The Drowning Girl

10

There’s always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. The harridans of Sirenum scopuli, three sharp rocks battered by Aegean waves, just off the coast of Capri. La Castelluccia, La Rotonda, Gallo Lungo. Or the Sirenuse archipelago, or Capo Peloro. Homer made them Harpies, the three winged women who sang deadly songs for Ulysses. Euripides and Eustathius and Servius and Virgil and so many others who put pen to paper to warn of sirens. Homer does not take care to name them (or was too wise to try), but some of these scholars did: Peisinoe, Aglaope, and Thelxiepeia, for example. Elsewhere (Spanish, Romanian, French, etc.), elsewhen, folklore makes of them mermaids: Sirena, Sirène, Syrena, Sirena˘, and Sereia and on and on and on to lure sailors to shipwreck and drowning. Oh, and zoologists place manatees and dugongs and extinct Steller’s sea cows (Hydrodamalis gigas) in the mammalian order Sirenia (Illiger, 1811), and herpetologists have placed certain legless salamanders in the genus Siren, in the family Sirenidae. They look like eels, but aren’t. Aren’t eels, I mean. I looked up the word for eel-shaped things: anguilliform. Neither manatees nor Sirenidae live as far north as the Blackstone River. Manatees and dugongs, some people say, are responsible for the stories of sirens, when sirens are said to be mermaids. Though manatees do not sing, at least not songs that men and women can hear. They’re not amphibians. They’re mammals who went back to the ocean, like whales, and dolphins, and Eva Canning. Whales sing pretty songs, and we can hear them plain as day.

My siren came from the Blackstone River in Massachusetts, a river with the same name as the street that runs past the hospital where my mother died. The Siren of Millville, Perishable Shippen, E. L. Canning, Eva Louise, daughter of Eva May, who walked into Monterey Bay off Moss Landing State Beach, California, when I was only four years old. Who followed a woman named Jacova Angevine into the sea, and who never walked back out again. The deep sea is eternal night, and Jacova Angevine opened that door for E. M. Canning, who obediently stepped through it, along with so many others. She left her illegitimate daughter (like Imp) to her own fate.

“That’s enough rambling prologue, Imp. You’re stalling again. You’re still mired in now, and you’ve sat down to write about then.”

That’s true (and factual). I have sat down to make an end to this. To type the last of my ghost story there is to tell, or, at least, the last of the part from August 2008. One does not find closure, resolution. One is never unhaunted, no matter how much self-help happy-talk purveyors of pop psychology and motivational speaking ladle on. I know that. But at least I will not have to keep coming to the blue room with too many books and continue trying to make sense of my ghost story. I now understand it as well as ever I shall. When I’m done, I’ll show it to Abalyn, and I’ll show it to Dr. Ogilvy, and then I’ll never show it to anyone else, not ever.

A siren came knocking at my door.

It was only a few days after I had lain down in a bathtub of icy water and tried to end an earwig by inhaling myself to oblivion. Abalyn had gone away, and she’d taken all her things with her. I was alone. I was sitting on the sofa, where she sat so often with her laptop. I’d read the same paragraph of a novel several times. I can’t recall what the novel was, and it hardly matters. There was a knock at the door. It wasn’t a loud knocking. It was, I will say, almost a surreptitious knock, almost as if I weren’t meant to hear it, though I was, of course. No one knocks meaning you not to hear, right? No one would ever do such a thing, as a knock at a door or window says “Here I am. Let me in.”

I turned my head and stared at the door. My apartment door is painted the same blue as this room where I type. I waited, and in a few seconds, the surreptitious knock came again. Three raps against the wood. I had no idea who it might be. Abalyn had no reason to come back. Aunt Elaine never comes without calling. Likewise, my few friends all have instructions to always call before visiting. Perhaps, I thought, it was someone from upstairs or someone from downstairs. Perhaps it was Felicia, my landlady, or Gravy, her handyman. On the third surreptitious knock, I called out, “I’m coming.” I stood up and walked to the door.

Before I opened it, I smelled the Blackstone River, exactly as it had smelled the day Abalyn and I drove up there, only to find nothing but a few footprints in the muddy bank. So, I knew who was behind the door. I breathed in silt and murky water and crayfish and carp and snakes and dragonflies, and so I knew precisely who had come calling. I said her name aloud, before I turned the knob.

I said, “Eva.” And then I opened the door. My own Open Door of Night.

She stood on the landing in the same simple red sundress she’d been wearing that scalding day at Wayland Square, and that afternoon at the RISD Museum. She was barefoot, and her toenails were polished a silvery color that reminded me of nacre, which most people call mother-of-pearl. Rosemary Anne had mother-of-pearl earrings when I was a child, but she lost them before she went away to Butler Hospital and I’ve never found them. Eva stood before me, smiling. There was a bundle in her hands, something wrapped in butcher paper and tied up neat with twine.

“Your clothes,” she said, holding out the package. “I had them cleaned.” She didn’t say hello. She offered me the package, and I took it from her.

“I knew you’d come,” I said. “Even if I didn’t know I knew, I knew all the same.”

And she smiled like a shark, or like a barracuda might smile, and she said, “May I come in, India Morgan Phelps?”

I regarded her a moment, and then I said, “That day at the gallery, you told me the time for choice is behind us both. So, why are you bothering to ask?” And I thought of the stories that say vampires and other malevolent spirits have to be invited into your home. (Though hadn’t I invited her once already?)

“I’m only being polite,” she replied.

“But if I say no, you’re not going to leave, are you?”

“No, Imp. We’ve come too far.”

