The Drowning Girl (18 page)

“You talk about her,” Abalyn said. “You always talk about her.”

“Her who?” I asked, even though I knew exactly what her answer would be.

“That Eva woman,” she replied. “You wake me up talking about Eva Canning. Talking
to
Eva Canning. A few times, you were sort of singing.…” And she trailed off.

“I most certainly do not sing in my sleep,” I laughed. “No one sings in their sleep.” I had no idea whether people do or don’t sing in their sleep, but when she said that, it gave me a heavy, gelid feeling deep in my belly.

Rosemary Anne, did you sing in your sleep? When they tied you down to your bed in your room at Butler Hospital at 345 Blackstone Boulevard, did you sing in your sleep?

Grandmother Caroline, did you ever dream of songs and sing them to empty rooms where no one could hear?

“Why do you answer the phone when it hasn’t rang?” she asked me.

“When it hasn’t
rung
,” I corrected.

“Why do you do that? I never saw you do it before you brought her home.”

“How long had you known me before then, Abalyn? Maybe a week, that’s all. I’ve probably been doing it all my life. You wouldn’t know.”

“No, I probably wouldn’t,” she sighed, speaking and sighing in a single reluctant breath. I could tell she wanted to stop, but now that she’d started this, she wasn’t going to. Stop, I mean.

Caroline, didn’t you ever happen to pick up the telephone when it wasn’t ringing?

I thought to myself,
Please don’t ask me anything else, Abalyn. I can’t mix the right yellow, and I’m sweating like a pig, and please don’t keep asking me these questions I can’t answer.

“I found something,” she said very softly. I didn’t turn to see if she was still gazing out the window. “It was an accident. I wasn’t snooping. There was a folder on the kitchen table, and I accidentally knocked it off.”

Of course, it was the manila file I’d begun keeping years earlier, the one labeled “Perishable Shippen.” What I’d learned about “the Siren of Millville” and
The Drowning Girl
. A day or two before, I’d added Eva Canning’s name to the tab. I’d written it in green ink.

“My hand hardly brushed against it.”

I kept my eyes on the palette; the paint there had turned a very pale and sickly orange.

“Everything inside spilled out across the floor,” she continued. “I was gathering it all back up, to return it to the folder, Imp. I swear, that’s all that I was doing.”

“You read it?” I asked, biting down on my lip hard enough to taste a faint hint of blood, like iron in water.

She didn’t respond.

I set my palette down among the scatter of paint tubes and brushes. “That stuff is private,” I said, and my voice wasn’t any louder than hers.

“It was an accident,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to knock the folder off the table. I was cleaning up after lunch yesterday.”

“But it wasn’t an accident, reading what was in it. No one reads by accident.” I didn’t sound angry anymore, and I realized that I
wasn’t
. The anger had come and gone quick as lightning, and now I just felt sort of tired and weary of the color yellow.

“I’m worried about you, that’s all. I wouldn’t have brought any of this up, except I’m worried about you. You’re obsessed with this woman.”

I turned towards Abalyn, and when I moved, the stool wobbled, and I reached out for the easel to steady myself. She wasn’t still staring out the window; she was staring at me. She looked concerned. She almost looked frightened. All I wanted to say was that she shouldn’t worry, that sometimes I get a thing stuck in my head, but it eventually passes. Just like I always find the colors I need, stuff that gets stuck in my head always gets unstuck, sooner or later. But I didn’t say any of that. What I said instead was only meant to make Abalyn stop talking and leave me alone again, not to reassure her.

“I pay a doctor to worry about me,” I told her. “Frankly, it seems kind of presumptuous, giving me the third degree when you hardly know me that well. This really isn’t any of your business. You’re not my keeper. You’re only just barely my girlfriend.”

She sat there a moment, watching me, before she nodded and stood up. She dusted off the seat of her blue jeans.

“If that came out harsh, it wasn’t meant to. But I don’t want to discuss this with you.”

She nodded and said, “Tell me when you get hungry, and I’ll make us something to eat. Or I’ll go for takeout. Whichever.” She left, easing the door shut, the same way she had eased it open when she came in. I went to the window and stayed there until it was dark.

I’m almost done here. With the pretense of a fourth chapter. Soon, I know, I’m going to quit, and when (or if) I come back to this manuscript, I’ll type “5” seventeen lines down a new piece of paper.
No particular reason. The events of that summer are flawless in their continuity, and a more honest woman wouldn’t divide it up into episodes. There wouldn’t be section breaks, pound signs, and numbers denoting new chapters. If I were telling my ghost story the way I should, there might not even be punctuation. Or spaces between one word and the next. I don’t hear punctuation marks in my head. My thoughts all run together, and I slice them apart and nail them into place here. I might as well be a lepidopterist neatly pinning dead butterflies and moths onto foam boards. These words are all corpses now, corpses of moths and butterflies. Sparrows in stoppered jars.

By accident, cleaning up after herself, Abalyn knocked a folder off the kitchen table. I shouldn’t have left it there, but I wasn’t used to having someone else around. I wasn’t accustomed to concealing my fixations. It wasn’t her fault. Gravity took over and the pages spilled out, and she read what was on them. What was there, it would have struck her as odd, and we are curious animals, people are, human beings. The folder held an assortment of photocopies from newspapers, magazines, and library books, some of them going back almost a hundred years.

Had she asked, I might have shown them to her.

Or not. She didn’t ask, so I can’t know.

I never learned which of the pages she read and which she didn’t. I never asked, and Abalyn never volunteered the information. She may have read them all, or only a few of them. Those sheets of paper are only butterflies trapped in a killing jar. They’re only the feathers of broken, fallen birds. I did wonder, though, which she read. Sitting here in my blue room, I still wonder. But that’s only natural, right? It’s normal to wonder, even if knowing doesn’t matter and wouldn’t change anything.

