The Drowning Girl

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woods are said to be haunted. That’s the important part. At least, to me that’s the important part. Importance is always conditional, relative, variable from person to person. But what’s more important (to me) than the tales of the yurei is the fact that all this trouble in the Sea of Trees didn’t begin until Seichoˉ Matsumoto, a Japanese detective and mystery writer, published a novel, Kuroi Jukai (The Black Forest, 1960). In Matsumoto’s book, two lovers choose Aokigahara as the most appropriate place to commit suicide. And people read the book. And people began going to the forest to kill themselves.

I haven’t read Kuroi Jukai. I don’t even know if it’s been translated into English.

A book. A pernicious meme that created a haunting, a sort of focal point for people who don’t want to live anymore. Same as with Phillip George Saltonstall and The Drowning Girl, I find it hard to believe that Matsumoto meant anyone harm. I doubt he consciously set out to trigger the haunting of the Sea of Trees. But do his intentions enter into this? Do Saltonstall’s, or Albert Perrault’s? Are they innocent, or do we hold them accountable?

“What makes you any different?” I imagined Abalyn asking from the foot of my bed last night.

If I had answered, maybe I’d have said, “Nothing.” Maybe I’d have said, “I’m still trying to figure that out.” Possibly, I would have pointed out that those three, the novelist and the two painters, created something that was meant to be seen, whereas I’m not doing that at all.

“Write about Eva,” Abalyn told me. “What you brought home that night. Write about what happened to us because of what you brought home that night.”

I wanted to say, I still love you, Abalyn. I’m never going to stop loving you. I didn’t say that, because I didn’t say anything, but if I had replied to my imagination, I believe Abalyn would have turned away, angry, bitter, lonely as any yurei, but not howling. Determined I wouldn’t see her loneliness.

Walking through the woods, I have faced it.…

“You need to get dressed and go to work,” Imp typed.

I know. I just glanced at the clock. But I needed to get this down first. If I hadn’t, I might have forgotten that I meant to, because I forget so much.

I have to tell the story, because I forget so much.

The next morning—the morning after I found Eva Canning by the Blackstone River—I awoke to find that Abalyn was already up and about. That was sort of unusual. She tended to stay up later than me, and sleep later. Sometimes, she slept until two or three in the afternoon, after staying up until dawn. But not that morning. That morning I put on my robe, brushed my teeth, and went out into the parlor to find her flipping through my records.

“Good morning,” I said, and she probably said “Good morning,” too. Or something of the sort.

“You’re up early,” I said, and she shrugged.

“Don’t you have anything recorded after 1979?” Abalyn asked me, frowning. “And you have heard about CDs, right?”

“Those were Rosemary’s records.”

“Rosemary? An ex?”

“No, no. Rosemary my mother.”

“So, where is your music?” she wanted to know. All this time, she hadn’t looked at me, she just kept flipping through the records. She pulled out Rumours and stared at Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks on the cover.

“Those are my records, Abalyn. They’re the only ones that I have.”

“You’re shitting me,” she said, and laughed.

“No, I’m not. I don’t listen to music a lot, and when I do, I listen to Rosemary’s records. I grew up hearing them, and they make me feel safe.”

She looked at me then, over her shoulder. She made that face she used to make when she was trying to figure me out. Or when she was having trouble with one of her video games. It was pretty much the same expression, in either case. “Okay,” she said, “I guess that makes sense,” then turned back to the bookshelf (which is where I keep all Rosemary’s records, which are now my records). She slid Rumours back onto the shelf and pulled out Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky.

“I especially like that one,” I told her.

“You have a turntable?”

“Yeah. It was also my mother’s.”

“Jodie has a turntable. She collects this stuff. Me, I stick to CDs. Vinyl just gets scratched up, and it’s too much trouble to lug around whenever you move.”

I yawned, thinking about hot tea and toasted crumpets and strawberry jam. “I don’t know much about music,” I said. “Not about the newer stuff, I mean. Just Rosemary’s records.”

“We gotta remedy that, Imp. You need a crash course.”

I asked her what she liked, and her answer didn’t make much sense to me. EBM, synthpop, trance, shoegaze, Japanoise, acid house.

“I’ve never heard of any of those bands,” I said, and she laughed. It wasn’t a mean-spirited laugh. I don’t remember Abalyn ever making fun of me, or laughing at me the way you laugh at someone when you’re making fun of them.

“They’re not bands, Imp. They’re genres.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Seriously, we must begin the musical education of India Phelps ASAP.” She did play a lot of her music for me later, and I listened, trying to listen with an open mind, but I didn’t really like any of it. Well, except for a few songs by a British band named Radiohead. One of their songs had something about a siren in it, and shipwrecks. But in most of what she played for me, the lyrics, when there were lyrics, didn’t seem very important.

She was looking at the back cover of Late for the Sky, and I asked if she’d had breakfast. She said that she had, and that she’d made a pot of coffee. I reminded her I didn’t drink coffee. And really, I know I’m trying to get back to the story, and maybe this doesn’t seem like part of the story of Eva Canning, but it is. And, anyway, I’m just sort of in the mood to write about Abalyn. I’m missing her more than usual tonight. I even thought about calling her, but chickened out. Verily, I’m an invertebrate. Spineless.

I pointed at the album cover she was holding and said, “I really do love that one. I always thought Jackson Browne was so cool.”

“Imp, Jackson Browne doesn’t have a cool bone in his body. Not so much as a goddamned cool mitochondrion. That’s how uncool Jackson Browne is.”

It felt like an insult—like she was insulting me, I mean—but I knew she hadn’t meant it that way. Obviously she was insulting Jackson Browne.

“Have you ever listened to that album?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said. “Intend to keep it that way.”

“Then how can you possibly know?”

She didn’t answer the question. Instead she asked one of her own. “You’re evening shift today, right?” And I told her yeah, that I didn’t go in until four.

“Then get dressed. I’m taking you out for lunch.”

