The Drowning Girl

3

Returning, briefly, to the subject of Phillip George Saltonstall and The Drowning Girl, before returning to Eva Canning and that maybe-night in July. I’ve written that I first saw the painting on the occasion of my eleventh birthday, which is both true and factual. I was born in 1986, and am now twenty-four years old, so that year was 1997. So, that August, the painting was ninety-nine years old. Which makes it 112 at the present, and means that it was 110 the summer I first met Eva Canning. It’s odd how numbers have always comforted me, despite my being terrible at mathematics. I’ve already filled these pages with a plethora of numbers (mostly dates): 1914, 1898, #316, 1874, 1900, 1907, 1894, 1886, & etc. Perhaps there’s some secret I’ve unconsciously hidden in all these numbers, but, if so, I’ve lost or never had the codex to riddle it out.

Dr. Ogilvy suspects that my fondness of dates may be an expression of arithmomania. And, in fairness to her, I should add that during my teens and early twenties, when my insanity included a great many symptoms attributable to obsessive-compulsive disorder, I had dozens upon dozens of elaborate counting rituals. I could not get through a day without keeping careful track of all my footsteps, or the number of times I chewed and swallowed. Often, it was necessary for me to dress and undress some precise number of times (the number was usually, but not always, thirty) before leaving the house. In order to take a shower, I would have to turn the water on and off seventeen times, step in and out of the tub or shower stall seventeen times, pick up the soap and put it down again seventeen times. And so forth. I did my best to keep these rituals a secret, and I was deeply, privately ashamed of them. I can’t say why, why I was ashamed, but I was afraid, and I lived in constant dread that Aunt Elaine or someone else would discover them. For that matter, if I had been asked at the time to explain why I found them necessary, I would’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I could only have said that I was convinced that unless I did these things, something truly horrible would happen.

Always it has seemed to me that arithmomania is simply (no, not simply, but still) the normal human propensity for superstition to run amok in the mind. A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level. The Japanese fear of the number four, for example. Or the widespread belief that thirteen is unlucky, sinister, evil. Christians who find special significance in the number twelve, because there were twelve apostles. And so forth.

On my eleventh birthday, the painting was ninety-nine years old, and I wouldn’t begin any serious research into it until I was sixteen, at which point it had aged to one hundred and four (11. 99. 16. 104). I’d hardly thought about The Drowning Girl in the years since I first set eyes on it. Hardly at all. And when it reentered my life, it did so—seemingly—by nothing more than happenstance. It seemed so then. I’m not sure if it seems so any longer. The arrival of Eva may have changed coincidence to something else. I begin to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and connotation in ways closed off to the minds of “sane” people. I don’t. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken. Of course, that’s not what Eva said.

All my life, I have loved visiting the Athenaeum on Benefit Street. Rosemary and Caroline took me there more often than the central branch of the Providence Public Library downtown (150 Empire Street). The Athenaeum, like so much of Providence, exists out of time, preservationists having seen that it slipped through the cracks while progress steamrolled so much of the city into sleek modernity. Today, the Athenaeum isn’t so very different than in the days when Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman courted among the stacks. Built in the manner of the Greek Revival, the library’s present edifice was finished in 1838 (sixty years before Saltonstall painted The Drowning Girl), though the Athenaeum was founded in 1753. (Note the repetition of eight—at eighteen or twenty-two I would have been helpless to do otherwise—1 + 7 equaling 8; 5 + 3 equaling 8; 8 + 8 equaling 16, which divided by 2 equals 8; full circle.) I couldn’t begin to imagine how many hours I’ve spent wandering between those tall shelves and narrow aisles, or lost in some volume or another in the reading room on the lowermost floor. Housed there within its protective shell of pale stone, the library seems as precious and frail as a nonagenarian. Its smell is the musty commingling fragrance of yellowing pages and dust and ancient wood. To me, the smells of comfort and safety. It smells sacred.

On a rainy day in the eighth month of 2002, on the twenty-eighth day of August, I pulled from the shelves in the Athenaeum a book published in 1958, written by an art historian named Dolores Evelyn Smithfield—A Concise History of New England Painters and Illustrators (1958 + a name with eight syllables + I was 16 = 2 × 8). Somehow, I’d never before noticed the book. I took it back to one of the long tables, and was only flipping casually through the pages when I happened across eight paragraphs about Saltonstall and a black-and-white reproduction of The Drowning Girl. I sat and stared at it for a very long time, listening to the rain against the roof and windows, to thunder far away, the footsteps overhead. I noted that the painting appeared on page 88. I used to carry loose-leaf notebooks with me everywhere I went, and an assortment of pens and pencils in a pink plastic box, and that afternoon I wrote down everything Smithfield had written about The Drowning Girl. It doesn’t amount to much. Here’s the most interesting part:

That same day…well, that night, I managed (much to my surprise!) to find the envelope that Rosemary Anne had made notes on all those years before, on my eleventh birthday, in the presence of the painting that had seemed like a window to me. The next day, I returned to the Athenaeum and prowled through volume after volume of Massachusetts and Rhode Island folklore, hoping to come across anything more about the story of “the drowning girl.” For hours, I found nothing at all, and was about to give up, when I finally discovered an account of the legend in A Treasury of New England Folklore by Benjamin A. Botkin (New York: Bonanza Books, 1965). Here is an excerpt, and an excerpt I found later, in another book:

Also, I found:

As with my file on “Little Red Riding Hood,” I have a thick file on the haunting of the Blackstone River containing almost everything I’ve been able to learn about it over the last eight years. Before and after I met Eva Canning—both times, if, indeed, there were two meetings. The file tab was originally labeled “Perishable Shippen,” though Botkin’s is the only account of the legend that grants the murdered woman that name. I’ve never shown the file to Abalyn, though I think now that I should have. That’s one more mistake I made, keeping that history to myself (though, of course, Abalyn believed she’d uncovered her own “history” of Eva). I could make a lengthy roster of those mistakes, things I did that only drove us farther apart. I will say, “If I’d have done this or that differently, we might still be together.” That’s another, more insidious sort of fairy tale. That’s another facet to my haunting—having driven her away—another vicious wrinkle in the meme.

