The Drowning Girl
Page 29
A siren came knocking at my door.
It was only a few days after I had lain down in a bathtub of icy water and tried to end an earwig by inhaling myself to oblivion. Abalyn had gone away, and she’d taken all her things with her. I was alone. I was sitting on the sofa, where she sat so often with her laptop. I’d read the same paragraph of a novel several times. I can’t recall what the novel was, and it hardly matters. There was a knock at the door. It wasn’t a loud knocking. It was, I will say, almost a surreptitious knock, almost as if I weren’t meant to hear it, though I was, of course. No one knocks meaning you not to hear, right? No one would ever do such a thing, as a knock at a door or window says “Here I am. Let me in.”
I turned my head and stared at the door. My apartment door is painted the same blue as this room where I type. I waited, and in a few seconds, the surreptitious knock came again. Three raps against the wood. I had no idea who it might be. Abalyn had no reason to come back. Aunt Elaine never comes without calling. Likewise, my few friends all have instructions to always call before visiting. Perhaps, I thought, it was someone from upstairs or someone from downstairs. Perhaps it was Felicia, my landlady, or Gravy, her handyman. On the third surreptitious knock, I called out, “I’m coming.” I stood up and walked to the door.
Before I opened it, I smelled the Blackstone River, exactly as it had smelled the day Abalyn and I drove up there, only to find nothing but a few footprints in the muddy bank. So, I knew who was behind the door. I breathed in silt and murky water and crayfish and carp and snakes and dragonflies, and so I knew precisely who had come calling. I said her name aloud, before I turned the knob.
I said, “Eva.” And then I opened the door. My own Open Door of Night.
She stood on the landing in the same simple red sundress she’d been wearing that scalding day at Wayland Square, and that afternoon at the RISD Museum. She was barefoot, and her toenails were polished a silvery color that reminded me of nacre, which most people call mother-of-pearl. Rosemary Anne had mother-of-pearl earrings when I was a child, but she lost them before she went away to Butler Hospital and I’ve never found them. Eva stood before me, smiling. There was a bundle in her hands, something wrapped in butcher paper and tied up neat with twine.
“Your clothes,” she said, holding out the package. “I had them cleaned.” She didn’t say hello. She offered me the package, and I took it from her.
“I knew you’d come,” I said. “Even if I didn’t know I knew, I knew all the same.”
And she smiled like a shark, or like a barracuda might smile, and she said, “May I come in, India Morgan Phelps?”
I regarded her a moment, and then I said, “That day at the gallery, you told me the time for choice is behind us both. So, why are you bothering to ask?” And I thought of the stories that say vampires and other malevolent spirits have to be invited into your home. (Though hadn’t I invited her once already?)
“I’m only being polite,” she replied.
“But if I say no, you’re not going to leave, are you?”
“No, Imp. We’ve come too far.”
I very almost said, “So remote from the night of first ages.…We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.” But I didn’t. I didn’t have the nerve, and I didn’t think it would matter. There was no ward to drive her back, not from Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville or Matthew Arnold. Not from any holy book or infernal grimoire. I knew this, as surely as I knew the thing standing on my doorstep was alive and meant to enter, whether I wished it to or not.
But, to tell the truth, I desired nothing more.
“Yeah, you can come in,” I said. “Where are my manners?”
“Well, you weren’t expecting me.”
“Of course I was,” I told her, and she smiled again.
In a notebook, Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “The siren sings so sweetly, she lulls mariners to sleep. She boards ships and murders sleeping mariners.” Translated into English, this is what he wrote. Those who wrote of the fairy Unseelie Court told of the Each-Uisge (ekh-ooshh-kya), the Kelpie, who haunted lakes and bays and rivers in Ireland and Scotland. It rose from the slime and the reeds, a water horse, and any foolish enough to ride were drowned and eaten. Except the liver. The Each-Uisge disdains the liver. I don’t like liver, either.
Imp typed, “You’re drifting again.”