I very almost said, “So remote from the night of first ages.…We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.” But I didn’t. I didn’t have the nerve, and I didn’t think it would matter. There was no ward to drive her back, not from Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville or Matthew Arnold. Not from any holy book or infernal grimoire. I knew this, as surely as I knew the thing standing on my doorstep was alive and meant to enter, whether I wished it to or not.

But, to tell the truth, I desired nothing more.

“Yeah, you can come in,” I said. “Where are my manners?”

“Well, you weren’t expecting me.”

“Of course I was,” I told her, and she smiled again.

In a notebook, Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “The siren sings so sweetly, she lulls mariners to sleep. She boards ships and murders sleeping mariners.” Translated into English, this is what he wrote. Those who wrote of the fairy Unseelie Court told of the Each-Uisge (ekh-ooshh-kya), the Kelpie, who haunted lakes and bays and rivers in Ireland and Scotland. It rose from the slime and the reeds, a water horse, and any foolish enough to ride were drowned and eaten. Except the liver. The Each-Uisge disdains the liver. I don’t like liver, either.

Imp typed, “You’re drifting again.”

Sailing ships—clippers, dories, schooners, smacks, trawlers, gigantic cargo ships and toxic oil tankers, whaling ships—adrift on treacherous currents and storm winds, and they dash themselves to splinters on jagged headlands.

“Drifting,” Imp typed. “Tiller hard to port. Hold to true north, if you’re not to stray.”

Eva Canning stepped across my threshold.

“Who are hearsed that die on the sea?”

She shut the door behind her, and the latch clicked loudly. She turned the dead bolt, and I found nothing the least bit strange about her doing it. Nothing strange at all about her locking me into my own apartment, with her. I understood she’d not come so far only to be interrupted by intruders. I imagine so many before me have drowned in the depths of her bottle-blue eyes. She’s exactly, exactly, exactly as I remembered her from the July night by the Blackstone River, and from that day at the gallery. Her hair so long and the color of nothing at all, only the color of a place where no light has ever shone.

She turned away from the locked door. She turned towards me. She touched my cheek, and her skin felt like silk against mine. My skin felt like sandpaper compared with hers. This impression was so pronounced that I wanted to pull away and warn her not to cut herself. Her hand had not been fashioned to touch the likes of me. I think of stories I’ve read in books, tales of sharks brushing against swimmers, and how the denticles of sharkskin scrapes bare flesh raw. But here our roles are reversed, if only for this swift assemblage of instants. I am the author of abrasions, or I fear I will be.

But I draw no drop of blood from that silken hand.

“You hurt me,” I say. “You put words in my mind, and I almost died to get them out again.”

“I got your attention,” she replies.

“You hurt Abalyn.”

“Imp, she’d have been harmed far worse if she hadn’t gone.” And Eva quotes from Hamlet, “ ‘I must be cruel only to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.’ ”

I know there will be no arguing with her. That lilting voice foolish Ulysses heard, that he ordered himself lashed to a mast that he might hear. Eva reduces any objection to bald-faced absurdity.

“You’re a wicked thing. You’re an abomination.”

“I am as I am. As are you.”

Those silken fingertips glide across my lips, and then across the bridge of my nose. I have never been touched with such perfect intimacy.

“You’ve come to kill me,” I say very softly, and it surprises me that I don’t sound afraid.

“I’ve done nothing of the sort,” she replies, and that doesn’t surprise me, either. What she says, I mean. It’s easy to kill. It’s easy to be a predator. A shark. A wolf. Not easy, no. People hunt wolves and sharks for no reason except the fact that they are sharks and wolves. I’m trying to say, I realize that whatever Eva Canning is, it’s something far more subtle than a predator. She’s come to feed, and maybe to devour, but not to kill. My face is being stroked by a beast that does not need to feed to devour.

“You let him see you. Saltonstall, I mean.”

“I never said that.”

“The Drowning Girl, you called it ‘my painting.’ ”

“Did I?” she asks, and she smiles.

Her hand lingers at my left earlobe, and goose bumps speckle my arms. Her fingers brush through my hair.

“So, why are you here?”

“You stopped for me. No one else ever did,” she says. “I’ve come to sing for you, because I owe you a kindness.”

“Even if it’s cruel.”

“Even if,” she says, and now her fingers are exploring the back of my neck. “And, in return, I will ask a small favor of you, Imp. But we’ll talk about that later. Don’t be afraid of me. You can’t yet see it, but I’ve come to lead you out of the dark place where you’ve always lived. You can’t glimpse it from here, but from there, you will.” (Look upon the thing monstrous and free.)

She kissed me then, and I thought, I’ve never been kissed before.

(Oh. I’ve shifted tense, but then there is no proper tense in this Blakean land of dreams, this mnemonic labyrinth, past and present indistinguishable. The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. Just like Mary Cavan Tyrone said.)

She kissed me. She is kissing me. Always, she will be kissing me. This is the way of hauntings, as I’ve said. Eva Canning, I think—I think I only thought this, but it seemed as though Eva Canning tasted like the sea. Taste, smell, sight, audition, the sensation of touch…they all blur just as time has blurred.

Her tongue enters my mouth, probing, and there’s brief panic, because it’s not so different from the day I tried to breathe underwater, the day I tried to inhale a tub filled with ice water. She is flowing into me. Only, this time, my body doesn’t fight back. She is pouring down my throat, and I’m breathing her into me. But my lungs make no effort to resist the invasion.

