The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan Page A

story—for a while, and the thought of leaving a chapter unfinished makes me uncomfortable.

3

     
    R eturning, 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 notget 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 ofrandomness. 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