The Drowning Girl (27 page)

Finally, on the day
after
the day after the day at the Blackstone River, she grew so scared and angry, she threatened to call an ambulance. But she didn’t. Instead, she started crying and went for a walk. I’ll say that this was the third of August, even if it wasn’t. The sun was down, and the apartment was stifling, though all the windows were open and the fans were running on high.

Abalyn slammed the door, and the very next second the telephone rang. Not my cell phone, but the old avocado-colored phone mounted on the kitchen wall. The one I hardly ever use. It’s so old it has a dial. Hardly anyone ever calls me on that phone, and I’ve often wondered why I keep paying not to have the service shut off. The door slammed; the phone rang. I was sitting on the sofa, and I stopped writing halfway through the line about how delightful it will be when they take us up and throw us with the lobsters out to sea. The phone rang at least a dozen times before I got up and crossed the parlor to the kitchen and answered it. Maybe it was my boss, calling to tell me I was fired. Maybe it was Aunt Elaine, or even Dr. Ogilvy, though they both always called my cell number.

I lifted the receiver, but I don’t think I heard anything for a whole minute. Sometimes I believe I
did
hear something, the same sound you hear when you put a conch shell to your ear. So, either there was silence or there was a sound that imitated the sea and wind. When Eva Canning spoke, I wasn’t even a little bit surprised. I don’t know what she said. I’m pretty sure I forgot it as soon as she stopped talking and I hung up. But it seems as though she talked for a very long while. It seems she told me great and wonderful secrets, and also secrets that were ugly and malicious. When it was over, “The Lobster Quadrille” was still reverberating in that constructed space between my eyes and pounding at my temples and slithering in through my ears. But I no longer needed to write it down, and that may have been the greatest relief I’ve ever known (at least in the July version of my haunting).

I walked back to the parlor and went to the window and stood
contemplating Willow Street. There were chimney swifts swooping low above the roofs, chasing mosquitoes. Several Hispanic teenagers had set up a table across the street and were playing dominoes by streetlight and listening to loud Mexican pop music. There was no breeze whatsoever. Far off to the north I heard a train whistle. It might almost have been any summer night in the Armory. Maybe I was waiting for Abalyn to come home. Maybe I was standing there watching for her.

When Abalyn didn’t come back, I shut the window and locked it. I didn’t go to any of the other windows to shut and lock them. It was only important that I shut and locked
that
one. There was something symbolic in the gesture. Closing a window was shutting a door. The Open Door of Night? It was Caroline turning on the gas, and Rosemary Anne growing tired of fighting her restraints and finding the resolution to swallow her own tongue.

I recall all those little details about what I saw outside the window, but I can’t remember walking to the bathroom. I don’t remember anything between the window and being in the bathroom, flipping the light switch (on and off seven times) and turning the cold water (on and off seven times). I remember the bathroom smelled like Abalyn’s peppermint soap, and that I could still hear the music coming from the street, even over the singsong drone of “The Lobster Quadrille.” I sat on the rim of the tub and watched as the cast-iron tub filled. The heat was so unbearable, and I knew the water would
be heaven. I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t thought of taking a cold bath earlier that day. I blamed the notebook and the pen and Abalyn being so upset.

I held my hand beneath the tap, and it was like dipping my fingers into liquid ice, almost
too
cold. I undressed, and let my clothes lie where they fell on the blue and white tiles. When the tub was full enough it might slosh over, I shut off the faucet and stepped into the water. It burned, that’s how cold the water was. But I knew it would only burn at first, and then I would be numb, and I wouldn’t have to be hot anymore or ever again. I stood in the burning water, thinking how this water had come all the way from the Scituate Reservoir, seven or eight miles to the west. In the winter, the reservoir sometimes freezes over and there are skaters. In the summer, it is the darkest dark blue. I thought about the many streams that flow into the reservoir, and the water that comes from underground, and about the rain, and how, in the end, it all comes from the sea. And how, in the end, it all goes back to the sea, one way or another.

I lay down in the tub, and gasped and tightly clutched the edges until the initial shock passed.

My hair flowed out around my shoulders, across my breasts and belly like seaweed floating in a tide pool. As I sank deeper and deeper, the tub began to overflow and splash the floor.

I didn’t shut my eyes. I didn’t want to shut my eyes, and I knew Eva wouldn’t want me to. I sank in the shallows of the tub. I pulled my head under, and marveled at the silvery mirror above me. It might as well have been mercury spilled across the sky, the way it shimmered.

The first breath was easy. I just opened my mouth and inhaled. But then I was choking, my entire body fighting the flood pouring down my throat and into my lungs and belly. I fought back, but I almost wasn’t able to manage the second breath.