This sounds like pornography. I read back over the page and it sounds like I’m writing pornography. It was never anything like that. My words aren’t good enough. They’re not equal to the task. I don’t know how to communicate passion and longing, the wetness between my thighs, desire, that wish to have her within and around me, and not cheapen it. A woman struggles to describe demons, angels, and, being only a woman, she does their beauty and terror a disservice. I do Eva Canning, as she came to me, as I saw her, an abhorrent disservice.

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were—I have not seen

Our lips parted, and the division brought greater despair by far even than the days I learned first of Rosemary’s death, then of Caroline’s, than the hour that Abalyn went away. I stumbled backwards and bumped against the arm of the sofa. I would have fallen, if it hadn’t been there.

You really have no notion how delightful…

She stood between me and the door, and I was just beginning to see her, not as the mask to hide the thing, monstrous and free, a few inches of black water, and seeing her even clearer than that day at the museum. Her cheeks and shoulders shimmer, green-red-cyan iridescence, and only now does it occur to me she isn’t wearing the sunglasses she wore that day at Wayland Square and that day at RISD, because her bottle-blue eyes are black, and I don’t know why I ever mistook them for bottle-blue or any other color. Black is all colors, the absorption of all colors. No light escapes black. No light escapes the eyes of Eva Canning, when I still believe her the Siren of Millville.

“I will sing for you, Winter India Morgan,” she said, smiling her frayed, sad, voracious, apologetic, sympathetic smile. That smile is etched evermore on the insides of my eyelids, and when I am dead, embalmed, and in my grave, I’ll still see that smile. “I’ve come to sing for you, and to draw your song from you. And when we are done singing, you’ll take me home, and I’ll go down to my mother, who dreams of me each night.”

The voyeur of utter destruction.

In hindsight.

The fortune from the fortune cookie I got the first time Abalyn and I ordered takeout: Don’t stop now.

But I want to, because what’s coming is as bad as those latest days off my meds, those last days spent in my corner or whispering madly into the typewriter until Abalyn used her key and found me. What’s coming, it’s that impossible to describe, I think, because it’s that terrible, that beautiful, that derelict, and that private. But I’m so, so near The End. Don’t stop now.

Much of what follows is confused, fuzzy. Especially the beginning of it. For one, I stopped taking my meds. And there was Eva, and whatever it meant that she’d crossed my threshold, and by that, I mean much more than she’d stepped across my doorsill. I mean very many things. I do recall that she called work and said she was a friend of mine, that I had an intestinal bug and would be out for a few days. I also remember that it was Eva who convinced me I’d be better off without my pills, because, after all, I had her now. And she said something like, “They would only blur your perceptions of me. They keep you from seeing what the gift of your insanity reveals, and what others never guess.” At her bidding, I actually flushed it all down the toilet. The prescriptions. I sat at the toilet, emptying each bottle as she stood in the doorway, watching on approvingly. I flushed, and the swirling water stole my counterfeit sanity away.

She offered a hand, and helped me up off the floor. Though, truthfully, I wanted to stay there. The apartment was so awfully hot, and the tiles were cool beneath me. She pulled me to her, and then led me…

It’ll be a lie if I settle for, “She pulled me to her, and then led me to bed.” Though she did do that. But if I say that, and only that, it’ll be a falsehood. It might be factual, but it wouldn’t be true. “Take my hand, India. I’ll show you how to fly.” Fly, sing, swim. She led me to the bed, and she undressed me. She kissed me again. She kissed my mouth, and my breasts, and my sex. And then she led me into deepest winter, and to the Blackstone River. She took me into song, which became a far white country, until it became a painting, until it became the sea. But first, song was only song, and her lips only her lips.

Shoo, shoo, shoo la roo, shoo la rack shack, shoo la baba boo, When I find my sally bally bill come dibb-a-lin a boo shy lor-ree, Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, Go to sleepy little baby. When you wake, you shall have, All the pretty little horses. Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, Johnny’s gone for a soldier. “Come home with me, little Matty Groves, come home with me tonight. Come home with me, little Matty Groves, and sleep with me till light.” Johnny’s gone for a soldier. They grew and grew in the old churchyard Till they could grow no higher At the end they formed, a true lover’s knot And the rose grew round the briar. I am as brown as brown can be, And my eyes as black as sloe; I am as brisk as brisk can be, Johnny has gone for a soldier. “I put him in a tiny boat, And cast him out to sea, That he might sink or he might swim, But he’d never come back to me.” And the only sound I hear, as it blows through the town, is the cry of the wind as it blows through the town, weave and spin, weave and spin. His ghost walked at midnight to the bedside of his Mar-i-Jane When he told her how dead he was; said she: “I’ll go mad.” “Since my love he is so dead,” said she, “All joy on earth has fled for me.” “I never more will happy be,” and she went raving mad. Johnny has gone for a soldier. Twinki doodle dum, twinki doodle dum sang the bold fisherman. Shule, shule, shulagra, sure and sure and he loves me. Of thrupence a pound on the tea, of thrupence a pound on the tea. Siúl, Siúl, Siúl a ghrá Níl leigheas ar fáil ach leigheas an bháis Ó d’fhag tú mise is bocht mo chás Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán Way down yonder, down in the meadow There’s a poor wee little lamby. The bees and the butterflies pickin’ at its eyes, The poor wee thing cried for her mammy. Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, o follow the whale; Where the icebergs do float And the stormy winds blaw, Where the land and the ocean Are covered wi’ snaw. If that mockingbird don’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Weave and spin, weave and spin, Johnny has gone for a soldier. He made a harp o her breast-bane, That he might play forever thereon. Johnny has gone for a soldier. Then three times ’round went our gallant ship, And three times ’round went she, And the third time that she went ’round She sank to the bottom of the sea. The boat capsized and four men were drowned, and we never caught that whale, Brave boys, And we never caught that whale. And a’ the live-lang winter night The dead corp followed she. Weave and spin, weave and spin. I saw, I saw the light from heaven Come shining all around. I saw the light come shining. I saw the light come down. As slow our ship her foamy track Against the wind was cleaving, Shoo, shoo, shoo la roo shoo la rack shack, shoo la baba boo When I find my sally bally bill come dibb-a-lin a boo shy lor-ree, Johnny has gone for a soldier.