Sailing ships—clippers, dories, schooners, smacks, trawlers, gigantic cargo ships and toxic oil tankers, whaling ships—adrift on treacherous currents and storm winds, and they dash themselves to splinters on jagged headlands.
“Drifting,” Imp typed. “Tiller hard to port. Hold to true north, if you’re not to stray.”
Eva Canning stepped across my threshold.
“Who are hearsed that die on the sea?”
She shut the door behind her, and the latch clicked loudly. She turned the dead bolt, and I found nothing the least bit strange about her doing it. Nothing strange at all about her locking me into my own apartment, with her. I understood she’d not come so far only to be interrupted by intruders. I imagine so many before me have drowned in the depths of her bottle-blue eyes. She’s exactly, exactly, exactly as I remembered her from the July night by the Blackstone River, and from that day at the gallery. Her hair so long and the color of nothing at all, only the color of a place where no light has ever shone.
She turned away from the locked door. She turned towards me. She touched my cheek, and her skin felt like silk against mine. My skin felt like sandpaper compared with hers. This impression was so pronounced that I wanted to pull away and warn her not to cut herself. Her hand had not been fashioned to touch the likes of me. I think of stories I’ve read in books, tales of sharks brushing against swimmers, and how the denticles of sharkskin scrapes bare flesh raw. But here our roles are reversed, if only for this swift assemblage of instants. I am the author of abrasions, or I fear I will be.
But I draw no drop of blood from that silken hand.
“You hurt me,” I say. “You put words in my mind, and I almost died to get them out again.”
“I got your attention,” she replies.
“You hurt Abalyn.”
“Imp, she’d have been harmed far worse if she hadn’t gone.” And Eva quotes from Hamlet, “‘I must be cruel only to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.’”
I know there will be no arguing with her. That lilting voice foolish Ulysses heard, that he ordered himself lashed to a mast that he might hear. Eva reduces any objection to bald-faced absurdity.
“You’re a wicked thing. You’re an abomination.”
“I am as I am. As are you.”
Those silken fingertips glide across my lips, and then across the bridge of my nose. I have never been touched with such perfect intimacy.
“You’ve come to kill me,” I say very softly, and it surprises me that I don’t sound afraid.
“I’ve done nothing of the sort,” she replies, and that doesn’t surprise me, either. What she says, I mean. It’s easy to kill. It’s easy to be a predator. A shark. A wolf. Not easy, no. People hunt wolves and sharks for no reason except the fact that they are sharks and wolves. I’m trying to say, I realize that whatever Eva Canning is, it’s something far more subtle than a predator. She’s come to feed, and maybe to devour, but not to kill. My face is being stroked by a beast that does not need to feed to devour.
“You let him see you. Saltonstall, I mean.”
“I never said that.”
“The Drowning Girl, you called it ‘my painting.’”
“Did I?” she asks, and she smiles.
Her hand lingers at my left earlobe, and goose bumps speckle my arms. Her fingers brush through my hair.
“So, why are you here?”
“You stopped for me. No one else ever did,” she says. “I’ve come to sing for you, because I owe you a kindness.”
“Even if it’s cruel.”
She kissed me then, and I thought, I’ve never been kissed before.
(Oh. I’ve shifted tense, but then there is no proper tense in this Blakean land of dreams, this mnemonic labyrinth, past and present indistinguishable. The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. Just like Mary Cavan Tyrone said.)
She kissed me. She is kissing me. Always, she will be kissing me. This is the way of hauntings, as I’ve said. Eva Canning, I think—I think I only thought this, but it seemed as though Eva Canning tasted like the sea. Taste, smell, sight, audition, the sensation of touch…they all blur just as time has blurred.
Her tongue enters my mouth, probing, and there’s brief panic, because it’s not so different from the day I tried to breathe underwater, the day I tried to inhale a tub filled with ice water. She is flowing into me. Only, this time, my body doesn’t fight back. She is pouring down my throat, and I’m breathing her into me. But my lungs make no effort to resist the invasion.