“I haven’t even had breakfast.”

“Fine. I’m taking you out for breakfast, brunch, whatever. You’ll have to drive, though.”

So, I got dressed, and we went over to Wayland Square, to a coffee shop she liked that I’d never been to, a place called the Edge, because coffee makes you edgy, I guess. There were big wooden tables and mismatched chairs and lots of people reading newspapers and working on their laptops. Lots of Brown students, I suppose. I thought about ordering a sandwich, but got something called a Cowboy Cookie, instead, and a cup of scalding-hot Darjeeling. Abalyn got an egg-and-cheese sandwich and a huge latte. The tea and coffee were served in great ceramic cups, green cups with red coffee beans painted on them. I told Abalyn I thought the coffee beans looked more like ladybugs.

We sat down at a table in the back, a corner table, and neither of us said anything for a few minutes. We ate and sipped our drinks. I watched people with their laptops and iPhones. I didn’t see many people having conversations or even reading books or newspapers. Almost all of them were too absorbed with their gadgets to talk to one another. I wondered if they even noticed anything going on around them. I thought how strange it must be, to live like that. Maybe it’s no different from always having your nose in a book, but it feels different to me. It feels somehow colder, more distant. No, I don’t know why it strikes me that way.

Finally, Abalyn put down her sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and said to me, “I don’t want you to think I’m pissed or anything. I’m not. But what happened last night, Imp, maybe we ought to talk about it.”

“Last night you sounded angry,” I said, not meeting her eyes, stirring at my tea with a spoon.

“Last night, well…” And she trailed off for a moment, and she glanced over her shoulder, and I thought maybe she was checking to see if anyone was eavesdropping. They weren’t. They were all too busy with their gadgets. “Last night I was sort of freaked-out, I admit. You brought a stranger home, a woman you’d found standing naked and soaking wet by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.”

“She left,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound so defensive. “I’ll probably never see her again.”

“That’s not the point. It was dangerous.”

“She didn’t hurt me, Abalyn. She just played with the radio.”

Abalyn frowned and picked at her sandwich.

“I like you,” she said. “I think I like you a lot.”

I replied, “I like you a lot, too.”

“You can’t do stuff like that, Imp. Sooner or later, you keep picking people up, doing shit like that, something bad’s gonna happen. Someone’s not gonna be harmless. Someone will hurt you, sooner or later.”

“I haven’t ever done it before. It’s not like a habit or anything.”

“You’re too trusting,” Abalyn sighed. “You never know about people, what they’ll do.”

I sipped at my tea and nibbled at my cookie. Turned out, a Cowboy Cookie was oatmeal and chocolate chips with cinnamon and pecans. Sometimes, I still go back and have them. I always hope that I’ll see Abalyn, but I never have, so maybe she doesn’t go to the Edge anymore.

“She was helpless,” I told Abalyn.

“You don’t know that. You shouldn’t ever assume stuff like that.”

“I don’t want to argue about her.”

“We’re not arguing, Imp. We’re just talking. That’s all.” But she sounded the way people sound when they’re arguing. I didn’t tell her that, though. By then, I was wishing I were back at home, in my own kitchen, eating a breakfast I’d made myself.

“She might have been hurt,” I said.

“Then you should have called the police and told them about her. That’s what police are for.”

“Please don’t talk to me like that. It’s condescending. Don’t talk to me like I’m a child. I’m not a child.”

Abalyn looked over her shoulder again, then back to me. Part of me knew she was right, but I didn’t want to admit it.

“No, you’re not a child. It just freaked me out, that’s all, okay? It was seriously weird. Imp, she was seriously weird.”

“Lots of people say that about me,” I told Abalyn. “Lots of people might say that about you.”

I think maybe I was baiting her, and I know I shouldn’t have been. My face felt flushed. But she stayed calm and didn’t bite.

“Just promise me you won’t do anything like that again, please.”

“She might have been hurt,” I told her for the second time. “She could have been in trouble.”

“Come on, India. Please.”

I chewed a corner of my Cowboy Cookie. And then I promised her, all right, I wouldn’t ever do anything like that again. I meant it. But I would. In November, the second time I met Eva Canning, I’d do exactly the same thing all over again.

After the coffee shop, we walked to a used bookstore around the corner. Neither of us bought anything.

“Only write what you saw,” Imp typed. “Don’t interpret. Only describe.”

That’s what I would like to do, but I already know exactly how I’ll fail. I already see that I’ll draw attention to parallels that I wouldn’t realize existed until long after the July day that Abalyn and I had our little brunch at Wayland Square. I’m too impatient to allow these events to unfold in a truly linear fashion. The present of that afternoon has become the past of my present moment, the precipice from which I survey the convoluted landscape of all the moments leading from then to now.

We left the used bookstore, and briefly thought about ducking into the little junk shop in the basement next door. It’s called What Cheer, as in “What Cheer, Netop?” Netop is supposedly a Narragansett Indian word meaning “friend,” and is supposedly the greeting Indians shouted out to Roger Williams (who founded Rhode Island) and his cohorts as he crossed the Seekonk River in seventeen thirty-whatever and such and such. “What Cheer” are magical words in Rhode Island, which is pretty ironic when you pause to consider just how bad things would go for the Narragansetts not too long after they welcomed white men into their lands. No, I wasn’t thinking any of this as we stood there on the hot sidewalk trying to decide if we wanted to go down the stairs into the junk shop. They have antique postcards, vintage clothes, and huge antique apothecary cabinets. The drawers are filled with countless random, inconsequential treasures, from doorknobs to chess pieces to old political-campaign buttons. What Cheer also sells a lot of vinyl, by the way.

I still visit the shop sometimes, though I never buy any of those records. Or much of anything else. Mostly, I just like to browse through the records and try to figure out why Rosemary bought the albums she did, instead of this one or that one. We never really talked about music, though she played her records a lot. I love the way What Cheer smells, like dust and aging paper.