I’ll come back to my file and its contents, after I force myself to spit up one version of the truth.

“A woman in a field—something grabbed her.”

A line from Charles Fort’s Lo! (1931) that I’ve been carrying around in my head for days. It was incorporated into one of Albert Perrault’s paintings. I wanted to get it down here so that I wouldn’t forget it. All the same, this is not where it belongs, not in the first version of the coming of Eva Canning, but in the second. But now I won’t forget it.

July, two years and three months ago and the spare change of a few days (one way or the other). That night alone on the highway in Massachusetts, passing by the river. That night I left Providence alone, but didn’t return alone. I think maybe now I’m ready to try to write it out in some semblance of a story, what I recall of the first version of my meeting with Eva. A story is, by necessity, a sort of necessary fiction, right? If it’s meant to be a true story, then it becomes a synoptic history. I read that phrase someplace, but I can’t for the life of me recall when or where. But I mean, a “true” story, or what we call history, can only ever bear a passing resemblance to the facts, as history is far too complex to ever reduce to anything as clear-cut as a conventional narrative. My history, the history of a city or a nation, the history of a planet or the universe. We can only approximate. So, now that’s what I’ll do. I’ll write an approximation of that night, July 8, the most straightforward I can manage.

But I’ll also keep in mind that history is a slave to reductionism.

Telling this story, I diminish it. I reduce it. I make of it a synodic history.

I render it. That night. This night.

Begin here:

I work until ten o’clock, so I’ve driven the Honda because I dislike walking home from the bus stop after dark. The Armory is a much tamer neighborhood than it used to be, but better safe than sorry, et cetera. I drive home to Willow Street, and Abalyn is sitting on the sofa with her laptop, writing. I go to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of milk and make a fluffernutter sandwich, plenty enough dinner. I rarely eat very much at a time. I snack, I suppose. I bring the milk and my saucer with the sandwich back to the parlor and sit down on the sofa with Abalyn.

“It’s a beautiful night,” I say. “We should go for a drive. It’s a beautiful night for a drive.”

“Is it?” Abalyn asks, briefly glancing up from the screen of the laptop. “I haven’t been outside today.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” I reply. “You shouldn’t stay cooped up in here all day.” I take another bite and watch her while I chew. After I swallow, and have a sip of milk, I ask her what she’s writing.

“A review,” which is what I would have guessed, so it doesn’t seem like much of an answer.

For a few moments, maybe for a few minutes, I eat my sticky sandwich and she types. I almost don’t ask about the drive again, because there’s something so peaceful about the rhythm of the evening as it’s playing out. But then I do ask the question, and from that everything else follows.

“No, Imp,” she says, looking up at me again. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got a deadline. I need to have this piece finished in the next couple of hours. I should have finished it yesterday.” She tells me the name of the game, and it’s one I’d watched her play, but I’ve entirely forgotten what it was. “I’m sorry,” she says again.

“No, that’s okay. No problem.” I try not to sound disappointed, but I’ve never been very good at hiding disappointment. It almost always shows, so I will assume she heard it that night.

“Know what?” she says. “Why don’t you go, anyway? No reason you shouldn’t, just because I’ve got to work. Might even be better without me along. More quiet and all.”

“It won’t be better without you.”

I finish my sandwich and my milk and set the saucer and the empty glass on the floor beside the sofa.

“I still say you shouldn’t let me keep you from going. It’s supposed to rain the rest of the week.”

“You’re sure? It’s all right if I go without you, I mean.”

“Positive. I’ll probably still be up when you get back, this one’s turning out to be such a bitch.”

I tell her that I won’t be gone more than a couple of hours at the most, and she says, “Well, then I’ll definitely still be up when you get back.”

Regardless, I almost don’t go. There’s a wash of apprehension, or dread. Some brand of misgiving. It isn’t so very different from what I felt back when the arithmomania was so bad, or the night I saw the raven-nuns in the park, or on innumerable other occasions when the crazy kicks into overdrive. Dr. Ogilvy has said repeatedly that whenever this happens, I should make a concerted effort to go ahead and do the thing that I’d meant to do, but was suddenly afraid of doing. Within reason, she’s said, I shouldn’t let the delusions and magical thinking and neuroses prevent me from living a normal life. Which means not locking up.

Normal is a bitter pill that we rail against.

Imp isn’t sure what that means. It just occurred to her, and she didn’t want to lose it.

I dislike this language, the detached argot of psychiatry and psychology. Words like codependent and normal, phrases like magical thinking. They disturb me far more than crazy and insane. Let it be enough to say, There’s a wash of apprehension, or dread.

Even so, I almost decide not to go alone. I almost reach for the book I’ve been reading, or go to my studio to work on the painting I’ve been trying to finish.

“I think it would be good for you,” Abalyn says, not looking away from the screen, her fingers still tapping away at the keyboard. “I don’t want to become a ball and chain.”

