The Drowning Girl (9 page)

That day I bought apples and tomatoes, and when I had, Abalyn and I sat on a bench beneath the trees and each ate one of the apples, which were just the right blend of tart and sweet. The next day, I used the rest to bake a pie.

“Want to hear something creepy?” I asked, when I was done with my apple and had tossed the core away for the squirrels and birds.

“Depends,” she said. “Is this where you tell me you’re an axe murderer or into furries or that sort of creepy?”

I had to ask her what furries were.

“No. It’s something I saw about a year back, something I saw here in the park.”

“Then sure,” she said. “Tell me something creepy.” She was eating her apple much more slowly than I had (I often eat too fast), and she took another bite.

“I was driving home from work one night. Usually, I take the bus, right? But that day, I drove because, well, I don’t know, I just felt like driving. On my way home that evening, passing by the park, I saw four people walking along together. They were away from the streetlamps and under the trees, where it was the darkest, but I still saw them pretty clearly. When I first spotted them, I thought they were nuns, which was strange enough. You never see nuns around here. But then they didn’t seem like nuns anymore.”

“Nuns are creepy enough,” Abalyn muttered around a bite of her apple. “Nuns freak me out.”

“I saw that they weren’t wearing habits, but long black cloaks, with hoods that covered their heads. Suddenly, I wasn’t even sure they were women. They might just as well have been men, from all I could make out of them. And then—and yeah, I know how this sounds—and then I fancied they weren’t even people.”

“You
fancied
? No one actually says they
fancied
.”

“Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is,” I told her. “So we should use all the words we have.” It wasn’t really an original thought; I was paraphrasing Spencer Tracy from
Inherit the Wind
.

She shrugged, said, “So the nuns who weren’t nuns might not even have been people. Go on,” and took another bite of her apple.

“I didn’t say for sure that they weren’t people. But for a moment they seemed more like ravens trying very hard to
look
like people. Maybe trying too hard, and because they were so self-conscious, I could see that they were actually ravens.”

Abalyn chewed her apple and watched me. By then, she already knew why I take the pills I take. She’d seen all the prescription bottles on my nightstand, and I’d told her some stuff. Not everything.
Not anything about Caroline or my mother, but I’d told her enough that she understood about the state of my mental health (a phrase Dr. Ogilvy does approve of). Still, that day, she didn’t say she thought I was nuts. I’d expected her to, but she didn’t. She just ate her apple and considered me with those blue-green beach-glass eyes of hers.

“Sure, I know they weren’t ravens, of course. I don’t know why it seemed that way. I think they might have been Wiccans. There are a few witches around here, I suspect. Maybe they were on their way to a ritual or witches’ sabbat or potluck or whatever it is Wiccans do when they get together.”

“Frankly, it’s a lot more interesting to imagine they were ravens trying too hard to pass themselves off as human beings,” Abalyn said. “It’s a lot creepier than if they’re just Wiccans. I’ve met witches, and, unlike nuns, they’re never creepy. They tend to be rather humdrum, in fact.” She finished her apple and tossed the core so that it landed in the grass near mine.

“Whatever they were, they gave me the willies.”

“Gave you the
willies
?” she asked, smiling. “No one actually says that, you know.”

“I do,” I replied, and flicked her lightly, playfully, on the left shoulder, as I was sitting on her left. She pretended that it had hurt and made faces. I continued, “They gave me the willies, and I went home and locked my doors and slept with all the lights burning that night. But I didn’t have bad dreams. I looked for them again the next night, and the night after that, but I haven’t ever seen them again.”

“Were you homeschooled?” she asked me, which annoyed me since it had nothing to do with what I’d seen that night in the park.

“Why?”

“If you were, it might explain why you use old-fashioned words like
fancied
and
willies
.”

“I wasn’t,” I said. “I went to public schools, here in Providence
and in Cranston. I hated it, usually, and I wasn’t a very good student. I barely made it through my senior year, and it’s a miracle I graduated.”

Abalyn said, “I hated high school, for reasons that ought to be obvious, but was a pretty good student. Had it not been for most of the other students, I might have loved it. But I did well. I aced my SATs, even got a partial scholarship to MIT.”

“You went to MIT?”

“No. I went to the University of Rhode Island, down in Kingston—”

“I know where URI is.”

“—because the scholarship was only a partial scholarship, and my folks didn’t have the rest of the money.”

She shrugged again. It used to irritate me, the way Abalyn was always shrugging. Like she was indifferent, or stuff didn’t get to her, when I knew damned well it did. She’d wanted to attend MIT and study computer science and artificial intelligence, but instead she’d gone to URI and studied bioinformatics, which she explained was a new branch of information technology (she said “IT”) that tries to visually analyze very large sets of biological data—she gave DNA microarrays and sequences as examples. I was never any good with biology, but I looked this stuff up. Bioinformatics, I mean.

I stared at the ground a moment, at my feet. “There must be good money in that,” I said. “But, instead, you write reviews of video games for not much money at all.”

“I do something I’m passionate about, like you and painting. I was never passionate about bioinformatics. It was just something to do, so I could say I went to college. It meant a lot to me, and more to my parents, because neither of them had.”

Katharine Hepburn said something like, “Do what interests you, and at least one person is happy.”

There was a breeze then, a warm breeze that smelled like freshly
mowed lawns and hot asphalt, and I suggested we should head back. Abalyn caught me peering at the place beneath the chestnuts and oaks where I’d seen the not-nuns, not-raven people, and she leaned over and kissed me on the right temple. It was confusing, because the kiss made me feel safe, but letting my eyes linger at the spot below the trees, that sent a shudder through me.

“Hey, Imp,” she said. “Now I owe you one.”