In those days that followed, all and every song was hers, and of her kind. She didn’t ever tell me that. It was something I understood implicitly. It was an unspoken truth hung between us. Eva Canning laid me out on my bed, filleted me, and she buried her face between my thighs, and her tongue sang unspeakable songs into me.

They are too many to write them all down, so I settle for dread morsels. Most I can’t recall, anyway, and, besides, I know now what I didn’t know then. I’ve seen the grave in Middletown, and I know now my ghost story isn’t the ghost story I thought it was, the one I set out to tell. My stories shape-shift like mermaids and werewolves. A lycanthropy of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, subjects and predicates, and so on and so forth.

She lapped between my legs, and filled me to bursting with music few have ever heard and lived. She made me Ulysses. She made me a lyre and a harp and flute. She played me (two meanings here). And songs are stories, and so she made of me a book, just as I became song. None of this means what it meant a few days ago, but I’m telling it as I would have told it before Abalyn went with me to Aquidneck Island. There will be time later for other revelations. These things are still true, and I think facts are patient things. Facts have all the time the universe allows.

I awoke one night, past midnight but long before dawn, and she was standing at the bedroom window, looking out on the house’s stingy, weedy backyard, at the houses that face Wood Street, the sky, at everything you can see from that window. It’s a depressing view, and I hardly ever open those curtains. Eva was naked, and her skin as iridescent as motor oil in a puddle. Even by the moonlight through the window, her skin shimmered.

“Did I dream—?” I began.

“You dreamed about me,” she said.

“What are you looking at?” I asked, my voice filled with sleep and the taste of the dreams she’d given me, and the dreams that were still to come.

She looked over her shoulder at me, and she smiled. It was the saddest sort of smile. It was a smile that almost broke my heart. “Your heart is brittle, Winter India Morgan. Your heart’s no more than a china shop, and all the world’s that proverbial bull. Your heart’s spun from molten glass.

“You should be asleep,” she said.

“Something woke me,” I replied. I asked her what she was looking at, and she turned to face the window again.

“Something woke me,” she said.

I shut my eyes again, only wanting to sink back down to sleep, so tired, so happily, painfully worn from her ministrations and the songs and stories filling me alive. Then she said something more, and I’m not sure of what I heard. I’m only almost sure, which isn’t at all the same as being sure, right?

I think Eva Canning said, “You’re a ghost.” But she wasn’t speaking to me. What she was looking at was her reflection in the bedroom window, and I’m only almost sure that’s what, whom, she was speaking to.

I choose this next song at random. This dream,

I believe I’ll choose it, then one more.

Or two.

I’m painting a picture of days that are all but lost, and yet they are the most real and immediate days I’ve ever lived. I’m trying to recall those precious dreams and stories she sang and whispered across my lips and teeth and into my throat.

She knew hundreds of permutations of the story of how, in 1898, Phillip George Saltonstall came to paint The Drowning Girl. She told me most of them. She sang them to me. Some echoed his letter to Mary Farnum. Most didn’t.

I remember this, whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that liminal space where she kept me most of the time. I sleepwalked through entire days.

I was in the forest at Rolling Dam on the Blackstone River, and it was deep into winter, and there’d been a heavy snowfall. I was naked as Eva had been standing at the bedroom window, but I wasn’t cold. I didn’t feel the cold at all. I was on the western shore, looking out across the dam, at all that water the color of pickled Spanish olives spilling over the convex top and crashing to the rocks below. The water above the dam was black, and who knows how deep, or what it hid. (And, writing this, I’m reminded of Natalie Wood trying to drown herself above a dam in Splendor in the Grass, and of Natalie Wood drowning in 1981 off the Isthmus of Catalina Island. She was afraid of drowning all her life, because, as a child, she almost did. Drown, I mean. Anyway, in Splendor in the Grass, the water above the dam was dark, too. But, in the movie, it was summer, not winter.)

The waters below Rolling Dam were rapids that roared and gurgled between snow-covered granite boulders. I walked down to the waterline, and saw that north of me, where the river bends sharply back to the west, it was frozen over, and the ice stretched away as far as I could see. A road of white laid between the boles and frosted limbs of paper birch, pines, maple boughs dappled with thousands of tiny red flowers despite the cold, oaks, willows, thick underbrush growths of rhododendron, hawthorn, greenbrier, wild grapes.

My breath didn’t fog, and I suspected this was because I was dead, and so my body was almost as cold as the woods around me.

“What did you see there at the dam?” I type. “No lies. What did you see?”

I beg your pardon. I haven’t lied yet.

There was a noise on my left, and I turned my head to see a doe watching me. She was so still I thought she might be dead, as well. Might be dead and taxidermied and left out here as a practical joke or a morbid bit of ornamentation. But then she blinked, and bolted, springing away into the trees. She should have made a great deal of noise, tearing through the forest like that, but she made no sound at all. Maybe she did, but the roar from the dam obscured it. The dam was so loud, like a wave always breaking and never withdrawing down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world. The doe went, her white tail a warning flash, but I thought I was alone. Except for crows cawing in the trees.

