Caitlín Kiernan - The Drowning Girl

I need to put all this down. All of it. I need to be both true and factual, but I also must start off by looking at that night (or those nights) indirectly. Out of the corner of my eye. Or the corner of my memory, as it were. Out of the corner of my mind’s eye. To do otherwise is to risk bolting. Blinding myself and walking away from these pages and never coming back again. I don’t have to stare at the sun to see the light it radiates. That would be awfully foolish, wouldn’t it? Staring at the sun. Of course it would.

So, I’m driving in my Honda along a road, and it could be Massachusetts or Connecticut, and it could be summer or November. This is the month after I met Abalyn, or almost four months farther along. Either way, I’m alone, and it’s a very dark night. The moon is new, and the only illumination comes from the headlights and from the stars, which, this far out, you can see much better than in the city and the suburbs, where there’s so much light pollution. There’s also light from the Honda’s dashboard, a soft but sickly green light that puts me in mind of a science fiction movie, or absinthe, which I’ve never tasted.

This is something I do sometimes, when I can’t sleep. When my head is too full of thoughts, voices, the past. I’ll get in the Honda and drive nowhere in particular. Just drive to be driving. Usually, I go west or north, away from Providence, away from places where there are so many people. I go to places where I can be alone with my thoughts, and work through them enough that when I finally get back home I can rest (and sometimes that’s after dawn, so I’m half-asleep all day at work or, on days off, sleep until late afternoon). I try to lose myself out there in the dark, but never become so lost I can’t find my way back again.

“Journeys end in lovers meeting.” I used to think that was Shirley Jackson, because it goes through Eleanor’s head again and again in The Haunting of Hill House , but, turns out, it comes from Shakespeare and Twelfth Night .

Journeys end in lovers meeting,

Every wise man’s son doth know.

Sons and daughters.

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

Where were we, Imp? Oh, we were right here, on the road, on a night of the new moon, and it’s November, unless it’s July. There’s snow heaped at the side of the road, or it’s warm enough that I have the windows down and cool air is blowing into my crappy little car. I’m rushing through the dark (I admit, I often drive too fast on these nocturnal expeditions, because there’s an urgency when trying to outrun myself). 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. Never mind. I know exactly what I mean. If it’s November in Connecticut, she has her back to me, walking away, the forest on her right. If it’s July, she’s standing still in the breakdown lane, staring south at the black place where the river is hiding. Either way, she’s naked. There’s a surprising amount of precision here, despite my need to be indirect. That should at least earn me a silver star beside my name.

I’m driving fast, and given the way she appeared so suddenly, so all at once, I’m already past her before I’m even quite sure what I saw. But then I slow down. I slow down and pull over into the breakdown lane, if it’s July. If it’s November, I just stop, because there isn’t a breakdown lane, and there’s no other traffic on the chip-and-tar of Wolf Den Road. Besides, the snow’s heaped so high that I’d probably have gotten stuck had I tried to pull over.

I stare at the rearview mirror, and the brake lights have turned everything behind me red. I can see her, though, just barely. Standing naked at the side of the road, though she doesn’t appear to have seen me. What would a sane woman do in a situation like this? Would she keep driving, and think it’s better not to get involved? Would she call for help? Would she get out of the car, as I did? I can only know what I decided to do, though I don’t recall actually making a decision. So, I should say, instead, I only know what I did. I shifted the Honda into neutral, pulled up the parking brake, and opened the car door.

She doesn’t turn towards me, if she’s seen me. She doesn’t acknowledge me. She’s walking towards me, or she’s standing perfectly still.

“Are you okay?” I call out. She’s far enough away that I shout, even though, if it’s November, the night is very quiet. If it’s July, there are crickets and katydids and maybe cicadas. “Do you need help? Do you need a ride someplace?”

She turns towards me, glancing past her right shoulder, or she stops walking and looks at me.

“Are you okay?” I ask her again.

It’ll sound silly if I say her appearance was unearthly, but she was 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. But that’s the way she struck me, standing there on whichever road on whichever night, my breath fogging or the air smelling like tar and wild grapevines. That’s the word that first popped into my head, unearthly .

She narrowed her eyes, as though the light from the car was too bright. I guess it would have been, after all that darkness. Her pupils would have suddenly contracted, and her eyes would have hurt. She would have squinted, maybe shielded her eyes with one hand. Later, I’ll see that her eyes are blue, a shade of blue that Rosemary Anne used to call “bottle-blue.” Except, if this is November, I’ll see that her eyes are a strange shade of brown, a brown that almost seems golden. Regardless, she narrowed 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 have imagined it. She takes a step towards me, and I ask, a third time, if she’s okay.

“You must be freezing to death out here. You’ll get pneumonia.”

Or.

“The mosquitoes must be eating you alive.”

She takes one step and stops. If she was smiling, she isn’t anymore.

“You can’t keep having it both ways, Imp. You can have it one way or the other, but not both.” Her voice isn’t remarkable. Not the way her eyes are. It might be any woman’s voice. “I never meant it both ways.”

“But that’s how I remember it,” I protest. “That’s how it happened, twice, both ways.”

“You often distrust your memories. That trip to New Brunswick, for instance. Or finding a seventy-five-dollar bill on Thayer Street.”

“There’s no such thing as a seventy-five-dollar bill.”

“My point precisely. But, regardless, you remember finding one, don’t you?”

“If you only wanted me to remember it one way, you shouldn’t have let it happen twice.”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that you’re supposed to make a choice? You can’t have it both ways. You create a paradox, if you try.”

“Like particle-wave duality,” I reply, and think to myself, Checkmate . “Matter exhibits the properties of waves and the properties of particles, depending how one examines it. There’s the EPR Paradox. I have a book on quantum physics, and I understand more of it than I thought I would when I bought it at a yard sale on Chapin Avenue.”

Eva Canning frowns and says, “Imp, you’re putting words into my mouth. You’re talking to yourself. This is you and you, not you and me.”

Right.

Also, I didn’t buy the book at the yard sale. I just stood there reading it, until the old woman who was selling stuff asked me if I wanted to buy it. I got embarrassed and told her no, I was just browsing, and put it back down. I did all my best to smile. Still, this is what I remember, that I met Eva Canning twice, once in July and again in November, and that both times were the first time we met. I’m going to proceed as if these are not false memories, though it’ll surely make telling my ghost story much, much more difficult. It does create a paradox, and, offhand, I don’t see how to resolve it and make a single narrative out of these conflicting recollections. Eva could not have come to stay with me in July and in November—not for the first time—could she? Because I only remember Abalyn leaving once, and that was definitely in August, and it was definitely because of Eva. I have multiple lines of physical evidence to corroborate this.