The Drowning Girl

2

“And what about this business with chapters?” Imp typed. “If I’m not writing this to be read—which I’m most emphatically not—and if it’s not a book, as such, then why is it that I’m bothering with chapters? Why does anyone bother with chapters? Is it just so the reader knows where to stop and pee, or have a snack, or turn off the light and go to sleep? Aren’t chapters a bit like beginnings and endings? Arbitrary and convenient constructs?” Nonetheless, she typed the Arabic numeral two precisely seventeen single-spaced lines down a fresh sheet of typing paper.

October is slipping away around me. I’ve spent several days now, days filled with work and not much else, trying to decide when and how to continue the ghost story. Or whether I should continue the ghost story. Obviously, I decided that I would. That’s another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it. I don’t leave paintings unfinished. If I start reading a book, I have to finish it, even if I hate it. I don’t waste food. When I decide to go for a walk, and I’ve planned the route I’m going to take, I insist upon taking the entire walk, even if it starts snowing or raining. Otherwise, I have to contend with that unfinished thing haunting me.

Before I met Abalyn Armitage, I’d never played a video game. I didn’t even own a computer. I also didn’t know much about transsexuals. But I’ll get back to that later. I’ll write about the video games now, because it was one of the very first subjects that she and I talked about that night. We managed to get all her things from the place on Wood Street where she no longer lived, because her ex-girlfriend had evicted her when they broke up, to my place on Willow Street before it started raining. It did start raining, which proved I’d been sensible after all, if somewhat premature, bringing the umbrella along and wearing my galoshes. We got her stuff back to my place, and up the stairs to my apartment. Most of it we piled in my front parlor, which was pretty much empty anyway.

“You’re the first person I’ve ever heard describe a room in their house as a parlor,” Abalyn said. She was sitting on the floor, sorting through her CDs, as if to be sure something hadn’t been left back at her old apartment.

“Am I?”

She watched me a moment, then said, “If you weren’t, I’d never have said you were.”

“Fair enough,” I replied, and then asked if she’d like a cup of tea.

“I’d really prefer coffee,” she said, and I told her that I didn’t drink coffee, so I couldn’t make her any. She sighed and shrugged. “Never mind,” she said, then added, “I’ll have to rectify that tout de suite. I can’t live without coffee. But thanks, anyway.”

I was only in the kitchen maybe ten minutes, but by the time I got back she’d already plugged in her television and was busy hooking up one of the gaming consoles. I sat on the sofa and watched her and sipped my tea. It was sweet, but there was no lemon, because I hadn’t thought to buy one the last time I’d gone to the market.

“Did you love her?” I asked, and Abalyn looked over her shoulder and frowned at me.

“That’s a hell of a thing to ask,” she said.

“Right. But…did you?”

She turned back to the wires and black plastic boxes, and I thought for a moment she was going to ignore me, so that I’d have to think of another question.

“I wanted to,” Abalyn said. “Maybe I thought I did, at first. I wanted to think I did.”

“Did she love you?”

“She loved the person she thought I was, or the person she’d thought I was when we met. But no, I don’t think she ever loved me. I’m not even sure she ever knew me. I don’t think I ever knew her.”

“Do you miss her?”

“It’s only been a couple of hours.” Abalyn was starting to sound annoyed, so I changed the subject. I asked instead about the black boxes and the television. She explained that one was an Xbox 360 and the other was a PS3, then had to explain that PS was an acronym for PlayStation. She also had a Nintendo Wii, which she pronounced “we.” I sat and listened, though I wasn’t particularly interested. I’d started to feel bad for having asked the question I’d asked, about her girlfriend, having belatedly realized how personal it was, so listening seemed like the least I could do. I figured talking would take her mind off her ex and suddenly not having a place to live and all.

“I get paid to write game reviews,” she said, when I asked why she spent so much time playing video games. “I write for websites, mostly. A few print magazines, now and then, but mostly for websites.”

“People read reviews of video games?”

“Do you think I’d get paid to write them if they didn’t?”

“Right. But…I never thought about it, I suppose.” And I told her I’d never played a video game. She wanted to know if I was joking, and I told her that I wasn’t.

“I don’t especially like games,” I said. “I’ve never much seen the point. I’m pretty good at checkers, and gin, and backgammon isn’t so bad. But it’s been years…” I trailed off, and she looked over her shoulder at me again.

“Have you always lived alone?”

“Since I was nineteen,” I told her, and I suspected she was thinking something along the lines of, So that’s why you’re so strange. “But I do okay,” I said.

“Doesn’t it get lonely?”