And this calls to mind another warning from Dr. Ogilvy, that if I ever should find myself in a relationship, not to allow my illness to let it drift into codependence. Not to risk losing my self-sufficiency.

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m totally sure, Imp. Go. Get out. It’s an order,” and she laughs. “If it’s not too late when you get home, we’ll watch a movie.”

“I have work tomorrow,” I say. “I can’t stay up that late.”

“Go,” she tells me again, and she stops typing long enough to make a shooing motion with her left hand. “I’ll still be here when you get home.”

So I got my keys, and a summer sweater just in case the night was chillier than it had seemed coming home from work. I kiss her, and say I won’t be gone long.

“Be careful,” she says. “Don’t drive so fast. One of these nights, you’re gonna get a ticket. Or hit a deer.” I reply that I’m always careful. I sound more defensive than I meant to, but Abalyn doesn’t appear to have noticed.

“You have your phone?” she asks.

It’s almost eleven thirty when I leave the house, but I don’t have to be at work until eleven the next morning. I pull back out onto Willow, turn onto Parade Street, then right on Westminster. I hardly think about where I might be headed. I hardly ever do on these drives. Any forethought or planning seems to defeat the purpose. Their therapeutic value seems to lie in their spontaneity, in the particular routes and destinations always being accidental. From Westminster, I cross the interstate and drive through downtown, with all its bright lights and unlit alleyways. I turn left, north, onto North Main Street, and pass Old North Burial Ground.

I don’t play the radio. I never play the radio on my night drives.

So, past North Burial Ground, and I continue on through Pawtucket, North Main becoming Highway 122. There’s more traffic than I would like, but then there’s almost always more traffic than I’d like. It’s long after midnight by the time I get to Woonsocket, with its decaying, deserted mills and the roaring cacophony of Thunder Mist Falls, there where the Blackstone River slips over the weirs of the Woonsocket Falls Dam. I pull into the parking lot on the eastern side of the dam. When I get out of the car, I look up and see that there’s a ring around the moon, reminding me of Abalyn’s warning that rain was on the way. But rain tomorrow, not tonight. Tonight the sky is clear and specked with stars. I lock the Honda’s doors and cross the otherwise empty parking lot and stand at the railing; I try hard to concentrate on nothing but the violent noise of the water crashing down onto the ragged granite island below the dam.

“Wouldn’t it be interesting,” Imp typed, “if there were a third version of the truth, one in which you met Eva at this dam? It would be poetic, wouldn’t it?”

No. Things are quite complicated enough already, thank you very much. Let’s not make it worse with obvious lies, no matter how pretty they may be.

I’m standing there, wanting only to hear the wild torrent against those water- and timeworn Devonian rocks. But, instead, my head’s filling up with distracting trivia about the dam’s history, minute clots of fact that intrude and push their way unbidden up and into my consciousness. It was completed in 1960, this present dam, after the terrible floods of 1955. But there were dams before this dam, and as long ago as 1660—before there was any dam and only the natural course of the falls—a mill stood on this spot. The mood is broken, and I turn away from the dam and the falls and the roar, crossing the street back to the parking lot and the car.

I continue north, leaving Rhode Island behind me and crossing into Massachusetts. I ford the river on Bridge Street, just east of the rusty railway trestle from which the lifeless body of Perishable Shippen might have been dropped, if those stories are true. I slow down in Millville, recalling what Abalyn said about speeding tickets. I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket. I’ve never even gotten a parking ticket. Millville is small, and I think of it as a village or hamlet, not a town. But still there are so many sodium-arc or mercury-vapor streetlights that they blot out the stars. Who needs all this light? What are they afraid of? There’s no point to being out in the night, beneath the night sky, if I can’t see the stars. But Millville is small, and soon I’m on the far side of it, heading northwest on 122. Soon, I can make out a few twinkling stars again.

Imp—nervous, fretting, skittish little Imp—typed, “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s not too late to stop, you know? You can stop right here, or say that you turned around and drove home to Willow Street. Or, if you insist, that you drove on to Uxbridge or wherever most suits you, but that nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever happened that night or any other. Not in July and certainly not in November.”

And I could never use the word insane again, and also I would pretend that Rosemary Anne died of a seizure, that she didn’t commit suicide. I could go through all the rest of my life in denial, always evading what makes me uncomfortable for fear of triggering uncomfortable, disturbing, appalling thoughts. I could do that, right? I could always call something one thing when, in fact, it’s the exact opposite. Lots of people do it, and it seems to work for them, so why the hell not me?

Hesitantly, Imp typed, “But we both know better, don’t we?” The persistent clack of the keys against the paper rolled into the carriage was pregnant with resignation.

But point taken.

I know better.

Stop.

Yesterday, I honestly did try to make it through that all at once. I wanted to spit it out and be done with it, put it at my back, that first version of the night on the road. I wanted to follow Dr. Ogilvy’s advice and proceed despite my anxiety. But then I was talking to myself, talking at myself, questioning myself, heaping aspersions upon my resolve and casting those aspersions into the cold, hard default Courier black-and-white of this typewriter. And, even though I immediately called myself on it, that was that. I had to step away. I find today that I’m still not ready to return to the events of that night, what occurred after I left the parking lot in Woonsocket, after I drove through Millville. But I also need to write, so I’ll write this, instead. Before sleep last night, I was thinking again about the night I saw the raven-nuns, and about relating that story to Abalyn, and I remembered what Caroline once told me about the meaning of ravens, and those birds closely related to ravens.

Maybe I was six or seven. I’m not sure. Rosemary had left me with my grandmother while she went shopping (she often did this, as I had a peculiar aversion to grocery stores and such). Caroline was sewing, and I was watching her sew. She had an antique Singer sewing machine, the sort you work with a foot pedal. I loved the rhythm of it. The sound of my grandmother’s sewing put me at ease; it was a soothing sound. We were in her bedroom, because that’s where she kept her sewing machine, and she was making a shirt from calico printed with a bright floral pattern.

What happened might seem strange, if you’re not me, or Caroline, or Rosemary. If you’re not someone or something like Eva Canning was, for that matter. It’s never seemed odd to me, but, then, I’m keenly aware how my perceptions are so often at odds with those of most other people I’ve met in my life. Maybe it wouldn’t seem strange, but only quaint or foolish. I don’t mean charmingly odd when I say quaint. I mean strange.

I was sitting on Caroline’s bed, which smelled of fresh laundry and tea rose perfume and very slightly of the Ben-Gay ointment she used when her bad shoulder was hurting her. Comfortable smells, all of those, in perfect harmony with the chuga-chuga-chuga of the old Singer. And I was telling her about Rosemary taking me down to Scarborough Beach just the week before. It was autumn, so there weren’t a lot of people at the beach, no tourists, no summer people, and we’d walked back and forth for a couple of hours, filling a plastic pail with shells and a few unusually shaped cobbles. And, sitting on the bed, telling my grandmother about that day by the bay, I said:

“And then Rosemary looked out across the water, and she said, ‘Oh, baby, look. Do you see it?’ She was awfully excited, and she pointed at the water. I tried very hard to see what she was seeing, but I didn’t, not at first.

“ ‘You can’t see it, because the sun’s reflecting off the water,’ and she told me to shade my eyes with my hand and try again.”

“Did that work?” Caroline asked, stopping to fiddle with the machine’s bobbin. “Could you see what she was pointing at?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“And what was it you saw?”

And, thinking that I’d delivered the yarn without a trace of guile and that she’d believe every single word, I said, “I saw a great sea serpent slithering about in the waves. It was the color of kelp. It looked smooth and rubbery like kelp. I thought that if I could touch it, it would even feel the way kelp feels.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t kelp?” Caroline asked me. “Sometimes there are pretty big tangles of kelp in the bay. I’ve seen them myself. At a distance, they can look like all sorts of things besides kelp.”

“Oh, absolutely sure,” I told her. “Kelp doesn’t have a head like a snake and red eyes and a tongue that flicks out the way a snake’s tongue flicks out. Kelp doesn’t turn and stare back at you and open its mouth to show how many teeth it has, so you’ll know it could eat you if it wanted to, if it decided to swim towards you and you weren’t fast enough to get out of its way. Kelp doesn’t slap at the water with its tail like a whale does, now, does it?”

“Not in my experience,” she said, and went back to working the Singer’s pedal and feeding the bright calico beneath the needle. “Doesn’t sound much like kelp.”

“It must have been at least as long as a school bus, however many feet that is. Mother was afraid, but I told her it wouldn’t hurt us. I told her how I’d read about a sea serpent that was in Gloucester Harbor in 1817—”

“You remember the date?” Caroline wanted to know.

“I most certainly do, and it’s rude to interrupt.” She apologized, and I continued. “I told Rosemary that lots of people saw that sea serpent in 1917, and it didn’t attack any of them.”

“You said before that it was 1817, didn’t you?”

“Does it make any difference? Either way, it didn’t attack anyone, and that’s what I told Mother. We stood there and watched the sea serpent swimming around, and it watched us back, and we even saw it stretch out its long neck and try to snatch a seagull out of the air.”

No sooner had I mentioned the gull than a large crow appeared at the bedroom window and perched there, gazing in at us with its beady black eyes. Caroline stopped sewing, and I stopped telling my story about the sea serpent off Scarborough Beach. The crow pecked once at the window screen, cawed once, then flew away again. My grandmother stared at the window for a moment, then turned and looked at me.

“Imp, now I know you made up the story about the sea serpent.”

“How?” I asked, still watching the window, as if I expected the crow to return.

“It’s something that crows can do,” she said. “Tell whenever someone’s lying. If you’re listening to a story, and a crow shows up like that, you can bet the storyteller is making the whole thing up.”

“I’ve never heard that before,” I protested, though I think by that time I’d decided it was wise not to press the issue of my fabulous sea serpent.

“Imp, there’s lots of stuff you’ve never heard before. You’re just a kid, and you’ve got a lot to learn. Anyhow, it’s not just crows. Same goes for ravens, too, and also rooks, magpies, and pretty much any sort of corvid, even blue jays and nutcrackers. They’re damn smart beasts, and it’s their special ability, to know a lie when they hear one. And what with their troublesome dispositions, they have an annoying tendency to show up and remind someone when they’ve strayed from the facts.”

“You’re not just making this up?”

Caroline nodded towards the window. “Did you see a crow?” she asked.

“What’s a corvid, anyway?” I wanted to know, as it was a word I’d never heard before.

“The family Corvidae, into which ornithologists place ravens and crows and all their close relatives.”

“You read that in a book?”

“I most certainly did,” she said, and started sewing again.

“And you also read the part about blackbirds showing up when people are making stuff up?”

“Strictly speaking, Imp, blackbirds aren’t corvids, though most corvids are birds that are black.”

By this time I’m sure I must have been quite entirely confused. Caroline had this habit of talking in circles, so maybe that’s where I got it from. The circles almost always made sense, which is why they were so frustrating, especially to a six- or seven-year-old girl who’d not yet learned for herself the trick of talking in meaningful circles, conversational mandalas that resist scrutiny and refutation.

“You didn’t answer my question, Caroline. Did you read it in a book, that part about corvids showing up whenever people tell lies?”

“I don’t remember, Imp, but it doesn’t make any difference. Lots of things are true, but no one’s ever bothered writing them down in books. Lives are filled with true things, things that really happened, and hardly any of it ever shows up in books. Or newspapers. Or what have you. Maybe my mother told me about crows and ravens. But I might have read it somewhere.”

“I really did read about the Gloucester sea serpent,” I told her, somewhat sheepishly, I expect.

“I don’t think that’s what the crow was objecting to, India Morgan.” Grandmother Caroline rarely ever called me by my first and middle name like that, but when she did, it got my attention. And then she said:

“I have fled in the shape of a raven of prophetic speech. That’s something I read. It’s from a Welsh poet named Taliesin. You ought to look him up next time you’re at the library.”

And then she recited, rather dramatically:

Then she laughed and jiggled the bobbin again.

“More Taliesin?” I asked.

“Nope. That’s something I read in a book, an invocation Scottish witches used when they wanted to turn back into women, after having turned themselves into crows.”

I asked what thraw meant, because I’d never heard the word before.

“To throw,” she replied. “To twist, turn, distort, and so forth. It’s an old Scottish word, if I’m not mistaken.” I still didn’t quite understand what it meant in the context of the incantation, but I didn’t say so. I already felt foolish enough over the sea serpent.

“Oh,” she said, “here’s one more, from Shakespeare, from Cymbeline.”

“At least I’ve heard of him.”

“I should hope so,” she scowled, and then recited:

“Another poem?” And she said, “No, a play.”

So, Grandmother Caroline, the night I was driving home from work and saw the four raven-nuns walking there beneath the trees, what lie had I told that day? What truth were they trying to remind me of that evening?

There were no ravens, or crows, or (to the best of my recollection) even blue jays the day before the night I found Eva. Or the day after. And I’ve never seen a crow or a raven at night, so that goes without saying. There was an owl, and whip-poor-wills, but that’s hardly anything out of the ordinary.

Yesterday, when I was typing out the story of that night in July, no crow or raven appeared at my window. If one had, I’d have been relieved, and I might have been able to finish.

I had an appointment today with Dr. Ogilvy. I’ve not mentioned to her that I’m writing all these things down, though we 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.” I have no idea yet if I’m going to tell her I’m writing this ghost story. She might ask to read it, and I’d have to say no. She might ask if I’m being literal when I say “ghost story,” or if I’m being metaphorical, and I’d have to say I’m being very literal. These things would worry her. I think that I know her well enough to know they would. Worry her, I mean. For someone who doesn’t like to cause other people consternation, I’ve surely done more than my fair share.

There’s no point to being out in the night, beneath the night sky, if I can’t see the stars. But Millville is small, as I’ve said, and soon I’m on the far side of it, heading northwest on Route 122. Before long, I can make out a few twinkling stars through the windshield. I have the driver’s-side window down, and the air is fresh and plant scented. There’s the faint musky, muddy odor of the river, which is no more than fifty feet away on my left (or southwest, along this short stretch of road). I have often thought that rivers and lakes and the ocean smell like sex. So, the summer night has about it the not disagreeable bouquet of sex. I’ve just checked the speedometer, and see that I’m only doing forty or forty-five miles per hour, which I don’t think Abalyn would think of as speeding. Though, I don’t know what the speed limit is; there are signs, no doubt, but I’ve never noticed them. If I have, I’ve forgotten.

There’s absolutely no sense of foreboding, none of the apprehension I felt before leaving Providence. All of that has passed away. The drive is relaxing me. I’m glad I didn’t stay home.

I think I’ll even go as far as Worcester before turning back. And then…I’ve written this part down before. I just stopped, went back through the pages, and found it:

And one moment she isn’t there, and the next moment, there she is. It’s just like that. Not so much like I came upon her. It’s more like she just appeared.

Yes. Exactly like that. Or I only blinked at an inopportune moment, and it seemed like that. Does it matter which? No, not at all.

A nude woman standing in the breakdown lane, gazing out into the dark towards the Blackstone River, caught in the low beam of the Honda’s headlights. Later, Abalyn will want to know why I stopped. Eva will ask me, as well. And I’ll say, “What else would I have done? What would you have done?” And I’ll say, “I don’t know why I stopped.”

Because she could not stop for me, I kindly stopped for death.

I don’t “hit the brakes,” but I do slow down pretty quickly. I surely haven’t gone more than a hundred yards before I pull over. I sit there with the Honda’s engine idling, my eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. I linger there in the car for a couple of minutes, maybe, at the most. When I cut the engine, the night becomes all at once enormously, profoundly, oppressively silent—but just for the space of a few heartbeats, a handful of breaths—and then there are insect trills and clicks and the throaty songs of frogs. I leave the lights on and get out of the Honda. There’s a high granite wall on the right side of the northbound lane, a rocky wound sliced into the earth however long ago the road was made. Once upon a time, a wooded hillside sloped gently down to the river, but men and their gelignite made short work of that and all the stone and soil and all those trees were carted away, and now there is but this wall of granite.

I turn from it and look both ways before crossing the road. My shoes crunch in the gravel as I walk cautiously towards the woman. I can’t see her right off, of course. I’ve gone too far and the taillights don’t reach that far. I even consider I might have imagined it all. I’ve imagined lots and lots of things over the years, and I consider that I might have hallucinated the woman. Or, instead of making an appeal to my insanity, it might only have been a disquieting optical illusion that any driver could have experienced. I’m not running, or even walking at a fast pace. I’m wishing the moon were full, or at least first quarter, because then there would be so much more light. But then my eyes begin to adjust, and I can see her (there actually is a small bit of reflected reddish glow from the taillights, and that helps). If she’s noticed me, she doesn’t act like she has.

“Are you okay?” I call out. She doesn’t reply, or give any sign that she’s heard. I stop walking and call out to her a second time. “Do you need help? Has something happened? Were you in an accident? Did your car break down?” In retrospect, the last two questions will strike me as very absurd, but there you go. What part of this doesn’t strike me as absurd?

Now I can see well enough that I realize her hair’s wet, and I glance towards the river, hidden in the darkness, but smelling much stronger than it smelled when I was only driving past. I look back to the woman and notice that she’s standing near the beginning of a dirt path that leads down towards the water. Fishermen made that path, I think. Fishermen and people with canoes and kayaks.

“Were you swimming?” I ask, and finally she turns her head in my direction.

What happened next, I’ve written it down already, back on page 66, and what’s the point of trying to reword it, reward it, rewind it? This is what I wrote days and days ago, more or less:

“Are you okay?” I ask her again.

It’ll sound silly if I say that she’s unearthly, but she is unearthly. Worse, it’s presumptuous, right? It presupposes I know everything that is earthly, and so would recognize anything that isn’t. I don’t, of course. Know unearthly from earthly, or vice versa. But that’s the way she strikes me, standing by Route 122. That’s the word that first pops into my head—unearthly.

She narrows her eyes, as though the faint red light from the car is too bright for her. I guess it would have been, after all that darkness. Her pupils would have suddenly contracted, and her eyes would have hurt. Later, I’ll see that her eyes are blue, a shade of blue that Rosemary Anne used to call “bottle-blue.” (If this were November, and not July, I’d see that her eyes are an unusual shade of brown, a brown that almost seems golden.) Regardless, she narrows her eyes, and they flash iridescent eyeshine, and she blinks at me. I think feral, which is much more appropriate and far less presumptuous than was unearthly. She smiles very, very slightly, so slightly, in fact, that I may be mistaken. She might not be smiling. She takes a step towards me, and I ask, a third time, if she’s okay.

(Rewrote more of that than I thought I would.)

I add, “Do you need me to call for help?”

Her lank, wet hair hangs down about her shoulders, clinging to her skin in dark tendrils. She licks at her thin lips, and her skin glistens. In passing, it reminds me of the skin of an amphibian, a frog or a salamander, the way it glistens. And in passing, I have the impression that when I touch her (and I know now that I will touch her), her skin will be slimy.

She takes another step towards me, and now there can’t be more than ten feet remaining between us.

“Imp?” she asks, and that should startle me, but it doesn’t. Not in the least.

“Do I know you?” I ask her, and she frowns and looks confused.

“No,” she says, almost whispering, “not yet.”

A pickup truck rushes past then, roars past, going much faster than forty-five miles an hour. It’s heading towards Millville, and so it passes so near to us that if I’d held out my left arm, the car might have hit me. Might well have taken my hand off, broken my arm, whatever happens. We’re washed in the brilliance of the headlights. The driver doesn’t even slow down, and I’ll always wonder what, if anything, she or he might have glimpsed.

The headlights leave me half-blind for a few seconds, and I stand there cursing and blinking at the afterimages.

“It’s not safe, just standing here,” I say, sounding annoyed. “A wonder that truck didn’t hit us both. You know that, right? Where are your clothes? Did you leave them down by the water?” And I point at the darkness concealing the Blackstone River.

In the quiet after the car, the quiet that is punctuated only by katydids and crickets and frogs and an owl, she says, “I have dreamed it again.” I have no doubt this is what she says, and, too, “Till your singing eyes and fingers.”

“It’s not safe here,” I tell her once more. “And the mosquitoes must be eating you alive.”

And she asks, “Who are hearsed that die on the sea?” She asks as if I haven’t spoken, as if it’s perfectly safe to stand naked at the side of Route 122 in the middle of the night with trucks racing by.

I’m as sure she said that as I am that she wasn’t wearing any clothes. It’s from “The Whale Watch,” chapter 117 of Moby-Dick. I don’t know that yet, of course. I’ve never even read Moby-Dick, not this summer evening.

I’ve stood there asking questions long enough, and I walk up to her and say, “Come on,” holding out my hand. She takes it. I’m relieved that her skin isn’t slimy at all, just chilled from having been wet. “If I can’t get you to make sense, I can at least get you someplace safe,” and she doesn’t resist or say anything else as I lead her back across the road to the Honda.

I give her the light cotton sweater I brought with me, but she just stands there holding it, so I put it on her myself. I button it up, covering her small breasts and her flat belly. There’s a flannel blanket in the backseat, from a trip to the beach, and I wrap it about her waist. “It’s not much,” I say, “but it’s better than before.”

When I suggest that she get into the Honda, she only hesitates a moment. On the drive back to Providence and Willow Street she doesn’t say another word. I repeat questions she already hasn’t bothered to answer. I ask new questions, such as “Where do you live?” and “Do you need to go to a hospital?” and “Is there anyone you’d like me to call for you?” She doesn’t answer any of them, either, and I start to wonder if she’s deaf. She switches on the radio, but doesn’t seem content with any of the stations, roaming restlessly up and down the dial. I don’t tell her to stop. I figure it’s something to keep her occupied while I try to think what I ought to do with her. And then I’m home, pulling into my driveway, wondering why I can’t recall most of the trip back from Massachusetts; wondering, too, why I’ve brought the woman home with me; wondering, finally, what Abalyn is going to say.

