The Drowning Girl (12 page)

There’s no point to being out in the night, beneath the night sky, if I can’t see the stars. But Millville is small, as I’ve said, and soon I’m on the far side of it, heading northwest on Route 122. Before long, I can make out a few twinkling stars through the windshield. I have the driver’s-side window down, and the air is fresh and plant scented. There’s the faint musky, muddy odor of the river, which is no more than fifty feet away on my left (or southwest, along this short stretch of road). I have often thought that rivers and lakes and the ocean smell like sex. So, the summer night has about it the not disagreeable bouquet of sex. I’ve just checked the speedometer, and see that I’m only doing forty or forty-five miles per hour, which I don’t think Abalyn would think of as speeding. Though, I don’t know what the speed limit is; there are signs, no doubt, but I’ve never noticed them. If I have, I’ve forgotten.

There’s absolutely no sense of foreboding, none of the apprehension I felt before leaving Providence. All of that has passed away. The drive is relaxing me. I’m glad I didn’t stay home.

I think I’ll even go as far as Worcester before turning back. And then…I’ve written this part down before. I just stopped, went back through the pages, and found it:

And one moment she isn’t there, and the next moment, there she is. It’s just like that. Not so much like I came upon her. It’s more like she just appeared.

Yes. Exactly like that. Or I only blinked at an inopportune moment, and it
seemed
like that. Does it matter which? No, not at all.

A nude woman standing in the breakdown lane, gazing out into the dark towards the Blackstone River, caught in the low beam of the Honda’s headlights. Later, Abalyn will want to know why I stopped. Eva will ask me, as well. And I’ll say, “What else would I have done? What would you have done?” And I’ll say, “I don’t know why I stopped.”

Because she could not stop for me, I kindly stopped for death.

I don’t “hit the brakes,” but I do slow down pretty quickly. I surely haven’t gone more than a hundred yards before I pull over. I sit there with the Honda’s engine idling, my eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. I linger there in the car for a couple of minutes, maybe, at the most. When I cut the engine, the night becomes all at once enormously, profoundly, oppressively silent—but just for the space of a few heartbeats, a handful of breaths—and then there are insect trills and clicks and the throaty songs of frogs. I leave the lights on and get out of the Honda. There’s a high granite wall on the right side of the northbound lane, a rocky wound sliced into the earth however long ago the road was made. Once upon a time, a wooded hillside sloped gently down to the river, but men and their gelignite made short work of that and all the stone and soil and all those trees were carted away, and now there is but this wall of granite.

I turn from it and look both ways before crossing the road. My shoes crunch in the gravel as I walk cautiously towards the woman. I can’t see her right off, of course. I’ve gone too far and the taillights don’t reach that far. I even consider I might have imagined it all. I’ve imagined lots and lots of things over the years, and I consider that I might have hallucinated the woman. Or, instead of making an appeal to my insanity, it might only have been a disquieting optical illusion that any driver could have experienced. I’m not running, or even walking at a fast pace. I’m wishing the moon were full, or at
least first quarter, because then there would be so much more light. But then my eyes begin to adjust, and I can see her (there actually is a small bit of reflected reddish glow from the taillights, and that helps). If she’s noticed me, she doesn’t act like she has.

“Are you okay?” I call out. She doesn’t reply, or give any sign that she’s heard. I stop walking and call out to her a second time. “Do you need help? Has something happened? Were you in an accident? Did your car break down?” In retrospect, the last two questions will strike me as very absurd, but there you go. What part of this doesn’t strike me as absurd?

Now I can see well enough that I realize her hair’s wet, and I glance towards the river, hidden in the darkness, but smelling much stronger than it smelled when I was only driving past. I look back to the woman and notice that she’s standing near the beginning of a dirt path that leads down towards the water.
Fishermen made that path,
I think.
Fishermen and people with canoes and kayaks.

“Were you swimming?” I ask, and finally she turns her head in my direction.

What happened next, I’ve written it down already, back on page 66, and what’s the point of trying to reword it, reward it, rewind it? This is what I wrote days and days ago, more or less:

“Are you okay?” I ask her again.

