The Drowning Girl

6

Abalyn and I didn’t go to the Blackstone River the day after Eva Canning came to me in the museum. Usually, it seems that way, but then I stop and think, and realize there were days in between. There was a visit to Dr. Ogilvy in between. I didn’t hear the receptionist when she said I could go in. I was too busy scribbling in the margins of pages in a year-old issue of Redbook. Eventually, Dr. Ogilvy came out to see if there was something wrong, and she found me writing in the magazine. I’d written lines from “The Lobster Quadrille” over and over again, over and over, out of order. She asked if I was okay, “Imp, is something wrong?” and when I didn’t answer (I was trying to, but my head was too full of Lewis Carroll) she asked if she could look at what I’d written. I blinked a few times and relinquished the copy of Redbook.

She stared at my messy handwriting, and then wanted to know what it meant. Not what it was, but what it meant.

“I don’t know,” I said, tapping my pen against my leg and reaching for another magazine (Cosmopolitan, I think). “But I can’t get it out of my head.”

She said it would be better to talk in her office, and she said if I needed to take the magazine in with me, that was perfectly okay. By then, I was fifteen minutes into my hour. Dr. Ogilvy’s office is small, and decorated with butterflies and beetles and other colorful insects pinned inside glass frames. She once told me she almost studied entomology in college.

“India, when you say you can’t get this out of your head, I assume you mean the thoughts are involuntary and unwelcome.”

“I wouldn’t want them to go away if they were welcome, would I?” And I wrote

They are waiting on the shingle—will youcome and join the dance?

in the margin of an article about spicing up your sex life by learning the secret sexual fantasies of men.

“How long has this been going on?”

“I’m not sure,” I lied. It started when Eva whispered in my ear, of course. But I knew better than to start talking to Dr. Ogilvy about Eva Canning.

“More than a day?”

“Yeah.”

“More than two days?”

“Maybe.”

“Have you told anyone?” she asked, and I told her that my girlfriend had caught me writing the poem on the back of a napkin the day before. We’d gone out for hamburgers.

“What did you tell her?”

“I said it was nothing, and I threw away the napkin.”

I scribbled

in the copy of Cosmopolitan.

“It’s been a long time since it was this bad,” I said. “I couldn’t go into work yesterday. My manager’s not happy. I’m afraid he’s going to fire me, and I can’t afford to lose my job.”

“You’ve been missing a lot of days.”

“Some,” I said. “I keep telling him I’m sick when I call in, but he doesn’t believe me anymore. I’ve always been a good employee. You think he’d cut me some slack.”

“India, would you like me to call him and explain?”

“No,” I replied. I said no seven times, and didn’t look up because I didn’t want to see Dr. Ogilvy’s expression. I knew what it was without having to look. I wrote

and she asked if I’d stopped taking my meds. I told her no, that I hadn’t missed a single dose. That was the truth. Then she asked if I would give her the magazine. I clutched it tightly, so tightly I tore the page I’d been writing on, but then I gave it to her. I apologized for ruining it, and offered to replace it and the copy of Redbook.

“Don’t worry about that. They’re not important.” She stared at the page a moment, then asked, “You do know what this is, I assume?”

“The Mock Turtle’s song. From the tenth chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, first published in London in 1865 by Macmillan and Company.”

I was tapping the pen very hard against my knee, tapping seven times, then seven times, then seven times.

“We’re going to adjust the levels of your medications,” she said, and passed the magazine back to me. “Are you okay with that?”

She scrawled illegibly on a prescription pad, and I scrawled almost as illegibly in Cosmopolitan:

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

“When did you memorize that poem?” Dr. Ogilvy asked me, and before I thought better of it, because I was too busy writing, I said, “Never. I never memorized this poem or any other poem.”

She tore two pages from the pad, but didn’t immediately hand them to me. “If I send you home today, will you be safe? Can you drive?” I told her I’d taken the bus from Willow Street, and she said that was for the best.

“You’ll be safe?” she asked again.

“Safe as houses,” I answered. When I glanced up, she was staring at me skeptically.

“Your girlfriend knows about your condition?”

“Yeah. I told her right after we met,” and I wrote:

She handed me the prescriptions, and asked me to please be careful, and to try to go to work, and to call her if it got any worse, or if I wasn’t better in a couple of days. I could tell she didn’t want to let me leave, that she was thinking about the hospital. She knows, and she knew back then, that she’d have to force me to spend even a single night in a hospital. She knew almost everything there was to know about Rosemary Anne. She knew it would have to get a lot worse than obsessively copying Lewis Carroll onto napkins and old magazines before I’d go, and that even then I’d go kicking and screaming.

