The Drowning Girl

1

“I’m going to write a ghost story now,” she typed.

“A ghost story with a mermaid and a wolf,” she also typed.

I also typed.

My name is India Morgan Phelps, though almost everyone I know calls me Imp. I live in Providence, Rhode Island, and when I was seventeen, my mother died in Butler Hospital, which is located at 345 Blackstone Boulevard, right next to Swan Point Cemetery, where many notable people are buried. The hospital used to be called the Butler Hospital for the Insane, but somewhere along the way “for the Insane” was dropped. Maybe it was bad for business. Maybe the doctors or trustees or board of directors or whoever makes decisions about such things felt crazy people would rather not be put away in an insane asylum that dares to admit it’s an insane asylum, that truth in advertising is a detriment. I don’t know, but my mother, Rosemary Anne, was committed to Butler Hospital because she was insane. She died there, at the age of fifty-six, instead of dying somewhere else, because she was insane. It’s not like she didn’t know she was insane, and it’s not like I didn’t know, too, and if anyone were to ask me, dropping “for the Insane” is like dropping “burger” from Burger King because hamburgers aren’t as healthy as salads. Or dropping “donuts” from Dunkin’ Donuts because doughnuts cause cavities and make you fat.

My grandmother Caroline—my mother’s mother, who was born in 1914, and lost her husband in World War II—she was also a crazy woman, but she died in her own bed in her own house down in Wakefield. No one put her away in a hospital, or tried to pretend she wasn’t crazy. Maybe people don’t notice it so much, once you get old, or only older. Caroline turned on the gas and shut all the windows and doors and went to sleep, and in her suicide note she thanked my mother and my aunts for not sending her away to a hospital for the mentally insane, where she’d have been forced to live even after she couldn’t stand it anymore. Being alive, I mean. Or being crazy. Whichever, or both.

It’s sort of ironic that my aunts are the ones who had my mother committed. I suppose my father would have done it, but he left when I was ten, and no one’s sure where he went. He left my mother because she was insane, so I like to think he didn’t live very long after he left us. When I was a girl, I used to lie awake in bed at night, imagining awful ways my father might have met his demise, all manner of just deserts for having dumped us and run away because he was too much of a coward to stick around for me and my mother. At one point, I even made a list of various unpleasant ends that may have befallen my father. I kept it in a stenographer’s pad, and I kept the pad in an old suitcase under my bed, because I didn’t want my mother to see it. “I hope my father died of venereal disease, after his dick rotted off” was at the top of the list, and was followed by lots of obvious stuff—car accidents, food poisoning, cancer—but I grew more imaginative as time went by, and the very last thing I put on the list (#316) was “I hope my father lost his mind and died alone and frightened.” I still have that notebook, but now it’s on a shelf, not hidden away in an old suitcase.

So, yeah. My mother, Rosemary Anne, died in Butler Hospital. She committed suicide in Butler Hospital, though she was on suicide watch at the time. She was in bed, in restraints, and there was a video camera in her room. But she still pulled it off. She was able to swallow her tongue and choke to death before any of the nurses or orderlies noticed what was happening. The death certificate says she died of a seizure, but I know that’s not what happened. Too many times when I visited her, she’d tell me she wanted to die, and usually I told her I’d rather she lived and get better and come home, but that I wouldn’t be angry if that’s really what she had to do, if she had to die. If there came a day or night when she just couldn’t stand it any longer. She said she was sorry, but that she was glad I understood, that she was grateful that I understood. I’d take her candy and cigarettes and books, and we’d have conversations about Anne Sexton and Diane Arbus and about Virginia Woolf filling her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse. I never told Rosemary’s doctors about any of these conversations. I also didn’t tell them about the day, a month before she choked on her tongue, that she gave me a letter quoting Virginia Woolf’s suicide note: “What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.” I keep that thumbtacked to the wall in the room where I paint, which I guess is my studio, though I usually just think of it as the room where I paint.

I didn’t realize I was also insane, and that I’d probably always been insane, until a couple of years after Rosemary died. It’s a myth that crazy people don’t know they’re crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people. Still, it simply hadn’t occurred to me, that the way I saw the world meant that I had inherited “the Phelps Family Curse” (to quote my aunt Elaine, who has a penchant for melodramatic turns of phrase). Anyway, when it finally occurred to me that I wasn’t sane, I went to see a therapist at Rhode Island Hospital. I paid her a lot of money, and we talked (mostly I talked while she listened), and the hospital did some tests. When all was said and done, the psychiatrist told me I suffered from disorganized schizophrenia, which is also called hebephrenia, for Heˉbeˉ, the Greek goddess of youth. She—the psychiatrist—didn’t tell me that last part; I looked it up myself. Hebephrenia is named after the Greek goddess of youth because it tends to manifest at puberty. I didn’t bother to point out that if the way I thought and saw the world meant I was schizophrenic, the crazy had started well before puberty. Anyway, later, after more tests, the diagnosis was changed to paranoid schizophrenia, which isn’t named after a Greek god, or any god that I’m aware of.