But we didn’t go in that day. Abalyn needed to get back to the apartment, because that night she had a deadline on a review she’d not even started writing. And I’d forgotten to bring my one o’clock meds with us. It was still a couple of hours before I had to be at work. I remember how it was an especially hot day, up in the nineties, and we stood together in the shade of a green canvas awning, sheltered but sweating, anyhow.

Abalyn turned back to the Honda, and that’s when I saw her watching us from the other side of Angell Street. Eva Canning, I mean. It took me a few seconds to recognize her, and at first it was just this blonde woman. (Have I said Eva had blonde hair that first time she came? Well, she did, even if I haven’t said it already.) She wasn’t wearing the clothes I’d given her. She was wearing a long red dress with spaghetti straps, and sunglasses, and a straw hat that kept her safe from the sun the way an umbrella protects you from rain. It was one of those cone-shaped Asian hats, tied at her chin with a blue silk ribbon. In Vietnam, those hats are called Nón lá, and in Japan they’re called sugegasa. Japan has now made three appearances in this “chapter,” and maybe that means something, and maybe it’s just my arithmomania rearing its ugly head. My grandmother called those hats coolie hats, but also told me I couldn’t call them that, because it was racist.

So, Eva in a red dress, sunglasses, the straw hat with a blue silk ribbon. And she was barefoot. One, two, three, four, five, and I suddenly knew it was her. It was her, and she was watching us. I don’t know how long she’d been standing there, but when I realized who she was, at the same instant I recognized her, she smiled. I reached out to take Abalyn’s arm, to tell her. I also started to wave to Eva Canning. But I didn’t actually do either of those things. Abalyn was already walking away towards the car, and Eva had turned her back on me. Just as quickly as I’d recognized her, I thought maybe it wasn’t really her after all. Whoever it was, I lost sight of her, and then I followed Abalyn back to the Honda. It was so hot inside the car (black upholstery) that we had to stand with the doors open for a while before we got in.

I wish I were a writer, a real writer, because if I were, I expect I wouldn’t be making such a goddamn mess of this story. Rambling, tripping over my own feet. I wish I were sane enough to always distinguish fact from fancy, but, like Caroline used to say, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Rosemary, she used to tell my grandmother…

“Cut the crap and tell the story, Imp,” Imp typed. I typed. “Tell the story or don’t, but stop stalling. Stop procrastinating. It’s annoying.”

It is. I know it is.

I know it is.

I know.

On the July afternoon after the night I found Eva Canning the first time, and brought her back to my apartment, I saw her watching us at Wayland Square. She didn’t wave or call out to me or try to get my attention in any way. She saw me, and when she was sure I knew it was her, she turned away. I never told Abalyn.

In a letter Phillip George Saltonstall wrote to Mary Farnum, in December of 1896, he mentions “a most curious and absurd dream.” He describes waking late at night, or thinking that he’d awakened. He eventually decided that he’d only gone from one nightmare to another, the illusion of having woken up acting as a sort of “dreaming transition.” He crossed his bedroom and stood at the window, gazing down on Prince Street. This was in Boston, of course, because he lived in Boston. He looked out the window and saw that it was snowing very hard, and “on the street below there was a tall woman in a red coat and a red bonnet. She wore no shoes. I thought how cold she must be, and wondered to what end she was tarrying below my windowsill in such a storm. It happened that she glanced up at me then, and I beheld her eyes. Even now, dear Mary, writing you by the cheerful light of a bright winter’s day, I am chilled at the memory of her face. I cannot place my finger on how that face was rendered so demonic, for it was a fair face. A beautiful face, but it was a beautiful face that filled me with a singular dread. It was a face almost as blanched as the fresh snow, and she smiled at me before turning and strolling slowly away. She left no footprints, and I thought she must surely be a phantom.”

My fairy tales are beginning to blur together here. I can see that, yes. Eva’s red dress, a barefoot woman in a red coat with a red bonnet, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. But I never said there wasn’t overlap, even if I forgot to say there was. There was. There is. This may be one of those places where I should draw a distinction between the truth of my story and its facts. I don’t know. Eva who was a mermaid and Eva who was a wolf are blurring together, even though I wish it were all more cut-and-dried.

I don’t think hauntings care one whit for my need to keep things neat and tidy. I think they have a disdain for shoe boxes.

In an interview that I have in my manila folder on Albert Perrault, he talks about a dream he had not long before he began painting Fecunda ratis, that hideous image of the child surrounded by wolves, the wolves surrounded by ancient standing stones. I’ve highlighted what he said with a yellow marker. “Oh no, no. Never suppose there’s but one source of inspiration. I might just as well claim that I had a mother and no father, or a father without having a mother. True, I had already conceived the painting, that’s true, after visiting the Castlerigg Stone Circle just outside Keswick. But a dream played a significant role, as well. I was staying with a friend in Ireland, in Shannon, and one night I dreamed I was back in California. I was on the beach in Santa Monica, within sight of the pier, and on the sand was a young woman in a crimson cape and a crimson cloche. There were black dogs walking in a circle around her, nose to tail. I say dogs, but maybe I ought to say beasts, instead. They seemed like dogs at the time. The woman was gazing out to sea and seemed not to notice the beasts, the dogs. I don’t know what she saw in the water, or what she was trying to see.

“Sure, sure. You may conclude it was my obsession with the painting I’d not yet started, but which was congealing in my mind’s eye, that inspired the dream. You may conclude it was not the other way round. But I do not think of it that way.”

Wolves or beasts walking nose to tail in a circle. But snow is crystallized water, right? And the woman in the cloche was watching the ocean.

So, it all bleeds together. It gets messy.

I try to force it not to, and it gets messy nonetheless. I’m sure stories don’t care what I want from them.

Stories do not serve me. Even my own stories.

