The Drowning Girl (31 page)

Anyway, here I am on the other side, and I put people through shit, and I lost my job, and I feel like an idiot. Maybe it was something I had to do. I read back over what I wrote, and I can’t help but think maybe it was necessary, a trigger for a
thing
I might never have managed otherwise. But I still feel like a heel for having done it. I don’t like to frighten people who care about me, and now I’m out of work and owe $125 for a missed session, and I can’t afford that even more than usual because Bill fired me. I don’t blame him, but I have
no idea what I’m going to do until I can find another job. Money’s gonna get tight fast, trust fund or no trust fund.

Dr. Ogilvy apologized, but said she can’t make an exception. The hospital sets the rules, not her.

Finally, Abalyn stopped calling and came to see what was wrong. Someone let her in the house, though they’re not supposed to do that. Let in people who don’t live here anymore. Maybe whoever did it, the college students upstairs or the mathematician from Brown who lives downstairs, maybe they weren’t aware Abalyn had moved out. She says she stood outside my door knocking for almost half an hour, then she used her key. I never asked for it back, and she never volunteered. Neither of us thought about it, I suppose. My car was in the driveway, and though she’s aware I often walk and take the bus, she knocked and knocked and waited, then gave up and used her key. I’m not going to be cross with her about it. I know how shitty it would be if I were. To be cross with her over using the key. Oh, she’d lost her key to the building, but not the one to my apartment.

Abalyn let herself in, and she found me holed up in my bedroom. I’d locked the door, so that was another barricade she had to get past. I’m not sure how long I’d been shut away in there, hours or days. I don’t remember, and I don’t have any way of finding out. It doesn’t matter now. She said I was crying, that she could hear me crying and talking to myself. She went to the kitchen and got a butter knife, and she was able to use it to jimmy the lock. She found me in nothing but my panties, hiding in a corner by the window. She didn’t say I was hiding, but I believe I must have been. Corners have always felt like safe places. Nothing can sneak up behind you in a corner, even a corner near a window. She found me with my back to two walls, squeezed into a corner, but I’m not going into detail. It’s too embarrassing, how she found me, what I was doing, the state I was in. But I was dehydrated. I hadn’t eaten in, I don’t know, days. I
hadn’t been flushing the toilet. At first, she was angry, but then she held me and cried. Don’t know for how long, but I remember telling her to stop a bunch of times. I struck her, too. I have to admit that part. I hit her several times while she was trying to calm me down and find out what was going on, and I blacked her right eye. I wish she’d hit me back, but she didn’t. She just held filthy, hysterical me there in my corner until I stopped freaking out. Later, she stood near the fridge, silent, calm, holding a bag of frozen peas against her face. Every time I remember that, her standing there, I wish all over that she’d hit me back.

Anyway, then the chain of events went something like this: Abalyn called Dr. Ogilvy’s emergency number, and someone, whomever she talked to, told her to try to get some Valium in me and call my aunt. But I didn’t want Aunt Elaine around, and apparently I told Abalyn that. She did call Aunt Elaine, but convinced her not to come to my apartment, got her to agree that she wouldn’t so long as Abalyn kept her in the loop. The clinic said if someone would stay with me, and if I didn’t seem like a danger to myself or anyone else, it wouldn’t be necessary to call an ambulance (again, again). Dr. Ogilvy phoned. I said something to her, but I don’t for the life of me know
what
I said. Abalyn agreed to stay with me, and Dr. Ogilvy told her to wait twenty-four hours, then get me back on my drug regime. She also told Abalyn to try to figure out how long it had been since I’d stopped taking my meds. Either I couldn’t remember, or I just wasn’t willing to tell anyone (back to the paranoia, I didn’t want Abalyn or anyone else near me). The best she, Abalyn, was able to do was find my pillbox, which holds a week’s worth of pills, Sunday through Saturday, contained in their own discrete plastic compartments—S, M, T, W, T, F, S. There was six days’ worth in the box, which only told her it had been a minimum of six days. She knew it might have been quite a bit longer.

Abalyn called Margot, the new girlfriend, and they had a big
fight. Margot said none of this—meaning me—was Abalyn’s responsibility, and I was being manipulative. They fought some more, and eventually Abalyn told her to fuck off, and now they’re not together any longer. So, I scared Abalyn half to death, punched her in the eye, and made her lose her girlfriend. Way to go, Imp. You’re a peach, you are.

She’s staying here, because she didn’t have anywhere else to go, and it was the very least I could do after what she did for me and what it cost her. She’s only
staying
with me; she isn’t
living
with me. I can see it’s hard on her. We try to keep out of each other’s way. You can care about someone deeply, but not be able to live with them, not easily. I look at Abalyn and I see how true this is; before the relapse, I probably didn’t understand how true that is. I made a joke about her being my knight in shining armor, but it wasn’t funny, and neither of us laughed.

There hasn’t been much of that, laughter, around here since she found me cowering in that bedroom corner. I live in a house where people upstairs laugh, and people downstairs laugh. I hear them through the floorboards, laughter going down, laughter coming up.

A couple of days after Abalyn found me, we were eating Trix cereal and watching cartoons, just like the old days. Except
Ren & Stimpy
and
The Angry Beavers
weren’t hilarious like they used to be, and the cereal tasted like tiny fruit-flavored balls of paper. Halfway through a cartoon, I said I didn’t want to see any more, so Abalyn picked up the remote and her TV went black (she had to move all her stuff back here, of course). She’s been so accommodating, which helps, but which also makes me feel even more ashamed. We both just sat there a few minutes, silent, picking at dry Trix, and the street noise seemed louder than usual. The Mexican boys, passing cars, autumn birds. Abalyn spoke first, and it was a relief, dispelling that not-really-quiet hanging between us. I’d still say it was a relief, even considering the stuff we both said immediately afterwards.

“I read it,” she said, and I nodded. I’d given Abalyn the pages I typed during the crazy spell and asked her to read them. She hadn’t wanted to, but I told her it was important.

“Thank you,” I said.

She asked, “Did it help?” and I shrugged.

“Probably too soon to say, but I don’t especially think so. I think it was a start, and I had to start somewhere, but I’m still scared.” I almost said something Dr. Ogilvy would have said, like “there’s still a high degree of cognitive dissonance,” but, fortunately, I thought better of it and said what I said, instead.

“But it was a start,” she said, and I noticed she was picking all the lemon-yellow Trix out of her bowl and lining them up single file on the floor in front of her. It reminded me of something I’d do. “I can’t stop feeling like none of this would have happened if only I’d been a little more tactful that day.”

“You shouldn’t have to walk on eggshells around me,” I told her. It was something I’d said to her before. “I don’t expect you to coddle me.”

“Still…,” she said, and trailed off.

“You didn’t even know I had those two versions of Eva in my head, Abalyn. There was no way you could have known, not if only one of them actually happened.”

She plucked another yellow Trix from her bowl and lined it up with the others.

“You believe that now?”

She wanted me to say yes, I did. But she’d been too good to me, and she deserved more than a lie. So I said, “No, but I’m working on it. I mean, I see Dr. Ogilvy in a few days…and I’m working on it. I know something’s wrong now, and that’s a start. I know something’s gone wrong in my head.”

“You’re a brave lady, Imp. I swear I couldn’t live with shit like that. You’re stronger than me.”

“No, I’m not. I’m just used to it. I haven’t ever been any other way. Not really. Besides, you’ve been through at least as much. I can’t imagine having the courage to do what you’ve done.” I was talking about coming out and her reassignment surgery, but she knew that without me having to spell it all out. “People do what they have to do. That’s all.”

“Listen to us,” she said, and she almost smiled, and she almost laughed. “Imp and Abalyn’s Self-Congratulatory Society of Mutual Admiration.”

I smiled, but didn’t try to laugh.

Then Abalyn said, “Maybe if you wrote. Not the way you wrote it when you were sick. I mean, if you wrote it as one of your short stories.”

“I’m not a writer. I’m a painter.”

“I know that. I’m just saying, it might help.”

“I haven’t written a story in a long time.”

“I figure it’s like riding a bicycle,” she said, then picked up one of the lemon-yellow Trix and ate it.

“It’s strange enough, that you’ve read what you’ve already read.”

“That was your idea,” she reminded me.

“I know, but that doesn’t make it any less strange.”

“You know what part surprised me most? The lines about the Black Dahlia. That’s the part that really put its hook in me. And I feel responsible for that, too. Seeing the Perrault exhibit was my idea.”

“So, that really did happen?”

“Unless we’re both crazy. Fuck knows, my mother and father would tell you I’m crazy as a shithouse rat.”