The psychiatrist, a women from Boston named Magdalene Ogilvy—a name that always puts me in mind of Edward Gorey or a P. G. Wodehouse novel—found the Phelps Family Curse very interesting, because, she said, there was evidence to suggest that schizophrenia might be hereditary, at least in some cases. So there you go. I’m crazy because Rosemary was crazy and had a kid, and Rosemary was crazy because my grandmother was crazy and had a kid (well, several, but only Rosemary lucked out and got the curse). I told Dr. Ogilvy the stories my grandmother used to tell about her mother’s sister, whose name was also Caroline. According to my grandmother, Caroline kept dead birds and mice in stoppered glass jars lined up on all her windowsills. She labeled each jar with a passage from the Bible. I told the psychiatrist I’d suspect that my great-aunt Caroline might have only suffered from a keen interest in natural history, if not for the thing with the Bible verses. Then again, I said, it might have been she was trying to create a sort of concordance, correlating specific species with scripture, but Dr. Ogilvy said, no, she was likely also schizophrenic. I didn’t argue. Rarely do I feel like arguing with anyone.

So, I have my amber bottles of pills, my mostly reliable pharmacopeia of antipsychotics and sedatives, which are not half so interesting as my great-aunt’s bottles of mice and sparrows. I have Risperdal, Depakene, and Valium, and so far I’ve stayed out of Butler Hospital, and I’ve only tried to kill myself. And only once. Or twice. Maybe I have the drugs to thank for this, or maybe I have my painting to thank, or maybe it’s my paintings and the fact that my girlfriend puts up with my weird shit and makes sure I take the pills and is great in the sack. Maybe my mother would have stuck around a little longer if she’d gotten laid now and then. As far as I know, no one has ever proposed sex therapy as a treatment for schizophrenia. But at least fucking doesn’t make me constipated or make my hands shake—thank you, Mr. Risperdal—or cause weight gain, fatigue, and acne—thank you so much, Mr. Depakene. I think of all my pills as male, a fact I have not yet disclosed to my psychiatrist. I have a feeling she might feel compelled to make something troublesome of it, especially since she already knows about my “how Daddy should die” list.

My family’s lunacy lines up tidy as boxcars: grandmother, daughter, the daughter’s daughter, and, thrown in for good measure, the great-aunt. Maybe the Curse goes even farther back than that, but I’m not much for genealogy. Whatever secrets my great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers might have harbored and taken to their graves, I’ll let them be. I’m already sort of sorry I haven’t done the same for Rosemary Anne and Caroline. But they’re too much a part of my story, and I need recourse to them to tell it. Probably, I could be writing fabricated versions of them, fictional avatars to stand in for the women they actually were, but I knew both well enough to know neither would have wanted that. I can’t tell my story, or the parts of my story that I’m going to try to tell, without also telling parts of their stories. There’s too much overlap, too many occurrences one or the other of them set in motion, intentionally or unintentionally, and there’s no point doing this thing if all I can manage is a lie.

Which is not to say every word will be factual. Only that every word will be true. Or as true as I can manage.

Here’s something I scribbled on both sides of a coffeehouse napkin a few days back: “No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the mind of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.”

Before I wrote that and decided it was true, I would come into this room (which isn’t the room where I paint, but the room with too many bookshelves) and sit down in front of the manual typewriter that used to be Grandmother Caroline’s. The walls of this room are a shade of blue so pale that sometimes, in bright sunlight, they seem almost white. I would sit here and stare at the blue-white walls, or out the window at the other old houses lined up neatly along Willow Street, the Victorian homes and the autumn trees and the gray sidewalks and the occasional passing automobile. I would sit here and try to settle on a place to begin this story. I would sit here in this chair for hours, and never write a single word. But now I’ve made my beginning, arbitrary though it may be, and it feels about as right as I think any beginning ever will. It seemed only fair to get the part about being crazy out up front, like a disclaimer, so if anyone ever reads this they’ll know to take it with a grain of salt.

Now, also arbitrarily, I’m going to write about the first time I saw The Drowning Girl.

For my eleventh birthday, my mother took me to the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design. I’d told her I wanted to be a painter, so that year for my birthday she bought me a set of acrylics, brushes, a wooden palette, and a couple of canvases, and she took me to the RISD Museum. And, like I said, that day was the first time I saw the painting. Today, The Drowning Girl hangs much nearer the Benefit Street entrance than it did when I was a kid. The canvas is held within an ornately carved, gilded frame—same as all the others in that part of the museum, a small gallery devoted to nineteenth-century American painters. The Drowning Girl measures about nineteen by twenty-four inches. It hangs between William Bradford’s Arctic Sunset (1874) and Winslow Homer’s On a Lee Shore (1900). The gallery’s walls are a uniform loden green, which, I think, makes the antique golden frames seem somewhat less garish than they might otherwise.

The Drowning Girl was painted in 1898 by a Boston artist named Phillip George Saltonstall. Hardly anyone’s written about Saltonstall. He tends to get lumped in with the Symbolists, though one article called him a “late American disciple of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.” He rarely sold, or even showed, his paintings, and in the last year of his life burned as many as fifty in a single night. Most of the few that survive can be found scattered about New England, in private collections and art museums. Also, one hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and another in Atlanta’s High Museum. Saltonstall suffered from seizures, insomnia, and chronic depression, and he died in 1907, at the age of thirty-nine, after falling from a horse. No one I’ve read says whether or not it was an accident, that fall, but probably it was. I could say he was a suicide, but I’m biased, and it would only be speculation.