“Crows mean lies,” Imp typed. “Don’t forget that. Don’t forget the plague doctors you never saw, the beak doctors.”

Crows are not always lies. Sometimes, they’re only hungry, rowdy, rude, punk crows perched in the bare branches of February trees. That’s my soul up there. Sometimes, they’re no more than that.

“Fine,” Imp typed. “But after the doe, what did you see after the doe? When you looked across the Blackstone River above the dam, what did you see?”

I saw Jacova Angevine (I didn’t know her name; I wouldn’t learn her name for another two years and four months). I saw Jacova Angevine, leader of the Open Door of Night, the Prophet from Salinas, leading dozens and dozens of women and men into the river. They were all dressed in robes as white as the snow. None of them even tried to swim. They walked in, went down, and none of them came back up again. No air bubbles. It went on for a long time, and I was starting to think there’d be no end to that procession, when there was, and only one woman was left standing on the opposite shore. No, not a woman. A very young girl. She wasn’t dressed in a white robe, but jeans and a sweater and a bright blue coat with a blue fur collar. She stood on the bank and peered into the tannin-stained river. It’s only fifty yards or so across at Rolling Damn, and I could see her very clearly. She looked up, finally, and for an instant her eyes met mine. And then she turned and, like the doe, bolted into the forest.

“You’re a ghost,” she told her reflection.

I wanted to follow the girl, but I didn’t dare enter that river, not with all those drowned men and women. I was certain they’d reach up and drag me down with them. Instead, I crouched in the snow, wild as any doe or bobcat or coyote. I crouched and watched the river. I pissed, and so I knew I must be alive, because I don’t think dead women piss, do they? I huddled in the trees, beneath a cloudy Man Ray kind of sky almost as white as the snow. And, before the sun set, I began to feel the cold, and my body turned to ice. I was crystal, and the moon shone through me.

Imp types, “In ‘Werewolf Smile,’ you named yourself Winter.”

We’re sitting together in moonlight, and there are no lights on anywhere in the apartment. We’re sitting together in front of the turntable and speakers, and I’m playing one of Rosemary Anne’s records for Eva. She has told me she is always fascinated by the music she doesn’t make, the music of man, the music above the sea, the music of the world above, though she’s heard very little of it. So, I’m playing Dreamboat Annie for her, because I remember that’s the one that Abalyn liked the most. Eva listens, and occasionally says something. The music is loud (she wants it that way), but I have no trouble at all hearing her words clearly above the guitars, the drums, the pianos and synthesizers, and the vocals.

I’ve just asked her, again, what she meant that day in the museum about The Drowning Girl being her painting. One song ends, another begins, and finally she says, “You see it, and are obsessed with it. But haven’t you ever made it yours? Haven’t you ever found yourself within it?”

I admitted I’d not.

She kissed me, and the music faded. In a few moments, I found myself standing on the riverbank again. This time I was not Winter it was not winter, but late summer, and the trees were a riot of green. There was very little I could see that was not one or another hue of green. But I noticed at once that I could only see a few feet in any direction. I couldn’t see the sky, or very far along the bank to either side. I’d stepped into the cool, welcoming water, and when I look over my right shoulder, the space between the trees is impenetrable. There is above me no hint of the sky. It’s not that I can’t see the sky; it simply isn’t there. And I understand then that I am not actually back at the river. Eva has kissed me, alchemical kiss, and now I am in the painting. No, I am the painting.

I inspect everything more closely, and there is about every surface—the river, the forest, the bark of the trees, the underbrush between them, even my own skin—there is about it all the unmistakable texture of linen stretched and framed. And this is when I feel the camel’s hair brush and the oil paint dabbing tenderly, meticulously, at the space below my navel.

“You see?” Eva asks. And I am back with her in the moonlight. The record has ended, and the phonograph’s pickup arm has automatically lifted and returned to the armrest. “It’s as simple as that. Now it’s your painting, too. It’s only another way of singing.”

It was a while before the disorientation passed, and I could speak. I said, “I wish there were something I could give you. You’ve given me so much.”

She smiled, and kissed my cheek. “It’s coming, love,” she sighed. “Be patient. Soon enough now, it’s coming.”

As I’ve said above, there are countless other songs and stories Eva sang into me. Though, I see they’re all variations on a theme. At most, distinguished one from another by disparities that seem far less important, less profound, to me now than they must have seemed then.

“You’re a ghost,” Eva told herself.

And she sang into me for days and days, nights and nights, making of me the vessel of a ghost’s memories. She hid me, sequestered in her arms and my apartment, apart from all distraction, that I would have eyes and ears and touch and taste for her and her alone. I breathed her into me. I breathed in a ghost, insubstantial and ectoplasmic, a woman who believed herself a ghost, and a siren, and who was not a wolf and never had been. We spoke, somewhen in all that time, of Albert Perrault, and she said, “My mother…,” but then trailed off.

I wrote that I’d choose one story, and then another. But there are too many choices, and too little distinction. And I have. The girl standing at the riverbank, and then turning away. Not following the others into the river and so missing that chance forever. Not joining, so evermore apart. I can understand that. Caroline went in merciful hydrocarbon fumes, and Rosemary Anne, she’s gone, too, and I am alone, in an exile of my own choosing, or of my own fear. I could join them, and, yet, I can’t. I can’t follow. Eva can’t follow, but the sea has her heart and soul forever. “The Little Mermaid,” and never “Little Red Riding Hood.” Never Gévaudan. Always The Drowning Girl, and never Elizabeth Short. But I’m racing ahead of myself. Stop. Retrace your steps, Imp.

