The Drowning Girl (38 page)

“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.

T
here’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.

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.”

“Even if,” she says, and now her fingers are exploring the back of my neck. “And, in return, I will ask a small favor of you, Imp. But we’ll talk about that later. Don’t be afraid of me. You can’t yet see it, but I’ve come to lead you out of the dark place where you’ve always lived. You can’t glimpse it from here, but from
there
, you will.” (Look upon the thing monstrous and free.)

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.)