As for the painting itself, The Drowning Girl was done mostly in somber shades of green and gray (and so seems right at home hanging on those loden walls), but with a few contrasting counterpoints—muted yellows, dirty-white shimmers, regions where the greens and grays sink into blackness. It depicts a young girl, entirely naked, possibly in her early twenties, but maybe younger. She’s standing ankle deep in a forest pool almost as smooth as glass. The trees press in close behind her, and her head is turned away from us, as she glances back over her right shoulder, into the forest, towards the shadows gathered below and between those trees. Her long hair is almost the same shade of green as the water, and her skin has been rendered so that it seems paradoxically jaundiced and imbued with some inner light. She’s very near the shore, and there are ripples in the water at her feet, which I take to mean she’s only just stepped into the pool.

I typed pool, but, as it turns out, the painting was inspired by a visit Saltonstall made to the Blackstone River in southern Massachusetts during the late summer of 1894. He had family in nearby Uxbridge, including a paternal first cousin, Mary Farnum, with whom he appears to have been in love (there’s no evidence the feelings were reciprocal). There’s been some conjecture that the girl in the painting is meant to be Mary, but if that’s the case, the artist never said so, or if he did, we have no record of it. But he did say the painting began as a series of landscape studies he made at Rolling Dam (also known as Roaring Dam, built in 1886). Above the dam, the river forms a reservoir that once served the mills of the Blackstone Manufacturing Company. The water is calm and deep, in sharp contrast to the rapids below the dam, flowing between the steep granite walls of the Blackstone Gorge, which are more than eighty feet high in some places.

The title of the painting has often seemed strange to me. After all, the girl isn’t drowning, but merely wading a little ways into the water. Still, Saltonstall has invested the painting with an undeniable sense of threat or dread. This may arise from the shadowy forest looming up behind the girl, and/or from the suggestion that something there has drawn her attention back to the trees. The snapping of a twig, maybe, or footsteps crunching in fallen leaves. Or a voice. Or almost anything else at all.

More and more, I’ve come to understand how the story of Saltonstall and The Drowning Girl is an integral part of my story—same as Rosemary Anne and Caroline are integral to my story—even if I won’t claim that it’s truly the beginning of the things that have happened. Not in any objective sense. If I did, I’d only be begging the question. Would the start be my first sight of the painting on my eleventh birthday, or Saltonstall’s creation of it in 1898? Or might it be better to start with the dam’s construction in 1886? Instinctively, I keep looking for that sort of beginning, even though I know better. Even though I know full well I can only arrive at useless and essentially infinite regressions.

That day in August, all those years ago, The Drowning Girl was hanging in another gallery, a room devoted to local painters and sculptors, mostly—but not exclusively—artists from Rhode Island. My mother’s feet were sore, and we were sitting on a bench at the center of the room when I noticed the painting. I can recall this all very clearly, though most of that day has faded away. While Rosemary sat on the bench, resting her aching feet, I stood gazing at Saltonstall’s canvas. Only, it seemed like I was staring into the canvas, almost the same as if it were a tiny window looking out on a soft-focus gray-green world. I’m pretty sure that was the first time a painting (or any other sort of two-dimensional image) struck me that way. The illusion of depth was so strong that I raised my right hand and pressed my fingers against the canvas. I believe I honestly expected them to pass right on through, to the day and the place in the painting. Then Rosemary saw me touching it and told me to stop, that what I was doing was against the museum’s rules, so I pulled my hand back.

“Why?” I asked her, and she said there were corrosive oils and acids on human hands that could damage an old painting. She said that whenever the people who worked in the museum needed to handle them, they wore white cotton gloves to protect the canvases. I looked at my fingers, wondering what else I could hurt just by touching it, wondering if the acids and oils seeping from my skin had done all sorts of harm to all sorts of things without my knowing.

“Anyway, Imp, what were you doing, touching it like that?”

I told her how it had seemed like a window, and she laughed and wanted to know the name of the painting, the name of the artist, and the year it was done. All those things were printed on a card mounted on the wall beside the frame, and I read them off to her. She made notes on an envelope she pulled out of her bag. Rosemary always carried huge, shapeless cloth bags she’d sewn herself, and they bulged with everything from paperbacks to cosmetics to utility bills to grocery store receipts (which she never threw away). When she died, I kept a couple of those bags, and I still use them, though I don’t think I kept the one she was carrying that particular day. It was made from denim, and I’ve never much liked denim. I hardly even wear blue jeans.

“Why are you writing that stuff down?”

“You might want to remember it someday,” she replied. “When something makes a strong impression on us, we should do our best not to forget about it. So, it’s a good idea to make notes.”

“But how am I supposed to know what I might want to remember and what I won’t ever want to remember?”

“Ah, now, that’s the hard part,” Rosemary told me, and chewed her thumbnail a moment. “That’s the most difficult part of all. Because, obviously, we can’t waste all our time making notes about everything, can we?”

“Of course not,” I said, stepping back from the painting, but not taking my eyes off it. It was no less beautiful or remarkable for having turned out not to be a window. “That would be silly, now, wouldn’t it.”

“That would be very silly, Imp. We’d waste so much time trying not to forget anything that nothing worth remembering would ever happen to us.”

“So you have to be careful,” I said.

“Exactly,” she agreed.

