The Drowning Girl

5

I went for a walk while Abalyn was reading “The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean.” Though I probably can’t explain exactly why, it just seemed wrong somehow for me to stay in the apartment while she read the story. I feared it might make her uncomfortable. I didn’t want her to feel as if I were reading over her shoulder, waiting impatiently for a reaction. Showing her the short story wasn’t about whether or not she enjoyed it or thought it was well written. I’m not sure it was even about whether or not she understood it. Possibly, I was rolling over and showing her a soft spot, as an act of atonement for the things I’d said to her the day before in the room where I paint. She’d only been worried about me, but I’d stopped just shy of lashing out at her. We hadn’t argued, but there had been a shadow. Possibly, I hoped that by allowing her to read “The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean,” any damage I’d done to the trust between us would be restored. I know what I said earlier, that Abalyn and I didn’t fight and bicker and stab at each other with ugly words, that when we parted, we’d not done each other harm that we’d spend our lives regretting.

Often, I say things I only wish were true, as though releasing the words into the world might make them so. Wishful thinking. Magical thinking, part and parcel of my unwell mind. I say things that are not true because I need them to be true. This is what liars and foolish people do. As Anne Sexton almost said, “Belief is not quite need.”

I know what I mean.

Anyway, I walked from Willow Street to the park, the Dexter Training Grounds where no one trains for anything. I wandered around beneath the trees, picking up acorns and chestnuts and rusty bottle caps and putting them into my pockets. I found myself counting my steps, and tried to remember if I’d skipped my meds. I crossed Dexter Street and went as far east as the intersection with Powhatan before turning back for home. I counted the windows of all the houses I passed. I took care to avoid the eyes of the few people I encountered.

Back home, I found Abalyn in the kitchen, making coffee. She drinks coffee all day long. I’ve never met anyone who drinks as much coffee as she does. But it doesn’t seem to keep her awake or make her nervous. I told her I was home, though, of course, she’d heard me come in. I sat on the sofa, where she’d left the issue of The Massachusetts Review with my story in it.

From the kitchen, Abalyn said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“You mean the story?”

“Yeah. We don’t have to, if you’d rather not.”

I stared at the cover of the magazine, which was a photograph taken inside an abandoned, decaying schoolroom. There were upturned desks and chairs, a chalkboard on which was written “Here I am. Here I am.” There were holes in the walls and the roof, exposing plaster and lath.

“I don’t mind,” I told her. And then I asked if she’d liked it, even though I’d promised myself I wouldn’t.

Abalyn stepped around the counter that divides the kitchen from the parlor, carrying the huge coffee mug she brought with her when she moved in. She came and sat on the sofa with me, and the copy of The Massachusetts Review lay between us.

“I think it’s sad and awfully grim,” she said. “Not the sort of thing I usually read, left to my own devices. But that’s really neither here nor there. Mostly, reading it made me want to know why you don’t write more. If I could write that well, Imp, I would.”

“You write. You write your reviews.”

“You don’t seriously think that’s the same thing?” she asked, then sipped at her steaming black coffee. When I didn’t answer her, she said, “I write content. I get paid, when I get paid, to fill space, and that’s about it. I tell geeks and nerds what I think of video games, and mostly they ignore me, or worse.”

“I haven’t even read this one since I finished it. Most times, I’d much rather be painting. Stories occur to me, and every now and then I sit down and make myself write them. Mostly because Rosemary liked my writing. But I only got fifty dollars for that story. It’s easier to make money with my paintings. They sell for a lot more. Well, I mean the paint-by-numbers, the ones the summer people buy.”

“Those summer-people paintings, they’re like my gaming reviews,” Abalyn said. “Just content you churn out by rote to make a paycheck. You know there’s no art in them, and you don’t pretend there is. You told me that much yourself.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I know,” and suddenly I found myself not wanting to talk about “The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean” and half-wishing I hadn’t let Abalyn read it. That I hadn’t brought it to her attention. Suddenly, it seemed like my act of atonement was entirely out of proportion to whatever wrong I imagined I’d committed the day before.

I was about to try and change the subject, maybe tell her about my walk, maybe show her my chestnuts and bottle caps, when Abalyn said, “It left me wanting to ask you a question.”

“What did?”

“Your story,” she sighed, and sort of rolled her blue-green eyes before taking another swallow of coffee.

“Isn’t it better with milk and sugar?” I pointed at the mug.

“It is when I want it with milk and sugar,” she replied. “When I want black coffee, it’s better black.” The tone in her voice made me afraid she was going to roll her eyes again. I hate when people roll their eyes at me. But she didn’t. Roll her eyes, I mean. She said, “I won’t ask it, if you don’t want me to. I’m not going to push.”

“If you don’t, I’ll just always wonder. What your question was. When someone tells someone else they have a question, then it sort of has to be asked. It would be indecent, otherwise.”

She thought “indecent” was a strange choice of words, but didn’t explain herself. I think I know, though; it was an echo from the story. Abalyn asked her question. Then I sat staring blankly at the cover of The Massachusetts Review (Volume 47, Issue 4, Winter 2006), and at the floor, and at my shoes. From the kitchen, I could hear the clock ticking loudly, like this was some sort of game show and any moment there would be a buzzer or bell and I’d be told my time was up.

“You really don’t have to answer it,” she reminded me.

But I did. To the best of my ability, I did. I think I’d rather not write her question down. Or my response. Not now. Maybe later, but not now.

Whichever day was the next day of the week, the next day of the month, I called in sick. I wasn’t sick, but I called in sick, anyway. Abalyn and I got up early and took the train to Boston, to Cambridge. We had noodles and miso soup, and then went to a comic-book shop she liked. She knew someone who worked there, a tall, skinny guy named Jip. I don’t think Jip was his real name, no, but I never learned any other. Jip and Abalyn had dated briefly, and he always gave her the employee discount. We got ice cream and watched the punks and goths and skater kids. Halfway through the afternoon, I splurged and ponied up eighteen dollars so we could get into the Harvard Museum of Natural History on Oxford Street.