It’ll sound silly if I say that she’s unearthly, but she
is
unearthly. Worse, it’s presumptuous, right? It presupposes I know everything that
is
earthly, and so would recognize anything that
isn’t
. I don’t, of course. Know unearthly from earthly, or vice versa. But that’s the way she strikes me, standing by Route 122. That’s the word that first pops into my head—
unearthly
.

She narrows her eyes, as though the faint red light from the car is too bright for her. I guess it would have been, after all that darkness. Her pupils would have suddenly contracted, and her eyes would have hurt. Later, I’ll see that her eyes are blue, a shade of blue
that Rosemary Anne used to call “bottle-blue.” (If this were November, and not July, I’d see that her eyes are an unusual shade of brown, a brown that almost seems golden.) Regardless, she narrows her eyes, and they flash iridescent eyeshine, and she blinks at me. I think
feral
, which is much more appropriate and far less presumptuous than was
unearthly
. She smiles very, very slightly, so slightly, in fact, that I may be mistaken. She might
not
be smiling. She takes a step towards me, and I ask, a third time, if she’s okay.

(Rewrote more of that than I thought I would.)

I add, “Do you need me to call for help?”

Her lank, wet hair hangs down about her shoulders, clinging to her skin in dark tendrils. She licks at her thin lips, and her skin glistens. In passing, it reminds me of the skin of an amphibian, a frog or a salamander, the way it glistens. And in passing, I have the impression that when I touch her (and I know now that I
will
touch her), her skin will be slimy.

She takes another step towards me, and now there can’t be more than ten feet remaining between us.

“Imp?” she asks, and that should startle me, but it doesn’t. Not in the least.

“Do I know you?” I ask her, and she frowns and looks confused.

“No,” she says, almost whispering, “not yet.”

A pickup truck rushes past then,
roars
past, going much faster than forty-five miles an hour. It’s heading towards Millville, and so it passes so near to us that if I’d held out my left arm, the car might have hit me. Might well have taken my hand off, broken my arm, whatever happens. We’re washed in the brilliance of the headlights. The driver doesn’t even slow down, and I’ll always wonder what, if anything, she or he might have glimpsed.

The headlights leave me half-blind for a few seconds, and I stand there cursing and blinking at the afterimages.

“It’s not safe, just standing here,” I say, sounding annoyed. “A
wonder that truck didn’t hit us both. You know that, right? Where are your clothes? Did you leave them down by the water?” And I point at the darkness concealing the Blackstone River.

In the quiet after the car, the quiet that is punctuated only by katydids and crickets and frogs and an owl, she says, “I have dreamed it again.” I have no doubt this is what she says, and, too, “Till your singing eyes and fingers.”

“It’s not safe here,” I tell her once more. “And the mosquitoes must be eating you alive.”

And she asks, “Who are hearsed that die on the sea?” She asks as if I haven’t spoken, as if it’s perfectly safe to stand naked at the side of Route 122 in the middle of the night with trucks racing by.

I’m as sure she said that as I am that she wasn’t wearing any clothes. It’s from “The Whale Watch,” chapter 117 of
Moby-Dick
. I don’t know that yet, of course. I’ve never even read
Moby-Dick
, not this summer evening.

I’ve stood there asking questions long enough, and I walk up to her and say, “Come on,” holding out my hand. She takes it. I’m relieved that her skin isn’t slimy at all, just chilled from having been wet. “If I can’t get you to make sense, I can at least get you someplace safe,” and she doesn’t resist or say anything else as I lead her back across the road to the Honda.

I give her the light cotton sweater I brought with me, but she just stands there holding it, so I put it on her myself. I button it up, covering her small breasts and her flat belly. There’s a flannel blanket in the backseat, from a trip to the beach, and I wrap it about her waist. “It’s not much,” I say, “but it’s better than before.”