I don’t recall much else about that birthday. Just my gifts and the trip to RISD, Rosemary saying I should write down what might turn out to be important to me someday. After the museum, we must have gone home. There would have been a cake with ice cream, because there always was, right up to the year she was committed. There wouldn’t have been a party, because I never got a birthday party. I never wanted one. We left the museum, and the day rolled on, and midnight came, and it wasn’t my birthday again until I turned twelve. Yesterday, I checked a calendar online, and it informed me that the next day, the third of August, would have been a Sunday, but that doesn’t tell me much. We never went to church, because my mother was a lapsed Roman Catholic, and always said I’d be better off steering clear of Catholicism, if only because it meant I’d never have to go to the trouble of eventually lapsing.

“We don’t believe in God?” I might have asked her at some point.

“I don’t believe in God, Imp. What you’re going to believe, that’s up to you. You have to pay attention and figure these things out for yourself. I won’t do it for you.”

That is, if this exchange ever actually occurred. It almost seems that it did, almost, but a lot of my memories are false memories, so I can’t ever be certain, one way or the other. A lot of my most interesting memories seem never to have taken place. I began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries can’t be trusted. For instance, there’s a series of entries describing a trip to New Brunswick that I’m pretty sure I never took. It used to scare me, those recollections of things that never took place, but I’ve gotten used to it. And it doesn’t happen as much as it once did.

“I’m going to write a ghost story now,” she typed, and that’s what I’m writing. I’ve already written about the ghosts of my grandmother, my mother, and my great-grandmother’s sister, the one who kept dead animals in jars labeled with scripture. Those women are all only ghosts now, and they haunt me, just the same as the other ghosts I’m going to write about. Same as I’m haunted by the specter of Butler Hospital, there beside Swan Point Cemetery. Same as my vanished father haunts me. But, more than any of these, I’m haunted by Phillip George Saltonstall’s The Drowning Girl, which I’d have eventually remembered even if my mother hadn’t taken the time that day to make notes on an envelope.

Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time. I don’t imagine that when Saltonstall painted The Drowning Girl, almost a hundred years before I saw it for the first time, he paused to consider all the people it might haunt. That’s another thing about ghosts, a very important thing—you have to be careful, because hauntings are contagious. 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, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother’s suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.

Or a painting hanging on a wall.

I’m pretty sure that Saltonstall was, in fact, only trying to exorcise his own ghosts when he painted the nude woman standing in the water with the forest at her back. Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people. So, Saltonstall went to the Blackstone River, and he saw something there, something happened there, and it haunted him. Then, later on, he tried to make it go away the only way he knew how, by painting it. It wasn’t a malicious act, the propagation of that meme. It was an act of desperation. Sometimes, haunted people reach a point where they either manage to drive away the ghosts or the ghosts destroy them. What makes all this even worse is that it usually doesn’t work, trying to drag the ghosts out and seal them up tight where they can’t hurt us anymore. I think, mostly, we only spread them, when we try to do that. You make a copy, or transmit some infinitesimal part of the phantom, but most of it stays dug so deeply into your mind it’s never going anywhere.

Rosemary never tried to teach me to believe in a god or sin, in Heaven or Hell, and my own experiences have never led me there. I don’t think I even believe in souls. But that doesn’t matter. I do believe in ghosts. I do, I do, I do, I do believe in ghosts, just like the Cowardly Lion said. Sure, I’m a crazy woman, and I have to take pills I can’t really afford to stay out of hospitals, but I still see ghosts everywhere I look, when I look, because once you start seeing them, you can’t ever stop seeing them. But the worst part is, you accidentally or on purpose start seeing them, you make that gestalt shift that permits you to recognize them for what they are, and they start to see you, too. You look at a painting hanging on a wall, and all at once it seems like a window. It seems so much like a window that an eleven-year-old girl tries to reach through it to the other side. But the unfortunate thing about windows is most of them work both ways. They allow you to look out, but they also allow anything else that happens past to look in.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Which means I need to stop, and go back, and set aside all this folderol about memes and ghosts and windows, at least for now. I need to go back to that night in July, driving alongside the Blackstone River not far from the spot that inspired Saltonstall to paint The Drowning Girl. Back to the night I met the mermaid named Eva Canning. But, also, back to that other night, the snowy night in November, in Connecticut, when I was driving through the woods on a narrow chip-and-tar road, and I came across the girl who was actually a wolf, and who may have been the same ghost as Eva Canning, and who’d inspired another artist, another dead man, a dead man whose name was Albert Perrault, to try and capture her likeness in his work.

And what I said earlier about the girlfriend who puts up with all my weird shit…that was sort of a lie, because she left me not long after Eva Canning showed up. Because, finally, the weird shit just got too weird. I don’t blame her for leaving, though I miss her and wish she were still here. Regardless, the point is, it was a lie, pretending she’s still with me. I said there’s no reason doing this thing if all I can manage is a lie.

So I have to watch for that.

And I have to choose my words carefully.

In fact, I find that I’m quickly, unexpectedly coming to realize that I’m trying to tell myself a story in a language that I’m having to invent as I go along. If I’m lazy, if I rely too heavily on the way anyone else would tell this story—anyone else at all—it’ll look ridiculous. I’ll be horrified or embarrassed by the sight of it, the sound of it. Or I’ll be horrified and embarrassed, and I’ll give it up. I’ll stash it away in a disused suitcase beneath my bed and never reach the place that will, arbitrarily, turn out to be the end. No, not even the end, but just the last page that I’ll write before I can stop telling this story.