The first time I went to the museum was with Rosemary and Caroline. I think I must have been ten. It really hasn’t changed much since then. I don’t think it’s changed much since it was founded in 1859 by a Swiss zoologist named Louis Agassiz. Lou-ee Aga-see. Especially the enormous Hall of Mammals, with all its tall glass cases and rickety, narrow balconies (or they might be catwalks) and wrought-iron filigree. It smells like dust and time. You can sit on a bench, surrounded by taxidermied giraffes and zebras, a rhino skull, primate specimens arranged to illustrate human evolution, and gigantic whale skeletons suspended from the ceiling high overhead. You can just sit there and marvel and be at peace. I have thought, on more than one occasion, that my great-aunt Caroline, the one who kept dead sparrows in stoppered bottles, might have loved this museum. But I don’t think she ever visited. It has a fossil sand dollar collected by Charles Darwin in 1834.

Abalyn wanted to see the dinosaurs first, so we did, but then we walked through narrow hallways filled with hundreds of moth-eaten birds, fish, and reptiles mounted in lifelike positions. Abalyn said she’d never much cared for museums, though she’d been to two or three in New York City and Philadelphia when she was a kid. She told me about the Mütter Museum, which she said has to be one of the weirdest places on earth. I’ve never been myself, but her description made it sound that way. It’s a medical museum filled with slivers of malignant flesh from very famous people, deformed fetuses in jars (she taught me the word teratology), and antique wax anatomical models. We sat together beneath the bones of a right whale (Balaena australis), and Abalyn told me about seeing the skull of a woman who’d had a horn growing from her forehead.

When no one was looking, we kissed while all those blind glass eyes watched on. I tasted her mouth in that silent reliquary.

I think it was one of the best days we ever spent together. I would press it between wax-paper pages like a rosebud or a four-leaf clover, if I knew how to capture and hold memories that way. But I don’t. Know how, I mean. And memories fade. I have no photographs from that day. I have the odd little plastic tag they gave me to wear to show that I’d paid to get in. I have that in a box somewhere. Right after Abalyn left, and after Eva (first and second time), sometimes I would wear that tag.

On the way back to Providence, I dozed. I’ve always liked sleeping on trains. The steel-wheel-on-rail rhythm of trains lulls me to sleep. I leaned on Abalyn and slept, and she woke me when we were pulling into the station.

I just wanted to write something about that day, because whichever day of the week it was, it was the last day that things were all right that summer. It was the last day, that summer, that I thought Abalyn and I might last. The calm before the storm; sometimes we speak in clichés because there aren’t any better words. Anyway. If I manage to tell the story of November wolf Eva, in that version we had many more good days than in this first version of my ghost story.

Abalyn made spaghetti with marinara sauce for dinner, and we watched cartoons.

Sometime past midnight, I was getting sleepy and telling her childhood stories, stories about my mother and grandmother and my asshole father. I promised to show her my “how Daddy should die” list (I never did). She found the idea of the list very funny. I asked her why, as I’d never thought it was funny, and I said so.

“Sorry,” she said. “I have my own Nightmare Father tales. At some point, I had to try to stop letting them gnaw at me and try to laugh at how awful and idiotic it all was. Is. You know. I mean, he’s still alive.”

“Mine might be,” I told her. “I have no idea. I don’t want to know.”

“Good for you,” she said, and switched off the television in the middle of an episode of Ren & Stimpy. (Abalyn maintained that no good cartoons had been made since the mid-nineties, and wouldn’t even talk about SpongeBob. I’d never watched very many cartoons, so I didn’t argue.) She set the remote down and folded her legs into a sloppy sort of lotus position. We were sitting on the floor, because she said you should always sit on the floor when you watch cartoons. We were eating Trix cereal, dry out of the box, which she said was another important part of her cartoon-watching ritual.

Abalyn talked about her dad, whom she called the Holy Grail of Douchebags. She told me how he’d punched her in the face when she came out, and she showed me a scar above her left eyebrow. “From his class ring,” she said. “Mom, she just said how she wished I was dead, or that I’d never been born. Or, at least, that she wished I was only gay. I was sixteen years old, and that was the day I left home.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Here and there, couch surfing. Was homeless a couple of times, which wasn’t as bad as you might think. It was better than life under the Holy Grail of Douchebags and my mother. There’s an old warehouse on Federal Hill where I used to crash with some other kids. We panhandled, Dumpster-dived, turned tricks, shit like that. Whatever it took to get from one day to the next. Things got a lot better later on, when I hooked up with a guy and he asked me to move in with him.”

I asked if he was the same guy who’d paid for her reassignment surgery.

“Nah, not him. This was another guy. Phil from Pawtucket.”

“You lived in Pawtucket?”

“No, but Phil had, before we met. He always used to introduce himself to people as ‘Phil from Pawtucket.’ He was sort of a skeeze, but it beat living on the street. And he had a wicked stereo.”

“I’m sorry it had to be that way.”

“Hey, knew lots of kids had it worse.”

“But to have your mother wish you’d never been born?” Which, frankly, shocked me a lot more than getting punched by your father. “How does someone just stop loving her child?”

“No fucking idea. Maybe she never loved me to start with. I always figured that made the most sense. Anyway, that was years and years ago. I don’t dwell on it. The past is the past. Let it lie.”

I apologized if I’d been the one who’d brought it up, the whole transsexual thing, childhood, parents. I wasn’t sure if it had been her or me. She ate a handful of Trix and said not to worry about it, then added, “Like I said, I laugh as much as I can. I laugh to keep the wolves at bay.”

I laugh to keep the wolves at bay.

Did you laugh, Mr. Saltonstall? Did you, Mr. Perrault, to keep your wolves at bay? Did you, and then did you each forget how, or did the wolves get too big? Too big, too bad, so they huffed and puffed and, my, what big eyes you have until you fell off that horse and wrecked that motorcycle. Mother, did you have wolves? Caroline, did you?

“Stop it,” Imp typed, hitting the keys just a little too hard so that the “O” key punched tiny holes in the paper. “This isn’t the wolf ghost story. This is the mermaid ghost story. Don’t mix them up.”

