could pretend it was.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll call. But whatever she says, I’m going anyway.”

  “Just call her,” Abalyn said. So, I called Dr. Ogilvy. I got lucky, and she had a few minutes between patients, so I didn’t have to leave a message with the receptionist and wait around for her to call me back, which would have meant losing more daylight (and I will admit I didn’t want to go to the graveyard after sunset; I don’t like graveyards, and this one, I knew, was going to be lots worse than usual).

  Dr. Ogilvy asked if I thought I was up to it. I told her yes, and she told me to go. She agreed it would be a good idea for Abalyn to accompany me. Abalyn grimaced at the news, but she’d been the one who struck the deal, and she didn’t argue.

  I drove. I drove slowly and carefully because of the snow. Abalyn smoked and blew smoke out her window, which she’d rolled down just a crack. We left Providence about three, left the city, and crossed the West Passage of the Narragansett Bay on the Jamestown Bridge. The water before us shimmered, blinding, in the sun, like mercury spilled on blue-gray slate. We crossed Conanicut Island, then up and over the Newport Bridge, with its pale green cables and guardrails, its two white lancet towers, the slate-and-mercury waters of the East Passage four hundred feet below us. I thought about seals, whales, sharks, how the bay had once been a series of river valleys that flooded fifteen thousand years ago when glaciers melted. Mostly, I tried not to think about what we’d find at the cemetery. We saw a bumper sticker on a car in front of us that read “A thesaurus is NOT a giant lizard.” I laughed, but Abalyn didn’t.

  And then we were on Aquidneck Island. I skirted Newport, following the directions Abalyn had gotten from MapQuest. We took Miantonomi Avenue and Green End Avenue east to the intersection with Turner Road, and here I turned left, turned north. I passed homes and a nursery with dozens of low greenhouses. I also passed tennis courts, basketball courts, and a track field mostly buried beneath the snow. Then we’d reached the place where Turner intersects with Wyatt Road. The cemetery lay at the northeast corner of the crossroads, and I thought, they used to bury suicides at crossroads. The obituary gave the graveyard’s name as Middletown Cemetery, but an incongruously cheerful blue and gold sign at the entrance called it Four Corners Cemetery.

  Abalyn glared at the cemetery, and she said, “This is so fucking dumb. It’s pointless, Imp.” I didn’t answer her.

  And then this really happened. Abalyn was right there to see it. Just as we turned off Turner into the graveyard, a huge crow alighted on a headstone only a few feet from the driver’s-side door. All those years ago, Caroline said, “If you’re listening to a story, and a crow shows up like that, you can bet the storyteller is making the whole thing up.” I didn’t tell Abalyn what crows mean, and, truthfully, in this context, I do not know. But it really did happen.

  The snow hadn’t fallen as heavily on Aquidneck Island as in Providence, but the narrow chip-and-tar roads in the cemetery hadn’t been cleared, so I had to drive very slowly. I knew how to find Eva Canning’s grave, because I’d had Abalyn check a couple of genealogy websites before we left. She’d even found a diagram of the graveyard. Eva’s grave was all the way back at the northern edge, where a low fieldstone wall separated the cemetery from a vineyard, gone brown with the season. The same fieldstone wall enclosed the entire graveyard.

  Rhode Island has many picturesque, photogenic cemeteries. Four Corners isn’t one of them. There are no trees, and most of the stones are the same weathered limestone and marble, few dating back before the late nineteenth century. I parked next to a huge mausoleum sort of thing. It was hardly more than an artificial hill, dirt heaped over a vacuity and fronted with granite blocks and a rusty iron door. There were patches of hay and dead turf on it, as though the caretakers were trying to get grass to grow. It was an ugly thing, and put me in mind of fairies, hollow hills, barrow dens, Tolkien, Mary Stewart. I switched off the car and looked at Abalyn.

  “You don’t have to get out,” I said.

  All she said was, “Yes, Imp, I do.”

  So we did. We both got out of the Honda. I stood by the car a moment, surveying the bleak cemetery. I glanced up at the sky, so blue and cloudless, so pale blue it was almost white, a wide carnivorous sky, as Rosemary Anne would have said. It wasn’t anyplace I wanted to stay very long, and twilight wasn’t far off. The shadows cast by the headstones were growing long. Abalyn lit another cigarette, and the cold wind took the smoke apart.

  “Let’s get this over with,” she said.

  It wasn’t hard to find Abalyn Canning’s marker. It was on the left (to the west) of the mausoleum barrow-den hill. It was set about twenty-five feet back from the road, surrounded by monuments bearing names like Cappucilli, Bowler, Hoxslii, Greer, Ashcroft, Haywood, Church, and, of course, other Cannings. It was a modest headstone carved from a brick-red granite, which distinguished it from its tiresome rows of gray-white neighbors. There was a garland of ivy carved at each upper corner. I read aloud what was written there, and then sat down on the snowy ground, already going spongy as the snow melted beneath that bright November sun.