I have to be careful, just like Rosemary said. I have to stop, and take a step back.

It wasn’t raining the day I met Abalyn, but the sky was overcast with the deceitful sort of violet clouds that roil and rush by and keep you thinking that it might rain. It was windy, and there was definitely the smell of rain. So I was wearing my galoshes and my raincoat and carrying my umbrella that afternoon, which was two years and four months ago. I was walking home from the bus stop after work. It was one of those last cool days in June, before the weather turns hot and nasty. Below the clouds, the air was sweet, and the trees seemed almost too green to be real. Not too green in any gaudy way, mind you, not as if they were artificial, but as if they had achieved a greenness that was so very green, so lush, it couldn’t possibly exist in nature. Or if it did, human eyes probably weren’t meant to perceive it. I got off the bus on Westminster and followed Parade Street, flanked on either side by those great green whispering chestnut and oak trees. On my left lay the open expanse of Dexter Training Grounds, which is only a park now, despite the name. Ahead of me, at the southern edge of the Training Grounds, the Cranston Street Armory rose up like a fairy-tale castle, its high crenellated turrets and glazed yellow bricks sharply delineated against the clouds. The Armory, from which my neighborhood takes its name, isn’t actually an armory anymore. It occurs to me that a lot of things in Providence aren’t what they used to be, but no one’s ever bothered to give them new names, and names can mislead and confound you.

I passed my street, because I felt more like walking than going straight home. I walked another two blocks, then turned right on Wood Street. I left most of the big trees behind, trading them for the high narrow houses with their mansard roofs and bay windows, gingerbread trim and stingy, weedy yards. I hadn’t gone far when I came upon a disorderly mound of cardboard boxes heaped near the curb. There were DVDs, books, a few pieces of vinyl, and some kitchen utensils. There was clothing (mostly T-shirts, jeans, and women’s underwear) stuffed haphazardly into still more boxes. There were two wooden kitchen chairs, a coffeemaker, a dinged-up nightstand, a floor lamp missing its shade, and, well, other things. I guessed someone had been evicted and their belongings tossed out on the street. It happens, though not as much on this side of town as over on College Hill. I was surprised there wasn’t a mattress, because there’s almost always a mattress and box springs. I propped my umbrella against a telephone pole and began picking through the boxes. A good thing it hadn’t rained, because then everything would have been ruined.

I’d long since learned that it pays to scavenge the castaway belongings of people who haven’t paid their rent, who’ve left everything behind and moved on. Half my apartment is furnished with castoffs, and I once found a first edition of The Great Gatsby and a stack of 1940s Superman comics tucked inside the drawer of an old chifforobe. A used bookstore downtown paid me almost enough for the lot to cover a month’s rent. Anyway, I’d just started sorting through the books—mostly science fiction and fantasy—when I heard footsteps and looked up. A tall girl was crossing Wood Street, her black boots clopping loudly against the asphalt. The first thing I noticed was how pretty she was, in an androgynous Tilda Swinton sort of way. The second thing I noticed was that she looked really, really pissed off.

“Hey!” she shouted when she was still only halfway across the road. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

She was looming over me before I was able to think of an answer. Abalyn is close to six feet tall, which means she has a good five inches on me.

“Is this stuff yours?” I asked, wondering if her short hair was really that black or if she dyed it.

“Hell yeah, it’s mine,” she said, and snatched a paperback out of my hands. I would say that she growled, but that might be misleading, like Dexter Training Grounds and the Armory. “What makes you think you can come along and start rummaging through someone else’s shit?”

“I thought it was abandoned,” I said.

“Well, it’s not.”

“I thought it was just junk,” I added.

“If it was just junk, what the hell would you want with it?” she demanded, and I realized that her eyes were green. Not green like the trees along Parade Street, but green like shallow seawater in winter rushing over granite cobbles, like waves on the floating, shapeless oceans, or green like the polished lumps of beach glass that used to be Coca-Cola or 7Up bottles. A green that was almost, but not quite, blue.

“Well, if it’s not junk, then why’s it piled out here on the curb like it is junk?”

“Oh, my fucking god,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “Where does that get to be any of your business?”

She glared at me, and I thought for a second or two that she would either punch me in the face or turn around and walk away. Instead, she just dropped the paperback into a different box than the one I’d taken it from and dragged her fingers through that black, black hair, which I’d decided had to be dyed. Also, I’d decided maybe she was a few years older than me.

“Honestly, I didn’t know it was yours. I didn’t know it was still anybody’s. I’m not a thief.” Then I pointed up at the cloudy sky. “You know, it might start raining any minute, so you should probably take all this inside somewhere before it gets wet and ruined.”

She made that face again, like maybe she was going to punch me after all.

“I’m waiting on someone,” she said. “A friend of mine, he has a truck, and he promised me he’d be here two and a half hours ago.” She scowled and glanced down Wood Street towards the park. “I’m going to store everything in his garage.”

“So, where do you think he is?” I asked, even though she was right, and none of this was my business. I think it was the hair that kept me talking. The hair and the eyes together.