Don’t mix them up.

That’s like trying to keep day and night apart with no twilight or dawn in between. I might as well try that. I’d be just as successful.

Now, I’m well aware that Abalyn’s earlier claim to have graduated high school, then attended URI to study bioinformatics, seems to conflict with her story of leaving home at sixteen and living on the street. But it never seemed to matter to me if somehow both were true, or if one was a lie and she was just a lousy liar, mixing up her tales like that. Or if she didn’t care what people thought, and maybe she changed her biography as often as she changed her clothes. It was none of my business.

Anyway, “Like I said, I laugh as much as I can. I laugh to keep the wolves at bay.”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up. We can change the subject if you’d rather not talk about it. I won’t mind.”

She smiled at me, a very slight sort of smile, and ate another handful of Trix. “It’s cool,” she said. “It happened. The stuff that happens to you makes you who you are, for better or worse. Besides, you let me read your story. So, it’s sort of like reciprocation.”

“No, it’s not. This is much more personal than my short story.”

“I’m a tranny, Imp. Usually, I don’t try to pretend any different. If I do, when I have, it just tends to make matters worse. This is me. I live with it.”

“Well—and I hope this doesn’t sound too freaky—but I think it’s kind of neat. I mean, how many people ever experience physical transformation on the level you have? Starting off one thing and becoming another thing. Making that choice. You’re brave.”

She stared at me a moment, then said, “I’ve always been a woman, Imp. The hormones and surgery, they didn’t change me from one thing to another. That’s why I hate the phrase ‘sex change.’ It’s misleading. No one ever changed my sex. They just brought my flesh more in line with my mind. With my gender. Also, not so sure there really was a choice. I don’t think I’d be alive if I hadn’t done it. If I couldn’t have done it.” She didn’t sound angry or put out with me. She spoke patiently, though there was something weary in the back of her voice, and I wondered how many times Abalyn had explained this, and to how many different people. “I don’t think it even means I’m brave,” she added.

I felt stupid, and started to apologize, but I didn’t. Sometimes, apologies don’t help at all.

When Rosemary killed herself, the hospital apologized to me. When Caroline killed herself, Rosemary didn’t apologize, and it was better that way.

“I still think it’s neat,” I said. I said lamely. “Even if you had to, even if there wasn’t really choice, and if they didn’t really change your sex.” Truthfully, though, I didn’t understand, but I would. In the weeks and months to come, surviving Eva and surviving Eva, I’d learn a lot more—too much—about being one sort of being on the inside and another on the outside. About being held prisoner by flesh, and wanting to be free so badly that death finally becomes an option, the way it became an option for my mother and grandmother. Trapped in a body, trapped in a mind. I don’t think the one’s so different from the other. No, I am absolutely not implying that Abalyn’s being transgender was the same as Caroline and Rosemary and me being crazy. There are traps everywhere I look, and I’ve read the stories about coyotes chewing off their paws to get out of traps. Coyotes and bobcats and raccoons and wolves. And wolves. And wolves. The steel jaws clamp down, merciless, unforgiving, and you hurt until you do what has to be done if you mean to survive. Or leave the world. Which is why, even now, I can’t hate Eva Canning. Or any other ghost.

“Maybe,” Abalyn said. “I’m not insulted if that’s how it strikes you. Someday it’s not going to seem so strange to people. At least, I like to hope it won’t. I like to believe that someday it will be generally understood it’s just how some people are. Gay. Straight. Transgender. Black. White. Blue eyes. Hazel eyes. Fish. Fowl. What the hell ever.”

“Crazy or sane,” I said.

“Sure, that, too,” and she smiled again. It was a less reserved smile than the first time, and I was glad to see it. It made me feel less awkward.

“Have some more Trix,” she said, holding the box out to me. “You know, for kids.”

“Silly rabbit,” I said, then sat picking out a bunch of the lemony yellow ones.

She began talking again, and I just crunched my handful of cereal and listened. She hated her voice, but I miss it so badly some days I don’t want to hear anyone else’s.

“When I was a child, I used to have this dream. Back before I was even sure what was going on. I must have had it a hundred times before I got the message. I’ll tell you, if you really want to hear.”

I nodded yes, because I don’t like to talk with my mouth full.

“Okay, and this is at least as personal as your short story, and don’t try to tell me it isn’t.”

I swallowed and promised her I wouldn’t.

“Okay, when I was a child, before I figured out I wasn’t a boy, I used to have this dream. I’m not gonna call it a nightmare. It was scary, but it never struck me as a nightmare.” Abalyn reached for her pack of cigarettes and took one out, but she didn’t light it. She never smoked in the apartment. “You know the story of Phyllis and Demophoön?”

I did, because I’ve always loved Greek and Roman myths, but I lied and told her I didn’t. I figured it might ruin her story somehow, if she knew that I was familiar with Phyllis and Demophoön.

“Demophoön was an Athenian king, and he married Phyllis, who was a daughter of the king of Thrace. Right after they were married, he had to leave to fight in the Trojan War. She waited and waited for him to come home again. She stood at the seashore and waited, but years passed and he didn’t return. She finally hung herself, thinking he’d been slain in battle. But the goddess Athena took pity on her, and brought her back to life as an almond tree. But Demophoön hadn’t been killed, and when he came home, he embraced the almond tree and it bloomed.”

“That’s not how I heard it,” I said, and she stopped and glared at me.

“Imp, you just said you didn’t know it.”

I was annoyed at myself for slipping and blurting out the truth, but I told her I’d forgotten I knew it. “Hearing you tell it, I remembered.”

“All right, well, anyway, I think we’d studied the story in school. Bulfinch’s Mythology, or whatever. Maybe that’s how it began.”

“You dreamed about them?” I asked, wishing I’d stop butting in, but interrupting anyway.