“Not especially,” I replied, which was a lie, but I didn’t want to come across as pathetic or maudlin or something. “I have my painting, and I have work. I read a lot, and sometimes I write stories.”

“You’re a painter and a writer?” By this time, she was untangling a snarl of black cables she’d pulled from one of the boxes.

“No, just a painter. But I write stories sometimes.”

“Does anyone ever publish them?”

“I’ve sold a few, but that doesn’t make me a real writer. Not an author, I mean.”

She glared at the snarl of black cables, and, for a moment, it seemed like she might put them back in the box or hurl them across the parlor.

“Have you ever sold a painting?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “Not really. Not my real paintings. Only my summer-people paintings.”

Abalyn didn’t ask what I meant. By “summer-people paintings,” I mean.

“But you think of yourself as a painter, and not a writer. You know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, right?”

“I also work at an art supply store, and I get paid for that. Still, I don’t ever think of myself as a clerk or a cashier. The point is, I think of myself as a painter, because painting is what I love to do, what I’m passionate about. So, I’m a painter.”

“Imp, you don’t mind me setting all this stuff up, do you? I guess I should have asked before I started. I just want to be sure nothing’s broken.” She finally managed to untangle the cables, connected the consoles to the television, and then pulled a power strip from the cardboard box.

“I don’t mind,” I said, and sipped at my tea. “It’s actually sort of interesting.”

“Should have asked before I started, I know.”

“I don’t mind,” I said again.

I considered the big flat-screen television a moment. She’d propped it against the wall. I’d seen them in shop windows and at the mall, but I’d never owned any sort of TV. “I don’t have cable,” I said.

“Oh, I’d already figured that part out.”

So, it rained, and we talked, and Abalyn was relieved that nothing had been broken. She told me that her girlfriend—who was named Jodie, by the way (I suppose she still is)—had set most of it out in the hallway rather roughly while they were still arguing. Abalyn hadn’t tried to stop her. Anyway, she showed me how to play a couple of games. In one, you were an alien soldier fighting an alien invasion, and there was a blue holographic girl. In another, you played a soldier who was trying to stop terrorists from using nuclear weapons.

“Are they all this violent?” I asked. “Are all the central characters male? Are they all about war?”

“No…and no, and no. Maybe I’ll show you some Final Fantasy tomorrow, and maybe Kingdom Hearts. That stuff might be more your speed. Though, there’s still sorta combat. It’s just not as graphic, the violence, if you know what I mean. Cartoon violence.”

I didn’t know what she meant, but I didn’t tell her that. Eventually it stopped raining. We ordered Chinese takeout, and my fortune cookie said, “Don’t stop now.” It really did. I’m not making that up.

Abalyn said, “That’s an odd thing to put in a fortune cookie.”

“I like it,” I replied, and I still have that fortune, tacked to the wall with the Virginia Woolf and Ursula K. Le Guin quotes. I always save fortunes from fortune cookies, though usually I put them in an antique candy tin in the kitchen. I probably have at least a hundred.

“Where is all this headed?” Imp typed, because it was beginning to seem a bit ramblesome. Then she answered herself by typing, “It really happened. It’s one of the things I’m sure really happened.”

“How can you be so sure?”

And Imp typed, “Because I still have the fortune from that cookie,” though that hardly seemed like a satisfactory answer. “Fine,” she said aloud. “Just so long as you don’t lose sight of why you’re doing this, don’t forget.”

I haven’t forgotten at all.

Isn’t that why I’m writing this down, because I haven’t forgotten, because I haven’t figured out how to forget? Abalyn is one of the ghosts, same as my mother and grandmother, and Phillip George Saltonstall and Albert Perrault, same as Eva Canning. No one ever said you have to be dead and buried to be a ghost. Or if they did, they were wrong. People who believe that have probably never been haunted. Or they’ve only had very limited experience with ghosts, so they simply don’t know any better.

Abalyn slept on the sofa that night, and I slept in my bed. I lay awake a long time, thinking about her.

If I let her read this, Dr. Ogilvy would probably tell me that I’m exhibiting “avoidant behavior,” the way I’m going about writing this ghost story.

But it’s mine, isn’t it? Yes, and so it’s mine to tell however I wish. It’s mine with which to tarry and stall and get to any particular point in my own sweet time. There is no Constant Reader to appease, only me and me alone. That said, I want to try to write about the road. And about the night I met Eva Canning. However, for the moment, it makes no difference whether it’s 122 winding along the Blackstone River, just past Millville, Massachusetts, or whether it’s Wolf Den Road in northeastern Connecticut. Which means it also doesn’t matter whether this night on this road is during the summer or the autumn, respectively. For now, the road is archetypal, abstract. It might be any road or any night. Specificity wouldn’t make it any truer, only more factual.