When I suggest that she get into the Honda, she only hesitates a moment. On the drive back to Providence and Willow Street she doesn’t say another word. I repeat questions she already hasn’t bothered to answer. I ask new questions, such as “Where do you live?” and “Do you need to go to a hospital?” and “Is there anyone you’d
like me to call for you?” She doesn’t answer any of them, either, and I start to wonder if she’s deaf. She switches on the radio, but doesn’t seem content with any of the stations, roaming restlessly up and down the dial. I don’t tell her to stop. I figure it’s something to keep her occupied while I try to think what I ought to do with her. And then I’m home, pulling into my driveway, wondering why I can’t recall most of the trip back from Massachusetts; wondering, too, why I’ve brought the woman home with me; wondering, finally, what Abalyn is going to say.

And so this is the night I meet Eva Canning. The first night I meet her for the first time, I mean.

It’s as true as I can manage. It’s almost factual.

I was in the kitchen eating a cucumber and cream-cheese sandwich with black pepper, and it suddenly occurred to me that if I
were
writing a novel, or even a short story, or novella, or novelette—if I were writing any of those things, I’d have neglected to say very much at all about Abalyn. Or about our relationship during that late June and July, the short time we were together, before she left. A critic might fairly say that I’ve neglected to include enough characterization. If this were a story by Beatrix Potter or A. A. Milne or Lewis Carroll, I might pause here and say something like, “Oh dear me!” and then apologize and promptly rectify the omission.

But whatever I’m writing, it isn’t any of those things, and
I
know who Abalyn Armitage was and is, as much as I will ever know her. It also occurs to me that maybe I’ve not, so far, said more about her or about us because in this first version of my ghost story, we weren’t together very long before Eva came and Abalyn went away. So, in
this
rendition, I really didn’t have the chance to get to know her very well, and there’s not much to say about us. So, perhaps in the other version, the November and wolf version, when it seems that we were together much longer than a few weeks. I might just be waiting until
I tell the story that way round to write about Abalyn in greater detail. From here, though, it’s all supposition and not much else, these thoughts of why I might have proceeded this way and how I might proceed another way farther along.

I’m afraid you’ve made an awful, stupid mistake, India Morgan Phelps, choosing to relate this ghost story as you remember it, as two separate narratives, as a particle and a wave, the devil
and
the deep blue sea, instead of boiling it down to a single narrative free of paradox and contradiction. I’m very afraid frustration will win out before much longer, and you’ll give up, never finish this. It’s difficult enough to hold both versions in my head, though both strike me as equally true (though, as I’ve said, the first has more evidence to support its factualness), much less translate these competing, parallel histories into prose.

Live and learn, or at least that’s what I keep hearing people say. I’ve heard them say that all my life. Even Caroline and Rosemary said, “Live and learn.” Why can I only turn half that trick?

When I got back to Willow Street, a little more than two hours after I left, Abalyn was still awake. She’d said she would be, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. She’d finished her article and was watching a movie on her television. Abalyn watched a lot of movies when she was here, but I hardly ever watched them with her. I don’t like movies much more than I like games.

I led the woman up the stairs to my front door. I still didn’t know that her name was Eva Canning, because she hadn’t said anything more to me since asking “Who are hearsed that die on the sea?” I unlocked the door and asked her in. She hesitated, not immediately accepting the invitation. She stood there in the hallway, her hair almost dry now. She squinted her cornflower blue eyes at me, then looked back over her shoulder at the stairs leading back down to the foyer.

“What’s wrong?” I wanted to know.

She began to take a step forwards, then hesitated, and asked me, “You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Come on. You can’t just stand out there in the hall all night.”

She stepped across the threshold, and behind me, Abalyn asked, “Who is it, Imp?” Abalyn hadn’t met many of my friends, in part because I didn’t have many. She’d met Jonathan, who used to be a barista at White Electric Coffee on Westminster, and I’m pretty sure she’d met Ellen, who worked downtown at Cellar Stories, but has since moved away to be with her boyfriend.

“We have a guest,” I replied, trying to sound casual, just, slowly, beginning to realize what a peculiar thing I’d done, bringing Eva home. Or how it might seem that way to Abalyn, who’s a surprisingly practical person for someone who makes her living writing reviews of video games.

I shut the door, and Abalyn got up from the sofa. She had the remote in her hand, and she paused the DVD. Then she stood there, smiling uncertainly at Eva Canning, and Eva Canning said, “Hello, Abalyn.”