“No, I didn’t. And maybe that wasn’t even the right place to start telling about the dreams. It’s just the first thing popped into my head. But I did dream that I was a tree. I’d been walking through very narrow city streets, the buildings so close together I could hardly see the sky when I looked up. It was hard to even be sure if it was night or day. I think it was usually day. It was an ugly city, garbage and rats everywhere. The air was so filthy it made my nose sting. The sidewalks were packed with hundreds and hundreds of people, and they were all going one way, and I was trying to go the other. I was terrified that I’d fall and they’d crush me. I knew they wouldn’t stop and help me up, or even go around me or step over. They’d just stomp me. I came to an alley that was even narrower than the street, and I managed to get loose from the crowd and hide there.”

“But you said you were a tree, right?”

“That part comes later. On the sidewalk and in the alley, I was still just me.”

“You were a boy?”

She frowned and said she’d looked like a boy.

“I couldn’t breathe, not after the press of all those bodies. They’d all kept staring at me, really hatefully, like the sight of me made them furious. When I reached the alley, I saw that it was a dead end. There was just a brick wall at the end and more trash cans, so there I was, thinking I’d live the rest of my life in an alley, because I sure as fuck wasn’t going back out into that crowd. But then I saw a fire escape. Someone had left the lowest ladder down, and I went to it and started climbing, just wanting to see the sky again. I climbed for a long time, the building was so tall. And when I passed windows, there were people looking out at me. All the windows had iron bars. Burglar bars, I guess. But it made the people in the apartments seem like they were in jail. Their eyes were white, and I knew they were jealous, even if I didn’t know why. Some of them pressed their palms against the glass. I tried hard not to look at them, and I climbed as fast as I dared. I held on tight to the railing and didn’t look down through the grating. I never wanted to see that alleyway again. Wherever the fire escape led, I was determined I was never climbing back down again.

“Eventually, I came to the top, but it wasn’t the roof of the building. It was a green field. I was so tired from pushing against the crowd, and then having to climb the fire escape, I collapsed in the grass. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t let myself. I lay there for the longest time, smelling dandelions, trying to catch my breath. And when I looked up again, there was a woman with white hair, hair so white maybe it was silver, standing above me. She had the astrological symbol for Mars drawn on her forehead in red. Sometimes, it was drawn in ink, and other times in blood. Sometimes it was tattooed on her skin. Her skin was as pale as milk.”

“That’s also the symbol for male,” I said. “The astrological symbol for Mars. The circle with the arrow. The female symbol is associated with Venus. The circle with the cross below it.”

“Jesus,” she sighed, and glared at me again. “I know that, Imp. Even then I knew it.” She took back the box of Trix. “You want to hear the rest of this or what?”

“I do,” I told her. “I really do.”

Abalyn set the cereal box down next to the remote control. “So, she stood there over me, this pale, silver-haired woman. And she said, ‘Daughter, which will you choose? The Road of Needles or the Road of Pins?’ I told her I was sorry, but I didn’t know what she meant. I did, but in the dream I didn’t remember that I did. She said—”

“It’s easier to fasten things together with pins,” I whispered, interrupting for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time. But Abalyn didn’t look put out with me; she looked surprised. “The Road of Needles is much more difficult, as it’s much more difficult to hold things together with needles. Is that what she said to you?”

“Yeah,” Abalyn said, not whispering, but speaking softly. The way I recall it, she went a little pale. But that’s probably just my memory embellishing. She probably didn’t, not really. “That’s it, pretty much. You know what it means?”

“It’s from one of the old French folk variants of ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ back before it was written down. That’s the choice the wolf gives the girl when they meet in the forest. In other versions, the roads are called the Road of Pebbles and the Road of Thorns. And the Road of Roots and the Road of the Stones in the Tyrol. I sort of know a lot about ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ ”

“Clearly,” Abalyn said, still not quite whispering.

“I hate that story,” I confided, and then I asked, “Which did you choose?”

“I didn’t. I refused to choose. And so the silver-haired woman turned me into a tree.”

“Like Phyllis.”

“Right,” she replied, then didn’t say anything more for a whole minute or two. That awkward silence felt as if it stretched on forever, but it couldn’t have been more than two minutes. I was beginning to think Abalyn wouldn’t finish telling me about the dream, when she said, “I was a tree for years. That’s how it seemed. I saw the green field turn brown, and then winter came and covered it with snow. And then spring came, and it was green again. Over and over I watched the seasons change. My leaves turned yellow and gold and drifted to the ground. My limbs would bare, and then there would be buds and shoots and there were fresh new leaves. It wasn’t unpleasant, especially not after being lost in the city. I almost wanted to stay a tree forever, but I knew the silver-haired woman wouldn’t allow it, that, sooner or later, she’d be back to ask the question again.”

“What sort of tree?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know shit about trees.”

“Did she come back?”

“She did. And, like I thought she would, she asked the question again, the Road of Pins or the Road of Needles. I chose the Road of Needles, because I suspected she’d think I was a coward or lazy if I chose the easier of the two. I was grateful, for her letting me be a tree, and I didn’t want to disappoint her, or for her to think I was ungrateful.”

“Little Red Cap chose the Road of Pins.”

“And she got eaten by a wolf.”

…to keep my wolves at bay.

“I never actually dreamed of walking on the Road of Needles, not literally,” she said. “Metaphorically, I did. It was all a metaphor, after all.” She looked down at the unlit cigarette between her fingers, and I almost told her to go ahead and smoke. But then she was talking again. “Did I mention that the mark on her forehead wasn’t Mars anymore? It was Venus.”

“I guessed that part,” I told her.

She nodded. “After that, it gets sort of silly. Childish I mean.”

“You were a child.”

“Yeah. Still.”

“So, what was so silly? What happened next?”

“She said that I’d learned to be patient. That I’d learned I couldn’t get what I wanted all at once, and it was hardly ever easy. I’d learned I might not ever get it. And this is the way of the world, she told me, and I wouldn’t receive any special favors. But then, she touched the mark on her forehead, and I became a girl. Just for an instant, before I always woke up. I’d lay there, after, trying so hard to go back to sleep, wanting to find my way back into the dream and never wake up again.”

“I don’t think that’s so childish,” I said.

She shrugged and muttered, “Whatever. My shrink was of the opinion I’d never had the dream, that it was only a sort of reassuring story I’d made up to give myself hope or some shit. But I did have that dream, I don’t know how many times. I still have it, but not very often. Not like back then.”