  “Fuck,” Abalyn said, and she didn’t say anything else until after we’d gotten back into the car. This is what was graven into the stone (I wrote it down, precisely):

  CANNING

  MOTHER

  1960 EVA MAY CANNING 1991

  DAUGHTER

  1978 EVA LOUISE CANNING 2008

  THEY THAT GO DOWN TO THE SEA

  I said, “They were thirty years old when they died. They were both thirty. They were both Eva Canning.” A
nd Abalyn smoked her cigarette and said nothing at all. I read the epitaph aloud, “They that go down to the sea.” And I heard a crow caw-cawing loudly somewhere very nearby. I’m not making that up, either. This is all as factual as it is true. “I don’t know what it means,” I said, and I sat on the soggy ground and cried for a while. My tears were like ice on my cheeks. Finally, Abalyn helped me up and led me back to the Honda. When we were safe inside, and I was behind the wheel, she asked, belatedly, if I was okay to drive. I told her yes. Yes, I can drive. I just want to be away from here. I just want to be far, far away from here and never, ever come back. I heard the crow again. Dusk was coming on fast.

  “Then let’s get moving,” Abalyn said. “We can figure this shit out later. Here isn’t the place to try.”

  I turned the key in the ignition. I retraced the path home: Turner to Green End to Miantonomi Avenue to the Newport Bridge, the East Passage, Conanicut Island, Jamestown, the West Passage, the Jamestown Bridge, Route 4 to I-95 back to Providence and the Armory and Willow Street.

  But this I know. I made a list for Dr. Ogilvy, and the eighth item—“There was only one Eva Canning”—was a lie I’d told without meaning to. It was a mistaken epiphany that somehow has turned out wrong. I wrote seven truths that afternoon, not eight. Seven (7).

  After dragging Abalyn off to the Middletown Cemetery (or Four Corners Cemetery), I wanted—no, needed—to give her something in return for that indulgence. And I gave her a secret, a secret so secret it scared me to admit it to myself, much less share it with another human being. Even with a woman whom I’d loved and still loved. This is the night after we go to Aquidneck Island, and after a dinner of bow-tie pasta with pesto and a green salad with vinaigrette dressing. It all tastes like paste to me. I ask her to come to the room where I paint, my studio. She looks uncertain at first. On the qui vive, as Caroline would have said.

  “It will only take a few minutes,” I said. “There’s something I need you to see.”

  “Need or want?” she asks, and wipes at her mouth with a paper toll towel (I’ve never owned cloth napkins).

  “Need,” I reply, so she shrugs and nods and follows me to the room where I paint. I switch on the light. I say, “You didn’t have to go with me today. You’ve been doing a lot of stuff you don’t have to do.”

  “Imp, you don’t owe me anything.”

  “It won’t take but a moment,” I tell her, deciding not to argue about the validity of unpaid debts. And then I went to an old wardrobe (found by the road, and I think it’s from the 1920s, banged-up Art Nouveau, a cheap knockoff of something much more expensive).

  “You don’t need to do this again,” she says, starting to sound exasperated, maybe at the borderlands of surly.

  I don’t say anything. I turn the small brass key that is always in the wardrobe’s lock and open both doors. Inside are very many canvases, some stretched and stapled to wooden frames, others rolled and stacked like papyrus scrolls. The wardrobe breathes out the aromas of dust, oil paint, and cedar. I pull out the canvas nearest the front (one of the stretched, stapled ones) and hand it to Abalyn. She holds it a moment, staring down at the painting, then up at me, then back at the painting. I take another from the wardrobe, then another, and another, and another, until a dozen or more are scattered about on the floor or leaned against the walls.

  “You did all these?” Abalyn asks, sounding like she won’t believe me if I say I id did; I nod, not especially caring if she believes me or not. No, I do care. But I want not to care.

  “‘The Mermaid of the Concrete Sea Ocean,’” she says. “The crippled woman and the painter…,” and trails off.

  “I did these after I wrote the story.”

  “And after Eva,” she almost whispers, and I say yes, after Eva Canning.

  “I’m sorry,” Abalyn says, and laughs a dry, hollow laugh. “I’m just a little freaked-out right now. You made up these paintings, that obsessed artist’s paintings, and then, after Eva came, you actually painted his paintings?”

  I nod, then sit down on the floor, holding the wardrobe key, and Abalyn (still holding the first canvas I took out) sits down in front of me.

  “What happened with Eva, that inspired these?”

  “Yeah, and the story I’d written. Before Eva came, I’d read a book about the shark that swam up Matawan Creek in New Jersey in 1916 and attacked three swimmers in the creek, miles and miles from the sea. Two of them died.”

  “That made you write a story about mermaids?”

  “And what the painter found washed up at Atlantic City, and…” And I stop, because I don’t think I can explain so that Abalyn will ever understand, and, besides, it’s suddenly all sort of muddled together in my head. The chronology, I mean.

