The Drowning Girl (14 page)

The woods are said to be haunted. That’s the important part. At least, to me that’s the important part. Importance is always conditional,
relative, variable from person to person. But what’s more important (to me) than the tales of the
yurei
is the fact that all this trouble in the Sea of Trees didn’t begin until Seichoˉ Matsumoto, a Japanese detective and mystery writer, published a novel,
Kuroi Jukai
(The Black Forest, 1960). In Matsumoto’s book, two lovers choose Aokigahara as the most appropriate place to commit suicide. And people read the book. And people began going to the forest to kill themselves.

I haven’t read
Kuroi Jukai
. I don’t even know if it’s been translated into English.

A book. A pernicious meme that created a haunting, a sort of focal point for people who don’t want to live anymore. Same as with Phillip George Saltonstall and
The Drowning Girl
, I find it hard to believe that Matsumoto meant anyone harm. I doubt he consciously set out to trigger the haunting of the Sea of Trees. But do his intentions enter into this? Do Saltonstall’s, or Albert Perrault’s? Are they innocent, or do we hold them accountable?

“What makes you any different?” I imagined Abalyn asking from the foot of my bed last night.

If I had answered, maybe I’d have said, “Nothing.” Maybe I’d have said, “I’m still trying to figure that out.” Possibly, I would have pointed out that those three, the novelist and the two painters, created something that was
meant to be seen
, whereas I’m not doing that at all.

“Write about Eva,” Abalyn told me. “What you brought home that night. Write about what happened to us because of what you brought home that night.”

I wanted to say,
I still love you, Abalyn. I’m never going to stop loving you.
I didn’t say that, because I didn’t say anything, but if I had replied to my imagination, I believe Abalyn would have turned away, angry, bitter, lonely as any
yurei
, but not howling. Determined I wouldn’t
see
her loneliness.

Walking through the woods, I have faced it.…

“You need to get dressed and go to work,” Imp typed.

I know. I just glanced at the clock. But I needed to get this down first. If I hadn’t, I might have forgotten that I meant to, because I forget so much.

I have to tell
the story
, because I forget so much.

The next morning—the morning after I found Eva Canning by the Blackstone River—I awoke to find that Abalyn was already up and about. That was sort of unusual. She tended to stay up later than me, and sleep later. Sometimes, she slept until two or three in the afternoon, after staying up until dawn. But not that morning. That morning I put on my robe, brushed my teeth, and went out into the parlor to find her flipping through my records.

“Good morning,” I said, and she probably said “Good morning,” too. Or something of the sort.

“You’re up early,” I said, and she shrugged.

“Don’t you have anything recorded
after
1979?” Abalyn asked me, frowning. “And you have heard about CDs, right?”

“Those were Rosemary’s records.”

“Rosemary? An ex?”

“No, no. Rosemary my mother.”

“So, where is your music?” she wanted to know. All this time, she hadn’t looked at me, she just kept flipping through the records. She pulled out
Rumours
and stared at Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks on the cover.

“Those are my records, Abalyn. They’re the only ones that I have.”

“You’re shitting me,” she said, and laughed.

“No, I’m not. I don’t listen to music a lot, and when I do, I listen to Rosemary’s records. I grew up hearing them, and they make me feel safe.”

She looked at me then, over her shoulder. She made that face she used to make when she was trying to figure me out. Or when she was having trouble with one of her video games. It was pretty much the same expression, in either case. “Okay,” she said, “I guess that makes sense,” then turned back to the bookshelf (which is where I keep all Rosemary’s records, which are now my records). She slid
Rumours
back onto the shelf and pulled out Jackson Browne’s
Late for the Sky
.

“I especially like that one,” I told her.

“You have a turntable?”

“Yeah. It was also my mother’s.”

“Jodie has a turntable. She collects this stuff. Me, I stick to CDs. Vinyl just gets scratched up, and it’s too much trouble to lug around whenever you move.”

I yawned, thinking about hot tea and toasted crumpets and strawberry jam. “I don’t know much about music,” I said. “Not about the newer stuff, I mean. Just Rosemary’s records.”

“We gotta remedy that, Imp. You need a crash course.”