If I owned a laptop, if I could afford to buy one, I would. Then I’d sit in a coffeehouse or a library and write my ghost story, safely surrounded by other people. It’s too easy to scare myself in this room with its blue-white walls. Especially when I write after dark, like I’m doing now. If I could call Abalyn and borrow one of her laptops, that’s what I’d do. I don’t think ghost stories should be written in solitude.

The house is so quiet tonight.

I’ve never liked quiet houses. They always seem to be waiting for something.

The forest became a siren. Matsumoto wrote his book, and when he did that, Aokigahara on the shores of Lake Sai became the Suicide Forest. Matsumoto sounded the first note in a song that is still singing out to people, still drawing broken, hurting people to take their own lives in that Sea of Trees. And the world is filled with sirens. There’s always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there’s always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we’re lucky we’re Odysseus tied up to the ship’s mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we’re not at all lucky, we’re another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea. Or a girl wading into the Blackstone River.

Dr. Ogilvy and the pills she prescribes are my beeswax and the ropes that hold me fast to the mainmast, just as my insanity has always been my siren. As it was Caroline’s siren and Rosemary’s siren before me. Caroline listened and chose to drown. Rosemary drowned, even though there were people who tried to stuff her ears and did tie her down.

I don’t think it much matters what shape the siren assumes. No, I believe that doesn’t matter at all. It may as well be a woman with the wings and talons of birds, or a mermaid, a rusalka in her river, or a kelpie drifting in a weedy pool. All those patient, hungry things. A siren may be as commonplace as greed, grief, desire, or passion. A painting hung on a wall. A woman found standing naked at the side of a dark road, who knows your name before you divulge it to her.

The first time I went to see Dr. Ogilvy, she asked me to describe the one symptom that caused me the most difficulty, that seemed to lie at the root of everything that shut me down and made it hard to be alive. She admitted it’s not that simple, that there might be a lot of symptoms like that, but it’s a place to start, she said. She asked me to tell her what it was and then to describe it as accurately as I could. She told me to take my time. So I sat on the sofa in her office. I shut my eyes and didn’t open them again or say anything for ten minutes or so. Not because I hadn’t known right off what the answer was, but because I hadn’t known right off how to describe it to her.

When I opened my eyes again, she asked, “Can you tell me now, India?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“It’s okay if you don’t get it right the first time. I only want you to try, okay?”

I’ve always been very good with metaphors and similes. All my life, metaphors and similes have come to me effortlessly. I used a simile that day, to try and explain to Dr. Ogilvy what that one worst thing in my head was, or one of the worst things. I wasn’t trying to be clever. I’ve never thought of myself as especially clever.

I explained to her that, “It’s like I put on a pair of headphones, and at first there’s no sound at all coming through them. No music. No voices. Nothing.”

(I do have a set of headphones. They came with Rosemary’s stereo and records. They’re big and padded and nothing at all like the tiny white earbuds that Abalyn used with her shiny pink iPod. I don’t use them much. I prefer to have a room filled with music, instead of silence all around me and only music in my ears.)

“But then,” I said, “way in the background, so soft maybe you only think you’re hearing it, there’s static. White noise. Or someone whispering. And slowly that sound gets louder and louder. At first, it’s easy to ignore. It’s hardly even there. But, eventually, it grows so loud you can’t hear anything else. In the end, the sound swallows the whole world. Even if you take the headphones off, that noise won’t stop.”

She nodded, and smiled, and told me I’d eloquently described what are called intrusive thoughts. Involuntary and unwelcome thoughts that can’t be shut out no matter how hard someone tries. Later, we’d spend a lot of time talking about exactly what sorts of intrusive thoughts I have. That day, she told me I was clever, to have described it the way I did. She said my description was apt. But, like I said, I’ve never imagined myself to be a clever woman. I took it as a compliment, even though I happened to be of the opinion it was a mistaken compliment.

Sirens are intrusive thoughts that even sane men and women have. You can call them sirens, or you can call them hauntings. Doesn’t matter. Once Odysseus heard the sirens, I doubt he ever forgot their song. He would have been haunted by it all the rest of his life. Even after his terrible twenty-year journey, the archery competition, even after he gets Penelope back and the story has a happy “ending,” he must still have been haunted by their song, in his dreams and when he was awake. Every time he saw the sea or the sky.

After that afternoon at Wayland Square, Abalyn and I went home. And everything seemed okay for a few days. But all that time the white noise through the headphones was getting louder and louder, and eventually it was all I could hear. Eventually, all I could see was Eva, barefoot and in her red dress and straw hat, watching us from across the street.

And it’s not as if I could have told Abalyn. I was too amazed that she was there, and too afraid she’d leave. I had every reason to suppose it was just me being crazy little Imp, daughter of crazy Rosemary Anne, granddaughter of mad Caroline. I assumed exactly that, and I wouldn’t risk Abalyn going away and never coming back again over a bout of white noise that, sooner or later, would get bored of humming, crackling, sizzling, popping in my ears, and stop. It always stops. Dr. Ogilvy had taught me ways to turn the volume down. And I had my pills, my beeswax.

I’m not clever. Clever women don’t pick up naked strangers late at night. Clever women are honest with themselves and their lovers, and they do something before it’s too late to do something.

I wasn’t a virgin. I lost my virginity in high school, before I thought better of sleeping with boys. Before I started listening to my libido and set aside my misgivings and stopped listening to the expectations of my peers. Anyway, even though I wasn’t a virgin, every time I made love to Abalyn, she handled me as if I were a virgin. As though I were a china doll that might crack and shatter unless she was always, always mindful of frailty, an imagined brittleness. It seemed to me she thought you have to fuck crazy women with kid gloves. But it’s not as if I took any of this as an insult. I suppose it amused and flattered me. In our bed (for the short time it was our bed). Lying in her arms, or grasping the headboard while her long arms encircled my waist and her tongue gently probed the most intimate recesses of my body, it was difficult for me to imagine this beautiful woman had ever been a boy. I mean, that she’d ever been caught inside the body of a boy, of a man. I’m not being sexist. Sure, men can be considerate, easy lovers. At least, I’m sure I’d be a chauvinist if I allowed my own more or less unfortunate and unremarkable experiences with them to lead me to conclude otherwise. What I’m trying to say is, the way she made love to me, it was clear that Abalyn understood my body, what it needed. She grasped the nuances and attended to my most minute longings. I would say she played me like a musical instrument, but she probably played me more like a video game. My clit and labia, my mouth and nipples, my mind and my ass, the nape of my neck, the space between my shoulder blades, all 1.5 square meters of my skin—perhaps, had I asked, she might have said my body was the controller with which she manipulated the game of my flesh.

