The Drowning Girl (30 page)

On two feet, upright, I ran until the souls of my feet bled. The soles. She removed all my ragged clothes, torn by her hunger, before laying me to rest, so upon my restoration I was naked as was she. I was her crippled sister, alike in intent if not her fearful symmetry burning bright down Valentine Road of Needles while unsuspecting farmers and the wives of farms slept snug in their beds. The horses heard us, though, and the cows. Goats, they heard us, too. I had strayed from the path of my life and illusions of medicated surrogate sanity. I strayed, and Eva let me dance beneath the starry sky with the long-leggedy beast the naked woman at the side of the road had
become. You really have no notion how delightful it will be, was, at the inevitable convergence of those two roads full sail. That’s what Abalyn would steal from me, the knowledge of the glory of that tarantella danse macabre dervish. I fell down among quiescent fields, pale as sugar-powdered confections, divided by fieldstone walls since the days of Israel Putnam. I lay down, and she climbed on top of me. She glared down at me, all iridescent crepe-paper crimson eyeshine appetite, insatiable and wanton, and I spread my legs for the wolf she’d always really been. Her wet black nose snuffled my welcoming sex, her lolling mottled ice-cream licking me apart before she roughly rolled me over onto my stomach and wounded breasts and mounted me in the fashion of a wolf.

“You are in the House of the Wolf,
casa del lobo
, young lady, and so you’ll fly right and do as is our custom. You will fuck as wolves fuck.”

A woman in a field—something grabbed her.

Fecunda ratis.

She plowed me, as the fields would be plowed come spring. She planted me, a second time, sowing later jealousy, as I am certain Abalyn would have smelled her musk on me when I came home that night. It’s a fairy tale, isn’t it? Yes, it’s all a fairy tale, even if there are no fairies, per se. Pixie-led, pixilated, the foolish disobedient child wanders into the heart of a haunted wood and meets a ravenous lupine devil who, in short order, promises I will race you to Caroline’s house, and what’s more, I’ll love you true, let me enfold you and I don’t care that you’re insane. I will love you forever and forever. Pull back the covers to find her waiting in the fallow fields, to plow.

(Abalyn is at the window again, but this time I’m ignoring her.)

The carmine girl who was me, is me, came up from the hollow hills, hand in hand with La Bête, thinking how lucky I was. Hoping I might bear her pups, and not be empty anymore. Empty cockleshell
girl behind the register, and people whisper about her behind her back, and they don’t know she knows or they just don’t fucking care. I wager the latter. Empty oyster girl at last not empty anymore. I came back to my car, and the headlights were still blazing white shafts in the gloom, making the snow sparkle. Eva was with me, on my left, and she let me fasten the seat belt around her. The roads were slick and treacherous, and sometimes I drive over the speed limit. Pixie-led girls who stray from the path aren’t the sort to worry too much about breaking traffic laws. They have their own limits painted indelibly on their palimpsest skin for wolves to read.

This is my ghost story of the wolf who cried girl. The murdered wolf ghost who roamed centuries after a musket blast, without other wolves, except other wolf ghosts, for company. And somehow she forgot she ever was a wolf, deprived of others of her kind to provide perspective. She forgot. But she saw so many human beings, men and women and children, and having forgotten herself she mistook herself for nothing more than a naked woman at the side of Valentine Road. Or it wasn’t entirely a matter of forgetting. What if she learned her lesson, that wolves are not safe from men, but women are just a little safer from men, so she sewed herself a woman’s skin and crawled inside? The fit was snug, and she had to take great care her claws didn’t rip the skin gloves, and that no one saw her fangs.

The ghost of a wolf in disguise.

Madwomen can see such apparitions, and our touch can render them corporeal. Which is how Abalyn saw her when we got back to Willow Street. If Abalyn had met what I came upon, it would have been invisible and she’d have kept right on driving drive, drive, drive, drive ignorant of what a miracle. Since 1742 or 1743 or 1947, that’s what everyone before mad India Morgan Phelps the Imp of Willow Street pulled over and asked if she was okay or if she needed help. I saw she had no voice, had not learned yet to use her pilfered woman’s tongue. She would, eventually, and that means she lost
herself that much more in the cacophony clash of nouns, vowels, participles, adjectives, verbs, and all.
I blame myself for that a little. I was an enabler to her psychotic amnesiac masquerade.

