The Drowning Girl (13 page)

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.

I
suppose, before Eva,
and
before Eva, I never had anything more than the usual number of nightmares. It was infrequent that I remembered my dreams, before Eva. When I did, they mostly seemed silly and inconsequential. Sometimes I’ve even felt I was letting down this or that therapist or Dr. Ogilvy by not giving them more to work with in that department. No ready, accommodating window into my subconscious mind. That sort of thing. Sometimes, they’ve turned to my art, in lieu of dreams. But yeah, Eva Canning changed all that. She brought me bad dreams. She taught me insomnia. Or maybe both are a sort of intangible disease, bereft of conventional vectors. Which brings me back around to memes, and hauntings. In a moment, a few more lines, it will bring me back around to both.

Last night, I lay awake, thinking about what I’ve been writing, how there’s a story here, but how I’ve taken very little care to fashion a coherent narrative. Or, if there
is
a coherent narrative, how it might be getting lost between other things: exposition, memories, rumination, digressions, and what have you. It’s not that all these things aren’t equally valid, and not as if they’re not an essential component
to what I’m trying to
get out of me
. They are. It’s more like, in ten or twenty years, I might look back at these pages, digging them out from wherever I’ve hidden them away, and be disappointed that I didn’t take greater care with the story of Eva and Abalyn and me. Because, by then, when I’m in my forties or fifties, I probably will remember so much less of the details. And I’ll see how I missed an opportunity. I’ll feel as though the me of now cheated the me of then.

Last night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Abalyn was standing at the foot of my bed. She wasn’t, of course. It wasn’t even what I’d call a proper hallucination. I think most people fail to see how little difference there is between
imagination
and
hallucination
. Sometimes, to me, the two seem divided only by a hairsbreadth. But I listened, and it was easier to listen knowing that Abalyn was probably sound asleep in her apartment in Olneyville. Or maybe she was sitting up playing a video game, or writing a review. Regardless, she wasn’t standing at the foot of my bed, talking to me.

She mostly asked questions, like “If you ever do show this to someone, or if you die and they find it, aren’t you just as bad as anyone who ever created a haunting? This manuscript, isn’t it an infected document, just waiting to spread its load of plague?”

I didn’t answer her, because I knew it
wasn’t
her. But I did lie there, not sleeping, unable to stop thinking about her questions, and I remembered something I wish I’d written about back in the first “chapter,” because it’s such an excellent example of what I mean by: Hauntings are
memes
, especially pernicious thought contagions,
social
contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book…

The Suicide Forest. I have a file here on the table next to me with several articles about the Suicide Forest of Japan. At the base of Mount Fuji, on the shores of Lake Sai, there’s a three-thousand-hectare forest called Aokigahara Jukai, which is also known as the Sea of Trees. The forest is thought of as a national treasure and
popular with hikers and tourists; it’s home to two hundred species of birds, and forty species of mammals. The trees are mostly Japanese red pines, Japanese oaks, tiger-tail spruce, boxwoods, beech, bamboo, and
himeshara
(
Stewartia monadelpha
: a medium-sized deciduous tree with shiny reddish bark and broad leaves and pretty white flowers). The forest is very dense and dark. In fact, the trees are so dense that they block the winds rushing down the slopes of the volcano, and, in the absence of the wind, the forest is said to be eerily silent. There are more than two hundred caves. There are claims that the soil and stone below Aokigahara is so rich in iron that it renders compasses useless, so it’s easy to get lost inside that maze of trees. That part might be true, and it might not. I don’t know, but it’s probably not important here.

What’s important is that the Sea of Trees is also known as the Suicide Forest. People go there to kill themselves. Lots of people. I have a February 7, 2003, article from the
Japan Times
(a Japanese newspaper published in English). It reports that in 2002 alone police recovered from Aokigahara the bodies of seventy-eight “apparent” suicides, and that they stopped another eighty-three people intent upon taking their lives who were found in the forest and placed in “protective custody.” In 1978, seventy-three men and women (mostly men) committed suicide there in the gloom of Aokigahara. There were one hundred in 2003. Every year has its own grisly tally, and only the Golden Gate Bridge is a more popular suicide destination. Signs have been placed in the forest imploring the people who travel there in order to kill themselves not to do so, to reconsider their decision. There are stories told by Buddhist monks that the forest
lures
suicides into its perpetual twilight, that it calls out to them. The woods are said to be haunted by ghosts called
yurei
, the spirits of the suicides, who are lonely and howl at night.