  Abalyn’s still holding the painting, my favorite of the lot—though part of me loathes them all—Regarding the Shore from Whale Reef. The painting hanging on the old woman’s wall in the story. As I have written before, the mermaid has her back to the viewer. Buoyed by rough waves, she holds her arms outstretched to either side, her long hair floating around her like a dense tangle of kelp, and she gazes towards land and a whitewashed lighthouse perched on a granite promontory. It’s the rugged slate and phyllite shore off Beavertail Point on Conanicut Island. I paid a fisherman twenty dollars to carry me out far enough for reference photos (and I got seasick). Also, I changed the name of Whale Rock to Whale Reef. I can’t remember why.

  In my short story, I wrote: “The viewer might be fooled into thinking this is only a painting of a woman swimming in the sea, as so little of her is showing above the waterline. She might be mistaken for a suicide, taking a final glimpse of the rugged strand before slipping below the surface. But, if one looks only a little closer, the patches of red-orange scales flecking her arms are unmistakable, and there are living creatures caught up in the snarls of her black hair: tiny crabs and brittle stars, the twisting shapes of strange oceanic worms and a gasping, wide-eyed fish of some sort, suffocating in the air.”

  “I thought maybe it would help,” I say. Out on the street, a car horn honks three times. “Like you and Dr. Ogilvy thought writing ‘Werewolf Smile’ might help me.”

  “But…,” Abalyn started, then was silent for a second or two. “But that was one story. There must be, what? Thirty or forty of these?”

  “Forty-seven,” I say, “and a couple of sketch pads of studies I did beforehand. Sometimes, I’ve thought I should make a big pile in the backyard and burn them all. I’ve thought I should make a pyre. Maybe that would provide the catharsis painting them didn’t.” (Isn’t that what Saltonstall did? And what did he really burn?)

  “Forty-seven,” Abalyn says, and laughs again, like she thinks I’m making the number up. Incredulous.

  “You can count them if you want,” I tell her.

  “Imp, don’t ever burn these. I don’t care why you painted them. I don’t care if that crazy bitch was in back of it.” Her eyes wander across all those paintings; then she stares hard at me. “Just don’t ever burn these. They’re beautiful.”

  I don’t make any promises. We sit there a long time, together and apart. I’ve seen people in love with art, and I think I’m watching Abalyn fall in love with my mermaid. It makes me want to burn them all the more.

  Now, I have to tell the part of my ghost story about the mermaid, what happened after I tried to drown myself in the tub and Abalyn Armitage saved me and left me. I have to tell about the day that Eva Canning, the daughter of Eva Canning, came back for me, that day and all the days that followed, and how it ended.

  10

  There’s always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. The harridans of Sirenum scopuli, three sharp rocks battered by Aegean waves, just off the coast of Capri. La Castelluccia, La Rotonda, Gallo Lungo. Or the Sirenuse archipelago, or Capo Peloro. Homer made them Harpies, the three winged women who sang deadly songs for Ulysses. Euripides and Eustathius and Servius and Virgil and so many others who put pen to paper to warn of sirens. Homer
does not take care to name them (or was too wise to try), but some of these scholars did: Peisinoe, Aglaope, and Thelxiepeia, for example. Elsewhere (Spanish, Romanian, French, etc.), elsewhen, folklore makes of them mermaids: Sirena, Sirène, Syrena, Sirena˘, and Sereia and on and on and on to lure sailors to shipwreck and drowning. Oh, and zoologists place manatees and dugongs and extinct Steller’s sea cows (Hydrodamalis gigas) in the mammalian order Sirenia (Illiger, 1811), and herpetologists have placed certain legless salamanders in the genus Siren, in the family Sirenidae. They look like eels, but aren’t. Aren’t eels, I mean. I looked up the word for eel-shaped things: anguilliform. Neither manatees nor Sirenidae live as far north as the Blackstone River. Manatees and dugongs, some people say, are responsible for the stories of sirens, when sirens are said to be mermaids. Though manatees do not sing, at least not songs that men and women can hear. They’re not amphibians. They’re mammals who went back to the ocean, like whales, and dolphins, and Eva Canning. Whales sing pretty songs, and we can hear them plain as day.

  My siren came from the Blackstone River in Massachusetts, a river with the same name as the street that runs past the hospital where my mother died. The Siren of Millville, Perishable Shippen, E. L. Canning, Eva Louise, daughter of Eva May, who walked into Monterey Bay off Moss Landing State Beach, California, when I was only four years old. Who followed a woman named Jacova Angevine into the sea, and who never walked back out again. The deep sea is eternal night, and Jacova Angevine opened that door for E. M. Canning, who obediently stepped through it, along with so many others. She left her illegitimate daughter (like Imp) to her own fate.

  “That’s enough rambling prologue, Imp. You’re stalling again. You’re still mired in now, and you’ve sat down to write about then.”

  That’s true (and factual). I have sat down to make an end to this. To type the last of my ghost story there is to tell, or, at least, the last of the part from August 2008. One does not find closure, resolution. One is never unhaunted, no matter how much self-help happy-talk purveyors of pop psychology and motivational speaking ladle on. I know that. But at least I will not have to keep coming to the blue room with too many books and continue trying to make sense of my ghost story. I now understand it as well as ever I shall. When I’m done, I’ll show it to Abalyn, and I’ll show it to Dr. Ogilvy, and then I’ll never show it to anyone else, not ever.