I said, “St. Ignatius of Loyola had obsessions. Intrusive thoughts, I mean. He was terrified of stepping on pieces of straw forming a cross, because he was afraid it showed disrespect to Christ. I don’t know where I read that. I must have read it somewhere. I think a lot of people that got to be saints were really only crazy.” I pressed too hard and tore the page.

Dr. Ogilvy was silent for a while.

“You know I’m not religious,” I said. “You know I’ve never believed in God and all that.”

“Will you sit in the waiting room for a couple of hours?” she wanted to know. “You can leave anytime, but I think it would be a good idea if you stuck around for a bit, just in case.”

“No,” I replied, and shut the magazine. I rolled it into a tube and squeezed it. “I need to get home. I’ll be fine, I swear. I’ll call you if it gets worse.”

“And you’re sure you don’t know what triggered this episode?”

“I’m sure,” so there was my second lie.

“Will you call when you get home?”

I told her I would. It was a small enough price to pay to escape her office and get out of the clinic and away from her scrutiny and questions. She followed me back out to the receptionist, and I wrote a check for the cost of the session. We said good-bye. I had to pee, and I ducked into the restroom before I left the building. I sat on the plastic toilet lid and wrote

Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but comeand join the dance.

and I even drew a snail beneath the verse. I almost missed my bus. But only almost. I was home by four o’clock, but Abalyn had taken the Honda and gone to the market. She’d left a list explaining that she’d gone to get milk, coffee, cereal, peanut butter, “feminine hygiene products,” AAA batteries, Red Bull, and carrots. I called Dr. Ogilvy, but she was with another patient, so I had to leave a message with her voice mail. I sat on the sofa and waited for Abalyn to come home. I tossed the magazine at a wastepaper basket and missed. I’d left one of my drawing pads on the sofa the night before, and so I wrote lines from “The Lobster Quadrille” in it, instead. When my pen ran out of ink, I stopped long enough to find another.

Abalyn and I are sitting together at one of the long oak tables in the downstairs reading room of the Athenaeum. The library, as usual, is noisier than most libraries, but I’ve never minded. The voices of the librarians have always comforted me, just like the building comforts me, the stones and mortar set in place one hundred and seventy years ago, fifty-eight years before Saltonstall saw what he saw in the Blackstone Gorge. Do the math. Draw the parallel lines and abrupt angles, then mark the intersecting points. The library comforts me. I am wrapped in the aroma of antique books, dust, everything that has aged and is still aging. The Athenaeum is a shroud I hide within. I’m sitting across from Abalyn. I have a college-ruled notebook open in front of me. I bought it at the Walgreens on Atwells Avenue the day before, and the first seventy-four pages are filled, front and back, with lines from “The Lobster Quadrille,” written down in no particular order. The number seven appears at the four corners of every page. I write in my notebook, and Abalyn talks, not quiet whispering.

“It’s a bad idea,” she says, staring at my notebook. She’s afraid. I would say that I can smell her fear, but I can’t. Maybe I feel her fear, or only see it in her green eyes, the color of mermaids’ tears. She keeps trying to take the notebook away from me, even though that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Last night, she called Dr. Ogilvy’s emergency number, but Dr. Ogilvy apologized and refused to speak with her about me. I haven’t signed a release form permitting my psychiatrist to discuss my case with anyone.

“It might work,” I say, not looking up from the notebook. I come to the last line; then I carefully place the four necessary sevens before turning to the next page. Seven, seven, seven, seven, twenty-eight.

“You don’t know that, Imp. You might only make this worse. That could happen, couldn’t it?”

“Almost anything could happen,” I say. “Almost anything at all. You don’t have to go with me. I keep telling you I can go alone.”

“The hell you will,” she says. “I’m afraid to let you out of my sight.”

I glance up at her then, and it hurts to see her so frightened. “Don’t say things like that. Please don’t. Don’t make me feel trapped.”

“You know that’s not what I’m trying to do.”

I go back to scribbling, because I have to, and so I don’t have to look at the expression on her face. “I know. But that’s what you’re doing.”

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.

It 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.

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.

“You really have no notion how delightfulit will be

When they take us up and throw us, with thelobsters, out to sea!”

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

“See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtlesall advance!”

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.

“What matter it how far we go?”

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.

“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side…”

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.

Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but comeand join the dance.

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.