I asked her what she liked, and her answer didn’t make much sense to me. EBM, synthpop, trance, shoegaze, Japanoise, acid house.

“I’ve never heard of any of those bands,” I said, and she laughed. It wasn’t a mean-spirited laugh. I don’t remember Abalyn ever making fun of me, or laughing at me the way you laugh at someone when you’re making fun of them.

“They’re not bands, Imp. They’re genres.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Seriously, we must begin the musical education of India Phelps ASAP.” She did play a lot of her music for me later, and I listened, trying to listen with an open mind, but I didn’t really like any of it. Well, except for a few songs by a British band named Radiohead. One of their songs had something about a siren in it, and shipwrecks.
But in most of what she played for me, the lyrics, when there
were
lyrics, didn’t seem very important.

She was looking at the back cover of
Late for the Sky
, and I asked if she’d had breakfast. She said that she had, and that she’d made a pot of coffee. I reminded her I didn’t drink coffee. And really, I know I’m trying to get back to the story, and maybe this doesn’t
seem
like part of the story of Eva Canning, but it is. And, anyway, I’m just sort of in the mood to write about Abalyn. I’m missing her more than usual tonight. I even thought about calling her, but chickened out. Verily, I’m an invertebrate. Spineless.

I pointed at the album cover she was holding and said, “I really do love that one. I always thought Jackson Browne was so cool.”

“Imp, Jackson Browne doesn’t have a cool bone in his body. Not so much as a goddamned cool mitochondrion. That’s how uncool Jackson Browne is.”

It felt like an insult—like she was insulting me, I mean—but I knew she hadn’t
meant
it that way. Obviously she was insulting Jackson Browne.

“Have you ever listened to that album?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said. “Intend to keep it that way.”

“Then how can you possibly know?”

She didn’t answer the question. Instead she asked one of her own. “You’re evening shift today, right?” And I told her yeah, that I didn’t go in until four.

“Then get dressed. I’m taking you out for lunch.”

“I haven’t even had breakfast.”

“Fine. I’m taking you out for breakfast, brunch, whatever. You’ll have to drive, though.”

So, I got dressed, and we went over to Wayland Square, to a coffee shop she liked that I’d never been to, a place called the Edge, because coffee makes you edgy, I guess. There were big wooden tables
and mismatched chairs and lots of people reading newspapers and working on their laptops. Lots of Brown students, I suppose. I thought about ordering a sandwich, but got something called a Cowboy Cookie, instead, and a cup of scalding-hot Darjeeling. Abalyn got an egg-and-cheese sandwich and a huge latte. The tea and coffee were served in great ceramic cups, green cups with red coffee beans painted on them. I told Abalyn I thought the coffee beans looked more like ladybugs.

We sat down at a table in the back, a corner table, and neither of us said anything for a few minutes. We ate and sipped our drinks. I watched people with their laptops and iPhones. I didn’t see many people having conversations or even reading books or newspapers. Almost all of them were too absorbed with their gadgets to talk to one another. I wondered if they even noticed anything going on around them. I thought how strange it must be, to live like that. Maybe it’s no different from always having your nose in a book, but it feels different to me. It feels somehow colder, more distant. No, I don’t know why it strikes me that way.

Finally, Abalyn put down her sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and said to me, “I don’t want you to think I’m pissed or anything. I’m not. But what happened last night, Imp, maybe we ought to talk about it.”

“Last night you sounded angry,” I said, not meeting her eyes, stirring at my tea with a spoon.

“Last night, well…” And she trailed off for a moment, and she glanced over her shoulder, and I thought maybe she was checking to see if anyone was eavesdropping. They weren’t. They were all too busy with their gadgets. “Last night I was sort of freaked-out, I admit. You brought a stranger home, a woman you’d found standing naked and soaking wet by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.”

“She left,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound so defensive. “I’ll probably never see her again.”

“That’s not the point. It was dangerous.”

“She didn’t hurt me, Abalyn. She just played with the radio.”

Abalyn frowned and picked at her sandwich.

“I like you,” she said. “I think I like you a lot.”

I replied, “I like you a lot, too.”