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.

The scales seem to tilt in favor of July, and Highway 122, and mermaids. Away from Albert Perrault and towards Phillip George Saltonstall. But…I have this sickening feeling that next time I sit down to write more of this, the scales will somehow manage to tilt the other way, in favor of November, and Connecticut, and wolves. That’s not just a turn of phrase, either—this sickening feeling. Knowing that may happen makes me queasy. Not quite full-on nauseous, but definitely queasy.

I’m going to go put the kettle on for a pot of tea, and maybe eat some toast or a crumpet with blueberry jam. And I need to get dressed, because I have to be at work in an hour. There isn’t time for a shower, though I need one, because I’ve been sitting here writing this ever since I woke up from a dream about Abalyn and Eva. Hopefully, if I use deodorant and wear clean underwear, no one will notice I need a shower.

My kitchen is the main reason that I rented the apartment at the east end of Willow Street. It gets the morning sunlight. The walls are painted a cheery sort of yellow, and in the morning the room is bright and, in autumn and winter and late spring, seems warmer than it actually ever is, which is nice. The kitchen puts me at ease after sleep. Sleep usually leaves me disoriented, my nerves jangling; I have dreams that are as bright, as vivid, as the eight o’clock sunshine off those kitchen walls, but there’s rarely anything cheery about the dreams. I didn’t used to have such bad nightmares—the dreams started after Eva. Grandmother Caroline always said that the kitchen is the most important room in any house (or apartment), and her advices have hardly ever steered me wrong.

The morning after the first night that Abalyn came to stay with me, we sat together at the kitchen table. I was having tea, a banana, and a crumpet—my usual—and she was eating Nilla Wafers with peanut butter. My tea was pale with milk, and hers was not. She was wearing a black T-shirt and black boxer shorts. I had on my gingham nightgown, the one with blue and white checks. It had stopped raining and the sun was out, so the yellow kitchen was very, very yellow. These details are so clear to me, which strikes me odd, since so many far more important details are hazy or have been altogether lost.

My memory is almost like Caroline and Rosemary never died. It plays surrogate and tries to keep me safe. It selects and omits, saves and sorts and wipes clean. Often, I think it smothers. Not intentionally, of course.

“Do you always have Saturdays off?” Abalyn asked, using a spoon to spread a thick glob of peanut butter onto a cookie.

“Mostly,” I replied, sipping my tea. “But I wish I could get more hours than I do. I wouldn’t much mind working weekends. Do you have a job?”

“I told you. I write reviews of video games.”

“I mean besides that.”

She chewed and stared at me a moment or two. “No, not besides that.”

“It pays enough you don’t need another job?”

“Not exactly,” she muttered around Nilla Wafer and peanut butter. “That’s one of the things busted up me and Jodie. She kept nagging at me to get a real job.” When Abalyn said “real job,” she used her fingers to make sarcastic quotation marks. “You get paid enough at the art supply place for the rent on this apartment?”

“Mostly,” I said again. “And I have some money put away, some money that my grandmother left me. So, I make ends meet.”

“So you’re sort of a trustafarian,” she said, and laughed.

“No,” I said, and I think I said it a little angrily. “I just have a little money Grandmother Caroline left me and my mother. It’s a trust fund, but I work. If I didn’t, it wouldn’t have lasted half this long.”

“Lucky you,” Abalyn sighed.

“I’ve never thought of it that way.”

“Maybe you should start.”

Neither of us said anything for a while then. Abalyn wasn’t the first person who’d made a snide remark about my inheritance (my aunt Elaine is the trustee). It happens sometimes, and sometimes I explain there’s not all that much of it left. That it’ll run out in a few more years, and who knows how I’ll manage then, what with rent and my meds and all? But I didn’t go into that with Abalyn, not that morning. We talked about it at some point later on.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just a little prickly on the subject of money right now.”

“No. It’s okay.”

She told me about Jodie, how they’d fought a lot, usually about the finances. Jodie had a nine-to-five office-job-type job, and Abalyn said Jodie resented the fact that her girlfriend spent all day sitting at home playing video games. Abalyn said they’d get into arguments because Jodie would see something in an Ikea catalog, for instance, and remark how they could have nicer things if Abalyn was making more money. She also talked about how they met, out on the Cape, at a bar in Provincetown.

“I know. Terribly cliché. She was a little drunk, but I bought her another beer and we got to talking. She didn’t even realize I was a tranny until we were leaving to go back to my hotel room.”