And so this is the night I meet Eva Canning. The first night I meet her for the first time, I mean.

It’s as true as I can manage. It’s almost factual.

I was in the kitchen eating a cucumber and cream-cheese sandwich with black pepper, and it suddenly occurred to me that if I were writing a novel, or even a short story, or novella, or novelette—if I were writing any of those things, I’d have neglected to say very much at all about Abalyn. Or about our relationship during that late June and July, the short time we were together, before she left. A critic might fairly say that I’ve neglected to include enough characterization. If this were a story by Beatrix Potter or A. A. Milne or Lewis Carroll, I might pause here and say something like, “Oh dear me!” and then apologize and promptly rectify the omission.

But whatever I’m writing, it isn’t any of those things, and I know who Abalyn Armitage was and is, as much as I will ever know her. It also occurs to me that maybe I’ve not, so far, said more about her or about us because in this first version of my ghost story, we weren’t together very long before Eva came and Abalyn went away. So, in this rendition, I really didn’t have the chance to get to know her very well, and there’s not much to say about us. So, perhaps in the other version, the November and wolf version, when it seems that we were together much longer than a few weeks. I might just be waiting until I tell the story that way round to write about Abalyn in greater detail. From here, though, it’s all supposition and not much else, these thoughts of why I might have proceeded this way and how I might proceed another way farther along.

I’m afraid you’ve made an awful, stupid mistake, India Morgan Phelps, choosing to relate this ghost story as you remember it, as two separate narratives, as a particle and a wave, the devil and the deep blue sea, instead of boiling it down to a single narrative free of paradox and contradiction. I’m very afraid frustration will win out before much longer, and you’ll give up, never finish this. It’s difficult enough to hold both versions in my head, though both strike me as equally true (though, as I’ve said, the first has more evidence to support its factualness), much less translate these competing, parallel histories into prose.

Live and learn, or at least that’s what I keep hearing people say. I’ve heard them say that all my life. Even Caroline and Rosemary said, “Live and learn.” Why can I only turn half that trick?

When I got back to Willow Street, a little more than two hours after I left, Abalyn was still awake. She’d said she would be, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. She’d finished her article and was watching a movie on her television. Abalyn watched a lot of movies when she was here, but I hardly ever watched them with her. I don’t like movies much more than I like games.

I led the woman up the stairs to my front door. I still didn’t know that her name was Eva Canning, because she hadn’t said anything more to me since asking “Who are hearsed that die on the sea?” I unlocked the door and asked her in. She hesitated, not immediately accepting the invitation. She stood there in the hallway, her hair almost dry now. She squinted her cornflower blue eyes at me, then looked back over her shoulder at the stairs leading back down to the foyer.

“What’s wrong?” I wanted to know.

She began to take a step forwards, then hesitated, and asked me, “You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Come on. You can’t just stand out there in the hall all night.”

She stepped across the threshold, and behind me, Abalyn asked, “Who is it, Imp?” Abalyn hadn’t met many of my friends, in part because I didn’t have many. She’d met Jonathan, who used to be a barista at White Electric Coffee on Westminster, and I’m pretty sure she’d met Ellen, who worked downtown at Cellar Stories, but has since moved away to be with her boyfriend.

“We have a guest,” I replied, trying to sound casual, just, slowly, beginning to realize what a peculiar thing I’d done, bringing Eva home. Or how it might seem that way to Abalyn, who’s a surprisingly practical person for someone who makes her living writing reviews of video games.

I shut the door, and Abalyn got up from the sofa. She had the remote in her hand, and she paused the DVD. Then she stood there, smiling uncertainly at Eva Canning, and Eva Canning said, “Hello, Abalyn.”

I’d not told her my girlfriend’s name (or that I had a girlfriend, for that matter). But it seemed perfectly natural to me that she would know Abalyn’s name; after all, hadn’t she known mine without being told?

“Hi,” Abalyn replied, and glanced questioningly at me.

“Abalyn, this is…” But I trailed off, only realizing then that I didn’t know the woman’s name, despite her knowing ours.

“My name is Eva,” she said. She spoke so softly it was almost hard to make out her words. “Eva Canning.”

“Imp, why is she dressed like that?” Abalyn wanted to know. I thought it was rude, her bringing up the fact that Eva was only wearing my sweater and a blanket cinched about her waist, but I didn’t say so. I was beginning to feel confused and jittery. I tried to remember if I’d forgotten my eight o’clock meds.

“Imp, do you mind if I take a hot shower?” Eva Canning asked. “If it’s not an imposition.”

It wasn’t, and I told her so, since it seemed like a reasonable request. I warned her to be careful, as the cast-iron tub was a little on the slippery side, and the showerhead mounted too low, so it was necessary to bend over a bit if you were as tall as Eva or Abalyn. She said she was sure it would be fine, and I told her I’d find her something better to wear. She thanked me, and I pointed her towards the bathroom door. And then she was gone, and Abalyn and I were alone in the parlor.

“Who is she?” Abalyn asked. No, it would be more accurate to say that she demanded.

“Not so loud,” I said. “She might hear you.”

Abalyn furrowed her brow, and she repeated the question in a hushed tone.