“Fuck all if I know. He’s not answering, and I’ve texted him like ten times already. Probably lost his phone again. He loses phones a lot, or they get stolen.”

“If it rains,” I said again, thinking maybe I’d spoken too softly the first time and she hadn’t heard, but she ignored me. So I asked what all her stuff was doing piled out by the curb on a cloudy day, if she still wanted it. She pointed across the street at one of the more run-down houses, one of the ones no one’s yet bothered to fix up and gentrify and rent to people who wouldn’t have wanted to live in the Armory just ten years ago. The paint job made me think of cottage cheese, except the trim, which made me think of boiled cabbage.

“You used to live there?” I asked. “Did you get evicted?”

“Yeah, in a manner of speaking,” she said (again, I would say she growled, but…) and sighed and stared down at her books and CDs and everything else. “Bitch whore of a girlfriend kicked me out, which I guess amounts to pretty much the same thing as an eviction. The lease is in her name, since my credit’s lousy, because I defaulted on my student loans.”

“I didn’t go to college,” I said. “My apartment’s only a couple of blocks over,” and I pointed off towards Willow Street.

“Yeah, and?”

“Well, it’s not very big, my apartment. But it is mostly empty, because I don’t have much furniture, and I don’t have a roommate. I have a car, though. It’s a tiny little Honda, so it might take us two or three trips, but we could get your stuff off the street. Well, the chairs might not fit.”

“Screw the chairs,” she said, smiling for the first time. “They’re junk. The nightstand and the lamp, that’s junk, too. You’re serious? I mean, if I wait here another few hours, he might actually show up. I don’t want to impose on you or be a bother.”

“It wouldn’t be an imposition,” I told her, trying to sound like I didn’t care one way or another whether she took me up on the offer. I wanted her to say yes so badly I probably had my fingers crossed. “I didn’t have any plans for the evening, anyway, and it would suck if it rained and all your things got wet.”

“This isn’t even all of it,” she said. “The TV and computer and my gaming stuff, it’s still sitting in the downstairs hallway,” and she pointed at the cottage-cheese-and-cabbage-colored house again. “I wasn’t about to drag it out on the street, I don’t care how loud she screams.”

“I’ll go get my car,” I said. “You wait here, in case anyone else comes along and assumes it’s just junk.” And I handed her my umbrella. She stared at it a moment, as if she’d never seen an umbrella before and had no idea what it was for.

“Just in case it does start to rain,” I said. “Might at least help keep the books dry.”

She nodded, though she still looked kind of confused. “You’re absolutely sure about this?” she asked. “I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m India,” I told her. “Like the country, or India ink, but mostly people call me Imp. So you can call me Imp, or India. Either’s fine.”

“Okay, Imp. Well, this is wicked nice of you. And I promise, I’ll get everything out of your way by tomorrow night at the latest. And my name’s Abalyn, which is what everybody calls me. Just don’t call me Abby. I hate that.”

“Okay, Abalyn. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

She looked worriedly at that low, worrisome sky and opened the umbrella. I hurried home and got my car. It wound up taking us four trips, because of the computer and the television and all her gaming stuff, but I didn’t care. She said she liked my galoshes, which were blue with yellow ducklings, and if black hair and green eyes hadn’t already gotten me, that would’ve done the trick.

And that’s the day I met Abalyn Armitage.

“I think I’ve been telling lies,” Imp types.

Not that I didn’t meet my ex-lover on a not-quite-rainy day in June when the trees were very green. All that part’s true, and so is the part about her belongings being heaped by the curb. And me almost unintentionally stealing books. But I have no idea what we said to each other. I don’t think anyone could write that scene and not lie, recollections of a conversation that happened two and a half years ago. Still, I didn’t set out to lie, trying to write about how Abalyn and I met. Then again, I didn’t set out not to lie, either. That’s some sort of fine line I’m walking, isn’t it? Maybe I should cut myself some slack. How I wrote about Abalyn is true, just not especially factual, like a movie “based on” or “inspired by” actual events. I’m having to fill in all the gaps so this is a story, and not just a bunch of snapshots laid out in words instead of photographs. My memory’s not very good, which is why I was never able to learn the multiplication and periodic tables, or all the state capitals, or how to play the alto saxophone. And why I decided not to go to college. I felt like I was lucky to have graduated high school, what with this lousy memory of mine. Besides, I couldn’t really afford college, and at least I’m not in debt now, like Abalyn. Yes, that part’s both true and factual. And none of the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Of course, I’ve never actually met an innocent person. Everyone hurts someone eventually, no matter how hard they try not to be hurtful. My mother, she hurt me by getting knocked up by my asshole father (who never even had the courtesy to marry her, though he hung around for ten years), but I’m sure that she had no intention, at the time, of hurting a daughter who didn’t even exist yet. I guess that makes it a crime of passion, what she did, or only a lack of foresight. I’m sure Grandmother Caroline had no idea, when she got pregnant, that her daughter would inherit her insanity and then pass it along to an illegitimate granddaughter. When I almost stole books from Abalyn that day, books I wasn’t trying to steal, I had no intention of causing her harm just by talking to her, but the way things worked out, the way that conversation led to our relationship, I did. I did cause her harm. I don’t believe in sin, original or otherwise, but I do believe people cause other people harm, and that to imagine it can be any way else is only asking for disappointment. I believe this is true, just like my inaccurate recounting of that first talk with Abalyn, even though I would be hard-pressed to suggest any sort of factual foundation or causal agent for why it’s true.