“I haven’t said anything about Abalyn being a transsexual,” Imp typed. “She wouldn’t have wanted me to make a big deal out of it, and it never mattered to me. That’s why I haven’t really brought it up before now.

“It’s just part of who she was,” Imp typed.

“Did she get pissed? When she found out, I mean?” And I was thinking about that scene in The Crying Game, when Stephen Rea first sees Dil naked, then goes to the toilet and pukes. I didn’t tell Abalyn that’s what was running through my mind.

“As a matter of fact, she did. So, we didn’t go back to my room, after all. But I’d given her my card—”

“You have cards?”

Abalyn smiled. “Started out sort of like a joke. But they come in handy. Anyway, she had my card, which has my email and Facebook and everything, and she got in touch with me about a week later. Wanted to meet up again.”

“And you did? Even after the way she’d acted?”

“You will find I can be a very forgiving soul, especially when pretty women are involved.”

We talked a little more about her being a transsexual then. Not a lot, just a little. I didn’t tell her how I’d known right away, when she’d caught me rummaging through her stuff the day before. I thought it would have been rude to tell her that. She told me about going to a clinic in Bangkok for her surgery, and the guy she’d been living with at the time. She said, “He paid for almost all of it, but then we broke up right after. Turned out he didn’t like me afterwards. I’ve met a lot of guys like that. They have hard-ons for pre-ops, but they’re really just gay men with a fetish, so post-ops are a complete turnoff.”

“Did you love him?” I asked, though, in retrospect, I think it was an indelicate question.

Abalyn ate another cookie with peanut butter, and frowned slightly, as if it was hard thinking of the answer, or hard putting the answer into words.

“I believed that I did. At the time. But I got over it. I was grateful for what he’d done for me, and it was an amicable split. We still talk, every now and then. He calls me. I call him. Email. He’s a good guy, but he really ought to stick to straight-up cock.”

“This is more relevant than it may at first glance appear,” typed Imp. The keys jammed, and she had to stop to get them unstuck, staining the fingers of both hands with ink. “Duality. The mutability of the flesh. Transition. Having to hide one’s true self away. Masks. Secrecy. Mermaids, werewolves, gender. The reactions we may have to the truth of things, to someone’s most honest face, to facts that run counter to our expectations and preconceptions. Confessions. Metaphors. Transformation. So, it’s very relevant. Not just a random breakfast conversation. Don’t leave out anything relevant, no matter how mundane it might feel.”

Hemingway said to write about the weather.

Imp stopped and stared at what she’d written.

“You’re a very beautiful woman,” I told Abalyn. Then I said, quickly, because it immediately occurred to me how that could be taken the wrong way, “Not that beauty matters. Not that it has anything to do with whether or not—”

“It’s okay. I know what you meant,” Abalyn said, holding up her left hand and interrupting me.

“You do?”

“Probably. Close enough.”

“Have you ever regretted it?” I asked, knowing I shouldn’t, but the words tumbling out before I could stop them from coming.

Abalyn sighed loudly and turned her head, looking out the window instead of at me. “Only once or twice,” she said very softly, almost whispering. “Not often, and not for very long. I doubt I’ve ever made a decision I didn’t regret somewhere down the line, but it was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do.”

I don’t want to write any more about this. At least, not right now. I’ll probably have to come back to it later, even though I’d prefer not to. I don’t like thinking of Abalyn this way. I dislike remembering how self-conscious and awkward she could be at times, and the expression she’d get whenever we’d be out and some asshole would say something hateful or inconsiderate. Or called her sir. I don’t like remembering the way that hurt her. Hurts her. I’m sure it still does; I’m just not around to see, and I don’t like dwelling on that, either. That’s only normal. Missing people you still love, and not wanting to see them in pain and angry and humiliated.

I wish I could be merciful, and leave Abalyn out of the ghost story entirely.

But just like Rosemary and Caroline, Phillip George Saltonstall and Albert Perrault, she’s part of the tapestry, and I can’t tell my story without telling part of hers. She’s part of mine. If Abalyn ever writes her own ghost story, I’ll have to be part of it, and I’m pretty certain she knows that. I wouldn’t hold it against her.

We drank our tea and ate our breakfast, and the conversation turned to video games, and how I’d never owned a computer. When the kitchen began to get too warm (no air-conditioning), we moved to the sofa. She lectured me on MMORPGs and the pros and cons of various consoles, and the relative merits of PCs and Macs. She patiently explained glitches and gigabytes and how she regretted having been too young in the eighties to have been in on the Golden Age of the Video Arcade. It went on like that for hours. I kept up, for the most part. And I began to understand why Abalyn lived the way she did, writing reviews for video games, avoiding conventional workspace. She felt safe cloistered in front of her monitor or television screen, with no prying, uninvited eyes studying her, drawing unwelcome, uninformed conclusions. I would never begrudge her that privacy. Not ever.