This sounds like pornography. I read back over the page and it sounds like I’m writing pornography. It was never anything like that. My words aren’t good enough. They’re not equal to the task. I don’t know how to communicate passion and longing, the wetness between my thighs, desire, that wish to have her within and around me, and not cheapen it. A woman struggles to describe demons, angels, and, being only a woman, she does their beauty and terror a disservice. I do Eva Canning, as she came to me, as I saw her, an abhorrent disservice.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
Our lips parted, and the division brought greater despair by far even than the days I learned first of Rosemary’s death, then of Caroline’s, than the hour that Abalyn went away. I stumbled backwards and bumped against the arm of the sofa. I would have fallen, if it hadn’t been there.
You really have no notion how delightful…
She stood between me and the door, and I was just beginning to see her, not as the mask to hide the thing, monstrous and free, a few inches of black water, and seeing her even clearer than that day at the museum. Her cheeks and shoulders shimmer, green-red-cyan iridescence, and only now does it occur to me she isn’t wearing the sunglasses she wore that day at Wayland Square and that day at RISD, because her bottle-blue eyes are black, and I don’t know why I ever mistook them for bottle-blue or any other color. Black is all colors, the absorption of all colors. No light escapes black. No light escapes the eyes of Eva Canning, when I still believe her the Siren of Millville.
“I will sing for you, Winter India Morgan,” she said, smiling her frayed, sad, voracious, apologetic, sympathetic smile. That smile is etched evermore on the insides of my eyelids, and when I am dead, embalmed, and in my grave, I’ll still see that smile. “I’ve come to sing for you, and to draw your song from you. And when we are done singing, you’ll take me home, and I’ll go down to my mother, who dreams of me each night.”
The voyeur of utter destruction.
In hindsight.
The fortune from the fortune cookie I got the first time Abalyn and I ordered takeout: Don’t stop now.
But I want to, because what’s coming is as bad as those latest days off my meds, those last days spent in my corner or whispering madly into the typewriter until Abalyn used her key and found me. What’s coming, it’s that impossible to describe, I think, because it’s that terrible, that beautiful, that derelict, and that private. But I’m so, so near The End. Don’t stop now.
Much of what follows is confused, fuzzy. Especially the beginning of it. For one, I stopped taking my meds. And there was Eva, and whatever it meant that she’d crossed my threshold, and by that, I mean much more than she’d stepped across my doorsill. I mean very many things. I do recall that she called work and said she was a friend of mine, that I had an intestinal bug and would be out for a few days. I also remember that it was Eva who convinced me I’d be better off without my pills, because, after all, I had her now. And she said something like, “They would only blur your perceptions of me. They keep you from seeing what the gift of your insanity reveals, and what others never guess.” At her bidding, I actually flushed it all down the toilet. The prescriptions. I sat at the toilet, emptying each bottle as she stood in the doorway, watching on approvingly. I flushed, and the swirling water stole my counterfeit sanity away.
She offered a hand, and helped me up off the floor. Though, truthfully, I wanted to stay there. The apartment was so awfully hot, and the tiles were cool beneath me. She pulled me to her, and then led me…
It’ll be a lie if I settle for, “She pulled me to her, and then led me to bed.” Though she did do that. But if I say that, and only that, it’ll be a falsehood. It might be factual, but it wouldn’t be true. “Take my hand, India. I’ll show you how to fly.” Fly, sing, swim. She led me to the bed, and she undressed me. She kissed me again. She kissed my mouth, and my breasts, and my sex. And then she led me into deepest winter, and to the Blackstone River. She took me into song, which became a far white country, until it became a painting, until it became the sea. But first, song was only song, and her lips only her lips.