Eva didn’t love me. I doubt she ever loved anyone. She loved the ocean. Trapped in a dark river in Massachusetts, she was only seeking her way home, the path flowing to the tide of a lover’s arms. In “Werewolf Smile,” I wrote of that fictionalized Eva, “…because I knew that she never loved any of them, any more than she loved me.”

I’ve told about the river in winter, and becoming the painting, but I’m not going to write down all those story-songs, the mutable, unchanging permutations: a child on a merry-go-round, spinning round and round while her mother watched, and never getting anywhere at all; an emaciated creature with golden eyes and needle teeth lying hungry and watchful in the mud at the bottom of the deep water in back of Rolling Dam; the wrecks of ship after ship, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-century drownings; a beach leading down to the submarine Monterey Canyon, ninety-five miles long and out of soundings, almost twelve hundred feet deep; a beautiful, charismatic woman with an ancient idol of a god-thing she called Mother Hydra; an intricate mandala on the floor of a temple that had once been a warehouse, and the supplicants praying there for deliverance from terrestrial damnation; Phillip George Saltonstall climbing into the saddle; the rape of my mother by a man I have called Father; all those men and women marching into the sea; the hand of hurricane demons. See, Imp, they’re all the same story, seen through the eyes of the ghost whom they haunt, and that ghost is Eva, and that ghost is me.

She showed me the face I needed to see, and that she needed me to see, to complete a circuit. It would end her haunting, even as it made mine worse. I couldn’t have known this at the time, lost in her and off my meds.

There are no monsters. No werewolves. No sirens.

But she showed me her truest face, and it hardly matters whether it was ever factual.

The Siren of Millville writhed in her variegated coils upon my bed, the murdered, transformed soul of Perishable Shippen, who had surely perished, true to her name, even if she’d never existed. Eva writhed in the vermiform coils of eels and sea snakes, hagfish and lamprey. She fastened that ravenous, barbeled mouth about the folds of my labia, rasping teeth working at my clit. She writhed and coiled about me, wrapping me in a smothering, protective cocoon of slime, thick translucent mucus exuded from unseen glands or pores. Across her rib cage were drawn the gill slits of a shark, a deep row of four crimson slashes on either side of her torso, out of water and gasping, opening and closing, breathless but undying. Her breasts had vanished, leaving her chest flat except for those gills. I gazed into black eyes, eyes that were only black and nothing more, and they gazed into me.

She flowered, and bled me dry.

She took my voice, and filled me with song.

Unloving, she left me no choice but to love her.

Where there had been clean cotton sheets, there was a blanket of polyps, a hundred different species of sea anemones, the stinging embrace of their stinging tentacles planted there to keep us safe. We were immune to their neurotoxins, I understood instinctively, like the tiny clownfish that nest within anemones to escape the jaws of bigger fish are immune. To my eyes, the anemones were no different from a field of wildflowers. She flowered. And there were minute blue-ringed octopuses and sea snakes, nestled between those flowers, each sparing us its fatal bite. She called them all with melodies no mortal woman’s throat may ever replicate. Crabs scuttled across my belly, and a razor rash of barnacles flecked my arms and legs. I questioned none of this. It was. It simply was. The room was filled with the darting, sinuous shadows of fish.

I came again and again and again.

Orgasm is too insufficient a word.

She held me tightly in arms the same bottle-blue as her eyes had once been, hands and webbed fingers and arms dappled with scales and photophores that glowed another shade of blue to illuminate the abyssal gloom of my bedroom, which must have sunk as deeply as anything has ever sunken. Her chitin claws drew welts on my breasts and face. Her lionfish spines impaled my heart and lungs.

She drew me down.

“Promise,” she whispered with that lipless mouth. “Promise me, when we are done here.”

And I did promise, barely half-understanding the pledge I’d made. I’d have promised her I’d fight my way through all the hells in which I’d never believed. I’d have promised her every remaining day of my life, had she asked.

“You are my savior,” she whispered, coiling and uncoiling. “You are the end of my captivity.”

“I love you,” I told her.

“I’m wicked. Remember?”

“Then I love your wickedness, and I’ll be wicked, too. I’ll become an abomination.”

“There’s not an ounce of wickedness in you, India Morgan Phelps, and I’ll not put it there.”

“If you leave me,” I said. “You leave me, I’ll die,” and I was trying so hard not to sob, but there were tears on my cheeks, tears instantly lost to the ocean filling my bedroom. “I’ll drown if you ever leave me.”

“No, Imp,” she replied, her voice all kelp and bladderwrack. “You’re not the girl who drowns. Not in this story you’re writing. You’re the girl who learns to swim.”

“I want to believe you.”

“Oh, Winter India, everything I’ve ever told you or ever will tell you is a lie, but this, this one thing is true.” (I don’t tell her I would one day write those words and put them in her mouth in a story titled “Werewolf Smile.”)

She kissed me again, tasting all of brine, and her lips the lips of l’Inconnue de la Seine.

And then I began to sing. It was my song, and my song alone, never voiced since the dawn of time. It was everything I was, had been, might be. I swelled with song, and I sang.

“Like the fortune cookie said, ‘Don’t stop now,’ ” Imp typed. “You’re almost at the end of it.”

It’s true. There’s not that much more left to tell, though, possibly, what remains may be the most important part of the ghost story. I could draw it out, perhaps. There is so much more I haven’t told, moments that transpired between myself and Eva Canning, and I could sit here and record all of them that I can remember. That would take many days more, many pages more. Even though there’s not that much more left to tell. I have the time, I suppose. Still unemployed, I have quite a lot of time on my hands. So, yeah, I could draw it out, how I was seduced and romanced by my mermaid (who never was a wolf), my lover who would be a melusine, a daughter of Phorcys, the Siren of Millville trapped in the Blackstone River ages ago by a hurricane, who would be all these things and innumerable things more. In her way, and in my way, she bewitched me as surely as Circe, though her tinctures worked on my eyes and mind. The physical transformations she worked all upon herself.