I hope I’m not sounding like one of those trashy paperbacks you see on the racks at a Shaw’s or Stop & Shop. If I am, I’ve not done Abalyn justice. It’s not as though I’ve never written about sex before, in those odd bits of fiction I sometimes feel compelled to write. But that’s different, even if I don’t feel like taking the time just now required to explain how it’s different.

On a morning almost a week after I thought I saw Eva Canning watching me in Wayland Square, Abalyn and I lay on top of sweaty sheets, sheets left sweaty from fucking. Our best sex was usually in the morning, as though it were some natural bridge between dreaming and wakefulness. We lay together, the sun through my bedroom window splashed across our breasts and bellies. It was one of my days off, and we pretended we’d just stay in bed all day. We both knew we wouldn’t, that we’d eventually get bored and do other stuff, but it was nice to tread the boards, as Caroline used to say when she meant someone was putting on an act.

“Am I better than she was?” I asked, tangling my fingers in coal-black hair. Blonde roots were starting to show, but I did my best not to notice, not wishing to spoil the effect.

“Better than who was?” Abalyn replied.

“You know. Better than her. Better than Jodie.”

“Is there a contest?”

“No, there’s not a contest. I’m just curious about how I measure up, that’s all.”

She turned her head and looked at me and sort of scowled, making me wish I hadn’t asked. It was a dumb, insecure question, and I wanted to steal it back. Erase it from the space between us.

“Jodie’s Jodie,” Abalyn said. “You’re you. I don’t have to like oranges better than I like apples, do I?”

“No,” I whispered, and kissed her forehead.

“Jodie’s into all sorts of kinky shit, which is cool. But sometimes it gets tiresome.”

“You mean like spankings and being tied up?”

“Something along those lines,” Abalyn sighed. “I’m hungry. I’m going to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You want one?”

“No,” I told her. “I should take a shower. I want to spend the day painting. I’ve been negligent.”

“What’s the rush?” she asked me. “Do you have deadlines?”

“Sort of. I mean, I have my paintings, the ones that I really love and care about, the ones that are just for me. And with those I can take as long as I need, right? But then there are my Mystic and Newport paintings.” She asked me what I meant, and so I explained how I did seascapes that I sold to the summer people, the tourists. Sometimes I sit out on the hot sidewalk and sell them myself. Other times, I let galleries sell them, but then they take a commission. They’re pretty cheesy, my summer-people paintings, and I think of them as my paint-by-number pictures. But they bring in enough money to cover the cost of my paints and brushes and canvas and what have you for the rest of the year. I hardly ever sell the paintings that are just for me, which means I have an awful lot of them hung on the walls and leaning against the walls of the apartment.

So, Abalyn went to make her sandwich. I took my shower, then had a cup of tea and a bowl of Maypo with sliced banana. Abalyn parked herself on the sofa, her laptop already open and signed into one of her MMORPGs (I’d picked up the lingo pretty quickly), the one with orcs and two sorts of elves and space goats with Russian accents.

That day, the canvas on my easel was one I’d been working on for a month or so. The paintings that are just for me, they always take a long time. Almost always, coming in their own sweet time, like Abalyn said they needed to do. So far, it was hardly more than a mottled interplay of ebony and reds so deep they were almost the color of currents. I wasn’t even sure yet what I meant it to be. I put on my smock and sat and stared at it. I sat and breathed the comforting aroma of linseed oil and paints, turpentine and gesso. The smells that are always present in the room where I paint, and that I imagine will remain long after I’ve moved somewhere else (assuming I ever do move somewhere else). I sat and stared, listening to the muted sounds from the parlor, Abalyn killing pixel monsters. Abalyn tends to curse a lot when she plays her games. So, the muted sounds of her game and her cursing.

At some point, I picked up a pad and began sketching in charcoal. At first, I must have meant the sketches to be studies for where the canvas might be headed. I’m almost certain that’s what I meant to do. Down on the street, I could hear a car stereo, Mexican pop music blaring from a car stereo. You hear that a lot in the Armory. It doesn’t annoy me the way it did when I first moved here. I sat and listened to Abalyn and the music and filled page after page after page with my hasty sketches. Down on the street, men shouted in Spanish. I licked my lips and tasted sweat and thought how I ought to get up and open a window, switch on the old box fan sitting on the floor.

I sketched until Abalyn knocked at the door to tell me that she was going out for a smoke.

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay,” I said, speaking so quietly I’m surprised she heard me. Maybe she didn’t.

“Won’t be gone long,” she said. “Might walk down to the corner store. Anything you need?”

“No,” I told her. “Thanks, but I don’t need anything.”

Then she was gone, and I sat staring at the drawing pad open in my lap. I’d torn each page out once I was done with it, and the floor around my stool was littered with paper. It made me think of fallen leaves. I saw then what I was sketching, what I’d sketched again and again and again for almost two hours. Eva Canning’s face. There was no mistaking it for anyone else. I sat for a long time, just staring at those sketches. It was Eva, but it was also the wryly smiling face of l’Inconnue de la Seine. In every one of the sketches her eyelids were shut.

And each and every one of them was so alike each and every other they might almost have been photocopies. I’d gotten her face right the first time, and then I’d repeated myself twenty or twenty-five times.

“Is that what you saw on those pages, Imp? Are you absolutely certain that’s what you saw?”

