The Drowning Girl (39 page)

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.

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 was 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.

“Did I dream—?” I began.

“You dreamed about me,” she said.

“What are you looking at?” I asked, my voice filled with sleep and the taste of the dreams she’d given me, and the dreams that were still to come.

She looked over her shoulder at me, and she smiled. It was the saddest sort of smile. It was a smile that almost broke my heart. “Your heart is brittle,
Winter
India Morgan. Your heart’s no more than a china shop, and all the world’s that proverbial bull. Your heart’s spun from molten glass.

“You should be asleep,” she said.

“Something woke me,” I replied. I asked her what she was looking at, and she turned to face the window again.

“Something woke me,” she said.

I shut my eyes again, only wanting to sink back down to sleep, so tired, so happily, painfully worn from her ministrations and the songs and stories filling me alive. Then she said something more, and I’m not sure of what I heard. I’m only almost sure, which isn’t at all the same as being sure, right?

I think Eva Canning said, “You’re a ghost.” But she wasn’t speaking to me. What she was looking at was her reflection in the bedroom window, and I’m only almost sure that’s what, whom, she was speaking to.

I choose this next song at random. This dream,

I believe I’ll choose it, then one more.

Or two.

I’m painting a picture of days that are all but lost, and yet they are the most real and immediate days I’ve ever lived. I’m trying to recall those precious dreams and stories she sang and whispered across my lips and teeth and into my throat.

She knew hundreds of permutations of the story of how, in 1898, Phillip George Saltonstall came to paint
The Drowning Girl
. She told me most of them. She sang them to me. Some echoed his letter to Mary Farnum. Most didn’t.

I remember this, whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that liminal space where she kept me most of the time. I sleepwalked through entire days.

I was in the forest at Rolling Dam on the Blackstone River, and it was deep into winter, and there’d been a heavy snowfall. I was naked as Eva had been standing at the bedroom window, but I wasn’t cold. I didn’t feel the cold at all. I was on the western shore,
looking out across the dam, at all that water the color of pickled Spanish olives spilling over the convex top and crashing to the rocks below. The water above the dam was black, and who knows how deep, or what it hid. (And, writing this, I’m reminded of Natalie Wood trying to drown herself above a dam in
Splendor in the Grass
, and of Natalie Wood drowning in 1981 off the Isthmus of Catalina Island. She was afraid of drowning all her life, because, as a child, she almost did. Drown, I mean. Anyway, in
Splendor in the Grass
, the water above the dam was dark, too. But, in the movie, it was summer, not winter.)

The waters below Rolling Dam were rapids that roared and gurgled between snow-covered granite boulders. I walked down to the waterline, and saw that north of me, where the river bends sharply back to the west, it was frozen over, and the ice stretched away as far as I could see. A road of white laid between the boles and frosted limbs of paper birch, pines, maple boughs dappled with thousands of tiny red flowers despite the cold, oaks, willows, thick underbrush growths of rhododendron, hawthorn, greenbrier, wild grapes.

My breath didn’t fog, and I suspected this was because I was dead, and so my body was almost as cold as the woods around me.

“What did you see there at the dam?” I type. “No lies. What did you see?”

I beg your pardon. I haven’t lied yet.

There was a noise on my left, and I turned my head to see a doe watching me. She was so still I thought she might be dead, as well. Might be dead and taxidermied and left out here as a practical joke or a morbid bit of ornamentation. But then she blinked, and bolted, springing away into the trees. She should have made a great deal of noise, tearing through the forest like that, but she made no sound at all. Maybe she did, but the roar from the dam obscured it. The dam was so loud, like a wave always breaking and never withdrawing
down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world. The doe went, her white tail a warning flash, but I thought I was alone. Except for crows cawing in the trees.

“Crows mean lies,” Imp typed. “Don’t forget that. Don’t forget the plague doctors you never saw, the beak doctors.”

Crows are not always lies. Sometimes, they’re only hungry, rowdy, rude, punk crows perched in the bare branches of February trees. That’s my soul up there. Sometimes, they’re no more than that.