The Drowning Girl (23 page)

Imp typed, “Eva and Eva, maybe. You’re not so sure about all the rest.”

No, I’m not. But Eva Canning. What climbed into my car, what I found in a wild place and brought home, what left and bided its time, then came back to me both times.

“Is this the sort of conversation that normal couples have?” I asked Abalyn, and that made her smile.

“You’re asking the wrong woman about what’s normal,” she replied. “Anyhow, is that what we are now, a couple?”

“Isn’t it?” Hearing the question, I was suddenly afraid I’d misspoken, or been mistaken, that I’d fucked it all up.

“Sure, Imp. If you want to put a name on it.”

“I do, but only if you don’t mind. If I’m wrong, if that isn’t what we are…that would be okay. I mean—”

And then she kissed me. I think she kissed me so I’d shut up. I was glad, because hearing myself, I wanted very badly to shut up. Words start coming out of my mouth like rocks rolling down a hill, and every now and then someone has to stop me. It was a long kiss.

When it was over, I asked if I could play some of Rosemary’s records for her, some of the ones that were my favorites. “I’ll try to avoid the really schmaltzy stuff. And you don’t have to, you know, pretend to like anything you don’t,” I told her.

“I won’t,” she assured me, and crossed her heart. “Though, wasn’t I gonna give you the musical education, and not the other way round?”

“First, you ought to know what you’re up against.”

So for the next three hours we lay on the thrift-store cushions in front of Rosemary’s turntable and listened to Rosemary’s records. I played songs off Elton John’s
Madman Across the Water
,
Dreamboat Annie
by Heart (which she decided she liked), Jethro Tull’s
Aqualung,
and Blue Öyster Cult’s
Agents of Fortune
. She wouldn’t let me play anything by the Doobie Brothers or Bruce Springsteen. She got up a couple of times, and strummed air guitar. We listened to the hiss and pop of the scratchy vinyl, and kissed, and didn’t talk about bad dreams or childhood or changelings. It was after four before we went to bed and that long, long day ended. Our last good day (in the July ghost story). Our last day before the gallery, and the river, the bathtub, and Abalyn leaving me.

My fingers hurt from typing, and this is as good a place to stop as any. To stop for now, I mean.

I’m not sure how many days transpired between our last good day and the day when, for the first time since I met Abalyn, I visited the RISD Museum. It might have been no more than one or two. Surely, not more than three. I do, however, know it was a Thursday evening, which would have made it the third Thursday of July (admission is free after five, the third Thursday of each month; I try never to pay
admission). But I admit this timeline doesn’t seem right. There was the afternoon Abalyn and I almost quarreled, and then our last good day, and…I don’t recall the latter coming so quickly on the heels of the former. So here’s something else to cause me to doubt my memories. If it
was
the third Thursday of July 2008 (so, the seventeenth), then Abalyn might not have left until early August, and I was almost certain she went at the end of July. Time is warping. It begins to feel like my
perception
of time is collapsing back on itself, compressing events and recollections.

I’m driving with the window rolled partway down. The city is shrouded in a long summer twilight, no clouds in the violet-blue sky, and I cross the Point Street Bridge. There are two swans floating on the river, and a cormorant is perched on a rotten old piling. The piling juts from the river like a broken bone, and the cormorant spreads its wings, drying its feathers. There’s a lot of traffic, and the air stinks of car exhaust and my own sweat. I catch a whiff of scorched crust from a pizza place, just before turning onto South Main. I haven’t had dinner, and I skipped lunch; the burned-bread smell reminds me I’m hungry.

I told Abalyn I was going to the library. She didn’t ask which one, though if she had, I’d have told her the public library downtown. The central branch of the public library is open until eight thirty on Mondays and Thursdays. She had a deadline, and didn’t ask to come along.

“Be careful,” she said, without looking up from her laptop.

“I will,” I replied, and when she asked if I had my cell phone, I told her I did. I reminded her there was leftover Chinese in the fridge.

The night before, I dreamed of
The Drowning Girl
, and the next day—this day—I couldn’t stop thinking of the painting. I was distracted at work, and kept making stupid mistakes when I rang
people up or tried to show them to the aisle they were looking for. Then, on the way home from work, I turned on the wrong street and got lost. I hardly said a word to Abalyn until I told her I was going out. I had it in my head that if I saw the painting, if I confronted it, maybe I could stop obsessing over it.