I was taking the sea inside me, even if I couldn’t taste salt. I was taking the sea inside, and as my lungs caught fire and my body struggled against me, the earwig died. It died, or it merely faded away, and there was no noise remaining in my head except the sloshing of water and the stubborn, insistent beating of my heart. The mercury sky swishing to and fro above was going black, and I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth.

FALLING ACTION

Act Four: Try Not To Breathe

A
nd then Abalyn’s strong hands were digging into my shoulders, hauling me up and out of the ice, lifting me from the tub. Maybe I don’t
truly
remember this part. Maybe I was unconscious for this part, but if these aren’t genuine memories, they’ve fooled me for two and a half years. Abalyn set me down on the bathroom floor, and held me while I coughed and vomited water and whatever I’d had for lunch until my throat was raw and my chest ached. She was cursing herself and cursing me and sobbing like I’d never heard anyone cry before or since. I’ve never cried the way she was crying, never been so wracked with sorrow and anger and confusion that I
had
to cry that way. Sorrow and anger and confusion. It’s presumptuous of me, acting like I know what she was feeling while I puked and sputtered in her arms.

When there was nothing left inside me, Abalyn picked me up again and carried me to bed. I’d never realized she was so strong, strong enough to carry me like that. But she did. She bundled the sheets and comforter about me, and kept asking what the hell I thought I was doing. I couldn’t possibly have answered, but she kept asking me anyway.
Imp, what the hell were you trying to do?

She wanted to call an ambulance (again), but I was able to shake my head, and that stopped her. I’m surprised that stopped her, but it did.

Two days later, Abalyn left me, and she never came back again.

“Stop this,” Imp typed.

I also typed.

“You don’t have to do this anymore. You need to stop. It doesn’t matter what she said. So stop. Stop and put these pages away and be done with this bullshit. Have mercy for yourself.”

“No,” I type. “You can only set it aside for now. But you
can
do that. You’ve said what matters. You didn’t drown, and the earwig died, and Abalyn left, and you can get to the rest of it tomorrow or the next day.”

It’s such a wicked, selfish fucking thought, but I wish she’d let me go that day. I wish that as hard as I wish the telephone would ring, and this time it would be Abalyn.

Stop. Enough. Enough for now.

Enough forever.

DENOUEMENT

Act Five: The Wake-Up Bomb

T
here weren’t supposed to be five acts. But I was wrong, and there are.

Four days ago, I said “enough forever,” and for four days I haven’t sat down in this chair in the blue-white room with too many books. But here I am again. Here I am, because, because, because…even as I have tried to tell my ghost story, my mermaid and my werewolf story, as a thing that
happened
to me in the past, stuff keeps happening. New events stubbornly occur that I know are part of the story, which continues to unfold around me, rudely making a worse tangle of my hopelessly tangled mess. All along, I’ve desperately wanted to say these days
were
, and now it’s over,
right? So, I’m only recording history. I’ve been pushing away, trying to put behind.

And yeah, history has consequences, but at least it’s
over
. You remember it, but you don’t live it. This is what I think most people believe, and what I wanted to believe, because maybe believing that I could stop living the ghost story. I would type THE END, and walk away, and there would be no more sorrow and no more fear. No more thoughts of Abalyn and Eva and wolves and sirens and snowy roads and muddy rivers. No more Saltonstall. No more Perrault.

But. In
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
, Mary says, “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.” (Rosemary was very fond of Eugene O’Neill.) I searched through a book of plays after work last night, because I wasn’t sure I was remembering that line exactly right, but I was. Past is present. The future is present, too. And hey, look at me trying to sound like I know something, when the whole point here is that what I thought I knew I’m no longer sure I ever knew at all. Because it’s still happening, and the past is present, like Mary Cavan Tyrone said. She took morphine, and she was crazy, too, plus she’s only alive when actresses bring her to life, but she saw. She saw, and all I can do is borrow her vision.

This happened (happens) to me yesterday (now):

I was at work, and on my break, I felt like walking. This isn’t unusual. I left the art supply store and walked around the corner to Elm Street, and then I turned again onto Hospital Street. I was walking past the parking lot for the Providence Children’s Museum when I saw Abalyn and another woman, whom I’d never seen before, and a little girl, getting out of a red car parked close to the sidewalk. I could have turned around and headed back to work. If I had, everything would be different, and I wouldn’t be writing this. But “if I had” doesn’t matter, because I didn’t turn around. I just stopped, and stood there, hoping Abalyn wouldn’t see me, but also
so happy to see her again after so long that I felt dizzy, but also so dizzy from the pain of having lost her twice welling up like it had all just happened. Like the pain was fresh. The way it felt, we might only have split up a week ago.

She did see me, and she glanced at the other woman, as if waiting for some sort of cue or for permission, or as though she were going to beg my pardon for something she hadn’t yet done. And then she spoke words I couldn’t hear, so she couldn’t have said them very loudly, and walked over to where I was standing.