The Drowning Girl (26 page)

We leave Providence about one o’clock. It’s hot that day, up in the nineties. The wind through the open windows does nothing much to keep us cool, and the smell of sweat puts me in mind of the
sea, which puts me in mind of Eva Canning. I write in my notebook, and
Eva
Abalyn drives and stares straight ahead. She never takes her eyes off the road.

The night before, Abalyn googled Eva Canning. It’s weird all the words I never knew existed before Abalyn came to live with me, words like “googled.” I told her it was amazing how much she’d found, and she said, “Yeah, well. I was going to open a private-detective agency, but the name Google was already trademarked.” She got 473 hits, almost all of which were clearly other people and not
my
Eva Canning. But there was one thing. I have Abalyn’s printouts here beside me. One article from the
Monterey County Herald
and another from the
San Francisco Chronicle
, a few others, all from April 1991. They connect a woman named Eva Canning to a woman named Jacova Angevine. In one of the articles there’s a photograph of Eva standing beside Jacova Angevine, who was the leader of a cult, a cult that ended in a mass drowning, a mass suicide in the spring of 1991. Angevine led them into the sea at a place called Moss Landing in California, not far from Monterey. I’ll quote a short passage from the
Herald
and then one from the
Chronicle
article here:

“The bodies of 53 men and women, all of whom may have been part of a religious group known as the Open Door of Night, have been recovered following Wednesday’s drownings near Moss Landing, CA. Deputies have described the deaths as a mass suicide. The victims were all reported to be between 22 and 36 years old. Authorities fear that at least two dozen more may have died in the bizarre episode and recovery efforts continue along the coast of Monterey County” (
Monterey County Herald
).

And:

“The protestors are demanding that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) end its ongoing exploration of the submarine canyon immediately. The 25-mile-long canyon, they claim,
is a sacred site that is being desecrated by scientists. Jacova Angevine, former Berkeley professor and leader of the controversial Open Door of Night cult, compares the launching of the new submersible
Tiburón II
to the ransacking of the Egyptian pyramids by grave robbers” (
San Francisco Chronicle
; note that
tiburón
is Spanish for shark).

Obviously, the second article was written before the first. In an article from a website devoted to suicide cults, the names of most of the people who drowned themselves are listed. One of them is a thirty-year-old woman named Eva Canning from Newport, Rhode Island. The website speculates that she was Jacova Angevine’s lover, and listed her as a priestess in the Open Door of Night (which some journalists called the “Lemming Cult”). The name Eva Canning appears in the acknowledgments of a book,
Waking Leviathan
, that Jacova Angevine published several years before, and something somewhere said the book was written before the cult was actually formed.

I sat and listened and wrote in my notebook while Abalyn read the articles to me. When she was done, there was a long silence, and then she asked, “Well?”

“I don’t know what any of that means,” I replied. “It can’t be the same Eva Canning.”

“I showed you the photograph, Imp.”

“The photograph isn’t very clear.” (That’s true. It wasn’t.) “It can’t be the same Eva Canning, and you know it. I know you know that.”

Abalyn pointed out that one of the articles mentioned many of the bodies being in “an advanced state of decay” by the time they were recovered by the Coast Guard. Some appeared to have been fed upon by sharks (id est,
tiburón
).

“Maybe she didn’t drown there, Imp. Maybe they made a mistake when the bodies were identified, and she came back East. That’s
practically murder, leading those people to their deaths like that. She’d be hiding.”

“And not using her real name,” I pointed out.

Abalyn stared at me, and I stared at the parlor window, the moon, and the headlights of passing cars down on Willow Street. There was a question I didn’t want to ask, but finally I asked it anyway.

“Did you ever hear of this cult? Before today, I mean. I never did, and wouldn’t this have been a pretty big deal? Wouldn’t we have heard about it before now?”

Abalyn opened her mouth, but then she shut it again without actually saying anything.

“I don’t know what any of this means,” I said again. “But it can’t be the same Eva Canning. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense neither of us ever heard of this before.”

“We were just kids,” she said.

“We weren’t even born when Jim Jones made all those people poison themselves, or when Charles Manson went to prison. But we know all about them. This sounds at least as awful as both of those, but we’ve never heard of it. I think it’s a hoax.”

“It’s not a hoax,” she said, but then dropped the subject. She threw the printouts away, but later, when she wasn’t watching, I fished them out of the kitchen trash and wiped the coffee grounds off them. I added them to my file devoted to the Siren of Millville, the file I’d also labeled “Eva Canning.”

The sun is a white devil, the broiling eye of a god I don’t believe in, gazing down at all the world. The Honda’s tires hum against the blacktop. We drive north and west, following the heat haze dancing above 122, through Berkeley, Ashton, Cumberland Hill, Woonsocket. We cross the state line into Massachusetts, and we cross the Blackstone River, and we drive slowly through Millville. I see a black dog at the side of the road. It’s busy chewing at what I think
might be a woodchuck that’d been hit by a car as it was trying to cross the road.

“You’ll have to show me where,” Abalyn says. She sounds hot and scared and tired. I know she’s all those things. I’m only hot and tired. My head is too filled with Lewis Carroll to be scared. “The Lobster Quadrille” rattles and bangs through my head, like church bells and thunder.

I showed her the place where I’d found Eva, and the spot where I’d pulled over that night. She turned around in someone’s drive, so we wouldn’t have to cross the highway, and she parked my car almost exactly where Eva was standing, naked and dripping wet, when I first spoke to her. It’s so hot I can hardly breathe. I think I’ll smother, it’s so hot. It’s a little after two o’clock, but sometimes the clock set into the dash runs slow, and other times it’s fast. You can’t ever trust that clock. It’s fickle.