All this said, I feel as if I should write something factual, now. Telling this ghost story, I’m beginning to think of facts and truth like bricks and mortar, only I’m not sure which is which. The facts are probably the bricks, with truth being the mortar that holds it all together. I like the sound of that, so I’ll consider it a provisional truth. By the way, all this business about truth and fact, I can’t take credit for that. It comes from an essay in defense of fairy tales, written by Ursula K. Le Guin, titled “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” She might just as well have asked, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Ghosts, Werewolves, and Mermaids?” Anyway, she writes, “For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. And that is precisely why many of them [Americans] are afraid of fantasy.” That’s another quotation I keep thumbtacked to the wall in the room where I paint, right next to the quote from Virginia Woolf’s suicide note.

Imp stared a moment at what she’d written, then added, “Stop stalling, India Morgan Phelps. It’s annoying.”

My favorite fairy tale when I was a child was “The Little Mermaid,” and I was especially fond of having it read aloud to me by Grandmother Caroline. She had a tattered old copy of Stories from Hans Christian Andersen, which had been printed in 1911, three years before she was born. She said her mother had purchased it at the Brattle Book Shop in Boston, while she was still pregnant with Caroline. My grandmother’s book of fairy tales is illustrated with twenty-eight beautiful watercolor paintings by a French artist named Edmund Dulac, who was born in 1882 and died in 1953. When Caroline killed herself, this book was one of the few things she left to me, and it’s yet another thing I keep in the room where I paint. The pages have turned yellow and brittle, and the illustrations are beginning to fade. I imagine they were much more vivid ninety-seven years ago, when my great-grandmother bought the book so that she’d have fairy tales to read to her child. Sure, I also liked some of the other stories, especially “The Snow Queen” and “The Wind’s Tale,” but none of them half as much as I liked “The Little Mermaid.” I’m sure Caroline must have known the story by heart, I asked to hear it so many times. But she always pretended she was actually reading it, and would pause to show me the illustrations by Edmund Dulac. I’ve seen two film adaptations of the story—Splash, which came out two years before I was born, and the animated Disney version, which was released when I was three, so I saw both on VHS. The way Disney changed the ending made me angry. Sure, Splash changed the ending, too, but it wasn’t filled with insipid music, and at least Daryl Hannah didn’t have to stop being a mermaid.

To me, the ending of the Disney film took a true (though not factual) story, and turned it into a lie.

My least favorite fairy tale when I was a child was “Little Red Riding Hood.” It wasn’t in the book my great-grandmother bought in Boston, of course, because it wasn’t written by Hans Christian Andersen, but by Charles Perrault (not to be confused with Albert Perrault). And it wasn’t published in 1911, but in 1697. That’s the first time it appeared in print, but the story existed in many forms long before Perrault put it down on paper. I have a file on “Little Red Riding Hood” with versions that go back as far as the eleventh century. Most people know the story the way that the Brothers Grimm wrote it, and most children are told that tamed and toned-down variant, in which a huntsman saves the girl from the wolf. But Caroline told me the story the way that it was published in Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités: Contes de ma mère l’oye in 1697. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are both eaten by the wolf, and no one comes to save her, and there’s no happy ending. This is, I think, the truer incarnation of the story, though, even as an adult, I really don’t care for either.

Anyway, even with the happy ending, the story terrified me. For one thing, I never pictured the wolf as a real wolf, but as something that walked upright on two legs, and looked a lot more like a man than a wolf. So, I suppose I saw it as a werewolf. When I was older, and read a book about wolves and saw a National Geographic documentary, I realized that the way I’d seen the wolf, in my mind’s eye, made the story truer, because men are much more dangerous than wolves. Especially if you’re a wolf, or a little girl.

My mother never read me fairy tales, and she never told them to me from memory. Rosemary Anne wasn’t a bad mother, she just didn’t do fairy tales.

Imp typed: “I think this is what you call prolegomena, what I’ve written so far, which is a word I’ve never before had a reason to use.” And then she got up and went to the bathroom, because she’d needed to pee since that part about Daryl Hannah. She also got a handful of Lorna Doones and an apple, because she’d skipped dinner again. Then she sat back down at the typewriter and typed, “The importance of fairy tales, and her love for ‘The Little Mermaid,’ as well as her aversion to ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ is very much at the heart of the ghost story she’s writing.”

Which means that wasn’t a digression.

A couple of months after Abalyn moved in with me, we went to an exhibit at the Bell Gallery at Brown. Going was her idea, not mine. The exhibit, which was called The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (in Hindsight), was a retrospective of the work of an artist who’d died in a motorcycle accident a few years before, a man who called himself Albert Perrault (though that wasn’t the name he was given at birth). I’d heard of him, but not much. Abalyn had read an article about Perrault somewhere online, and I went because she wanted to go. The exhibit consisted of an assortment of oil paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media pieces, almost all of it inspired, in part, by fairy tales, and mostly by “Little Red Riding Hood.” Had I known that beforehand, I might have let Abalyn go alone. I probably would have insisted. As it was, I held her hand almost the whole time we were in the gallery.