Back to Phillip George Saltonstall.

Back to The Drowning Girl.

My ghost story is filled with significant moments that I would only become aware were significant moments in hindsight. Perhaps this is always the way of it. I can’t say, because I’ve only ever lived my one haunting. I have a single data point. Still, I would stress mine’s not a simple haunting, obviously. The sort you usually read about or hear around a campfire. I didn’t merely feel a sudden and inexplicable chill in a dark room. I didn’t wake to the sound of rattling chains or moaning. I was not shocked at an ectoplasmic woman drifting down a corridor. Those are only cartoons, caricatures of phantoms, invented by people who’ve never suffered (or been graced by) an actual, true, factual haunting. Of that I’m very certain.

So, this, then, is a significant event, and, in time, its significance would be made plain to me. But first it was only an anecdote or an interesting story that my grandmother told me.

L’Inconnue de la Seine.

I don’t speak French. I had a year of it in high school, but I wasn’t very good at it (as with so many other subjects), and I’ve forgotten almost all I did manage to learn. But Caroline, she spoke French. When she was a young woman, she’d gone to Paris and Mont Saint-Michel, Orléans and Marseille. She had photographs and picture postcards. She had a box of souvenirs. Sometimes she’d take them out and show them to me. She had stories of France. She told me one when I was nine years old.

I treasure her stories of France, as I seriously doubt I’ll ever be able to go there myself. Travel isn’t as cheap or easy as it once was, and I don’t like the idea of being on an airplane (I’ve never flown).

I was in Girl Scouts, working on my first-aid merit badge. One day, a woman came to our scout troop, from a hospital in Providence, and she taught us CPR with a rubber dummy she called Resusci Anne. We learned how to properly administer chest compressions, and how to press our lips to the dummy’s lips and breathe our breath into it. How we would breathe into the mouth of someone who’d stopped breathing after a heart attack. Rosemary was busy that day—I don’t recall why—and Grandmother Caroline picked me up after the meeting.

Caroline drove this huge car, a Dresden blue 1956 Pontiac Star Chief, and I loved riding in the wide backseat. That car was the antithesis of my crappy little Honda. The speedometer went all the way to something like 120 miles per hour. It glided so smoothly along the road that you hardly ever felt a bump or a pothole. Rosemary sold it to a collector in Wakefield right after my grandmother committed suicide, and I’ve often wished she hadn’t, that it had been passed to me. Of course, gas is so expensive now, and I’m sure the Star Chief got lousy mileage, so I probably couldn’t have afforded to drive it. I can’t afford to go to Paris, or to drive Caroline’s lost Star Chief.

We went back to her house, and while I was trying to make sense of my math homework, after I’d told her about Resusci Anne, she told me about l’Inconnue de la Seine.

“The dummy had a very distinctive face, didn’t it?” she asked me, and I had to think about the question for a moment. “Not just any old generic face,” Caroline added. “Not like a face someone made up, but a face that must have been the face of a real human being.” In hindsight, I realized that she was right, and I told her so.

“Well, that’s because it wasn’t a made-up face,” she said. And then she told me the story of a drowned girl who’d been found floating in the river Seine in the 1880s or 1890s. The body was discovered near the quai du Louvre, and taken to the Paris Morgue.

“The woman was very pretty,” Caroline said. “She was beautiful. Even after all that time in the river, she was still beautiful. One of the morgue assistants was so smitten with her that he made a death mask. Copies of the beautiful girl’s face were sold, hundreds and hundreds of them. Almost everyone in Europe knew that face, even though no one ever did learn who she’d been. She might have been anyone. Maybe a girl who sold flowers, or a seamstress, or a beggar, but her identity is still a mystery. No one came forward to claim the corpse.”

By this time, I’d completely forgotten about the confusing tedium of my homework, and was listening with rapt attention to my grandmother. She said she’d seen a copy of the mask when she was in Paris in the 1930s. Stories and poems and even a novel were written about l’Inconnue de la Seine (which she translated as “the unknown woman of the Seine,” although Babel Fish tells me it should be translated as “the unknown factor of the Seine.” It also tells me that “the unknown woman of the Seine” in French is Le femme inconnu du Seine. Maybe it’s right, but I don’t trust a computer program as much as my dead grandmother). She said one story had been written from the point of view of the dead girl, as she floated down the river. In the story she doesn’t remember who she was when she was alive. She can’t even remember her name. She’s become a new sort of being, one that must live always at the bottom of the river, or in the sea. But she doesn’t want to live like that, so she lets herself rise to the surface, where she quickly drowns on air.

