The Drowning Girl (28 page)

“Hey, Imp,” she said. Her hair isn’t black anymore. She’s letting it grow out, and mostly it’s blonde, but the color of her eyes hasn’t changed.

“Hi,” I said, and had no idea what to say next.

“It’s been a long time,” Abalyn said, like somehow I wasn’t aware of that. “You doing okay?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I’m doing okay. Who are your friends?”

She looked over her shoulder, back to the other woman and the little girl waiting in the parking lot by the red car. She turned back to me. When she spoke again, she sounded as anxious and dizzy as I felt.

“Oh, yeah. That’s Margot and her niece, Chloe. We’re taking Chloe to the museum. She’s never been before.”

“You don’t like museums,” I said.

“Well, it’s for Chloe, not me.”

“Margot’s your new girlfriend?” I asked, hearing the words and knowing that I was saying everything I shouldn’t be saying, but saying them anyway.

“Yes, Imp,” Abalyn answered, and the smallest bit of a smile creased the corners of her mouth. “Margot’s my girlfriend.”

There were a few seconds of awkward silence that likely seemed longer than they actually were, and then I said—no, then I
blurted
, “I’ve been writing it all down.”

She stared at me, still almost frowning, and she asked, “Writing all what down?”

Wishing I could take back what I’d blurted out, wishing I were sitting in the break room at work, or out in the courtyard, instead of standing on the sidewalk with Abalyn staring at me, I said, “You know, what happened. What happened before you left. The river, and the two Evas. I’ve only gotten as far as trying to drown myself in the bathtub, but I don’t think I’m going to write any more. I’ve told the July story, and I don’t think I really have to tell the November story.”

Words tumbling out of me, like I was someone with Tourette’s and couldn’t help myself. She looked over her shoulder at Margot and Chloe, and then turned back to me.

“The
two
Evas?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Both of them. July and November.”

There was an even longer awkward silence than the first one, and she tried to smile, but didn’t do a very good job of it. “I’m not sure what you mean, Imp. There was only ever one Eva Canning. You’ve lost me.” She stopped, glanced up at the sun, and squinted. And I thought she was about to ask me if I’d been skipping my meds, missing doses. That was the sort of expression she had. All at once, it felt like my belly was full of rocks.

“There was July, and then there was November,” I told her, the words still tumbling, sounding insistent when I’d only meant to sound certain of myself and a little perplexed. “There was the first time you left, right? And then there was—”

“I’m sorry, Imp,” she interrupted. “It’s really good to see you again. Really, but I need to go.”

“Why are you acting like you don’t know what I mean?”

“Because I don’t. But that’s all right. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, I have to go now.”

“I miss you,” I said. I shouldn’t have, but I did.

“We’ll talk sometime,” she promised, but I knew she didn’t mean it. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

Then she was gone. I stood on the sidewalk, and I watched her and the woman named Margot and the little girl named Chloe go into the children’s museum.

There was only ever one Eva Canning.

Only one.

All the way back to the store, and the rest of the day, and most of last night, I tried to only be angry and only pretend it had pissed her off, embarrassed her, running into me like that. Or it was a cruel joke. Perhaps she hadn’t meant it as a cruel joke, but that’s what it was. Phillip George Saltonstall hadn’t meant to perpetuate a haunting when he painted that picture, and neither had Seichoˉ Matsumoto when he published
Kuroi Jukai
and changed a forest into a place where people went to die. I might have called Abalyn last night, if I had her phone number. I might have called and demanded that she apologize and explain herself, tell her how it felt like she’d been making fun of me. I stood by the telephone in the kitchen, and sat on the sofa holding my cell phone. I probably would have been able to find her number if I’d tried, but I didn’t. I considered emailing her, because I’m pretty sure her email hasn’t changed, but I didn’t do that, either.