We signed the guest book at a table near the door, and Abalyn took a copy of a glossy brochure about the exhibit. The first painting had a Latin name, Fecunda ratis. The canvas was executed mostly in shades of gray, though there were a few highlights of green and alabaster, and a single striking crimson smudge floating near the center. A card on the wall beside the painting explained that Perrault borrowed the title from a book by an eleventh-century pedagogue named Egbert of Liège, a book that had included “De puella a lupellis seruata,” an account of a lost girl found living with a pack of wolves. In the story, she’s wearing a red wool tunic, given to her by her grandfather on the day of her baptism. Someone spots the red tunic, and she’s rescued, which I suppose makes it a morality tale. Baptize your children, or they’ll go live with wolves.

I didn’t like the painting. It made me uncomfortable. And not only because it went straight back to my old hang-up about “Little Red Riding Hood.” There was something awful about it, something that made it hard for me to look directly at for more than a few seconds at a time. I suppose this should have impressed me, that the artist had so effectively managed to imbue his work with such a sense of dread. My impression of it was formed piecemeal. I’d glance at the painting, then turn away again. I don’t think Abalyn noticed I was doing this; I’m not sure she had any idea how the exhibit was affecting me until I asked if we could please leave, which was about twenty minutes and several paintings and sculptures later.

Before I sat down to write this, I googled Fecunda ratis and looked at some images on the web, because I didn’t want to rely on my unreliable memories. The painting doesn’t upset me the way it did that August day at the Bell Gallery. Too much has happened, and the sculptures and paintings of Albert Perrault, for all their dreadfulness, pale by comparison. But, like I’ve said, mostly all in gray, and then the red smudge near the center. The smudge forms a sort of still point, or a nexus, or a fulcrum. It’s the child’s wool baptismal tunic, and it’s the only thing she’s wearing. She’s on her hands and knees, her head bowed so that her face is hidden from view. There’s nothing but a wild snarl of matted hair and the red tunic, which, when the painting is considered as a whole, seems to me cruel and incongruent. The girl is surrounded by a circle of dark, hulking forms—the wolves—and the wolves, in turn, are sitting within an outer circle of standing stones, a looming megalithic ring.

The wolves are rendered so indistinctly that I might have mistaken them for something else, if I hadn’t first read the card on the wall. I might have looked at those great, shaggy things squatting there on their haunches, lewdly, hungrily watching over the girl. And I might have mistaken them for bears. Bears or even, I don’t know, oxen. You can’t tell from the painting if the wolves are about to eat the girl, or if they’re keeping her safe. You can’t tell if they’re marveling at what a strange wolf she is, or thinking about how they’ve never made love to a human woman and maybe that would be an interesting change of pace.

But the very worst part of the painting was a strip of rice paper worked into the lower left-hand corner of canvas. Printed on the paper were the words Nobody’s ever coming for you.

I had it in my head, when I sat down with my apple and my Lorna Doones, that I would be able to write in detail about all the pieces that made up The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (in Hindsight), or at least those I saw before I started feeling sick and we had to leave the gallery. Night in the Forest, which was very much like Fecunda ratis, only more so. And 1893 and Sudden Fear in Crowded Spaces. A series of rusty metal cages collectively titled Breadcrumbs, each cage holding a single cobble inside, each stone engraved with a single word. And the grotesque pinwheel spread out at the center of it all, Phases 1–5, a series of sculptures portraying a woman’s transformation into a wolf. Not just any woman, but the murdered and dismembered corpse of Elizabeth Short, known to most of the world as “the Black Dahlia.” I had nightmares about those sculptures for weeks. Sometimes, I still do. I was going to describe all of this to the best of my abilities. But now I think it’s better if I don’t. Maybe later into the story I will, when doing so might become unavoidable, but not now.

“So,” Imp typed, “I’ve made my beginning, however arbitrary and disjointed it may be. I’ve begun my ghost story, and I’m going to pretend there’s no turning back now.”

It’s a lie, but I’m going to pretend, regardless.

In the end, it may or may not all add up to something coherent. I won’t know until I’ve found the end.

Me. Rosemary Anne. Caroline. Three crazy women, all in a row. My mother’s suicide and my grandmother’s suicide. Taking away words so that scary things are less scary, and leaving behind words that no longer mean what they once did. “The Little Mermaid.” The cloudy day I met Abalyn. Dead sparrows and mice trapped inside stoppered bottles. The Drowning Girl, painted by a man who fell off a horse and died. Fecunda ratis, painted by a man who fell off a motorcycle and died. A man who took the surname of the Frenchman who is often credited with having first written down the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood,” and then proceeded to create horrific works of art based on that same fairy tale. Which happens to be my least favorite fairy tale of all. Jacova Angevine and the Open Door of Night, which I’ll come to later. Contagious hauntings and pernicious memes. The harm we do without meaning to do any harm at all.

A dark country road in eastern Connecticut. Another dark road beside a river in Massachusetts. A woman who called herself Eva Canning, who might have been a ghost, or a wolf, or maybe a mermaid, or possibly, most likely, nothing that will ever have a name.

These are the sum of the notes my mother told me I should make, so I won’t forget that which has made a strong impression upon me. This is my apology to Abalyn, even though I know she’s never going to read it.

This might be my pocket full of stones.

“That’s enough for now,” Imp typed. “Get some rest. It’ll still be here when you come back.”