Grandmother Caroline didn’t tell me the name of the story or its author, or if she did, I forgot. I found it many years later. The story was written by a poet named Jules Supervielle, who was born in 1884 and died in 1960. First published in 1929, the story is titled simply “L’Inconnue de la Seine.” I found it in a library at Brown University, in a collection of Supervielle’s work called L’Enfant de la haute mer. I brought it home, though like I said, I can’t read French. I copied the story down by hand. I still have it somewhere. And I’ve found other poems and stories about the drowned girl. Vladimir Nabokov wrote a poem about her, a poem that was also about the Slavic rusalki. Man Ray took photographs of that face.

One thing I have come to comprehend about true ghost stories is that we rarely know they’re happening to us until after the fact, when we’re haunted, but the events of the story proper are over and done with. This is a perfect example of what I mean. The first woman I ever kissed was l’Inconnue de la Seine, the likeness of an unidentified suicide who was born over a hundred years before me. That day, I pressed my lips gently to hers, again and again, breathing gently into her lifeless mouth. And I felt a peculiar tingle in my belly. I know now, in hindsight, this was one of my earliest sexual experiences, even though it would be several years yet before I fully admitted to myself that I would only ever want to make love to women. My lips brushing those silicone lips, and there was a…a what? A frisson, I think. A shudder of pleasure that came and went so fast I was hardly even consciously aware of it.

I’ve sat staring at photographs of the death mask. I have a book on sculpture with two black-and-white photographs of it. She doesn’t look dead. She hardly even looks like she’s sleeping. There’s a wry sort of a smile (which is why she’s sometimes called the “drowned Mona Lisa”). Her hair is parted in the middle. You can see her eyelashes clearly.

It’s all a perfect circle, in hindsight. A mandala of moments that are possessed of great significance, in hindsight. I only say that now, state it as a fact, but maybe it will become clearer farther along in my ghost story. Or maybe it won’t, and I’ll have failed.

Two years later, on my eleventh birthday, I would see Phillip George Saltonstall’s painting The Drowning Girl, hanging at RISD. Eleven years later, I would take a drive one night in July and find Eva Canning waiting for me near the banks of the Blackstone River. Beautiful, terrible, lost Eva. My ghost who was a mermaid. Unless she wasn’t. She would kiss me, and her lips were no different from those of the CPR dummy, or the lips of l’Inconnue de la Seine. And so I would fall in love with her, even though I was already very much in love with Abalyn. Did the morgue attendant kiss those dead lips, either before or after he made his mask?

In my head, this all makes a perfect circle, an elegant and inescapable circuit. But seeing it on paper, it comes across confusing. I’m afraid it isn’t clear at all, what I mean. What I want to take from my mind and put someplace outside of me. I don’t know the right words, and maybe that’s because there are no right words to pull a haunting out into the light and trap it in ink and paper.

In his painting, Saltonstall hid the face of The Drowning Girl from view, by having her look over her shoulder, back towards the forest. But the painting was done in 1898, right? So…he might well have seen l’Inconnue de la Seine. He was in love with his first cousin, and if Mary Farnum is the girl he painted, it could be that’s why he hid her face. But also maybe not. Eva Canning didn’t ever wear the face of l’Inconnue de la Seine, though she wore at least two faces that I know of.

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It’s entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

The drugstore closes in half an hour, and I have to pick up a refill.

Am I repeating myself? Bah. Dah. Ba-ba.

I don’t mean, when I ask this, repeating myself in a useful sense that underscores and makes manifest the ways in which all these occurrences and lives are bound inextricably together to create the ghost story that I’ve lived and am now trying to write down. I mean, am I repeating myself (Bah. Dah. Ba-ba.), and I also mean to ask, am I doing it to avoid moving forwards towards the terrifying, sad truth of it all? Am I dragging my feet because I’m a crazy woman who knows damn well she’s crazy, but who doesn’t want to be reminded just how crazy she is by having to tell two stories that are true, when only one can be factual? I feel as though I’m doing just exactly that. That I’m acting out Rosemary’s old joke about a man in a rowboat with only one oar, rowing in endless circles and never, ever reaching shore. But how can I do otherwise, when the story is a spiral, or spirals set within spirals? Am I panicking because I think I need or I wish to force a straight, sane line, a narrative that begins here and proceeds to there by a conventional, coherent route? Am I too busy second-guessing myself and pulling my insecurities up over my head—like the blankets when I was five and afraid of the dark, afraid of what might be in the dark, afraid of wolves—to stop procrastinating and relate these events straightforwardly?