“This is such a bad idea,” she says again, before we get out of the car. I don’t reply. I take my notebook with me. We leave the windows rolled down.

It’s easy to find the trail leading down to the river, though it’s half-hidden between the brush. I go ahead of Abalyn, and we’re careful to watch for poison ivy. I cut my ankle on creepers and blackberry briars. The trail is steep, and no more than two feet wide. Here and there, it’s deeply gullied from rain. The farther we walk from the road, the more the air smells like the Blackstone River and the plants growing all around us, and the less it smells like the road and melting asphalt. There are monarch butterflies and clumsy, bumbling bumblebees.

At the bottom of the winding trail, there are a couple of trees, but it’s not much cooler in the shade than in the sun. I’ve counted my steps from the car, and I took fifty steps. We’ve come to a wide rocky clearing. There are patches of mud between the granite boulders. The river’s the color of pea soup, and the water’s so still it
hardly seems to be flowing at all. I spot three turtles sunning themselves on a log, and I point them out to Abalyn. Iridescent dragonflies skim low over the pea-green river, and the air throbs with the songs of cicadas and other insects. Every now and then, a fish causes ripples on the surface. I will wonder, hours later, if this is the same spot where Saltonstall was sketching the day he saw the woman come down from the woods on the other side.

Abalyn sits down on one of the boulders and uses the front of her T-shirt to wipe the sweat from her face. She takes out her cigarettes and lights one, so that now the air also smells of burning tobacco.

“So, just what are we looking for, Imp?”

“Maybe we’re not looking
for
anything,” I reply. “Maybe we’re just looking,” and she shakes her head and stares out across the river.

“This is bullshit,” she says. She almost hisses the last word. She sounds like an impatient snake would sound, if impatient snakes could talk. Sibilant, as though a forked tongue is flicking out between fangs. She sits on her rock, and I stand near her. I’m not sure how long, but no more than twenty minutes, I think. Yeah, twenty minutes, at the most.

“Imp, there’s nothing to see,” Abalyn says, in an imploring sort of tone that also says,
Can we please get the fuck out of here?
Out loud, she adds, “I think I’m about to have fucking heatstroke.”

And then I see the footprints in the mud. They must have been there the whole time, but I was too busy searching the river and the trees on the other side of the river to notice them. They’re small, slender, long-toed. They might have been left by a kid who came down to swim. Anyway, that’s what Abalyn says when I point them out to her. They lead out of the water, then back in again, making a half circle on the shore. They don’t seem to lead back up the trail towards the highway. But, I tell myself, maybe the dirt trail is too hard and dry for bare feet to leave footprints.

“Come on, Imp. We’re going home. You need to get out of this
heat,” she says, and flicks the butt of her cigarette into the river. She stands and very gently touches my left elbow.

I clutch my notebook to my chest and stare at the footprints for a couple more minutes, “The Lobster Quadrille” louder than the cicadas screaming in the trees. I think of seeing Eva (or only thinking I was seeing Eva) that day at Wayland Square, and how she hadn’t been wearing any shoes.

“I’m sorry,” Abalyn says. “If this didn’t help you, I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry I dragged you all the way out here,” I reply, and my voice has the odd rhythm that comes from taking great care to insert each word between the syllables of “The Lobster Quadrille.”

“When we get home, promise me you’ll call your doctor again, okay?”

I didn’t. Promise, I mean. But I let her lead me back to the car.

CLIMAX

Act Three: 7 Chinese Brothers

I
t didn’t get any better after the drive to the river. The earwig, I mean. That’s what Caroline used to call getting something stuck in your head—a song, a jingle from a television commercial. I’m sure she would have called getting “The Lobster Quadrille” stuck in my head an earwig, too. Also, I remember an episode of a TV show called
Night Gallery
, one I saw when I was living with Aunt Elaine in Cranston. In the episode, a man pays another man to place an earwig in the ear of a third man, a romantic rival. But there’s a mix-up. The earwig is mistakenly inserted in the ear of the man who paid the man, and it lays eggs in his brain. Earwigs don’t really do that,
tunnel into people’s brains and lay eggs in their heads. But it scared me all the same, and for a while I slept with cotton stuffed in my ears. In the
Night Gallery
episode, the man with the earwig in his head was in unspeakable agony as the insect ate its way through his brain. I don’t think it was all that different from what Eva Canning did to me, when she leaned close that day in the RISD Museum and whispered in my ear.

This earwig of mine, these intrusive, echoing thoughts, she set them in motion. She said the words that turned the Aokigahara into the Suicide Forest. She laid her eggs between the convolutions of my cerebellum. She honeycombed the living gray matter, reshaping it to her own ends. I knew that, though I didn’t dare tell Dr. Ogilvy or Abalyn or anyone else. I was crazy enough without telling tales of a siren who’d bewitched me because I’d not had the good sense to follow the example set by Odysseus’ crew and fill my ears with wax. Or even cotton balls. I brought her home, and she rewarded me with a cacophony of Victorian nonsense.

I didn’t call Dr. Ogilvy when we got home. Abalyn kept asking me to, but I didn’t. I told her it would pass, because it always passed. But it wouldn’t, not this time, so I knew that I was lying.

And then there was another day, and I filled up my notebook and then bought another. I used up two ballpoint pens and started on a third. It had never, ever been even half this bad, the unwelcome, deafening thoughts clanging about my mind, not even before my meds. I don’t suffer from migraines, but maybe migraines are like having the same string of words running on an endless loop through your skull day and night and even when you dream. The compulsion to set the words to paper, and the inability to stop. I doubled my Valium dose, then tripled it. Abalyn watched, except when she was trying not to watch. She tried to get me to eat, but the Valium was making me sick to my stomach, and, besides, it was hard to eat while writing in my notebooks.