The Drowning Girl (40 page)

“Fine,” Imp typed. “But after the doe, what did you see after the doe? When you looked across the Blackstone River above the dam, what did you see?”

I saw Jacova Angevine (I didn’t know her name; I wouldn’t learn her name for another two years and four months). I saw Jacova Angevine, leader of the Open Door of Night, the Prophet from Salinas, leading dozens and dozens of women and men into the river. They were all dressed in robes as white as the snow. None of them even tried to swim. They walked in, went down, and none of them came back up again. No air bubbles. It went on for a long time, and I was starting to think there’d be no end to that procession, when there was, and only one woman was left standing on the opposite shore. No, not a woman. A very young girl. She wasn’t dressed in a white robe, but jeans and a sweater and a bright blue coat with a blue fur collar. She stood on the bank and peered into the tannin-stained river. It’s only fifty yards or so across at Rolling Damn, and I could see her very clearly. She looked up, finally, and for an instant her eyes met mine. And then she turned and, like the doe, bolted into the forest.

“You’re a ghost,” she told her reflection.

I wanted to follow the girl, but I didn’t dare enter that river, not with all those drowned men and women. I was certain they’d reach up and drag me down with them. Instead, I crouched in the snow,
wild as any doe or bobcat or coyote. I crouched and watched the river. I pissed, and so I knew I must be alive, because I don’t think dead women piss, do they? I huddled in the trees, beneath a cloudy Man Ray kind of sky almost as white as the snow. And, before the sun set, I began to feel the cold, and my body turned to ice. I was crystal, and the moon shone through me.

Imp types, “In ‘Werewolf Smile,’ you named yourself Winter.”

We’re sitting together in moonlight, and there are no lights on anywhere in the apartment. We’re sitting together in front of the turntable and speakers, and I’m playing one of Rosemary Anne’s records for Eva. She has told me she is always fascinated by the music she doesn’t make, the music of man, the music above the sea, the music of the world above, though she’s heard very little of it. So, I’m playing
Dreamboat Annie
for her, because I remember that’s the one that Abalyn liked the most. Eva listens, and occasionally says something. The music is loud (she wants it that way), but I have no trouble at all hearing her words clearly above the guitars, the drums, the pianos and synthesizers, and the vocals.

I’ve just asked her, again, what she meant that day in the museum about
The Drowning Girl
being
her
painting. One song ends, another begins, and finally she says, “You see it, and are obsessed with it. But haven’t you ever made it yours? Haven’t you ever found yourself within it?”

I admitted I’d not.

She kissed me, and the music faded. In a few moments, I found myself standing on the riverbank again. This time
I was not Winter
it was not winter, but late summer, and the trees were a riot of green. There was very little I could see that was not one or another hue of green. But I noticed at once that I could only see a few feet in any direction. I couldn’t see the sky, or very far along the bank to either side. I’d stepped into the cool, welcoming water, and when I look
over my right shoulder, the space between the trees is impenetrable. There is above me no hint of the sky. It’s not that I can’t
see
the sky; it simply isn’t there. And I understand then that I am not actually back at the river. Eva has kissed me, alchemical kiss, and now I am in the painting. No, I
am
the painting.

I inspect everything more closely, and there is about every surface—the river, the forest, the bark of the trees, the underbrush between them, even my own skin—there is about it all the unmistakable texture of linen stretched and framed. And this is when I feel the camel’s hair brush and the oil paint dabbing tenderly, meticulously, at the space below my navel.

“You see?” Eva asks. And I am back with her in the moonlight. The record has ended, and the phonograph’s pickup arm has automatically lifted and returned to the armrest. “It’s as simple as that. Now it’s your painting, too. It’s only another way of singing.”

It was a while before the disorientation passed, and I could speak. I said, “I wish there were something I could give you. You’ve given me so much.”

She smiled, and kissed my cheek. “It’s coming, love,” she sighed. “Be patient. Soon enough now, it’s coming.”

As I’ve said above, there are countless other songs and stories Eva sang into me. Though, I see they’re all variations on a theme. At most, distinguished one from another by disparities that seem far less important, less profound, to me now than they must have seemed then.

“You’re a ghost,” Eva told herself.

