The Drowning Girl

And 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.

There 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.

“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.