Early one morning—and I cannot say how many days had passed since she’d crossed the threshold, since Abalyn had left, only that we’d remained in the apartment all that time. I had no need of food, or no need beyond whatever was already in the pantry and the fridge. So, early one morning in August I woke, and I was alone in the bed. The sheets were only sheets. All her anemones had melted away again. They came and went as they wished, or as she summoned and dismissed them. There were only the sheets, which smelled of sweat and sex and, so, faintly of the sea. I’d been dreaming of the day that Abalyn and I had gone to the river and seen nothing much at all, only in the dream, we did see something. I won’t say what. What is not important. I woke from the dream, and lay blinking, immediately aware that Eva wasn’t there beside me. I slept in her arms, or her in mine. We curled fetal as any unborn beast in one another’s arms. We wrapped ourselves together as though all we were depended on those embraces.

“Eva?” I whispered, sleepily.

“Good morning, India Morgan,” she said. She was at the bedroom window again, looking out at the sky, which was only just beginning to brighten. She wasn’t naked this time. She’d put on her silky red dress, but was barefoot. The dawn light painted her pale face a muted shade of ginger. Ginger or butterscotch. The wolf Eva who never existed, she’d had butterscotch eyes. I considered that maybe the light came from within her, as much as it reflected off her. She stood very straight. She didn’t look over her shoulder at me as she spoke. There was no iridescence remaining about her, and she only looked like any thin, pale woman. She was no longer unearthly, and I thought, The spell is broken. I thought, Perhaps whatever happens from here on, it’s my choice and my choice alone.

This might have been true. Sometimes now, knowing what I know, I prefer to believe otherwise.

“You should put something on,” she said, words soft as velvet. “I need you to take me to the sea today. We need to leave soon. I’ve put it off too long already.”

I found no reason to doubt any of this. In every way, it seemed entirely sensible. I’d seen the sort of being she was, and borne witness to her magic, and of course she needed to be near the sea. I got up, found a cleanish pair of panties and mismatched socks (one argyle, one black and white stripes), cargo shorts, and a khaki tank top that Abalyn had left behind. I know now, and knew then, that I should have felt a pang of…something…seeing the tank top, but I didn’t. I simply slipped it on.

I was tying my tennis shoes when she asked if I was hungry, if I needed breakfast before we left. I told her no, I wasn’t hungry, though I was.

“Do you know Moonstone Beach?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Been there lots.” In the summer, you can only walk a narrow strip of Moonstone Beach, because it used to be a nude beach, until 1989 or so when the US Fish and Wildlife people declared it a refuge for endangered piping plovers. From April to mid-September, you can’t go where the plovers nest. They are tiny gray-white birds with black bands around their throats and between their eyes. They dash about the sand, pecking at whatever they eat, worms or bugs or whatever.

“Then we’ll go to Moonstone Beach.” And then she was talking about the January twelve winters before, when a tank barge and a tug both ran aground there. The barge spilled more than eight hundred thousand gallons of toxic heating oil into Block Island Sound and onto the beach. The name of the barge was North Cape, and the tug was named Scandia, and, during a storm, they’d run afoul of the rocks in the shallows just offshore. Both Trustom and Card ponds were contaminated by the spill—two salt ponds bordering the beach—and Moonstone was littered with the corpses of tens of millions of poisoned seabirds, lobsters, surf clams, and starfish. Anything that could be poisoned and was washed up onto the beach. People saved some of the birds. You can’t save a poisoned lobster.

You really have no notion how delightful…

“It was a massacre,” Eva said, and there was an unmistakable trace of bitterness in her voice. “She doesn’t forget these things. Maybe people do. Maybe the birds come back and shellfish come back, and no one tells tourists what happened here. But the sea remembers. The memory of the sea encompasses eons.”

I tell her how I found a trilobite fossil out on Conanicut Island when I was a kid. “It was sort of smooshed up, though, because the shale metamorphosed, got turned to slate…,” and then I realized I was prattling and trailed off.

“I sang for me,” she said, and I sat on the bed, watching the butterscotch light on her face. “I sang you, and drew your song from you. I kept my promise.”

“Do you think she’s waiting?” I asked. “Your mother, I mean,” and she didn’t answer me. I wanted to tell her I loved her. I wanted to beg her to be with me forever, to strangle me in her bathypelagic reveries she’d only allowed me to briefly glimpse. I wanted to implore her to teach me metamorphosis, that I might coil and peer at the world through shark-black eyes. Please teach me the witchcraft, I thought, so I can call the anemones and crabs, the octopuses and starfish. Stay and always be my sister, my lover, my teacher, my dissolution. My thoughts were bright as the rising sun, and she heard them all. Or she only guessed.

“No,” she whispered. “I’ve given as much as I may.”

That’s when I remembered my Moonstone dreams from July, dancing hand in hand to “The Lobster Quadrille” while Eva fiddled. But I kept them to myself. I went to the bathroom, brushed and flossed my teeth, used deodorant, and peed. My reflection, in the mirror on the medicine cabinet door, my reflection surprised me, but only a little. I’d lost weight, and my skin was sallow, and there were dark circles beneath my eyes.

Small price to pay, I silently told myself.