While I wasn’t looking the Abalyn Crow flew away again. I think it won’t be back. Not tonight, at least. A black bird means a lie, unless a black bird
is
a lie. When moving through fairy tales, one must obey the laws of fairy. When moving through a ghost story, Gothic and Victorian law applies. Here I creep my footpath through both at once and the dictates are unclear, winding together in greenbrier snarls I’ll have to prick my fingers on spinning wheel spindleshanks to comprehend. It must have been worse on Eva. I was on the outside looking in and she was locked in the lie she’d told herself not to go mad as India Morgan Phelps or her mother.

All my telephones keep ringing, but I know better than to answer. I know what seeps through telephones. I know the Messieurs would have me answer, and I know they’re lying sons of bitches. Liars very much count on our not recognizing a lie when we hear one. Even when, like a lost wolf, we are lying to ourselves.

I ran poor, poor Eva Wolf a bath with iodine water the color of Coca-Cola tins straight from Scituate and so come indirect from the sea. Abalyn went for a walk and a smoke, hating what I’d done, afraid and we hate what scares us, what we don’t understand, and she couldn’t fathom Eva any more than she could fathom me. I was careful the water was warm, to chase away the chill shot through her crystalline veins, through otherwise unblemished lacteous calcite veins. I helped her into the tub, and she folded up easy as a Japanese fan, all knees and elbows and those xylophone ribs showing from beneath her filthy bleached hide. It pained me to see anything that starved. I’d have to learn what ghost wolves eat. I used Abalyn’s peppermint soap to scrub her clean. I found cuts, scrapes, scratches, welts, offal and twigs matted in her chestnut hair, and I took all that away and left her purified as if I’d used salt and holy water. I made
her baptism in chlorination and shampoo. But, deceive the deceivers thus neither the angels in heaven above nor the demons down under the sea can ever dissever my soul from the soul of what I know to be the truth. Not even Abalyn, however much she knows I still love her.

That’s it. Or that’s all I’m allowing for now. The story of the wolf who cried girl when there was no one but me to finally show up and hear her. Once upon a time, she got hunted down and nailed to a wall, and I wrenched the cold iron spikes from her pelt and a thorn from the callused pad of a bloodied paw. There is more, yes. That’s no decent conclusion. But I have been typing now for so many hours I can’t count, but a long time because the sun was going down and now it’s rising. I’m sleepy. I can’t recall ever before having been half this sleepy. But here it is, here I am, here I am, and I can see it, and this undoes all Abalyn’s lies that there was only ever one Eva Canning.

Go away, crow tapping at my window. One brings only sorrow; it takes
too
two for mirth.

Don’t think I don’t know that. Don’t think I can’t see you there. Before I go to bed, I’ll seal the window with seven mustard seeds and seven bottle caps and seven bay leaves, and I won’t even have to dream of you, Abalyn.

7/7/7/7
7/7
7
seven
7
7/7
7/7/7/7

(L
ITTLE
C
ONVERSATIONS
)

S
elected telephone messages, last week of October 2010 (offers of aid, concerned voices neglected):

Part of me always thought no one would much care if I ever dropped off the face of the earth. Obviously, I was mistaken. People kept calling until the answering machine and voice mail were full. I was only half-aware the phone kept ringing. That was two and a half weeks ago. Halloween came and went; I’m not sure I even noticed. Now it’s the middle of November, and the trees along Willow Street are almost bare. Willow Street has no willows by the way. Oak Street has no oaks. Maybe they did once upon a time. Like I said, lots of things in Providence have names that no longer fit.

On the twenty-sixth of October, the day after I ran into Abalyn outside the children’s museum, I stopped taking my meds. At first, I just forgot. I’m not bad about forgetting, ’cause it’s been so many years, me and the meds. But after a day or two I was aware I wasn’t taking them because I didn’t
want
to take them. I was getting paranoid. That can happen pretty quickly, and I thought…well, it’s there in the stuff I wrote during the relapse. I got it in my head the pills were messing with my memory. After Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can’t remember what I definitely
do
remember, and sometimes I panic. I’m not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used to it, I mean to say. The false memories. That hasn’t happened in a long time, a full-on bahooties return to the worst it can get. I’m trying not to dwell on what might have happened, because it didn’t, and nothing good’s gonna come of fretting over spilled milk, right?