That evening during dinner neither of us said very much. Afterwards, she went to the parlor and the sofa and her laptop, her digital,
pixeled worlds. Her time displacement. I went to the bedroom, where I sat reading back over my “clippings” (I think of them that way, even if that’s not what they are). I scanned headlines and notes I’d scribbled in the margins. There are two photocopied newspaper articles, in particular, I can remember reading that night. Reading start to finish, I mean.

One bears the headline “Search for Mystery Woman’s Body Halted, Hoax Suspected,” from
The Evening Call
(Woonsocket, Friday, June 12th, 1914). It describes how two fifteen-year-old boys had been paddling a canoe along the Blackstone River near Millville, Massachusetts, when they’d happened upon the body of a woman floating facedown in the murky water. They prodded her with an oar, to be sure she was dead, but didn’t try to pull her from the river. They went at once to a local constable, and that same afternoon, and again the next day, men from Millville probed the river with poles, and used a fishing net to drag the area where the boys claimed to have sighted the corpse. But no corpse was found. Finally, everyone gave up and decided there’d never been a dead woman, that the boys were bored that summer day and fabricated the story to get everyone stirred up.

And the other article I’m fairly certain I read back over that night comes from the
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
(“Bather Claims Attacked and Injured by Unseen Animal,” Tuesday, September 4th, 1951). Three girls (their ages aren’t given) were swimming above Rolling Dam in Blackstone, near Millville, when one screamed and began thrashing and calling out for help. Her name was Millicent Hartnett (
Mill
icent from
Mill
ville); her friends’ names aren’t given. When the girls reached the shore, they were horrified to see a deep gash in Millicent’s right leg, just above the knee. The wound was serious enough it required twenty stitches. Authorities suspected a snapping turtle (
Chelydra serpentina
) was responsible, or that the girl had caught her leg on a submerged log. Millicent claimed otherwise.
She said she’d seen what had bitten her, and that it wasn’t a turtle or a log. But she refused to say what it
had
been. “I saw it up close, but no one will believe me,” she said. “I don’t want people thinking I’m crazy or lying.” Millicent’s mother told reporters that her daughter was a good student, that she was practical, trustworthy, and not the sort of girl given to tall tales. Swimmers were advised to avoid the dam, and the three girls were said to have been so upset they swore they’d never swim in the river again.

Both boys became soldiers and died in France four years later. Millicent Hartnett grew up, got married, and lives with her oldest son in Uxbridge. It wasn’t very hard to find these things out. I’ve often thought about contacting Millicent, who would be seventy-six or so, and trying to get her to tell me what she saw in the river that day. But I don’t think she’d talk to me. She might not even remember, though she must still have a scar on her ankle.

If Abalyn didn’t read either of those articles, there are others just as peculiar she might have read, instead. About eleven o’clock, I closed the folder and slipped it under my side of the bed. I switched off the lamp and lay in the dark, listening to the noises rising up from the street and the sounds from the apartments above and below mine. Abalyn slept on the sofa that night, and in the morning we didn’t talk about the folder. Mostly, more than anything, I was embarrassed, and was glad I had to be at work early. She was gone when I got home, but had left a note saying she was with friends. The note promised she wouldn’t be late, and she wasn’t. I didn’t tell her how it scared me, coming in and finding she wasn’t there, how I’d thought maybe she’d left for good. How I checked to make sure all her stuff was still there. When she got home, Abalyn was a little drunk. She smelled like beer and Old Spice aftershave lotion and cigarette smoke. She told me she loved me, and we fucked, and then I lay awake for a long, long time, watching her sleep.

“The next day,” Imp typed, “I apologized.”

I’m not sure if I really did. Apologize, I mean. But I like to believe that I did. Regardless, I am sure that was the day I asked her to read a short story I’d written and that had been published a couple of years earlier in
The Massachusetts Review
. If I didn’t apologize in so many words, letting her read that story was another and more personal sort of apology. I no longer have a copy of the magazine, but I’m attaching the typescript, because I know it’s part of my ghost story. It’s a part that I’d already committed to paper well before I met Eva Canning, the first time and the second time, in July and in November. The story’s not factual, but it’s true. I’m stapling it to this page because I can’t find a paper clip.

BY INDIA MORGAN PHELPS

T
he building’s elevator is busted, and so I have to drag my ass up twelve flights of stairs. Her apartment is smaller and more tawdry than I expected, but I’m not entirely sure I could say what I thought I’d find at the top of all those stairs. I don’t know this part of Manhattan very well, this ugly wedge of buildings one block over from South Street and Roosevelt Drive and the ferry terminal. She keeps reminding me that if I look out the window (there’s only one), I can see the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems a great source of pride, that she has a view of the bridge and the East River. The apartment is too hot, filled with soggy heat pouring off the radiators, and there are so many unpleasant odors competing for my attention that I’d be hard-pressed to assign any one of them priority over the rest. Mildew. Dust. Stale cigarette smoke. Better I say the apartment smells shut away, and leave it at that. The place is crammed wall to wall with threadbare, dust-skimmed antiques, the tattered refuse of Victorian and Edwardian bygones. I have trouble imagining how she navigates the clutter in her wheelchair, which is something of an antique itself. I compliment the Tiffany lamps, all of which appear
not to be reproductions, and are in considerably better shape than most of the other furnishings. She smiles, revealing dentures stained by nicotine and neglect. At least, I assume they’re dentures. She switches on one of the table lamps, its shade a circlet of stained-glass dragonflies, and tells me it was a Christmas gift from a playwright. He’s dead now, she says. She tells me his name, but it’s no one I’ve ever heard of, and I admit this to her. Her yellow-brown smile doesn’t waver.