“I’m ready,” I said, stepping back into the bedroom. Eva was still standing at the window. At last she turned away from the coming day. And I think, I almost am certain, that she said something about Aokigahara Jukai, but she was speaking so quietly, and I didn’t ask her to repeat herself.

We left the house, left the city, and I took the Broad Street exit onto I-95 to South County. I had to find my sunglasses, the sun so bright on my left. The day was bright, the sky blue as blue ever is, no clouds at all. Eva found a radio station playing classical music, and…

“Don’t stop now,” Imp typed.

Full fadom five thy MOTHER lies,

Of HER bones are Corrall made:

Those are pearles that were HER eies

Nothing of HER that doth fade,

But doth suffer a Sea-change

Into something rich, & strange:

It takes us less than an hour to reach Moonstone Beach. I exit the interstate at…no, no sense in a blow-by-blow travelogue, is there? I left the interstate and drove south to the sea. I drove south, to the sea. The windows were down, and the air was sweet with the perfume of growing things. I drove, and we passed the picturesque rural pageant below I-95: the Kenyon Grist Mill (circa 1886, 1695) and fields of tall, dry cornstalks, forests and bracken and pastureland, fieldstone walls scabbed with moss and lichen, horses, and cows, and goats, trees so huge I imagine they must have been planted or taken root before the Revolutionary War, a handful of houses (some old and dignified, some new and shoddy), and a wide plot of Queen Anne’s lace, their white flowers rustling lazily in the morning breeze. Ponds, and streams, and small bogs. A time or two, I wanted to pull the Honda over, to show Eva some thing or another. But I didn’t. Back on Willow Street, she’d said, “We need to leave soon. I’ve put it off too long already.”

She wouldn’t want me to stop, so I didn’t ask. I tried not to ask questions I already knew the answers to; Rosemary taught me not to do that.

By seven o’clock (I had to stop for gas, or we’d have gotten there sooner), we’d reached the sandy cul-de-sac, the turnaround at the end of Moonstone Beach Road. On one side, the west, the turnaround is flanked by Card Pond, and on the other side, the east, it’s flanked by an impenetrable thicket, interlaced with stunted trees, and then Card Pond. I parked on the Card Pond side, and warned Eva to be careful of poison ivy when she got out, as it grows everywhere near the beach. I didn’t know whether or not she was allergic, but I’m awfully allergic to poison ivy. So cautioning her was reflexive. She hadn’t worn shoes, after all. Eva smiled, opened the door, and got out of the car.

We stood there, with the car between us, for…for not too long. I spotted two swans on the pond and pointed them out to her. She nodded and said, “The dying swan, when years her temples pierce, In music-strains breathes out her life and verse. And, chanting her own dirge, tides on her wat’ry hearse.”

Who are hearsed that die on the sea?

“Did you just make that up?” I asked.

“Hardly,” she said, and laughed, but it was in no way an unkind or mocking laugh. “An English poet, Phineas Fletcher. He wrote it.”

“Well, it’s beautiful,” I told her.

“Not as much as the swans,” she replied.

“No,” I agreed, “not that beautiful.”

A gust of wind rippled the tea-colored surface of the pond, and one of the swans spread its wide wings.

“We shouldn’t linger,” she said then, and I followed her from the Honda down the trail of gray sand leading to the beach. We crossed the culvert that connects the two ponds. The tide was going out, so water was gurgling into Card Pond through the concrete pipe beneath us. There are only two or three lines of dunes dividing the salt ponds from the beach. The dunes were festooned with dog roses and the aforementioned poison ivy. That morning, there were the delicate pink and white dog roses in bloom, and still a few drooping scarlet rose hips that hadn’t shriveled and dropped to the ground.

“Make it short,” Imp typed. “We shouldn’t linger.”

I also type.

The air smelled of the sea, and of the dog roses. Beyond the dunes, Moonstone Beach is almost always very, very windy. The wind whipped madly through Eva’s long hair. The wind was colder than I’d expected it to be, and I wished I’d brought a sweater. The air was so clear that morning, I could plainly make out the silhouette of Block Island, ten miles to the south. The beach was, as always, littered with seaweed and cobbles and pebbles: granite, slate, calcite, schist, and the opaque white moonstone for which the beach was named. The sea was calm, and only very low waves, ankle-high, rolled in and broke against the shoreline. The air was filled with herring gulls, a few of the larger black-backed gulls, and sleek cormorants streaking past.

No, Caroline. There were no crows, or ravens, or black birds of any sort.

Eva bent down and picked up a perfectly rounded moonstone, about the size of a chestnut, and she placed it in my hand, then closed my fingers around it.

“You can sing now, India Morgan Phelps,” she said. “I wish your songs weren’t going to cause you so much pain.” And then she placed a hand on either side of my head and kissed me, and Eva tasted no different from any human woman I’ve ever kissed.

When our mouths parted, I said, “Let’s go home.”

Her bottle-blue eyes stared into my eyes. She didn’t smile, and she didn’t frown. I don’t know a word for the expression that had settled over her face. Maybe the word is calm.

“No, Imp. That’s not the way your ghost story ends,” she said so softly I could hardly hear her voice over the wind. “That’s not the way my ghost story ends, either.”

And then the woman I knew as Eva Canning, daughter of Eva Canning, did what her mother had done seventeen years before. Eva turned away from me, and she walked into the sea. At first, the waves broke about her ankles, then about her thighs, soaking her red dress, red as rose hips. Then she swam a little ways. And then she was gone. I thought, Love is watching someone die.

I sat down on the beach and held the moonstone she’d given me. I sat there a long, long time, shivering and listening to the gulls.