There are trees on South Main, and the wind through the Honda’s open window smells less of automobiles. I park opposite the museum gift shop, and linger by the car a moment, thinking it might be a mistake, coming here. Wishing I’d have asked Abalyn to come with me. I could climb back into the Honda and drive straight home again. Then I tell myself that I’m behaving like a coward, stuff the keys in my pocket, cross the street, and go inside, where it’s cool and the air smells clean.

There’s a special exhibit up devoted to artists’ models as depicted
by
artists, and I use it as a convenient excuse to avoid confronting
The Drowning Girl
for another twenty minutes or so. There are pieces on display by Picasso, Klimt, Matisse, Angelica Kauffmann, paintings and charcoal studies and photographs, a cartoon from
The New Yorker
. I stop and examine each one closely, but I can’t really focus on any of them. It’s impossible to concentrate on these images, no matter how exquisitely executed or revealing or intimate they might be. This isn’t why I’ve come.

Get it over with
, I think. But not in my
own
thought voice. This is the voice I dreamed of the night before, the voice I’ve dreamed repeatedly, the voice I first heard that night by the Blackstone River. I take out my phone and almost call Abalyn. I notice one of the docents watching me, and I return the phone to the bag I’m carrying and walk away. I move through one gallery after the other until I come to that small octagonal room with its loden-green walls and ornate gilt frames. There are eleven oil paintings by New England artists, but the first one you see, entering from the south, is Saltonstall’s. I quickly avert my eyes and turn my back on it. I slowly move
around the room clockwise, pausing before each canvas before moving along to the next. Each painting brings me a few steps nearer
The Drowning Girl
, and I keep reminding myself it’s not too late; I can still leave the museum without having caught more than the briefest glimpse of the thing.

(
Thing
. I type the word, and it seems hideous to me. It seems filled with an indefinable threat. It has too many possible meanings, and none of them are specific enough to simply dismiss out of hand. But by that evening I had made a thing of
The Drowning Girl
. Probably, I’d been busy making a thing of it since Rosemary brought me to the museum on the occasion of my eleventh birthday, almost eleven years before.)

There’s a docent in this room, too, and he’s watching me. Do I seem suspicious? Does the anxiety show on my face? Is he just bored, and I’m something new to occupy his attention? I ignore him and try hard to pretend to be interested in those other compositions—two landscapes by Thomas Cole (1828 and 1847), Martin Johnson Heade’s
Brazilian Forest
(1864) and
Salt Marshes of Newburyport, Massachusetts
(1875–1878), and the last before Saltonstall, William Bradford’s
Arctic Sunset
(1874). That makes five. Were I the Catholic that my mother cautioned me against becoming, it would make somewhat more sense that it suddenly occurs to me how this was like the grim, grotesque procession of the Stations of the Cross, stopping before each painting. But I’m not Catholic, and it seems very odd. This, the fifth,
Arctic Sunset
, would be the scene where Simon of Cyrene carries the cross for Christ, and the next, the next will be Veronica wiping the brow of Jesus. The comparison is alien, another
thing
rising up to haunt me, and I push it away.

I push it away and, my mouth gone dry as dust and ashes, turn to confront the
thing
that has brought me here. And I do, but that thing, it’s not Phillip George Saltonstall’s painting of a woman
standing in a river. I turn, and Eva Canning is standing in front of me. Just like that, as ridiculous as a scene in a horror movie, a scene that’s meant to be unexpected, to startle you and make you jump in your seat. When it’s over, you laugh nervously and feel silly. I don’t jump. I don’t laugh. I don’t even breathe. I just stand there, staring at her. She’s wearing the same red dress she might have been wearing the day I thought I saw her at Wayland Square. The same sunglasses, round lenses in wire frames that make me think of John Lennon. She smiles, and her limp blonde hair glimmers faintly beneath the lights. She isn’t barefoot this time. She’s wearing very simple leather sandals.

“India. What a pleasant surprise,” she says. “You’re the very last person I expected to see tonight.” Her tone is warm and entirely cordial, as if we’re nothing more remarkable than two old friends, meeting by chance. It’s just a happy coincidence, that’s all.