I am. Later, Abalyn saw them, too.

There were water stains on some of the sketches, splotches made by sweat dripping from my face onto the paper. There were the careless smudges left by my fingers and the heel of my right palm.

“You tried to hide them from Abalyn.”

No, no, I didn’t. But I gathered them all up before she got back. I rolled them into a tight bundle and put a rubber band around them before placing them on the top of a shelf. My head felt fuzzy and my stomach was sour, but that might have been the heat. I’d let the room get hot, let it fill up with the afternoon sunlight without even having opened a window.

After I put the sketches away, I took off my smock and went to the kitchen sink to wash the charcoal from my hands. I wasn’t hiding anything from anyone, or I wasn’t aware that I was. But I felt guilt just the same, as sharply as I’ve ever felt guilt, like when Aunt Elaine walked into the bathroom and I was masturbating to pictures in a Penthouse magazine. Like that. I was still washing my hands (though they were clean) when Abalyn got back from the store.

Thirty-four pages back, I said that the dreams began the night I brought Eva Canning back with me to Willow Street. But I’ve said nothing since then about the dreams. No, wait, I see now that on page 136 I wrote, “I suppose, before Eva, and before Eva, I never had anything more than the usual number of nightmares. It was infrequent that I remembered my dreams, before Eva.” And also, “…Eva Canning changed all that. She brought me bad dreams. She taught me insomnia.” So, there. I haven’t neglected the matter as badly as I was afraid I had. The matter of my own dreams, I mean. I’ve talked about Saltonstall’s dream, and Albert Perrault’s, but I haven’t taken the time to describe any of my own. More evasion, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t at least half-conscious.

I’ve never liked talking about my dreams. It never seemed to me that different than if I were to talk to people about my bowel movements. Okay, that was, admittedly, a weird analogy. I can’t help but wonder what Dr. Ogilvy would make of it. A mountain from a molehill, I suppose, especially the way it’s followed by the word “analogy,” which I can readily break into [anal]ogy.

That first night, and every night between that first night and the day I repeatedly sketched her face, the dreams came. They came like camera-bright flashes in my sleep. After I woke up each morning, they left afterimages that I spent the days trying to blink away. I didn’t talk to anyone about them, though anyone would have pretty much amounted to Abalyn. I didn’t see much of anyone else that week, none of my very few friends. Not Jonathan at the coffee shop on Westminster, or Ellen from Cellar Stories (though I did talk with Johnny on the phone that Thursday). I knew that the next time I saw Dr. Ogilvy, I wouldn’t talk to her about them, either. They felt like such private things, messages meant for no one else but me, and messages that would be diminished if I dared to share them with other people. There’s also my continuing—what?—my continuing insistence that one may perpetuate a haunting simply by speaking certain words aloud, even when all you want to do is get rid of them. But I’m alone now. No one’s listening. No one’s reading these pages over my shoulder.

The dreams were not all the same, so I guess it wouldn’t be accurate to call them recurring dreams. Not the way people usually mean recurring. But there was a sameness about them. Those dreams, they had the same mothers: Eva and I. The union of her touch and my insanity. It’s like Poe said. Well, sort of like that. Passions from a common spring, if dreams may be called passions. I see no reason not to call them passions. Certainly, the dreams that Eva brought me were as ardent as passion, as intense. I awoke from each one breathless, sometimes sweating, disoriented, always afraid I would also startle Abalyn awake (but I never did, as she’s a very deep sleeper).

Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning—after my drive to the Blackstone River—I began keeping a written record of my dreams for the first time in my life. I was thinking of what Rosemary had said to me on my eleventh birthday: “You might want to remember it someday. When something makes an impression on us, we should do our best not to forget about it. So, it’s a good idea to make notes.”

This is a haunting within a haunting, the advice of my suicide mother still reaching out to me after thirteen years.

Dead people and dead thoughts and supposedly dead moments are never, ever truly dead, and they shape every moment of our lives. We discount them, and that makes them mighty.

Here is my record of the dreams, which I wrote with a ballpoint pen on several blank endpapers in the back of the novel I was reading, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (I’ve always had a thing for Jane Austen, and I’ve read every one of her novels over and over again). This is the first time I’ve copied them from the book, and the first time I’ve looked at them in almost two years:

Wednesday (July 9th): Dreamed me and Abalyn arguing about Moby-Dick. Her telling me how Vishnu first appeared to mankind in the guise of a gigantic fish that saves all creation from a flood, like Noah and his ark. Said it was the Matsya Avatar. She said that. Outside it was raining hard, very hard. Cats and dogs. And she kept pinting [sic] at a window. It wasn’t a window in my apartment. Don’t know where we were. And then I knew I wasn’t hearing rain, only Eva Canning taking her shower. Told Abalyn repeatedly how I didn’t want to talk about this, and that I haven’t read Moby-Dick, but she wouldn’t let up. She kept telling me how stupid I was, picking up stray dogs and cats and women at the side of the road like that. All so vivid, all of this. All so vivid my head almost hurts.

Note: I don’t know all that much about Hinduism. Didn’t then, still don’t. But this is a quote from Wikipedia, regarding Matsya: “…the king of pre-ancient Dravida and a devotee of Vishnu, Satyavrata who later was known as Manu was washing his hands in a river when a little fish swam into his hands and pleaded with him to save its life. He put it in a jar, which it soon outgrew. He then moved it to a tank, a river and then finally the ocean but to no avail.” Farther along, this will seem almost prescient. No, I don’t believe in prescience, clairvoyance, ESP, precognitive people, whatever. It’ll only seem prescient.