Shoo, shoo, shoo la roo, shoo la rack shack, shoo la baba boo, When I find my sally bally bill come dibb-a-lin a boo shy lor-ree, Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, Go to sleepy little baby. When you wake, you shall have, All the pretty little horses. Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, Johnny’s gone for a soldier. “Come home with me, little Matty Groves, come home with me tonight. Come home with me, little Matty Groves, and sleep with me till light.” Johnny’s gone for a soldier. They grew and grew in the old churchyard Till they could grow no higher At the end they formed, a true lover’s knot And the rose grew round the briar. I am as brown as brown can be, And my eyes as black as sloe; I am as brisk as brisk can be, Johnny has gone for a soldier. “I put him in a tiny boat, And cast him out to sea, That he might sink or he might swim, But he’d never come back to me.” And the only sound I hear, as it blows through the town, is the cry of the wind as it blows through the town, weave and spin, weave and spin. His ghost walked at midnight to the bedside of his Mar-i-Jane When he told her how dead he was; said she: “I’ll go mad.” “Since my love he is so dead,” said she, “All joy on earth has fled for me.” “I never more will happy be,” and she went raving mad. Johnny has gone for a soldier. Twinki doodle dum, twinki doodle dum sang the bold fisherman. Shule, shule, shulagra, sure and sure and he loves me. Of thrupence a pound on the tea, of thrupence a pound on the tea. Siúl, Siúl, Siúl a ghrá Níl leigheas ar fáil ach leigheas an bháis Ó d’fhag tú mise is bocht mo chás Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán Way down yonder, down in the meadow There’s a poor wee little lamby. The bees and the butterflies pickin’ at its eyes, The poor wee thing cried for her mammy. Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, o follow the whale; Where the icebergs do float And the stormy winds blaw, Where the land and the ocean Are covered wi’ snaw. If that mockingbird don’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Weave and spin, weave and spin, Johnny has gone for a soldier. He made a harp o her breast-bane, That he might play forever thereon. Johnny has gone for a soldier. Then three times ’round went our gallant ship, And three times ’round went she, And the third time that she went ’round She sank to the bottom of the sea. The boat capsized and four men were drowned, and we never caught that whale, Brave boys, And we never caught that whale. And a’ the live-lang winter night The dead corp followed she. Weave and spin, weave and spin. I saw, I saw the light from heaven Come shining all around. I saw the light come shining. I saw the light come down. As slow our ship her foamy track Against the wind w
as cleaving, Shoo, shoo, shoo la roo shoo la rack shack, shoo la baba boo When I find my sally bally bill come dibb-a-lin a boo shy lor-ree, Johnny has gone for a soldier.
In those days that followed, all and every song was hers, and of her kind. She didn’t ever tell me that. It was something I understood implicitly. It was an unspoken truth hung between us. Eva Canning laid me out on my bed, filleted me, and she buried her face between my thighs, and her tongue sang unspeakable songs into me.
They are too many to write them all down, so I settle for dread morsels. Most I can’t recall, anyway, and, besides, I know now what I didn’t know then. I’ve seen the grave in Middletown, and I know now my ghost story isn’t the ghost story I thought it was, the one I set out to tell. My stories shape-shift like mermaids and werewolves. A lycanthropy of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, subjects and predicates, and so on and so forth.
She lapped between my legs, and filled me to bursting with music few have ever heard and lived. She made me Ulysses. She made me a lyre and a harp and flute. She played me (two meanings here). And songs are stories, and so she made of me a book, just as I became song. None of this means what it meant a few days ago, but I’m telling it as I would have told it before Abalyn went with me to Aquidneck Island. There will be time later for other revelations. These things are still true, and I think facts are patient things. Facts have all the time the universe allows.
I awoke one night, past midnight but long before dawn, and she was standing at the bedroom window, looking out on the house’s stingy, weedy backyard, at the houses that face Wood Street, the sky, at everything you can see from that window. It’s a depressing view, and I hardly ever open those curtains. Eva was naked, and her skin as iridescent as motor oil in a puddle. Even by the moonlight through the window, her skin shimmered.