“It doesn’t matter, if it was a dream or a story, does it?” I asked her, and she said she didn’t like being called a liar on those occasions when she was not, in fact, lying.

“It helped, though.”

That elicited another shrug. “No idea. I can’t see how my life would have gone differently without it. My decisions seem almost inevitable in hindsight.”

“You never told your parents about the dream.” It wasn’t a question, because I was already certain enough of the answer.

“Hell no. My mother might have murdered her demon child in its sleep if I’d told her. My dad might have come after me with a hot iron poker.” She laughed, and I asked what she meant about a hot poker.

She laughed and put the cigarette back into the pack of Marlboros. “That’s what people used to do if they thought the fairies had stolen their child and left a changeling in its place. Fairies can’t stand iron, so—”

“But if they were wrong—”

“Exactly,” she said.

I remembered then about changelings and hot pokers, or tossing children that might be changelings onto glowing coals, or leaving them outside on a freezing night. (See Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness by Carole G. Silver [Oxford University Press, 1999], Chapter 2.) But I didn’t tell Abalyn I remembered. No, I don’t know why. No, I do. It struck me as irrelevant. What I knew and didn’t know, it didn’t have anything to do with this ghost story, which was Abalyn’s and not mine. Not mine at all. Except, the bit about changelings, because of what had happened already and what would happen. Seeing an illusion, put there to deceive or protect me, but either way to conceal the truth (or just the facts). Butler Hospital changing its name. Eva and Eva, July and November. The Drowning Girl and all those terrible paintings and sculptures Perrault made. In hindsight, as Abalyn said, all these come down to changelings, don’t they?

Imp typed, “Eva and Eva, maybe. You’re not so sure about all the rest.”

No, I’m not. But Eva Canning. What climbed into my car, what I found in a wild place and brought home, what left and bided its time, then came back to me both times.

“Is this the sort of conversation that normal couples have?” I asked Abalyn, and that made her smile.

“You’re asking the wrong woman about what’s normal,” she replied. “Anyhow, is that what we are now, a couple?”

“Isn’t it?” Hearing the question, I was suddenly afraid I’d misspoken, or been mistaken, that I’d fucked it all up.

“Sure, Imp. If you want to put a name on it.”

“I do, but only if you don’t mind. If I’m wrong, if that isn’t what we are…that would be okay. I mean—”

And then she kissed me. I think she kissed me so I’d shut up. I was glad, because hearing myself, I wanted very badly to shut up. Words start coming out of my mouth like rocks rolling down a hill, and every now and then someone has to stop me. It was a long kiss.

When it was over, I asked if I could play some of Rosemary’s records for her, some of the ones that were my favorites. “I’ll try to avoid the really schmaltzy stuff. And you don’t have to, you know, pretend to like anything you don’t,” I told her.

“I won’t,” she assured me, and crossed her heart. “Though, wasn’t I gonna give you the musical education, and not the other way round?”

“First, you ought to know what you’re up against.”

So for the next three hours we lay on the thrift-store cushions in front of Rosemary’s turntable and listened to Rosemary’s records. I played songs off Elton John’s Madman Across the Water, Dreamboat Annie by Heart (which she decided she liked), Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, and Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune. She wouldn’t let me play anything by the Doobie Brothers or Bruce Springsteen. She got up a couple of times, and strummed air guitar. We listened to the hiss and pop of the scratchy vinyl, and kissed, and didn’t talk about bad dreams or childhood or changelings. It was after four before we went to bed and that long, long day ended. Our last good day (in the July ghost story). Our last day before the gallery, and the river, the bathtub, and Abalyn leaving me.

My fingers hurt from typing, and this is as good a place to stop as any. To stop for now, I mean.

I’m not sure how many days transpired between our last good day and the day when, for the first time since I met Abalyn, I visited the RISD Museum. It might have been no more than one or two. Surely, not more than three. I do, however, know it was a Thursday evening, which would have made it the third Thursday of July (admission is free after five, the third Thursday of each month; I try never to pay admission). But I admit this timeline doesn’t seem right. There was the afternoon Abalyn and I almost quarreled, and then our last good day, and…I don’t recall the latter coming so quickly on the heels of the former. So here’s something else to cause me to doubt my memories. If it was the third Thursday of July 2008 (so, the seventeenth), then Abalyn might not have left until early August, and I was almost certain she went at the end of July. Time is warping. It begins to feel like my perception of time is collapsing back on itself, compressing events and recollections.

I’m driving with the window rolled partway down. The city is shrouded in a long summer twilight, no clouds in the violet-blue sky, and I cross the Point Street Bridge. There are two swans floating on the river, and a cormorant is perched on a rotten old piling. The piling juts from the river like a broken bone, and the cormorant spreads its wings, drying its feathers. There’s a lot of traffic, and the air stinks of car exhaust and my own sweat. I catch a whiff of scorched crust from a pizza place, just before turning onto South Main. I haven’t had dinner, and I skipped lunch; the burned-bread smell reminds me I’m hungry.

I told Abalyn I was going to the library. She didn’t ask which one, though if she had, I’d have told her the public library downtown. The central branch of the public library is open until eight thirty on Mondays and Thursdays. She had a deadline, and didn’t ask to come along.

“Be careful,” she said, without looking up from her laptop.

“I will,” I replied, and when she asked if I had my cell phone, I told her I did. I reminded her there was leftover Chinese in the fridge.

The night before, I dreamed of The Drowning Girl, and the next day—this day—I couldn’t stop thinking of the painting. I was distracted at work, and kept making stupid mistakes when I rang people up or tried to show them to the aisle they were looking for. Then, on the way home from work, I turned on the wrong street and got lost. I hardly said a word to Abalyn until I told her I was going out. I had it in my head that if I saw the painting, if I confronted it, maybe I could stop obsessing over it.

There are trees on South Main, and the wind through the Honda’s open window smells less of automobiles. I park opposite the museum gift shop, and linger by the car a moment, thinking it might be a mistake, coming here. Wishing I’d have asked Abalyn to come with me. I could climb back into the Honda and drive straight home again. Then I tell myself that I’m behaving like a coward, stuff the keys in my pocket, cross the street, and go inside, where it’s cool and the air smells clean.

There’s a special exhibit up devoted to artists’ models as depicted by artists, and I use it as a convenient excuse to avoid confronting The Drowning Girl for another twenty minutes or so. There are pieces on display by Picasso, Klimt, Matisse, Angelica Kauffmann, paintings and charcoal studies and photographs, a cartoon from The New Yorker. I stop and examine each one closely, but I can’t really focus on any of them. It’s impossible to concentrate on these images, no matter how exquisitely executed or revealing or intimate they might be. This isn’t why I’ve come.

Get it over with, I think. But not in my own thought voice. This is the voice I dreamed of the night before, the voice I’ve dreamed repeatedly, the voice I first heard that night by the Blackstone River. I take out my phone and almost call Abalyn. I notice one of the docents watching me, and I return the phone to the bag I’m carrying and walk away. I move through one gallery after the other until I come to that small octagonal room with its loden-green walls and ornate gilt frames. There are eleven oil paintings by New England artists, but the first one you see, entering from the south, is Saltonstall’s. I quickly avert my eyes and turn my back on it. I slowly move around the room clockwise, pausing before each canvas before moving along to the next. Each painting brings me a few steps nearer The Drowning Girl, and I keep reminding myself it’s not too late; I can still leave the museum without having caught more than the briefest glimpse of the thing.

(Thing. I type the word, and it seems hideous to me. It seems filled with an indefinable threat. It has too many possible meanings, and none of them are specific enough to simply dismiss out of hand. But by that evening I had made a thing of The Drowning Girl. Probably, I’d been busy making a thing of it since Rosemary brought me to the museum on the occasion of my eleventh birthday, almost eleven years before.)

There’s a docent in this room, too, and he’s watching me. Do I seem suspicious? Does the anxiety show on my face? Is he just bored, and I’m something new to occupy his attention? I ignore him and try hard to pretend to be interested in those other compositions—two landscapes by Thomas Cole (1828 and 1847), Martin Johnson Heade’s Brazilian Forest (1864) and Salt Marshes of Newburyport, Massachusetts (1875–1878), and the last before Saltonstall, William Bradford’s Arctic Sunset (1874). That makes five. Were I the Catholic that my mother cautioned me against becoming, it would make somewhat more sense that it suddenly occurs to me how this was like the grim, grotesque procession of the Stations of the Cross, stopping before each painting. But I’m not Catholic, and it seems very odd. This, the fifth, Arctic Sunset, would be the scene where Simon of Cyrene carries the cross for Christ, and the next, the next will be Veronica wiping the brow of Jesus. The comparison is alien, another thing rising up to haunt me, and I push it away.

I push it away and, my mouth gone dry as dust and ashes, turn to confront the thing that has brought me here. And I do, but that thing, it’s not Phillip George Saltonstall’s painting of a woman standing in a river. I turn, and Eva Canning is standing in front of me. Just like that, as ridiculous as a scene in a horror movie, a scene that’s meant to be unexpected, to startle you and make you jump in your seat. When it’s over, you laugh nervously and feel silly. I don’t jump. I don’t laugh. I don’t even breathe. I just stand there, staring at her. She’s wearing the same red dress she might have been wearing the day I thought I saw her at Wayland Square. The same sunglasses, round lenses in wire frames that make me think of John Lennon. She smiles, and her limp blonde hair glimmers faintly beneath the lights. She isn’t barefoot this time. She’s wearing very simple leather sandals.

“India. What a pleasant surprise,” she says. “You’re the very last person I expected to see tonight.” Her tone is warm and entirely cordial, as if we’re nothing more remarkable than two old friends, meeting by chance. It’s just a happy coincidence, that’s all.

And I say the very first thing that occurs to me. I say, “You were in my head. A few minutes ago. You said, ‘Get it over with.’ ” There’s a tremble in my voice. My voice is a counterpoint to Eva’s, as is what I’ve said, implying that this coincidence isn’t happy. It may not even be a coincidence.

Her smile doesn’t waver. “Was it, now?” she asks me, and I nod. “Well, you were dawdling. You were getting cold feet, weren’t you?”

I don’t say yes or no. I don’t have to. She already knows the answer. Standing here before me, in such mundane surroundings, she strikes me as a thing taken out of context. The sight of Eva naked at the side of the road made more sense to me than the sight of her in the gallery, and in some ways she seems more naked here than she did when I first saw her. There’s a wooden bench directly in front of The Drowning Girl, and she sits and motions for me to do the same. I glance at the docent, and he’s still watching me. No, now he’s watching us. I sit beside her.

“You came to see my painting,” she says. (I’m very sure that’s what she said. My painting. Not the painting.) “Where’s Abalyn?” she asks.

“Home,” I reply, the tremble fading from my voice. “She doesn’t much like museums.”

“I’ve been meaning to call and thank you. No telling what would have become of me if you hadn’t come along. It was rude of me not to call. Oh, and I still have the clothes you lent me. I need to get those back to you.”

“It wasn’t an accident, was it? That night, I mean.”

“No,” she says. “No, Imp, it wasn’t. But you didn’t have to stop for me. That much was left up to you.”

She isn’t lying to me. There’s no hint of deception here. She isn’t denying anything, though I wish she were. I wish she would at least try to make it all less real. Do her best to render these events perfectly ordinary. I sit and stare at The Drowning Girl, and catch the familiar, comforting scent of the sea coming off Eva. It doesn’t strike me as odd, her smelling like the sea. If anything, it only seems appropriate, consistent, inevitable.

“He was a sad sort of man,” she says, and points at the painting. “He was a melancholy man. It was a shame, him dying so young, but hardly unexpected.”

“So you don’t believe his fall from the horse was an accident?”

“That’s twice now you’ve used that word,” she says. “You seem preoccupied with causality and circumstance. But no, I seriously doubt it was an accident. He was a very accomplished horseman, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” I tell her, and I don’t take my eyes off the painting. Ironically, it strikes me as the safest place in the entire gallery to let my eyes linger, even though the dark woods behind Saltonstall’s bather appear more threatful than they ever have before.

“I didn’t have to stop,” I say. “You mean that. I truly had a choice?”

“You did, Imp. You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one’s ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I’m afraid the time for choice is behind us both.”

These words could have so many different meanings, and I don’t want to know precisely which meaning she intends for them to have. So, I don’t ask her to explain. I think, I’ll find out soon enough.

“Was it because I’m crazy?” I ask, instead. “Is that why I heard you?”

“You’re too hard on yourself,” she says, and I don’t really know what that means, either.

“Can I ask what happens next?”

She smiles again, but not the same way she smiled before. This smile makes her look frayed, and there’s a sadness about it that makes me think of what she said about Phillip George Saltonstall.

“There’s no script,” she says, and straightens her spectacles. “No foregone conclusions. So, we’ll both just have to wait and see what happens next. Me, as much as you.”

“I don’t want Abalyn to get hurt.”

“You’re not the sort of person who wishes harm to come to much of anyone, are you, Imp? Well, except your father, but I can’t blame you for that.”

I don’t ask her how she knows about my father. I’d figured out enough to understand it’s not important. Sitting there with her, I’m overwhelmed by an instant of déjà vu, stronger than any I’ve ever felt in my life. It makes me dizzy. It almost makes me ill.

“I should be getting home,” I say, and shut my eyes.

“Yes, you should. She’s waiting for you. She worries when you’re out alone.” And then Eva leans near and whispers into my right ear. Her breath is warm, but the smell of the sea grows cloying with her face so near mine. She exhales, and I think of mudflats at low tide. I think of mud and reeds and crabs. Quahogs waiting to be dug from their snug burrows. Stranded fish at the mercy of the sun and the gulls. Her words are drops of brackish, estuarine water, dripping into me, and I bite my lip and keep my eyes squeezed closed as tightly as I can.

“ ‘Turn not pale, beloved snail,’ ” she whispers. “ ‘But come and join the dance. Will you, won’t you, won’t you, will you join the dance? I’m waiting to hold you.’ ”

Her lips brush my earlobe, and I flinch. And I want to kiss her. I imagine those lips prowling over every inch of my body. The words drip, and I wonder how much water will fit inside my ear, inside my skull. How much before it spills out into my mouth and down my throat and I drown in the gentle flow of Eva Canning’s words.

She whispers, “ ‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied. ‘There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.’ ”

Then she isn’t speaking anymore, and I can no longer smell the tidal flats. I can only smell the clean museum air. I know she’s gone, but I keep my eyes shut until the docent walks over and asks me if anything’s wrong, if I’m okay. I open my eyes, and see that Eva’s no longer sitting there beside me.

“Where did she go?” I ask. “Did you see her leave?”

“Who do you mean, ma’am?” the man wants to know, and he looks confused. He has that quizzical expression people get when they begin to realize there’s something wrong with me.

I don’t bother asking him a second time.

I’ve been thinking about what I wrote earlier regarding the word thing, and how a thing imperfectly defined, only half-glimpsed, has the potential to be so much more fearful than dangers seen with perfect clarity.

I spent a day and a half composing that sentence. I must have written twenty-five or thirty versions of it on various scraps of paper before letting myself type it here. I’m not a careful writer, not usually, and I’ve been especially lackadaisical writing this all out (another word Abalyn kidded me for using: “Imp, no one actually says ‘lackadaisical’ ”). I’ve made little or no effort to rein in my disordered mind. As long as I set down the events, to the best of my ability, it hardly matters whether or not this manuscript is orderly.

But—the word thing. The vague concept of a thing, versus the concrete image of any given thing. I started thinking about the movie Jaws. I’ve already mentioned that I’m not particularly interested in movies, and I haven’t seen all that many of them. Not compared to most people, I would think. Not compared to Abalyn, who often spoke in dialogue borrowed from movies, who peppered our conversations with allusions to films I’d never seen, but which she seemed to know by heart. Anyway, I have seen Jaws. I saw it before Abalyn and before Eva Canning. I’m still not sure whether or not I liked it, and that doesn’t really matter. I’m sure it was one of the many things that inspired me to write “The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean.”

The film begins with the death of a young woman. Unlike the later victims, she isn’t killed by a shark. No, she’s killed and devoured by a thing we never see. She leaves her friends and the warmth of a campfire, leaves her friends and the safety of the shore, and she enters the cold sea. The sun is rising as she strips off her clothes and enters the sea. The water is black, and anything below it is hidden from our view. Something under the water seizes her, and she’s hurled violently from side to side. She screams and desperately clutches at a bell buoy, as though it might save her. We hear her cry out, “It hurts.” It, a word as terrible and empty of specificity as thing. The attack doesn’t last very long. Less than a minute. And then she vanishes, pulled down into that black abyss off Amity Island, and we can only guess at what pulls her down. The sea is an accomplice to her attacker, concealing it, though this unseen force must lie only inches below the surface.

Later, when I encountered the story of Millicent Hartnett’s having been bitten by something in the Blackstone River at Rolling Dam, a something her friends never saw, I thought at once of this scene. I thought about how lucky Millicent Hartnett was that day in the summer of 1951. She might have been that girl who was pulled under in Jaws.

I didn’t find the rest of the movie scary. It’s only about a very large shark, which we are shown again and again and again. We are shown the shark, and then nothing is left to the imagination. A shark can only kill a woman. And a shark can be understood and reckoned with. A shark is only a fish that can be tracked down and destroyed by three men in a leaky little boat. It’s nothing even as remotely unsettling as the opening scene’s villain.

I shouldn’t have written villain, so I’ve struck it out. After all, whatever mauled and pulled the unlucky girl down to her death, it was only being whatever it was. She was the interloper. She came to it, invaded its world, not the other way round.