And I say the very first thing that occurs to me. I say, “You were in my head. A few minutes ago. You said, ‘Get it over with.’” There’s a tremble in my voice. My voice is a counterpoint to Eva’s, as is what I’ve said, implying that this coincidence
isn’t
happy. It may not even be a coincidence.

Her smile doesn’t waver. “Was it, now?” she asks me, and I nod. “Well, you were dawdling. You were getting cold feet, weren’t you?”

I don’t say yes or no. I don’t have to. She already knows the answer. Standing here before me, in such mundane surroundings, she strikes me as a
thing
taken out of context. The sight of Eva naked at the side of the road made more sense to me than the sight of her in the gallery, and in some ways she seems more naked here than she did when I first saw her. There’s a wooden bench directly in front of
The Drowning Girl
, and she sits and motions for me to do the same. I glance at the docent, and he’s still watching me. No, now he’s watching us. I sit beside her.

“You came to see my painting,” she says. (I’m very sure that’s
what she said.
My
painting. Not
the
painting.) “Where’s Abalyn?” she asks.

“Home,” I reply, the tremble fading from my voice. “She doesn’t much like museums.”

“I’ve been meaning to call and thank you. No telling what would have become of me if you hadn’t come along. It was rude of me not to call. Oh, and I still have the clothes you lent me. I need to get those back to you.”

“It wasn’t an accident, was it? That night, I mean.”

“No,” she says. “No, Imp, it wasn’t. But you didn’t have to stop for me. That much was left up to you.”

She isn’t lying to me. There’s no hint of deception here. She isn’t denying anything, though I wish she were. I wish she would at least try to make it all less real. Do her best to render these events perfectly ordinary. I sit and stare at
The Drowning Girl
, and catch the familiar, comforting scent of the sea coming off Eva. It doesn’t strike me as odd, her smelling like the sea. If anything, it only seems appropriate, consistent, inevitable.

“He was a sad sort of man,” she says, and points at the painting. “He was a melancholy man. It was a shame, him dying so young, but hardly unexpected.”

“So you don’t believe his fall from the horse was an accident?”

“That’s twice now you’ve used that word,” she says. “You seem preoccupied with causality and circumstance. But no, I seriously doubt it was an accident. He was a very accomplished horseman, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” I tell her, and I don’t take my eyes off the painting. Ironically, it strikes me as the safest place in the entire gallery to let my eyes linger, even though the dark woods behind Saltonstall’s bather appear more threatful than they ever have before.

“I didn’t have to stop,” I say. “You mean that. I truly had a choice?”

“You did, Imp. You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one’s ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I’m afraid the time for choice is behind us both.”

These words could have so many different meanings, and I don’t want to know precisely which meaning she intends for them to have. So, I don’t ask her to explain. I think,
I’ll find out soon enough.

“Was it because I’m crazy?” I ask, instead. “Is that why I heard you?”

“You’re too hard on yourself,” she says, and I don’t really know what that means, either.

“Can I ask what happens next?”

She smiles again, but not the same way she smiled before. This smile makes her look frayed, and there’s a sadness about it that makes me think of what she said about Phillip George Saltonstall.

“There’s no script,” she says, and straightens her spectacles. “No foregone conclusions. So, we’ll both just have to wait and see what happens next. Me, as much as you.”

“I don’t want Abalyn to get hurt.”

“You’re not the sort of person who wishes harm to come to much of anyone, are you, Imp? Well, except your father, but I can’t blame you for that.”

I don’t ask her how she knows about my father. I’d figured out enough to understand it’s not important. Sitting there with her, I’m overwhelmed by an instant of déjà vu, stronger than any I’ve ever felt in my life. It makes me dizzy. It almost makes me ill.

“I should be getting home,” I say, and shut my eyes.

“Yes, you should. She’s waiting for you. She worries when you’re out alone.” And then Eva leans near and whispers into my right ear. Her breath is warm, but the smell of the sea grows cloying with her face so near mine. She exhales, and I think of mudflats at low tide. I think of mud and reeds and crabs. Quahogs waiting to be dug from their snug burrows. Stranded fish at the mercy of the sun and the
gulls. Her words are drops of brackish, estuarine water, dripping into me, and I bite my lip and keep my eyes squeezed closed as tightly as I can.