Am I a crazy woman only transferring her delusions and disordered consciousness into the written word?

Dr. Ogilvy dislikes the word “crazy,” and she dislikes “insane,” as well. She probably approves of the way Butler Hospital changed its name. But I tell her these are honest words. Fuck the political or negative connotations, they’re honest words, and I need them. Maybe I’m frightened at the thought of being committed, of the antiseptic sterility of hospitals and the way they rob people of their dignity, but I’m not frightened by these words. Nor am I ashamed of them. But I am frightened by the thought that I’m caught in a loop and am incapable (or so unwilling I may as well be incapable) of communicating in a straightforward manner. And I would feel shame if I couldn’t muster the courage to tell the truth.

“Nothing is ever straightforward,” Imp typed, “though we lose a lot of the truth by pretending it’s so.”

Stop the questions. Just stop it. It makes me angry when I’m afraid. It makes me almost indescribably angry. I can’t possibly finish this if it makes me angry to try, and the only thing that makes me more angry than my fear is my failures. So, I have to do this, and I won’t stop me.

Abalyn and I didn’t really ever discuss her moving in. She just did. I had the space, and she needed someplace to live. Almost right from the start, I wanted her to be near me. I wanted to be in love with her, or it was the beginning of love. It never felt like a crush. I wasn’t a virgin. I’d had lots and lots of crushes, and it didn’t feel like that. It wasn’t that…what? Insistent? But I wanted her to stay, and she did stay, and I was glad of it. I do remember how she slept on the sofa the first few nights, out there with all her video game stuff, before I finally convinced her that was foolish when there was so much room in my bed. I wanted her in my bed. I wanted her close to me, and it was a relief when she accepted the invitation. The first time we made love, which was the first night she slept in my bed, that was a magnificent relief.

The Thursday after we met, I got off work early, and we walked together down Willow Street to the park, to Dexter Training Grounds, which, as I’ve said, isn’t a military training grounds anymore, though it’s still called that. On Thursdays, every week from early June until October, there’s a farmers’ market. Even if I don’t buy anything, I enjoy going and seeing all the produce heaped in colorful, fresh piles, arranged in woven wooden baskets, and in those little cardboard cartons, waiting to be purchased. Early in the summer, there are sugarsnap peas, green beans, cucumbers, many varieties of peppers (hot, mild, sweet; scarlet and yellow and green), apples, strawberries, kale, turnips, crisp lettuce, spicy radishes, heirloom tomatoes, and big jugs of cider. In June, it’s too early for good corn, and the blueberries aren’t ripe yet. But there’s bread from local bakeries. Sometimes, there’s fresh sausage and bacon sold from coolers by the same men who raised and killed the pigs. All of this is arranged on long folding tables beneath the chestnut trees.

That day I bought apples and tomatoes, and when I had, Abalyn and I sat on a bench beneath the trees and each ate one of the apples, which were just the right blend of tart and sweet. The next day, I used the rest to bake a pie.

“Want to hear something creepy?” I asked, when I was done with my apple and had tossed the core away for the squirrels and birds.

“Depends,” she said. “Is this where you tell me you’re an axe murderer or into furries or that sort of creepy?”

I had to ask her what furries were.

“No. It’s something I saw about a year back, something I saw here in the park.”

“Then sure,” she said. “Tell me something creepy.” She was eating her apple much more slowly than I had (I often eat too fast), and she took another bite.

“I was driving home from work one night. Usually, I take the bus, right? But that day, I drove because, well, I don’t know, I just felt like driving. On my way home that evening, passing by the park, I saw four people walking along together. They were away from the streetlamps and under the trees, where it was the darkest, but I still saw them pretty clearly. When I first spotted them, I thought they were nuns, which was strange enough. You never see nuns around here. But then they didn’t seem like nuns anymore.”

“Nuns are creepy enough,” Abalyn muttered around a bite of her apple. “Nuns freak me out.”

“I saw that they weren’t wearing habits, but long black cloaks, with hoods that covered their heads. Suddenly, I wasn’t even sure they were women. They might just as well have been men, from all I could make out of them. And then—and yeah, I know how this sounds—and then I fancied they weren’t even people.”

“You fancied? No one actually says they fancied.”

“Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is,” I told her. “So we should use all the words we have.” It wasn’t really an original thought; I was paraphrasing Spencer Tracy from Inherit the Wind.

She shrugged, said, “So the nuns who weren’t nuns might not even have been people. Go on,” and took another bite of her apple.

“I didn’t say for sure that they weren’t people. But for a moment they seemed more like ravens trying very hard to look like people. Maybe trying too hard, and because they were so self-conscious, I could see that they were actually ravens.”