“Your mother and father don’t know you,” I told her, trying hard not to think about having to be despised by one’s parents. I silently wished Abalyn could have had a mother like Rosemary Anne, a grandmother like Caroline. If I’d ever told Rosemary I was a boy,
not a girl, I’m sure she’d have been mostly fascinated. Maybe concerned, too, because of the way the world treats transgender people, but mostly fascinated. She probably would have gone so far as to insist it was marvelous.

“Anyway, yes. We went to the Perrault exhibit, and there was that Black Dahlia sculpture. I’m never gonna forget how much it upset you.”

“It shouldn’t have. I overreacted.”

“It was damned creepy. It’s even worse if you stop to consider he had to look at it every day for who knows how long it took to finish. Months maybe. Months coming back to the same grotesque subject day after day, and all the research he would have needed to do. I read there was a feminist victims’ rights sort of group out in California tried to get the exhibit banned because of that sculpture. Hell, I almost halfway don’t blame them.”

“I’m not for censorship,” I said, “no matter how awful art gets.”

Abalyn frowned and stared at a lemon-yellow Trix held between thumb and index finger, only halfway to her mouth. “You know I’m not in favor of censoring art, Imp. I was only saying I can see how that sculpture could elicit so strong a response.”

We were talking about
Phases 1–5
, of course, the grotesque pinwheel Perrault made using life casts and taxidermy to depict Elizabeth Short transforming into a werewolf. The last piece we’d seen before I couldn’t stand seeing any more and we’d left the gallery.

“If writing a story would help you sort through that second Eva you remember, it might help,” she said. “I’m here to help, you know. If you want me to help. I didn’t mean to be presumptuous.”

“I know.”

“And I’m sure Dr. Ogilvy would help.”

I told Abalyn that I’d never talked to Dr. Ogilvy about Eva Canning, and she looked kind of dumbfounded.

“Imp, whatever really happened with her, don’t you think that’s
sort of a big thing not to tell your psychiatrist? Isn’t that what you pay her for?”

“I don’t think she believes in ghosts. And certainly not werewolves, or mermaids.”

“Does it matter what she believes in? You gotta figure she’s heard weirder shit than this.”

I told Abalyn I seriously doubted she had.

“Okay, but what’s the worst she can do? Have you committed? From what I saw, and what you’ve told me, I think if she was going to try to do that, she’d have already done it.”

I wanted to say, let’s please stop talking about this. Possibly, I was getting angry, and, possibly, I wanted to tell Abalyn she simply didn’t
get it
, that there’s crazy and then there are crazy people who believe in mermaids and werewolves and unicorns and fairies and shit. But I didn’t. Surely, she’d earned the right to speak her mind. I’d be in the hospital, or worse, if she hadn’t found me when she did. If she hadn’t cared enough to come looking, and then cared enough to stick around. And, anyway, down inside, I knew she probably wasn’t wrong about Dr. Ogilvy.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I’ll talk to her. I’ll try to consider writing a story.”

“And I’m here, if you need me.”

“Because you don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Jesus, Imp. No, not because I don’t have anywhere else to fucking go.”

“Well, you don’t, do you?”

She didn’t answer me. Conversation ends here. She shook her head and sighed, then took her cereal bowl and the box of Trix, stood up, and went to the kitchen. I sat on the floor in front of the blank television, trying to imagine what I was going to say to my psychiatrist, if that’s what I was going to do.
How
I would say what
Abalyn thought I ought to say, because I realized it wasn’t so much the
what
of Eva as it was finding the necessary words.

We didn’t talk much the rest of that day. Aunt Elaine called sometime after dark, and I worked on a painting until I was tired enough to try to sleep.

I’m piling contradictions upon contractions, building myself a house of cards or a deadfall jumble of pick-up sticks. I told Abalyn that I’ve never spoken with my psychiatrist about Eva Canning, but that’s not true. Just look back at pages 115 and 166, where I wrote: “I’ve not mentioned that I’m writing all these things down, though we [Ogilvy and I] have spoken several times now of Eva Canning, both the July Eva and the November Eva, just as we’ve talked about Phillip George Saltonstall and
The Drowning Girl
(painting and folklore) and ‘The Little Mermaid.’ Just as we’ve talked about Albert Perrault and The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (in Hindsight) and ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’”