Abalyn never played tricks on me. Why would she do it now, even if she was embarrassed at having to talk to me while her new girlfriend was standing there, close enough to hear everything we said? No matter how much easier it would be if she had, I don’t think she was lying to me. Which means she might just have been confused and not remembering it right, but that’s ridiculous. That would mean she’s forgotten months and months and so many awful things. If she thinks there was just one Eva, whether it was the first or the second, she would have to have forgotten things so terrible they’re impossible to forget.

Last night I didn’t sleep. I lay awake until the sun came up, forcing myself to ask the worst question, first to myself and then aloud. Forcing myself to let it become solid as concrete, so I can’t deny it. Because Eva taught me the unknown is immune to the faculties of human reason, that something hungry below the water that you can’t see is scarier than a hungry twenty-foot-long shark. Because the unknown is even scarier than a truth so appalling that it breaks your whole wide world apart.

Almost three hundred pages ago, I typed, “I said there’s no reason doing this thing if all I can manage is a lie.” If I wasn’t sincere, then none of this has meant anything, and I might just as well have been typing the same sentence over and over again. Or not even a real sentence, just the same letter hundreds of thousands of times. I didn’t mean what I said, that’s all I’ve done.

Was there only one Eva Canning, and, if so, which one is the real one?

Writing makes it even harder than concrete. Writing makes it hard as diamond.

But questions don’t come with answers conveniently attached, and I always knew there was a paradox. A particle and a wave. Spooky action at a distance. July and November. Asking my appalling question out loud doesn’t bring any sort of resolution. I know less than I ever thought I knew. That’s all being able to ask the question means.

Except it also means that I can’t stop here.

A
ll our thoughts are mustard seeds. Oh, many days now. Many days. Many days of mustard seeds, India Phelps, daughter of madwomen, granddaughter, who doesn’t want to say a word and ergo can’t stop talking. Here is a sad, sad tale, woebegone story of the girl who stopped for the two strangers who would not could not could not would not stop for me. She, she who is me, and I creep around the edges of my own life afraid to screw off the mayonnaise lid and spill the mustard seeds. White mustard, black mustard, brown Indian mustard. She spills them on a kitchen floor and so has to count them seven times seven times before returning them to the spice jaw jar jaw jar. Screwed the lid on tight, because once was plenty enough of that, thank you. She exaggerates, but counting them more than once, there’s no getting past that, right? A careless elbow, and India Phelps loses one whole fucking hour and a half counting the seeds scattered all over the inconsistent floor, caught in cracks between boards, rolled away under the fridge and the stove and so having to be retrieved and no matter how long it takes. My time is mine. Black
hands, hour hand, swift second hand, right and left hand dominant hand, minute hand, life line, soul line, all counterclockwise widdershins pockets full of posies. India Morgan Phelps, imp, demon, everyone calls her demon her whole life long thinking it was cute, her heart as rotten as old apples on the ground. These black enameled keys are good as mustard seeds, if I stop to consider the sound they make.

There she was with a girl named Chloe and a woman she named Margot, but how would I know she wasn’t lying? To herself, to me, drawing names out of a hat. She didn’t ask if I was off my meds, but I saw it in her eyes, eyes green as wave-tumbled Coca-Cola tins. Saying there was only one story happened, when I’ve got two in my head, and how, how. How. Haven’t picked up the phone. No, picked up the phone, but haven’t called you Abalyn or Ogilvy or anyone at all. Thinking she might be right is worse than knowing, but still easier than picking up the phone or an email to steer my demonic self towards confirmation. The unknown is terrifying, but certainty damns me. Strike, strike, strike, strike a typewriter key, strike a match, strike a deal, strike a cord or is it chord? strike a bargain, strike me dead. The thought has crossed my mind many times the last several days counting my spilled mustard seeds. It would be easy, though bodies never want to give up the ghost easily, but with a little luck this would be ended and no more playing games of this is true or that is true but only the madwoman on Willow Street would dare be such a fool as to think both are true.