“I don’t know,” I confessed, and I told her how I’d been driving along Route 122 and found Eva Canning standing naked by the side of the river. I said she’d seemed disoriented, and I hadn’t known what else to do, that Eva hadn’t asked to go to the hospital or police or volunteered an address.

Abalyn’s expression, which before had been suspicious, grew incredulous. “So you brought her home with you?”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” I said.

“Imp,” Abalyn said, turning her head towards the bathroom door, towards Eva Canning on the other side of that door, which had been opened and was now closed again. Abalyn ran her long fingers through her black hair and chewed at her lower lip. “Do you make a habit of bringing strangers you find by the side of the road home with you?”

“Isn’t that how I found you?” I countered, growing indignant. “Isn’t it?”

Abalyn looked back at me, that expression of incredulity increasing. I believe she was almost speechless, but only almost, because then she said, “You really think it’s comparable?”

“No,” I admitted. “Not exactly. But I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t leave her standing there.”

“Standing naked, at the side of the road,” Abalyn said, as if checking to be sure she’d heard me correctly. “Jesus, Imp. She’s probably on something. No telling what’s wrong with her.”

“You might have been a serial killer,” I said, unhelpfully, understanding I was making the situation worse, but unable to keep shut up. “I didn’t know you weren’t, now, did I? I didn’t know you weren’t a crack addict. I didn’t know anything about you, but I brought you home with me.”

Abalyn shook her head, and laughed—a dry, hollow, exasperated sort of laugh. She said, “I need a smoke. I’m going for a walk.” When we met, Abalyn had almost given up smoking, and when she did want a cigarette, she always went outside. I never asked her to; Caroline and Rosemary Anne, and even my aunt Elaine had been smokers, and it hadn’t much bothered me.

“Will you be gone long?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied, then jabbed a thumb at the bathroom door. I could hear the sound of the shower. “Is she staying?”

“Honestly, I haven’t thought about that. I don’t know if she has anywhere else to go.”

“For fuck’s sake, Imp. Didn’t she tell you anything at all? She must have said something.”

“Not much. She said, ‘Who are hearsed that die on the sea?’ ” I told Abalyn. “It’s from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ right?”

Abalyn went to the coat hook and reached into a pocket for her cigarettes and lighter. “No, Imp. It’s not. It’s Moby-Dick.”

“It is?”

“I’m going for a walk,” she said again. “Unless you’d rather I didn’t,” and here she glanced at the bathroom door again.

“No, I’m fine. I wish you wouldn’t get angry. I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do.”

“I’m not angry,” Abalyn said, but I could tell she was lying. Whenever she lied, the corners of her mouth twitched. “I need a cigarette, that’s all.”

“Be careful,” I told her, and she laughed again, that same laugh devoid of any trace of humor. She didn’t slam the door, but her footsteps as she descended the stairs sounded heavier than usual. And I was alone in my apartment with the mystery woman who said her name was Eva Canning, and, belatedly, the weirdness of it all was starting to sink in. I sat down on the sofa and stared at the image on the television screen. It was some sort of big Japanese monster frozen in the act of stomping a toy army. I tried to find the remote control, but couldn’t, and wondered if maybe Abalyn had taken it with her, and if so, whether or not she’d done so on purpose. When I heard Eva shut off the shower, I stood up again and switched off the television. I went to my bedroom and got her a T-shirt, underwear, and a pair of pants that were a little too big for me. And some socks. Eva was taller than me. Not as tall as Abalyn, but taller than me. I figured the clothes would fit her.

I didn’t know what to do about shoes.

When I came back from the bedroom, she was sitting naked on the floor near a window, drying her long hair with a towel. I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how very pale she was. Her skin was almost like milk, it was so pale. That probably comes across like an exaggeration, and possibly it is. My memory could easily be exaggerating her paleness, as it exaggerates so many things so often. It would probably be more factual to say that there was about the whole of Eva Canning a peculiar, arresting paleness. I might mean a paleness of soul, if I believed in souls. Regardless, I might indeed mean that, but since it’s easier to remember someone’s skin than the hue of her soul, I can’t rule out having unconsciously misattributed the milky complexion to her skin.

“I have some clothes for you to wear,” I said, and she thanked me. This was the first time I comprehended how musical her voice was. I don’t mean it was lilting or singsong or…never mind. I’ll come up with the right word later. I hope I will, because it’s important. Also, whereas back by the river, Eva’s voice had been sleepy, almost slurred—the unfocused voice of a somnambulist who’s just been rudely awakened—now she spoke with a quiet, alert confidence.

“It’s all been very kind of you,” she said. “I don’t mean to put you out.”

“You’ll sleep here tonight, okay? We’ll figure it out in the morning.”

She silently watched me for a few seconds, then replied, “No. I have friends nearby. They’ll be glad to see me. You’ve done too much already.”

Ten minutes later, she was gone. She went barefoot; she left the socks behind. And I was standing by the window looking down at Willow Street splashed with sallow pools of dim street light. But I can’t say it felt like none of it had happened, even though people in ghost stories say that sort of thing all the time, right? It felt very much like it had all happened, every bit of that night, even if the long drive and finding Eva and bringing her home with me made less and less sense the more I played the events over in my head.

I stood at the window, trying to puzzle it all out, until I saw Abalyn. She had her hands stuffed into the pockets of her jeans and her head was down, as if the sidewalk were far more interesting than it had any right to be. I went to the kitchen and poured milk into a pot, then set it on the stove, hoping Abalyn would want a cup of hot cocoa. Hoping she wasn’t still angry.

That was also the night the dreams began.