Thursday (July 10th): Another vivid dream. I almost have to squint, thinking about it. Can’t remember everything, but I remember some. I was climbing the stairs leading from front door up to my apartment. Up to the landing. But the stairs just kept going, up, up, up, and every now and then I had to stop and rest. My legs hurt. Knees and calves and thighs, like having walked a long way in very deep snow. I climbed stairs, sat down, got up, sat down, walked, got up. Looked back behind me, and stairs were a spiral I couldn’t see the bottom of. Looked up and same. Felt nauseous, like seasick, and I still do just a little. Went on and on, climbing, trying to get home. Now and then, oddest sense that I wasn’t alone, that someone was walking with me. But when I looked, no one was ever there. Once, water ran down the stairs, but stopped after my feet were wet. I don’t want to think about this all day.

Note: I did eventually tell Dr. Ogilvy about this dream. It’s one of the only things I’ve told her so far about those months and what happened. But I lied and said I’d only just had the dream, a few days before. She said it reminded her of something, but she couldn’t recall what. At my next appointment, she read me lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a passage about a man walking along a snowy white road and the illusion he was being accompanied by a mysterious third companion, though he could never count more than two. She said Eliot was alluding to a peculiar experience Ernest Shackleton described during or after one of his Antarctic expeditions. I had her write it down for me (Shackleton, not Eliot): “I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.” She read that to me, and then she asked, “Do you still feel lost, India? Do you still feel as if no one’s walking beside you?” I’m not in the mood to write down what I said in response. Maybe some other time I will.

Friday (July 11th): Trying not to wake up Abalyn. She was up later than usual, I think. Does three of these damn dreams a pattern make? Three in three nights, like I’ve never dreamed before. Flashbulb nightmares. Me and Caroline and Rosemary and Abalyn and some other people I knew in the dream, but don’t think I know in real life. Dancing in a circle down on Moonstone Beach, and Eva Canning was standing in the center of the ring holding a violin (not playing, just holding), singing “The Lobster Quadrille” from Lewis Carroll. There were dead crabs, lobster, fish everywhere, all tangled up and stinking in seaweed. And, Eva, you sang to me, “Sail to me.” I was barefoot and dead things under my feet, slippery, slimy, spines slicing the soles of my feet. This is the worst of the three, worse than the stairs.

Saturday (July 12th): Didn’t sleep much. Not insomnia, just not wanting to go to sleep, more like knowing the dreams would be there. Reluctance to sleep, not inability. Am I making it worse, recoding [sic] them? Abalyn is already up, and too much sun through window. I’m sweating. But the nightmare, almost same as last night. Dancing in a circle on the beach, like “ring around the roses.” There were even beach roses. Dog roses. Caroline and Rosemary weren’t with me this time, I was holding Abalyn’s right hand, and there was a man on my left. I don’t know who he was. We all sang along with Eva, the words to “The Lobster Quadrille.” Dancing, I think, counterclockwise, kicking up sand, dead fish underfoot. Stench. Sun high and white, hot, and maybe that was because the bedroom is hot. Then everyone stopped dancing, and Eva pointed the violin bow at me. She said, “I know an old woman who swallowed a fly,” but didn’t finish with the rhyme. Just that much. I told Abalyn I wanted to go home. I told her I’d left the oven on. She said we’d go home soon, but we didn’t.

Note: Ashes in the water, Ashes in the sea, We all jump up, With a one-two-three. (or) She’s in the water, she’s in the sea. (or) husha husha, we all fall down. See Roud Folk Song Index, #7925 (Roud ID #S263898), and see the website for English Folk Dance and Song Society: ’Twas a dream : Father stay in room : Three beautiful angels : Around bed. (July 10th, 1908; Roud ID #S135469). Hidden meanings: Great Plague of London, 1665 (Ring a-ring o’ roses, A pocketful of posies, A-tishoo! a-tishoo! We all fall down; Iona and Peter Opie, The Singing Game, Oxford, 1985, pp. 220–227)—but this interpretation is controversial and hasn’t been widely accepted. There are problems. And also, wreck of the Scandia and North Cape at Moonstone Beach, 1996.

Sunday (July 13th): This one is no better than a fucking cartoon. It’s cartoon silly. Abalyn is making breakfast, and she’s singing in the kitchen (I like the way she sings. Abalyn, I mean.), and I’m going to write down this silly cartoon dream that didn’t and won’t bother me because it’s no better than slapstick. It won’t feel like it’s stuck to me somehow, all day, or like it’s soaked me and I’ll need all day to dry off. Anyway, anyway, this time, I was on the road again, but the road was the river, Blackstone River Gorge rising up on either side, steep granite blacker than the night. The road was wild white water rushing through the gorge, and the car rolled and bobbed and listed this way and that way. I was afraid I would capsize.

Eva Canning was in the car with me, messing with the radio, looking for a channel I don’t think even exists. I asked her questions she wouldn’t answer. Then the road was just a road, and I’m speeding back towards the city. There are animals watching me from the edges of the highway, and their eyes flash red and iridescent blue-green like Eva’s might have flashed (but couldn’t have, not really, just me being freaked-out). I saw rabbits, foxes, skunks, weasels, dogs, cats, minks, sheep, coyotes, a bear. Other things I can’t remember. When I glanced in the rearview mirror there were big black birds following us. They had Christmas-light eyes. Then it stopped, and I woke up. My chest hurt, like I’d been holding my breath in my sleep. It still aches a little. Dumb fucking dream.

Monday (July 14th): In the bathroom, watching Eva Canning take a shower. The room smells like river water, shampoo, mud, turtles, soap. She is so beautiful. No one is supposed to be as beautiful as that. She shuts off the water and steps out, wincing when her feet meet the tiles. “I’m walking on needles,” she said. “I’m walking on sharp knives. The witch, the sea hag, told me that would happen, didn’t she? Did I listen?”

I hand her a towel, and notice she leaves bloody footprints on the white tiles. She stands at the mirror above the sink and wipes away condensation from the glass. Eva has no reflection. “What was I to do? He sunk me in the green water below the bridge. They made a violin of my breastbone. They made tuning pegs from my fingers. In the winter, I lay below the ice and the sky was silver and glass.” I’m trying to write exactly what she said. It’s close, but not exact. This was the worst yet. Call Dr. Ogilvy?