Which brings me to Wolf Den Road, so called, so-called sobriquet Wolf Den Road traced in dirt between banks of snow forest in north and eastern Connecticut. I didn’t know the etymology that November night but I know it now. I know Israel Putnam’s crime of the winter of 1742, 1743, as winters span or straddle one year and the next. The justifications are almost as wild and unlikely as the legends of Gévaudan, La Bête du Pomfret we are told by history slaying sheep all that long winter, the tally varying from one source to
the next. I don’t think any are reliable. I think the wolf was framed, and that sets me wondering about the wolf and the girl in red and who was it stalked who? Seventy sheep and goats on a single night. I don’t buy that, but I don’t buy many things others swallow whole, for the woodsman to cut free, half-digested, from distended lupine bellies. Lambs and kids mutilated, the survivors maimed badly enough to be put down like mad dogs, madwoman demonic disbelieving Imp. Devastated sheepfolds. Devastated shepherds of Connecticut. So there was a posse of Israel Shepherds and Oddfellow friends of sheep and goats and she’d left her fresh, incriminating paw prints in the new fallen snow so they’d have no trouble at all stalking her right back again. Makes me wonder if she wanted to die, too, and meant to be found, even if she didn’t make it entirely easy for those vengeful men of God. The dogs went down that stone throat and came out whimpering, tails between skinny legs, I think that’s shameful, sending dogs to do the bloody work of men, setting dogs against their forebears.

Eva Canning, you of November evenings, lost and hopeless and hungry, crouched in the dark, sending the hounds scrambling back to their vexed masters. They’d already slaughtered so many of your children. And here the men sit all a long winter’s night, at the mouth of your den in the rocks, vexing themselves. Rocks slippery with snow and ice and the blood not yet spilled to avenge livestock. Putnam made a torch of birch bark and with a rope he bade them lower him into the crevice because if you want something done they say do it yourself if you want it done right. Don’t leave it to the dogs who once were wolves themselves, so let’s consider a conspiracy of canine coconspirators. Let’s suppose, as we suppose uncounted mustard seeds spell certain and not unknown doom. Good and righteous Squire Putnam, Patron Saint of sheep and goats, kids and lambs, mutton chops, lowered head down into the stinking maw of surely unknown blackness to exorcise the imp of Pomfret which was
known lately to stalk frosty fields. Here he is, choosing the Road of Needles, for the sake of good Christian farmers of New England. Wolves who do evil out of ravenous hunger in the dead of winter. My headlights illuminating along back roads, not going anywhere on purpose, and ignorant of the mock-turtle heroics of Israel Putnam and the ghost he let loose that night so long ago when all my research has revealed the Holy Bible makes thirteen references to wolves. I’ve got a list right here. Try Acts 10:29. Skip this version. Remind me later.

Canto 1,
Inferno
, Dante Alighieri, who wrote, but emphatically not of Israel Putnam the wolfslayer of Pomfret, lost in primeval glades and confronted by three wild beasts. One was a she-wolf. Good Friday, 1300 AD:
Ed una lupa, che di tutte brame
, And a she-wolf, that with all hungerings;
sembiava carca ne la sua magrezza,
seemed to be laden in her meagreness;
e molte genti fé già viver grame,
she brought upon me so much heaviness. The depredations of all these misbegotten bitches, woebegotten, so you’d think it was a bitch wolf in Eden and not a snake at all.

(where you shall hear the howls of desperation)

She didn’t see me at first. I’m not sure when she noticed me, but not until I stopped for her, Mr. Putnam. It’s not as if she were stalking me that night to do me mischief in that wood of barren limbs and snow crust to decently hide a billion shed leaves from my sight. It’s not like she was out hunting that night. I came upon her, Abalyn. I was out hunting, and it wasn’t her.

I’m going to call this part “The Wolf Who Cried Girl.”

But hunched here in my seat by the window on Willow Street I’ll not let Israel Putnam off the hook by straying back towards the road to Eva Canning (that’s the Second Coming, and not the first, this rough slouching beast).