And she sang into me for days and days, nights and nights, making of me the vessel of a ghost’s memories. She hid me, sequestered in her arms and my apartment, apart from all distraction, that I would have eyes and ears and touch and taste for her and her alone. I breathed her into me. I breathed in a ghost, insubstantial and ectoplasmic,
a woman who believed herself a ghost, and a siren, and who was not a wolf and never had been. We spoke, somewhen in all that time, of Albert Perrault, and she said, “My mother…,” but then trailed off.

I wrote that I’d choose one story, and then another. But there are too many choices, and too little distinction. And I have. The girl standing at the riverbank, and then turning away. Not following the others into the river and so missing that chance forever. Not joining, so evermore apart. I can understand that. Caroline went in merciful hydrocarbon fumes, and Rosemary Anne, she’s gone, too, and I am alone, in an exile of my own choosing, or of my own fear. I could join them, and, yet, I can’t. I can’t follow. Eva can’t follow, but the sea has her heart and soul forever. “The Little Mermaid,” and never “Little Red Riding Hood.” Never Gévaudan. Always
The Drowning Girl,
and never Elizabeth Short. But I’m racing ahead of myself. Stop. Retrace your steps, Imp.

Eva didn’t love me. I doubt she ever loved anyone. She loved the ocean. Trapped in a dark river in Massachusetts, she was only seeking her way home, the path flowing to the tide of a lover’s arms. In “Werewolf Smile,” I wrote of that fictionalized Eva, “…because I knew that she never
loved
any of them, any more than she loved me.”

I’ve told about the river in winter, and becoming the painting, but I’m not going to write down all those story-songs, the mutable, unchanging permutations: a child on a merry-go-round, spinning round and round while her mother watched, and never getting anywhere at all; an emaciated creature with golden eyes and needle teeth lying hungry and watchful in the mud at the bottom of the deep water in back of Rolling Dam; the wrecks of ship after ship, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-century drownings; a beach leading down to the submarine Monterey Canyon, ninety-five miles long and out of soundings, almost twelve hundred feet deep; a beautiful, charismatic woman with an ancient idol of a god-thing she
called Mother Hydra; an intricate mandala on the floor of a temple that had once been a warehouse, and the supplicants praying there for deliverance from terrestrial damnation; Phillip George Saltonstall climbing into the saddle; the rape of my mother by a man I have called Father; all those men and women marching into the sea; the hand of hurricane demons. See, Imp, they’re all the same story, seen through the eyes of the ghost whom they haunt, and that ghost is Eva, and that ghost is me.

She showed me the face I needed to see, and that she needed me to see, to complete a circuit. It would end her haunting, even as it made mine worse. I couldn’t have known this at the time, lost in her and off my meds.

There are no monsters. No werewolves. No sirens.

But she showed me her truest face, and it hardly matters whether it was ever factual.

The Siren of Millville writhed in her variegated coils upon my bed, the murdered, transformed soul of Perishable Shippen, who had surely perished, true to her name, even if she’d never existed. Eva writhed in the vermiform coils of eels and sea snakes, hagfish and lamprey. She fastened that ravenous, barbeled mouth about the folds of my labia, rasping teeth working at my clit. She writhed and coiled about me, wrapping me in a smothering, protective cocoon of slime, thick translucent mucus exuded from unseen glands or pores. Across her rib cage were drawn the gill slits of a shark, a deep row of four crimson slashes on either side of her torso, out of water and gasping, opening and closing, breathless but undying. Her breasts had vanished, leaving her chest flat except for those gills. I gazed into black eyes, eyes that were only black and nothing more, and they gazed into me.

She flowered, and bled me dry.

She took my voice, and filled me with song.

Unloving, she left me no choice but to love her.

Where there had been clean cotton sheets, there was a blanket of polyps, a hundred different species of sea anemones, the stinging embrace of their stinging tentacles planted there to keep us safe. We were immune to their neurotoxins, I understood instinctively, like the tiny clownfish that nest within anemones to escape the jaws of bigger fish are immune. To my eyes, the anemones were no different from a field of wildflowers. She flowered. And there were minute blue-ringed octopuses and sea snakes, nestled between those flowers, each sparing us its fatal bite. She called them all with melodies no mortal woman’s throat may ever replicate. Crabs scuttled across my belly, and a razor rash of barnacles flecked my arms and legs. I questioned none of this. It was. It simply was. The room was filled with the darting, sinuous shadows of fish.

I came again and again and again.

Orgasm is too insufficient a word.