Abalyn chewed her apple and watched me. By then, she already knew why I take the pills I take. She’d seen all the prescription bottles on my nightstand, and I’d told her some stuff. Not everything. Not anything about Caroline or my mother, but I’d told her enough that she understood about the state of my mental health (a phrase Dr. Ogilvy does approve of). Still, that day, she didn’t say she thought I was nuts. I’d expected her to, but she didn’t. She just ate her apple and considered me with those blue-green beach-glass eyes of hers.

“Sure, I know they weren’t ravens, of course. I don’t know why it seemed that way. I think they might have been Wiccans. There are a few witches around here, I suspect. Maybe they were on their way to a ritual or witches’ sabbat or potluck or whatever it is Wiccans do when they get together.”

“Frankly, it’s a lot more interesting to imagine they were ravens trying too hard to pass themselves off as human beings,” Abalyn said. “It’s a lot creepier than if they’re just Wiccans. I’ve met witches, and, unlike nuns, they’re never creepy. They tend to be rather humdrum, in fact.” She finished her apple and tossed the core so that it landed in the grass near mine.

“Whatever they were, they gave me the willies.”

“Gave you the willies?” she asked, smiling. “No one actually says that, you know.”

“I do,” I replied, and flicked her lightly, playfully, on the left shoulder, as I was sitting on her left. She pretended that it had hurt and made faces. I continued, “They gave me the willies, and I went home and locked my doors and slept with all the lights burning that night. But I didn’t have bad dreams. I looked for them again the next night, and the night after that, but I haven’t ever seen them again.”

“Were you homeschooled?” she asked me, which annoyed me since it had nothing to do with what I’d seen that night in the park.

“Why?”

“If you were, it might explain why you use old-fashioned words like fancied and willies.”

“I wasn’t,” I said. “I went to public schools, here in Providence and in Cranston. I hated it, usually, and I wasn’t a very good student. I barely made it through my senior year, and it’s a miracle I graduated.”

Abalyn said, “I hated high school, for reasons that ought to be obvious, but was a pretty good student. Had it not been for most of the other students, I might have loved it. But I did well. I aced my SATs, even got a partial scholarship to MIT.”

“You went to MIT?”

“No. I went to the University of Rhode Island, down in Kingston—”

“I know where URI is.”

“—because the scholarship was only a partial scholarship, and my folks didn’t have the rest of the money.”

She shrugged again. It used to irritate me, the way Abalyn was always shrugging. Like she was indifferent, or stuff didn’t get to her, when I knew damned well it did. She’d wanted to attend MIT and study computer science and artificial intelligence, but instead she’d gone to URI and studied bioinformatics, which she explained was a new branch of information technology (she said “IT”) that tries to visually analyze very large sets of biological data—she gave DNA microarrays and sequences as examples. I was never any good with biology, but I looked this stuff up. Bioinformatics, I mean.

I stared at the ground a moment, at my feet. “There must be good money in that,” I said. “But, instead, you write reviews of video games for not much money at all.”

“I do something I’m passionate about, like you and painting. I was never passionate about bioinformatics. It was just something to do, so I could say I went to college. It meant a lot to me, and more to my parents, because neither of them had.”

Katharine Hepburn said something like, “Do what interests you, and at least one person is happy.”

There was a breeze then, a warm breeze that smelled like freshly mowed lawns and hot asphalt, and I suggested we should head back. Abalyn caught me peering at the place beneath the chestnuts and oaks where I’d seen the not-nuns, not-raven people, and she leaned over and kissed me on the right temple. It was confusing, because the kiss made me feel safe, but letting my eyes linger at the spot below the trees, that sent a shudder through me.

“Hey, Imp,” she said. “Now I owe you one.”

“How do you mean?” I said, standing, straightening my shirt, smoothing out the wrinkles. “What do you owe me?”

“Tit for tat. You told me a creepy story, now I owe you one. Not right now, but later. I’ll tell you about the time me and some friends got stoned and broke into the old railroad tunnel beneath College Hill.”

“You don’t have to do that. You don’t owe me anything. It was just a story I’ve never told anyone else.”

“All the same,” she said, and then we walked back up Willow Street to the apartment. Just now, I almost typed “my apartment,” but it was fast becoming our apartment. While I made dinner in the comfort of the butter-yellow kitchen, she played something noisy with lots of gunfire and car crashes.

If there are going to be chapters, this one ends here. I’ve been neglecting a painting, and I’ve got extra hours at work this week, so I may not get back to it—the ghost story—for a while, and the thought of leaving a chapter unfinished makes me uncomfortable.