“You can’t do stuff like that, Imp. Sooner or later, you keep picking people up, doing shit like that, something bad’s gonna happen. Someone’s not gonna be harmless. Someone will hurt you, sooner or later.”

“I haven’t ever done it before. It’s not like a habit or anything.”

“You’re too trusting,” Abalyn sighed. “You never know about people, what they’ll do.”

I sipped at my tea and nibbled at my cookie. Turned out, a Cowboy Cookie was oatmeal and chocolate chips with cinnamon and pecans. Sometimes, I still go back and have them. I always hope that I’ll see Abalyn, but I never have, so maybe she doesn’t go to the Edge anymore.

“She was helpless,” I told Abalyn.

“You don’t know that. You shouldn’t ever assume stuff like that.”

“I don’t want to argue about her.”

“We’re not arguing, Imp. We’re just talking. That’s all.” But she sounded the way people sound when they’re arguing. I didn’t tell her that, though. By then, I was wishing I were back at home, in my own kitchen, eating a breakfast I’d made myself.

“She might have been hurt,” I said.

“Then you should have called the police and told them about her. That’s what police are for.”

“Please don’t talk to me like that. It’s condescending. Don’t talk to me like I’m a child. I’m not a child.”

Abalyn looked over her shoulder again, then back to me. Part of me knew she was right, but I didn’t want to admit it.

“No, you’re not a child. It just freaked me out, that’s all, okay? It was seriously weird. Imp,
she
was seriously weird.”

“Lots of people say that about me,” I told Abalyn. “Lots of people might say that about you.”

I think maybe I was baiting her, and I know I shouldn’t have been. My face felt flushed. But she stayed calm and didn’t bite.

“Just promise me you won’t do anything like that again, please.”

“She might have been hurt,” I told her for the second time. “She could have been in trouble.”

“Come on, India. Please.”

I chewed a corner of my Cowboy Cookie. And then I promised her, all right, I wouldn’t ever do anything like that again. I meant it. But I would. In November, the second time I met Eva Canning, I’d do exactly the same thing all over again.

After the coffee shop, we walked to a used bookstore around the corner. Neither of us bought anything.

“Only write what you saw,” Imp typed. “Don’t interpret. Only describe.”

That’s what I would like to do, but I already know exactly how I’ll fail. I already see that I’ll draw attention to parallels that I wouldn’t realize existed until long after the July day that Abalyn and I had our little brunch at Wayland Square. I’m too impatient to allow these events to unfold in a truly linear fashion. The present of that afternoon has become the
past
of my
present
moment, the precipice from which I survey the convoluted landscape of all the moments leading from then to now.

We left the used bookstore, and briefly thought about ducking into the little junk shop in the basement next door. It’s called What Cheer, as in “What Cheer, Netop?”
Netop
is supposedly a Narragansett Indian word meaning “friend,” and is supposedly the greeting Indians shouted out to Roger Williams (who founded Rhode
Island) and his cohorts as he crossed the Seekonk River in seventeen thirty-whatever and such and such. “What Cheer” are magical words in Rhode Island, which is pretty ironic when you pause to consider just how bad things would go for the Narragansetts not too long after they welcomed white men into their lands. No, I wasn’t thinking any of this as we stood there on the hot sidewalk trying to decide if we wanted to go down the stairs into the junk shop. They have antique postcards, vintage clothes, and huge antique apothecary cabinets. The drawers are filled with countless random, inconsequential treasures, from doorknobs to chess pieces to old political-campaign buttons. What Cheer also sells a lot of vinyl, by the way.

I still visit the shop sometimes, though I never buy any of those records. Or much of anything else. Mostly, I just like to browse through the records and try to figure out why Rosemary bought the albums she did, instead of this one or that one. We never really talked about music, though she played her records a lot. I love the way What Cheer smells, like dust and aging paper.

But we didn’t go in that day. Abalyn needed to get back to the apartment, because that night she had a deadline on a review she’d not even started writing. And I’d forgotten to bring my one o’clock meds with us. It was still a couple of hours before I had to be at work. I remember how it was an especially hot day, up in the nineties, and we stood together in the shade of a green canvas awning, sheltered but sweating, anyhow.