She held me tightly in arms the same bottle-blue as her eyes had once been, hands and webbed fingers and arms dappled with scales and photophores that glowed another shade of blue to illuminate the abyssal gloom of my bedroom, which must have sunk as deeply as anything has ever sunken. Her chitin claws drew welts on my breasts and face. Her lionfish spines impaled my heart and lungs.

She drew me down.

“Promise,” she whispered with that lipless mouth. “Promise me, when we are done here.”

And I did promise, barely half-understanding the pledge I’d made. I’d have promised her I’d fight my way through all the hells in which I’d never believed. I’d have promised her every remaining day of my life, had she asked.

“You are my savior,” she whispered, coiling and uncoiling. “You are the end of my captivity.”

“I love you,” I told her.

“I’m wicked. Remember?”

“Then I love your wickedness, and I’ll be wicked, too. I’ll become an abomination.”

“There’s not an ounce of wickedness in you, India Morgan Phelps, and I’ll not put it there.”

“If you leave me,” I said. “You leave me, I’ll die,” and I was trying so hard not to sob, but there were tears on my cheeks, tears instantly lost to the ocean filling my bedroom. “I’ll drown if you ever leave me.”

“No, Imp,” she replied, her voice all kelp and bladderwrack. “You’re not the girl who drowns. Not in this story you’re writing. You’re the girl who learns to swim.”

“I want to believe you.”

“Oh,
Winter
India, everything I’ve ever told you or ever will tell you is a lie, but
this
, this
one
thing is true.” (I don’t tell her I would one day write those words and put them in her mouth in a story titled “Werewolf Smile.”)

She kissed me again, tasting all of brine, and her lips the lips of
l’Inconnue de la Seine.

And then I began to sing. It was
my
song, and my song alone, never voiced since the dawn of time. It was everything I was, had been, might be. I swelled with song, and I sang.

“Like the fortune cookie said, ‘Don’t stop now,’” Imp typed. “You’re almost at the end of it.”

It’s true. There’s not that much more left to tell, though, possibly, what remains may be the most important part of the ghost story. I could draw it out, perhaps. There is so much more I haven’t told, moments that transpired between myself and Eva Canning, and I could sit here and record all of them that I can remember. That would take many days more, many pages more. Even though there’s not that much more left to tell. I have the time, I suppose. Still unemployed, I have quite a lot of time on my hands. So, yeah, I could
draw it out, how I was seduced and romanced by my mermaid (who never was a wolf), my lover who would be a melusine, a daughter of Phorcys, the Siren of Millville trapped in the Blackstone River ages ago by a hurricane, who would be all these things and innumerable things more. In her way, and in
my
way, she bewitched me as surely as Circe, though her tinctures worked on my eyes and mind. The physical transformations she worked all upon herself.

Early one morning—and I cannot say how many days had passed since she’d crossed the threshold, since Abalyn had left, only that we’d remained in the apartment all that time. I had no need of food, or no need beyond whatever was already in the pantry and the fridge. So, early one morning in August I woke, and I was alone in the bed. The sheets were only sheets. All her anemones had melted away again. They came and went as they wished, or as she summoned and dismissed them. There were only the sheets, which smelled of sweat and sex and, so, faintly of the sea. I’d been dreaming of the day that Abalyn and I had gone to the river and seen nothing much at all, only in the dream, we did see something. I won’t say what. What is not important. I woke from the dream, and lay blinking, immediately aware that Eva wasn’t there beside me. I slept in her arms, or her in mine. We curled fetal as any unborn beast in one another’s arms. We wrapped ourselves together as though all we were depended on those embraces.

“Eva?” I whispered, sleepily.

“Good morning, India Morgan,” she said. She was at the bedroom window again, looking out at the sky, which was only just beginning to brighten. She wasn’t naked this time. She’d put on her silky red dress, but was barefoot. The dawn light painted her pale face a muted shade of ginger. Ginger or butterscotch. The wolf Eva who never existed, she’d had butterscotch eyes. I considered that maybe the light came
from
within her, as much as it reflected
off
her. She stood very straight. She didn’t look over her shoulder at me as
she spoke. There was no iridescence remaining about her, and she only looked like any thin, pale woman. She was no longer unearthly, and I thought,
The spell is broken.
I thought,
Perhaps whatever happens from here on, it’s my choice and my choice alone.