“How do you mean?” I said, standing, straightening my shirt, smoothing out the wrinkles. “What do you owe me?”

“Tit for tat. You told me a creepy story, now I owe you one. Not right now, but later. I’ll tell you about the time me and some friends got stoned and broke into the old railroad tunnel beneath College Hill.”

“You don’t have to do that. You don’t owe me anything. It was just a story I’ve never told anyone else.”

“All the same,” she said, and then we walked back up Willow Street to the apartment. Just now, I almost typed “
my
apartment,” but it was fast becoming
our
apartment. While I made dinner in the comfort of the butter-yellow kitchen, she played something noisy with lots of gunfire and car crashes.

If there are going to be chapters, this one ends here. I’ve been neglecting a painting, and I’ve got extra hours at work this week, so I may not get back to it—the ghost story—for a while, and the thought of leaving a chapter unfinished makes me uncomfortable.

R
eturning, briefly, to the subject of Phillip George Saltonstall and
The Drowning Girl
, before returning to Eva Canning and that maybe-night in July. I’ve written that I first saw the painting on the occasion of my eleventh birthday, which is both true and factual. I was born in 1986, and am now twenty-four years old, so that year was 1997. So, that August, the painting was ninety-nine years old. Which makes it 112 at the present, and means that it was 110 the summer I first met Eva Canning. It’s odd how numbers have always comforted me, despite my being terrible at mathematics. I’ve already filled these pages with a plethora of numbers (mostly dates): 1914, 1898, #316, 1874, 1900, 1907, 1894, 1886, & etc. Perhaps there’s some secret I’ve unconsciously hidden in all these numbers, but, if so, I’ve lost or never had the codex to riddle it out.

Dr. Ogilvy suspects that my fondness of dates may be an expression of
arithmomania
. And, in fairness to her, I should add that during my teens and early twenties, when my insanity included a great many symptoms attributable to obsessive-compulsive disorder, I had dozens upon dozens of elaborate counting rituals. I could not
get through a day without keeping careful track of all my footsteps, or the number of times I chewed and swallowed. Often, it was necessary for me to dress and undress some precise number of times (the number was usually, but not always, thirty) before leaving the house. In order to take a shower, I would have to turn the water on and off seventeen times, step in and out of the tub or shower stall seventeen times, pick up the soap and put it down again seventeen times. And so forth. I did my best to keep these rituals a secret, and I was deeply, privately ashamed of them. I can’t say why, why I was ashamed, but I was afraid, and I lived in constant dread that Aunt Elaine or someone else would discover them. For that matter, if I had been asked at the time to explain why I found them necessary, I would’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I could only have said that I was convinced that unless I did these things, something truly horrible would happen.

Always it has seemed to me that arithmomania is simply (no, not simply, but still) the normal human propensity for superstition to run amok in the mind. A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level. The Japanese fear of the number four, for example. Or the widespread belief that thirteen is unlucky, sinister, evil. Christians who find special significance in the number twelve, because there were twelve apostles. And so forth.

On my eleventh birthday, the painting was ninety-nine years old, and I wouldn’t begin any serious research into it until I was sixteen, at which point it had aged to one hundred and four (11. 99. 16. 104). I’d hardly thought about
The Drowning Girl
in the years since I first set eyes on it. Hardly at all. And when it reentered my life, it did so—seemingly—by nothing more than happenstance. It seemed so then. I’m not sure if it seems so any longer. The arrival of Eva may have changed coincidence to something else. I begin to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of
randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and connotation in ways closed off to the minds of “sane” people. I don’t. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken. Of course, that’s not what Eva said.

All my life, I have loved visiting the Athenaeum on Benefit Street. Rosemary and Caroline took me there more often than the central branch of the Providence Public Library downtown (150 Empire Street). The Athenaeum, like so much of Providence, exists out of time, preservationists having seen that it slipped through the cracks while progress steamrolled so much of the city into sleek modernity. Today, the Athenaeum isn’t so very different than in the days when Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman courted among the stacks. Built in the manner of the Greek Revival, the library’s present edifice was finished in 1838 (sixty years before Saltonstall painted
The Drowning Girl
), though the Athenaeum was founded in 1753. (Note the repetition of
eight—
at
eight
een or twenty-two I would have been helpless to do otherwise—1 + 7 equaling 8; 5 + 3 equaling 8; 8 + 8 equaling 16, which divided by 2 equals 8; full circle.) I couldn’t begin to imagine how many hours I’ve spent wandering between those tall shelves and narrow aisles, or lost in some volume or another in the reading room on the lowermost floor. Housed there within its protective shell of pale stone, the library seems as precious and frail as a nonagenarian. Its smell is the musty commingling fragrance of yellowing pages and dust and ancient wood. To me, the smells of comfort and safety. It smells sacred.

On a rainy day in the eighth month of 2002, on the twenty-eighth day of August, I pulled from the shelves in the Athenaeum a book published in 1958, written by an art historian named Dolores Evelyn Smithfield—
A Concise History of New England Painters and Illustrators
(1958 + a name with eight syllables + I was 16 = 2 × 8).
Somehow, I’d never before noticed the book. I took it back to one of the long tables, and was only flipping casually through the pages when I happened across eight paragraphs about Saltonstall and a black-and-white reproduction of
The Drowning Girl
. I sat and stared at it for a very long time, listening to the rain against the roof and windows, to thunder far away, the footsteps overhead. I noted that the painting appeared on page 88. I used to carry loose-leaf notebooks with me everywhere I went, and an assortment of pens and pencils in a pink plastic box, and that afternoon I wrote down everything Smithfield had written about
The Drowning Girl
. It doesn’t amount to much. Here’s the most interesting part: