The Drowning Girl

8

(LITTLE CONVERSATIONS)

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

“Imp, look [pause] I know this is weird, calling and all. Especially after that scene in the parking lot last week. It was awkward, and I’m sorry about that. Maybe I shouldn’t have said what I said. Anyway, hey [pause] I’m worried about you, Imp. Let’s talk, okay. I think it would be good if we could talk.”—Abalyn Armitage

“India, this is the receptionist from Dr. Ogilvy’s office, calling to remind you of your appointment at five p.m., day after tomorrow. Please let us know if you can’t make it and need to reschedule. Thanks.”

“Hi, Imp. You can’t keep missing work like this. I can’t continue to ignore it. You’re not even bothering to call in sick, and I can’t keep letting you slide. You know that. You need to call me, as soon as you hear this message. We have to talk.”—Bill, my ex-manager from work

“India, it’s Dr. Ogilvy. You missed your five o’clock yesterday. We’re going to have to charge you for the session, since you didn’t cancel. You’ve never missed and not let us know ahead of time, so I’m just a little concerned especially after our last session. Give me a call when it’s convenient.”—Dr. Magdalene Ogilvy

“It’s Bill again. I’ve left messages on your cell and your landline, and you haven’t called back. I don’t know what’s going on. I hope you’re okay, but I don’t have any choice but to let you go. I’m really sorry. You gotta know I didn’t want it to come to this. You’ve always been a great employee. But you’ve left me no choice. Anyway, come by when you can and pick up your last check. Thanks.”—Bill (fourth call in four days)

“Imp, it’s Abalyn again. Please call me.” (second call)

“India, it’s your aunt Elaine. I got a call this morning from your psychiatrist. She says you missed your last appointment, and didn’t even bother to call. That’s not like you, and she agreed. She’s worried, and so am I. Call me, baby. Let me know you’re okay.”

“India, it’s Dr. Ogilvy again. I spoke with your aunt yesterday, and she says she hasn’t talked to you in a couple of weeks. I know you need refills on two of your prescriptions. And, well, you’ve always been so good about getting in touch when you need to reschedule. Please call.” (second call)

“Abalyn again. I guess I’ve pissed you off. I’m not going to call again. I feel stupid, leaving all these messages. I truly did not mean to upset you that day. If you’re pissed, I probably have it coming. [long pause] So, yeah, I’m not going to call again. I can’t stand being a pest. But I still wanna talk. Call me, or don’t. Either way, I hope you’re okay. I’m not just saying that.” (sixth message)

“India, just a reminder that the rent check was due last week. Just a reminder. We’d hate to have to charge you the late fee.”—Felicia, my landlord

“Baby, I still haven’t heard from you, and it’s been days since I called. If something’s wrong, you need to let us know. I talked to Dr. Ogilvy again this afternoon. She said she’s still not heard from you, and we’re both worried. I’m thinking about dropping by. Call me.”—Aunt Elaine (second call)

“India, please pick up if you’re in. I spoke with your aunt again about an hour ago. If you’re off your medication, we need to know.”—Dr. Ogilvy (third call)

“Hey, I know I said I wasn’t going to call again, but I had a really fucked-up dream about you last night.”—Abalyn (seventh and final message)

“India, about the rent…”

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?

Anyway, here I am on the other side, and I put people through shit, and I lost my job, and I feel like an idiot. Maybe it was something I had to do. I read back over what I wrote, and I can’t help but think maybe it was necessary, a trigger for a thing I might never have managed otherwise. But I still feel like a heel for having done it. I don’t like to frighten people who care about me, and now I’m out of work and owe $125 for a missed session, and I can’t afford that even more than usual because Bill fired me. I don’t blame him, but I have no idea what I’m going to do until I can find another job. Money’s gonna get tight fast, trust fund or no trust fund.

Dr. Ogilvy apologized, but said she can’t make an exception. The hospital sets the rules, not her.

Finally, Abalyn stopped calling and came to see what was wrong. Someone let her in the house, though they’re not supposed to do that. Let in people who don’t live here anymore. Maybe whoever did it, the college students upstairs or the mathematician from Brown who lives downstairs, maybe they weren’t aware Abalyn had moved out. She says she stood outside my door knocking for almost half an hour, then she used her key. I never asked for it back, and she never volunteered. Neither of us thought about it, I suppose. My car was in the driveway, and though she’s aware I often walk and take the bus, she knocked and knocked and waited, then gave up and used her key. I’m not going to be cross with her about it. I know how shitty it would be if I were. To be cross with her over using the key. Oh, she’d lost her key to the building, but not the one to my apartment.

Abalyn let herself in, and she found me holed up in my bedroom. I’d locked the door, so that was another barricade she had to get past. I’m not sure how long I’d been shut away in there, hours or days. I don’t remember, and I don’t have any way of finding out. It doesn’t matter now. She said I was crying, that she could hear me crying and talking to myself. She went to the kitchen and got a butter knife, and she was able to use it to jimmy the lock. She found me in nothing but my panties, hiding in a corner by the window. She didn’t say I was hiding, but I believe I must have been. Corners have always felt like safe places. Nothing can sneak up behind you in a corner, even a corner near a window. She found me with my back to two walls, squeezed into a corner, but I’m not going into detail. It’s too embarrassing, how she found me, what I was doing, the state I was in. But I was dehydrated. I hadn’t eaten in, I don’t know, days. I hadn’t been flushing the toilet. At first, she was angry, but then she held me and cried. Don’t know for how long, but I remember telling her to stop a bunch of times. I struck her, too. I have to admit that part. I hit her several times while she was trying to calm me down and find out what was going on, and I blacked her right eye. I wish she’d hit me back, but she didn’t. She just held filthy, hysterical me there in my corner until I stopped freaking out. Later, she stood near the fridge, silent, calm, holding a bag of frozen peas against her face. Every time I remember that, her standing there, I wish all over that she’d hit me back.

Anyway, then the chain of events went something like this: Abalyn called Dr. Ogilvy’s emergency number, and someone, whomever she talked to, told her to try to get some Valium in me and call my aunt. But I didn’t want Aunt Elaine around, and apparently I told Abalyn that. She did call Aunt Elaine, but convinced her not to come to my apartment, got her to agree that she wouldn’t so long as Abalyn kept her in the loop. The clinic said if someone would stay with me, and if I didn’t seem like a danger to myself or anyone else, it wouldn’t be necessary to call an ambulance (again, again). Dr. Ogilvy phoned. I said something to her, but I don’t for the life of me know what I said. Abalyn agreed to stay with me, and Dr. Ogilvy told her to wait twenty-four hours, then get me back on my drug regime. She also told Abalyn to try to figure out how long it had been since I’d stopped taking my meds. Either I couldn’t remember, or I just wasn’t willing to tell anyone (back to the paranoia, I didn’t want Abalyn or anyone else near me). The best she, Abalyn, was able to do was find my pillbox, which holds a week’s worth of pills, Sunday through Saturday, contained in their own discrete plastic compartments—S, M, T, W, T, F, S. There was six days’ worth in the box, which only told her it had been a minimum of six days. She knew it might have been quite a bit longer.

Abalyn called Margot, the new girlfriend, and they had a big fight. Margot said none of this—meaning me—was Abalyn’s responsibility, and I was being manipulative. They fought some more, and eventually Abalyn told her to fuck off, and now they’re not together any longer. So, I scared Abalyn half to death, punched her in the eye, and made her lose her girlfriend. Way to go, Imp. You’re a peach, you are.

She’s staying here, because she didn’t have anywhere else to go, and it was the very least I could do after what she did for me and what it cost her. She’s only staying with me; she isn’t living with me. I can see it’s hard on her. We try to keep out of each other’s way. You can care about someone deeply, but not be able to live with them, not easily. I look at Abalyn and I see how true this is; before the relapse, I probably didn’t understand how true that is. I made a joke about her being my knight in shining armor, but it wasn’t funny, and neither of us laughed.

There hasn’t been much of that, laughter, around here since she found me cowering in that bedroom corner. I live in a house where people upstairs laugh, and people downstairs laugh. I hear them through the floorboards, laughter going down, laughter coming up.

A couple of days after Abalyn found me, we were eating Trix cereal and watching cartoons, just like the old days. Except Ren & Stimpy and The Angry Beavers weren’t hilarious like they used to be, and the cereal tasted like tiny fruit-flavored balls of paper. Halfway through a cartoon, I said I didn’t want to see any more, so Abalyn picked up the remote and her TV went black (she had to move all her stuff back here, of course). She’s been so accommodating, which helps, but which also makes me feel even more ashamed. We both just sat there a few minutes, silent, picking at dry Trix, and the street noise seemed louder than usual. The Mexican boys, passing cars, autumn birds. Abalyn spoke first, and it was a relief, dispelling that not-really-quiet hanging between us. I’d still say it was a relief, even considering the stuff we both said immediately afterwards.

“I read it,” she said, and I nodded. I’d given Abalyn the pages I typed during the crazy spell and asked her to read them. She hadn’t wanted to, but I told her it was important.

“Thank you,” I said.

She asked, “Did it help?” and I shrugged.

“Probably too soon to say, but I don’t especially think so. I think it was a start, and I had to start somewhere, but I’m still scared.” I almost said something Dr. Ogilvy would have said, like “there’s still a high degree of cognitive dissonance,” but, fortunately, I thought better of it and said what I said, instead.

“But it was a start,” she said, and I noticed she was picking all the lemon-yellow Trix out of her bowl and lining them up single file on the floor in front of her. It reminded me of something I’d do. “I can’t stop feeling like none of this would have happened if only I’d been a little more tactful that day.”

“You shouldn’t have to walk on eggshells around me,” I told her. It was something I’d said to her before. “I don’t expect you to coddle me.”

“Still…,” she said, and trailed off.

“You didn’t even know I had those two versions of Eva in my head, Abalyn. There was no way you could have known, not if only one of them actually happened.”

She plucked another yellow Trix from her bowl and lined it up with the others.

“You believe that now?”

She wanted me to say yes, I did. But she’d been too good to me, and she deserved more than a lie. So I said, “No, but I’m working on it. I mean, I see Dr. Ogilvy in a few days…and I’m working on it. I know something’s wrong now, and that’s a start. I know something’s gone wrong in my head.”

“You’re a brave lady, Imp. I swear I couldn’t live with shit like that. You’re stronger than me.”

“No, I’m not. I’m just used to it. I haven’t ever been any other way. Not really. Besides, you’ve been through at least as much. I can’t imagine having the courage to do what you’ve done.” I was talking about coming out and her reassignment surgery, but she knew that without me having to spell it all out. “People do what they have to do. That’s all.”

“Listen to us,” she said, and she almost smiled, and she almost laughed. “Imp and Abalyn’s Self-Congratulatory Society of Mutual Admiration.”

I smiled, but didn’t try to laugh.

Then Abalyn said, “Maybe if you wrote. Not the way you wrote it when you were sick. I mean, if you wrote it as one of your short stories.”

“I’m not a writer. I’m a painter.”

“I know that. I’m just saying, it might help.”

“I haven’t written a story in a long time.”

“I figure it’s like riding a bicycle,” she said, then picked up one of the lemon-yellow Trix and ate it.

“It’s strange enough, that you’ve read what you’ve already read.”

“That was your idea,” she reminded me.

“I know, but that doesn’t make it any less strange.”

“You know what part surprised me most? The lines about the Black Dahlia. That’s the part that really put its hook in me. And I feel responsible for that, too. Seeing the Perrault exhibit was my idea.”

“So, that really did happen?”

“Unless we’re both crazy. Fuck knows, my mother and father would tell you I’m crazy as a shithouse rat.”

“Your mother and father don’t know you,” I told her, trying hard not to think about having to be despised by one’s parents. I silently wished Abalyn could have had a mother like Rosemary Anne, a grandmother like Caroline. If I’d ever told Rosemary I was a boy, not a girl, I’m sure she’d have been mostly fascinated. Maybe concerned, too, because of the way the world treats transgender people, but mostly fascinated. She probably would have gone so far as to insist it was marvelous.

“Anyway, yes. We went to the Perrault exhibit, and there was that Black Dahlia sculpture. I’m never gonna forget how much it upset you.”

“It shouldn’t have. I overreacted.”

“It was damned creepy. It’s even worse if you stop to consider he had to look at it every day for who knows how long it took to finish. Months maybe. Months coming back to the same grotesque subject day after day, and all the research he would have needed to do. I read there was a feminist victims’ rights sort of group out in California tried to get the exhibit banned because of that sculpture. Hell, I almost halfway don’t blame them.”

“I’m not for censorship,” I said, “no matter how awful art gets.”

Abalyn frowned and stared at a lemon-yellow Trix held between thumb and index finger, only halfway to her mouth. “You know I’m not in favor of censoring art, Imp. I was only saying I can see how that sculpture could elicit so strong a response.”

We were talking about Phases 1–5, of course, the grotesque pinwheel Perrault made using life casts and taxidermy to depict Elizabeth Short transforming into a werewolf. The last piece we’d seen before I couldn’t stand seeing any more and we’d left the gallery.

“If writing a story would help you sort through that second Eva you remember, it might help,” she said. “I’m here to help, you know. If you want me to help. I didn’t mean to be presumptuous.”

“I know.”

“And I’m sure Dr. Ogilvy would help.”

I told Abalyn that I’d never talked to Dr. Ogilvy about Eva Canning, and she looked kind of dumbfounded.

“Imp, whatever really happened with her, don’t you think that’s sort of a big thing not to tell your psychiatrist? Isn’t that what you pay her for?”

“I don’t think she believes in ghosts. And certainly not werewolves, or mermaids.”

“Does it matter what she believes in? You gotta figure she’s heard weirder shit than this.”

I told Abalyn I seriously doubted she had.

“Okay, but what’s the worst she can do? Have you committed? From what I saw, and what you’ve told me, I think if she was going to try to do that, she’d have already done it.”

I wanted to say, let’s please stop talking about this. Possibly, I was getting angry, and, possibly, I wanted to tell Abalyn she simply didn’t get it, that there’s crazy and then there are crazy people who believe in mermaids and werewolves and unicorns and fairies and shit. But I didn’t. Surely, she’d earned the right to speak her mind. I’d be in the hospital, or worse, if she hadn’t found me when she did. If she hadn’t cared enough to come looking, and then cared enough to stick around. And, anyway, down inside, I knew she probably wasn’t wrong about Dr. Ogilvy.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I’ll talk to her. I’ll try to consider writing a story.”

“And I’m here, if you need me.”

“Because you don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Jesus, Imp. No, not because I don’t have anywhere else to fucking go.”

“Well, you don’t, do you?”

She didn’t answer me. Conversation ends here. She shook her head and sighed, then took her cereal bowl and the box of Trix, stood up, and went to the kitchen. I sat on the floor in front of the blank television, trying to imagine what I was going to say to my psychiatrist, if that’s what I was going to do. How I would say what Abalyn thought I ought to say, because I realized it wasn’t so much the what of Eva as it was finding the necessary words.

We didn’t talk much the rest of that day. Aunt Elaine called sometime after dark, and I worked on a painting until I was tired enough to try to sleep.

I’m piling contradictions upon contractions, building myself a house of cards or a deadfall jumble of pick-up sticks. I told Abalyn that I’ve never spoken with my psychiatrist about Eva Canning, but that’s not true. Just look back at pages 115 and 166, where I wrote: “I’ve not mentioned that I’m writing all these things down, though we [Ogilvy and I] have spoken several times now of Eva Canning, both the July Eva and the November Eva, just as we’ve talked about Phillip George Saltonstall and The Drowning Girl (painting and folklore) and ‘The Little Mermaid.’ Just as we’ve talked about Albert Perrault and The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (in Hindsight) and ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ ”

When I told Abalyn I’d kept it from Dr. Ogilvy, was I mistaken, or was I simply lying? Why would I have lied? Was it misremembering? Also, I wrote that Abalyn told me she and I went to the exhibit together, but we didn’t. My friend Ellen from the used bookstore, she asked me to go, not Abalyn, and that was in late September, after Abalyn says she’d already left.

I’m not trying to lie.

I’m lying.

I tell you this, India Morgan Phelps, daughter of Rosemary Anne and granddaughter of Caroline, you don’t even guess your own motives. You obfuscate and deny and spin falsehood (consciously or unconsciously), and you can’t say why. It’s deranged, and it’s all deranged. No, it’s worse than that. I’m beginning to lose the threads of my ghost story. I’m no longer even certain that it is a ghost story, and if it’s not, I don’t know what else it could be. Or how to proceed.

I’m setting aside the questions I posed last time I sat down at my grandmother’s typewriter. Not because they’re invalid questions, but because…because. Maybe, they’ve been answered, and that’s the because. I choose to posit that’s the truth of it.

Yesterday, I saw Dr. Ogilvy for the first time since the episode, and I want to write about that this evening, about seeing her, what I said and what she said. What was said. But I woke up this morning with a headache, and it’s only gotten worse. My usual cocktail of Excedrin and aspirin hasn’t helped. There’s a railroad spike in my left eye, and there are gremlins running around in my skull banging on pots and pans. Skull goblins. Abalyn has a bottle of codeine that a friend gave her, and she offered me one. But I don’t like to take other people’s prescriptions (evidently, Abalyn has no such qualms), so I said thank you, but no thank you. It might have helped, but I didn’t know if it would interact with my meds, and I didn’t feel like calling the pharmacy to find out. Abalyn offered to look online for any information regarding the possibility of negative interactions, but I don’t trust stuff about drugs posted on the internet; how do you know if whoever wrote it knows what he or she is talking about?

Dr. Ogilvy is in her fifties, probably close to sixty. I haven’t ever asked her age, but I’ve always been pretty good at guessing how old people are. Her hair is long, and she wears it pulled back in a ponytail. Where it comes free of the ponytail, it sticks out, sort of crinkly or kinky. It’s almost all gray, except for a few stubborn streaks of auburn. Those streaks aren’t crinkly. Her eyes are kind and alert. They’re hazel, closer to hazel green than hazel brown. There are fine wrinkles all around her kind, alert, hazel-green eyes. She smiles a lot, but it’s a soft smile that doesn’t show her teeth. She doesn’t grin, and that’s good, because it unnerves me when people grin. Her nails are usually polished.

I’ve mentioned all the insects in her office, right? And how she almost studied to be an entomologist in college? Well, her office, where the walls are painted a dark red that’s more comforting than most people might expect it to be. Dark red, but not maroon. There’s something of purple in maroon, and there’s nothing of purple in the red of her office walls. The first or second time I saw her, I asked about all the insects in their frames, and she told me about a lot of them. Many, many beetles, and she said that beetles really were her favorites. She called her passion for beetles “avocational coleopterology.” Coleopterology (koˉ-leˉ-op-ter-ology) being the branch of entomology that studies beetles. She said that twenty-five percent of all species on earth are beetles. “God,” she said, “if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” She told me she was paraphrasing a British biologist named Haldane.

She was especially proud of a gigantic four-and-a-half-inch black-and-white beetle called the Goliath beetle (Goliathus goliatus), which she collected herself on a trip to Cameroon, which is in western Africa.

“It wasn’t a safe place to go,” she told me. “It’s even less safe now. You’d probably be better off not ever visiting Cameroon. It’s a beautiful country with beautiful people—and beautiful beetles—but too much political unrest. Don’t go to Cameroon, Imp.”

I replied it was unlikely I ever would, that I’d ever be able to afford to even if I wanted to go. Then she showed me dozens of butterflies and a praying mantis that looked like a leaf. “I didn’t collect most of these,” she said. “There’s a shop in New York—Maxilla and Mandible, on Columbus, just around the corner from the American Museum of Natural History—and I buy many of them there.” I asked why she had no spiders on her walls, and Dr. Ogilvy reminded me spiders aren’t insects, that they’re arachnids, like scorpions and ticks. “I don’t collect arachnids,” she said.

“Well, you’ve got a lot of bugs.”

“This is nothing. You ought to see my house.”

I’m not supposed to be writing about Dr. Ogilvy’s insects, so I must be stalling.

“It’s what you do,” Imp typed. “You procrastinate, like it’ll ever get easier. Like, if you wait long enough, it’ll be a breeze.”

It won’t be. Not ever. It’ll be a hurricane.

Here’s what I “know,” after yesterday’s session. I have been talking with Magdalene Ogilvy about Eva Canning, on and off, since December 2008—so for the past twenty-two months. That’s what her records indicate, which would be long after July Eva, and during November Eva (whom, increasingly, I’ve begun to dismiss as…well, I’ll get back to that). Dr. Ogilvy was aware I’ve wrestled with the paradox of the two Evas and Abalyn having left me twice. She showed me the notes to prove it. It’s a very thick sheaf of notes. Does she believe in ghosts, werewolves, and/or mermaids? She said that wasn’t relevant, and I suppose I see her point.

However, she didn’t know I’ve been writing this manuscript. She was surprised to learn of it, I could tell, though I think she made a concerted effort not to appear surprised. The first thing I did yesterday was show her what I think of as the “7 pages,” what I wrote during the episode. She asked if I minded her reading them aloud, and I said I didn’t (which definitely wasn’t true). When she was done, I was almost shaking, and I wanted to leave.

“It’s very powerful,” she said. “It reads almost like an incantation.”

“An incantation against what?”

“Depends,” she said. “These ghosts of yours, and perhaps your illness. The anomaly you’ve been struggling with so long now. The contradictions. But it also reads like a declaration. It’s a bold thing you’ve set down on paper. Obviously, you shouldn’t have stopped your medication, but…” And she trailed off. I was pretty sure I knew how she would have finished the sentence.

“Do you believe these events happened?” she asked, and tapped at the pages. “As you’ve written them?”

I hesitated a moment, then said, “I don’t. I freaked, and I was hammering at what Abalyn claimed, the existence of only one Eva. I was clutching at…I don’t know. I can’t see how, if I somehow invented the second Eva, it could have been any sort of consolation.”

“So maybe that’s the question we need to find the answer to.” Then she corrected herself. “No, the question you need to answer for yourself, Imp.” And she brought up that Joseph Campbell quote I wrote down earlier (or did I?), about being permitted to “go crazy” and find your own way out again. “This is your journey, and if it’s ever going to let you rest, I believe it’s a problem you should try to solve for yourself. I’m here, of course, if you need me. I can be a guide, maybe, but it feels like you’re beginning to put the pieces together. I think Abalyn’s helping.”

“She wants me to write a story. About the second part, Albert Perrault and the exhibit and all.”

“Do you think you can?”

We’d already discussed the Perrault exhibition, and how it did, or didn’t, fit in with my garbled chronology of the events between late June and the winter of 2008–2009. July and November and what have you. I told her that Abalyn said she hadn’t gone to the exhibit with me, but that I was sure I hadn’t gone alone. I wouldn’t have dared to go alone.

“That’s where I want to begin,” Dr. Ogilvy said. “Where I want you to begin.” And she stared down at my thick file lying open in her lap. “There’s a reason you fabricated the second story, assuming you fabricated the second story, and, more than anything, you need to know why that was.”

“I don’t know why.”

“I know, but I think you can learn why. Or relearn why. It’s there in your mind, somewhere. You haven’t lost it, even if you have repressed it. You’ve just hidden it from yourself. Maybe you’re trying to protect yourself from something.”

“Worse than two Evas, and worse than mermaids and werewolves?” I asked, not making much of an effort to hide my skepticism.

“That’s your question,” she said. “Not mine. But I have an exercise I’d like you to try. I’d like you to make a list for me. I’d like you to list those things you are starting to believe are false, that you previously thought were part of the truth.” (She meant factual, not true, but I didn’t correct her.)

“About Eva Canning,” I said.

“Yes. About her, and these events which seem associated with her. Are you up to that?”

“Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t certain if I was.

She handed me a yellow legal pad and a number two pencil (#2, hexagonal in cross section, Palomino Blackwing, high-quality graphite), and said she’d leave me alone while I wrote my list. “I’ll be right outside in the hallway. Just let me know when you’re done.” And here’s what I wrote (she made a photocopy for herself, then let me take the original home):

Eva Canning only came to me once.

It was July when I found her, not November.

Abalyn left me early in August.

It may be impossible for me to set forth a strictly accurate chronology/narrative of these events.

There was a siren. There was no wolf.

Abalyn didn’t go with me to the Perrault exhibit. Ellen did. And that was after Abalyn left me.

I created the wolf/2nd Eva/Perrault exhibit as a defense mechanism against the events of the July Eva.

There was only one Eva Canning.

And then I stood up and opened the door to find Dr. Ogilvy just outside, talking with a nurse. She came back in and I sat again. She sat and read my list two or three times. “This last one,” she said. “I want to focus on this last one before you leave,” and she looked at the clock. I had five minutes before my time was up.

“Okay,” I said, and reached for my shapeless cloth bag, one of Rosemary’s old purses, and held it in my lap. Holding the bag made me feel safe, and, besides, I didn’t want to forget it.

“This is admitting to a lot,” Dr. Ogilvy said. “And it shows a considerable amount of understanding of what may have happened to you.” She seemed to expect me to say something then, but I didn’t.

“Why, Imp, do you suspect you’d have needed a defense mechanism or coping strategy against the July Eva?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Maybe, but I’d like to hear you say it.”

I stared at her for a minute. I probably mean that literally. I stared at her for a full minute. Probably, she saw reluctance and unease in my eyes.

“Sirens,” I told her, “sing you to drowning or sing you to shipwreck. They sing, and, if you’re listening, their song compels you to do things you wouldn’t do otherwise. They manipulate you to their own ends. I despise the idea that I was manipulated. But the wolf, the wolf was helpless and only a ghost that needed me to remember it was a wolf, so that it could also remember it was a wolf.”

She smiled a little wider than usual, and I glanced down at my bag.

“What do you think July Eva made you do, Imp?”

“I can’t say that. Later, maybe, but not now. Don’t ask me that again, please.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to push.”

And then I pointed out that my time was up, and she tapped at her computer and made my next appointment, and wrote prescriptions for my refills, writing in that secret language only doctors and pharmacists can decipher.

“Think about number seven,” she said, just before I left. “Just think about it.” (7/7/7)

“I think about it a lot,” I replied. It was raining when I left, and the rain falling on the mounds of dirty snow was ugly, so I watched the sky, instead.

On the bus home, there was an elderly Portuguese woman with ill-fitting dentures and a very large mole between her eyes. There were three thick white hairs growing from the mole. Despite the cold, she was wearing lime-green flip-flops and a T-shirt. She was like me, not sane, except I don’t think she was on any sort of medication. She was sitting across from me, talking to herself, and it was annoying other passengers, who kept glaring at the woman.

“Are you cold?” I asked her. She seemed startled that anyone would choose to speak to her.

“Isn’t everyone, this time of year?”

“You ought to wear a coat. And better shoes.”

“I should,” she agreed. “But, you know, shoes and coats hide too much skin.”

“You need to see your skin?”

“Don’t you?”

“I’ve never thought about it.” I asked her name, and she squinted at me, as if trying to puzzle out some devious ulterior motive for my having asked.

“Teodora,” she said. “When I had a name, it was Teodora. But it went away one day when I forgot to watch my skin. Now, I don’t know. But once it was Teodora.”

“My name is India,” I told her, and she laughed, which made those loose dentures slip around a bit.

“That’s a strange name, little lady.”

“My mother got it from Gone with the Wind. It’s a book, and there’s a woman in it named India Wilkes.”

“It’s a book,” she repeated. Then added, “It’s your name. You’re a book,” and stared out the window for a while at the storefronts along Westminster.

“I’m sorry if I bothered you,” I said.

She sighed and didn’t take her eyes off the window. “You haven’t bothered me, India Wilkes. But watch your skin. Don’t you wear so many clothes. Nobody knows to watch after their skin anymore. Look at ’em. Nobody on this bus watches their skin, so it waltzes in the night. You watch skin, or it moves around.”

I gave her five dollars, though she didn’t ask me for it. She held the bill wadded up in her left hand, which wasn’t clean. She didn’t appear to have bathed recently.

“I’ll watch my skin more closely,” I assured her. “You stay warm, and get something to eat.”

She didn’t reply, and I got off at the next stop. The bus driver wanted to know if Teodora had been bothering me, or panhandling. “No,” I told him. “We were just talking.” Then he looked at me funny. “You say so,” he said.

Back home on Willow Street, Abalyn was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her television playing a game called Fallout: New Vegas. I only knew the name because she’d told me the night before. She was playing a character named Courier who was wandering about a post-apocalyptic Mojave Desert trying to find a lost package containing a platinum poker chip. None of it made much sense to me. I told her I was going to write the story, and that I’d be in the blue room with too many bookshelves.

“Do you want me to remind you about dinner?” she asked. I said if I got hungry—and I knew I probably wouldn’t—I’d come out and find something to eat. But I thanked her for offering, anyway.

And so I wrote my story about the November Eva I didn’t find on Valentine Road, only it came out more of a story about Albert Perrault and Elizabeth Short. It came out as it needed to come. Because I couldn’t manage a recitation of false facts, I managed a recitation of truth. I was worried Dr. Ogilvy might question the utility of having written a story about the wolf that was only indirectly my story of the wolf. But she didn’t, even when I suggested I’d only set one box within another, that all I’d accomplished was the creation of a fiction to contain another fiction.

“If the fiction has been contained,” she replied, “then you’ve gained control over it.” And I didn’t argue with her. It took me five days (and nights) to write “Werewolf Smile,” and I’m never going to try to sell it to a magazine. It belongs to no one except me.