In Phillip George Saltonstall’s painting, the threat is completely shrouded. It is a thing only implied. The nude woman stands in murky river water, the same murky river where, fifty-three years after the painting was finished, Millicent Hartnett would be bitten by something no one ever saw. The same murky water said to be haunted by “the Siren of Millville.” The woman in the painting is glancing back over her shoulder towards the shore and a shadowy forest that imply threat. She has turned away from the placid water in the foreground, which may be as charged with menace as the trees. The trees might only be misdirection, an act of prestidigitation fashioned to distract the woman from a hazard that doesn’t lurk behind the trees, but beneath the deceptively calm water.

She stands poised between Scylla and Charybdis, having waded naively into a makeshift New England equivalent of the Strait of Messina.

It isn’t what we see. It’s what we are left to envision. This is the genius of The Drowning Girl, and the genius of so many of Albert Perrault’s loathsome paintings. We are told that the hulking forms surrounding the kneeling girl in Fecunda ratis are wolves, but they don’t exactly look like wolves. They might be anything else. This is Jaws’ and Saltonstall’s trick reversed, but to the same effect. The summoning of the unknown.

It isn’t the known we fear most. The known, no matter how horrible or perilous to life and limb, is something we can wrap our brains around. We can always respond to the known. We can draw plans against it. We can learn its weaknesses and defeat it. We can recover from its assaults. So simple a thing as a bullet might suffice. But the unknown, it slips through our fingers, as insubstantial as fog.

H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), a reclusive writer who lived here in Providence (and to whom I am distantly related), wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” I’ve never much cared for Lovecraft. His prose is too florid, and I find his stories silly. But Abalyn was a fan of his writing. Anyway, he’s not wrong about our fear of the unknown. He hits the nail on the head.

“What are you getting at?” Imp typed. “You’re losing me. You were sitting on a beach bench in a museum with Eva Canning, and first she was there and then she wasn’t anymore. First, the docent saw her, and then he hadn’t. And she wasn’t hidden. You saw her plain as day. A pale, blonde woman in a red dress and leather sandals. A pale woman with cornflower blue eyes, who sat next to you, who leaned in and touched you. She hid nothing.”

No. No.

That’s a lie. What she let me see was something like the tangible, ordinary, vulnerable flesh of the shark we finally see in Jaws. She showed me that to conceal the scene at the beginning of the movie, to mask the unknown swimming below the surface of her. That evening was the third time she came to me clothed in the skin of a woman, because, I think, she knew I wasn’t yet ready to see the truth of her. The truth of her was then and always will be, ultimately, unknown. Very soon, she would show me things I could only halfway comprehend, but no mystery I’d ever actually penetrate. The unknown is immune to the faculties of human reason. Eva Canning taught me that much, if she taught me nothing else.

“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whitingto a snail.

“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’streading on my tail.”

Imp types, “That evening in the museum, even if she hid her true face, she didn’t lie to you. She answered all your questions. She warned you what was coming, even if the warning was veiled. This is, at best, a paradox.”

Imp types. I type. “I see that, too.”

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

Perhaps I should rip up these last few pages. Maybe I have no idea what I’m trying to say. Or I should have spent many more days working out each and every sentence on countless scraps of paper, not daring to fit them together until every word had been unerringly selected.

I am not even sure I can hear my own voice anymore. Very soon now, as I tell my ghost story, that’s what I’ll say to Abalyn, that I’m not even sure I can hear my own voice anymore.

Did you join the dance, Rosemary Anne? That last night in the hospital, did a siren come to you and tell you how delightful it would be when they take us up and throw us with the lobsters out to sea? Did you listen?

“So, Saltonstall went to the Blackstone River, and he saw something there, something happened there, and it haunted him.” I wrote that sentence many pages ago, back when I was pretty sure I’d never get this far with the story of my ghost story. I need to return to what Saltonstall saw before moving along to the worst of it. I mean, the worst of this first incarnation of my haunting.

The detached sliver of my mind that is acting as The Reader is eager to know what happens next, even though she ought to comprehend that I’ll only divulge the narrative in my own time, as I find the courage to do so. I didn’t set out to appease the Tyranny of Plot. Lives do not unfold in tidy plots, and it’s the worst sort of artifice to insist that the tales we tell—to ourselves and to one another—must be forced to conform to the plot, A-to-Z linear narratives, three acts, the dictates of Aristotle, rising action and climax and falling action and most especially the artifice of resolution. I don’t see much resolution in the world; we are born and we live and we die, and at the end of it there’s only an ugly mess of unfinished business.

There was no resolution for me and Abalyn, and as for Eva Canning, I’m still chasing closure. That’s such an idiotic word, such an idiotic concept, closure.

Saltonstall died still searching for closure. Albert Perrault died before he ever got that far.

It’s just an accident that I found out exactly what Saltonstall claimed he saw at Rolling Dam that inspired The Drowning Girl. It’s something else buried in his correspondence with Mary Farnum, letters that’ll likely never be indexed or published, and that are scattered between three different institutions. That afternoon in August 2002, the day I found a brief mention of Saltonstall and the phantom said to haunt the Blackstone River in Smithfield’s A Concise History of New England Painters and Illustrators, a librarian at the Athenaeum who knew I was trying to dig up whatever I could on Saltonstall mentioned that some of his letters had ended up in the John Hay Library at Brown University. She had an acquaintance there and volunteered to give him a call and schedule a time I could examine them. I went to the Hay a week later, and this is what I found (in a letter to Mary, dated March 7th, 1897):

Had Saltonstall heard the tales of the ghost of Perishable Shippen? I’ve found nothing in any of his letters to indicate he had. If he had, wouldn’t you think he’d have mentioned the tradition here?

My eyes are smarting, and my fingertips are sore. These keys are sticky and need oiling. Anyway, I don’t have the heart, or the stomach, or whatever, to write about the things that happened after Eva came to me at the museum. Not just yet. Tomorrow, maybe. Maybe tomorrow.

“Imp, it won’t be any easier tomorrow than it would be today. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it will.”

I didn’t say it would be easier. I said I’m just not up to it right now. I want to get this over with. I want to spit it out so I don’t have to dread spitting it out. It’s a goddamn lump in my throat. It hurts, and I want to cough it up, please.