Notes: See Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Mrs. Henry H. B. Paull, translator. (London: Warne & Co., 1875). See also “The Twa Sisters,” The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Francis James Childs (ref #10; 1 10A.7–8), five volumes, 1882–1898.

Tuesday (July 15th): Back to the stairs, only I was walking down. Not up, and the water was continually gushing from above. Several times, it almost knocked me off my feet. Abalyn was calling my name at the bottom of the stairs, but, get this, there wasn’t a bottom to the stairs. It was an endless stepwise waterfall. It was a cataract. This has got to stop. I want to tell Abalyn about the dreams, but I absolutely know that I won’t. I don’t want to tell her; I want them to stop.

There. That’s the last of it. The dreams didn’t end after that Tuesday. I just didn’t write them down anymore. There wasn’t any blank space left at the back of Mansfield Park, and, besides, I was sick of writing them down. It started to feel like picking though my own vomit to see what I’d eaten. The dreams were making me sick, but I have always been good at hiding my craziness. On Tuesday morning, Abalyn and I fucked like there’d been no nightmare, and I tried to work on my painting. And drew Eva Canning, instead.

Imp typed, “You are a liar. You are a filthy, wicked little liar, and you know it, don’t you?”

Yeah, I’m a liar.

I’m a filthy, wicked little liar.

And I know it, sure as shit.

July grew old, as months always and will forever do, and on a day late in July, just before the death of the month and the birth of August, Abalyn and I almost had an argument. Almost, but not quite. In all the time we were together, I don’t think we ever had a genuine argument. That sort of thing isn’t in either of our natures, and, looking back, I’m grateful for that much, at least. At least we didn’t fight and bicker and stab at each other with ugly words we’d spend the rest of our lives regretting, but unable to take back.

So, this is an afternoon, a late afternoon, early evening, almost at the end of July. Which means six weeks or so had passed since Abalyn had come to live with me. The day was exceptionally hot. The sort of day when I really wish my apartment had air-conditioning, even if it costs too much, more than I can afford, and even though I don’t need air-conditioning for most of any given summer.

But I did that day. Need air-conditioning, I mean. I had both windows open, in the room where I paint, and I had the box fan running in one of the windows, but it wasn’t doing any good. The air was like soup, and the smells of turpentine, linseed, and oils—which I usually found comforting—only added to the oppressiveness of the air. I’d had to take off my smock. I had a bandanna on my head to keep the sweat out of my eyes, but that didn’t stop it from dripping off the end of my nose onto my palette. My sweat, mixing with my paint, which struck me as somehow wicked (there’s that word again), and somehow dangerous. Painting myself into the canvas, all the minute specks of me trapped in those surface-tension beads of sweat. Locking my physical self up within my paintings. I sat there, sweating, sweating, trying to blend a very particular shade of yellow, which I could see plainly in my head, but which kept eluding me. I tried to work, and tried not to think about my sweat in the paint, tried not to think about voodoo and magic and how an artist might become bound to something she’s made. How she might lose her soul inside it.

I think it might have been around seven thirty when Abalyn knocked very gently at the door. The sun was getting low, but the room wasn’t getting any cooler. She asked if she could come in. If it would bother me if she came in and talked while I was working. I wanted to say no. I probably should have said no, but I didn’t. I’d been alone in that room for hours, mixing yellows and sweating into my paint, but not actually putting anything new on the canvas. I couldn’t stop working, but I didn’t want to be alone in there anymore.

She came in and eased the door shut behind her, careful not to slam it. She sat down on the floor not far from my stool, her back to the wall. For a moment, she stared silently at the window nearest her, at the rooftops and trees and birds.

“Are you getting hungry?” she asked, after a minute or two. “I was thinking I’d make something cold for dinner. Maybe a big salad or something.”

“I’m not hungry,” I told her, squeezing the tiniest dab of naphthol crimson. I watched as the wrong yellow became an entirely wrong orange. “It’s too hot. I can’t eat when it’s this hot.”

“Later, then,” she said.

“It isn’t going well?” she asked.

“It isn’t going at all,” I told her. “I can’t get this color right. I keep fucking it up, and I’m wasting paint.”

“Then maybe you ought to stop for now.”

“I don’t want to stop for now,” I replied, and I heard how my voice sounded, almost snapping at her. I apologized and told her the heat was making me irritable.

There was a cigarette tucked behind her left ear, like she was a greaser or a mechanic in some old movie. I thought it was sexy, but I didn’t tell her. I just kept stirring at my palette, adding more paint, getting it wronger and wronger.

“Hey, Imp,” she said. “You okay?”

“No,” I said without looking up. “I’m hot. I’m hot, and I’m wasting paint.”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean, more like, are you okay, in general?”

I didn’t answer right away. I can’t remember if I didn’t want to answer, or if it was because I was so distracted, so intent on finding the right yellow and all.

“I don’t know,” I told her eventually. “I guess so. I guess I’m all right as I ever am.”

“If you weren’t, would you tell me?”

I looked up at her then. Maybe I narrowed my eyes. Maybe I frowned. Her expression changed, as if whatever she saw on my face bothered her or was unexpected.

“I wouldn’t lie to you, Abalyn. I wouldn’t have any reason to lie to you, right?”

She took a deep breath and let it out in measured exhalations. It made me think of swimming, the way she exhaled. I used to swim a lot, but not anymore, not since Eva. Abalyn breathed in and out and then she glanced at the open window again.

“I know you wouldn’t lie, Imp. That’s not what I meant. But sometimes there’s something wrong, and it’s easier not to talk about it.”

“That would be a lie by omission,” I told her.

“I wasn’t accusing you of lying,” she said, and I think she held her breath for a moment then. I thought of swimming again. “Maybe I should leave you alone,” and Abalyn’s beach-glass eyes drifted from the window to the floorboards. Sometimes, my mother used to call beach glass “mermaids’ tears.”

“No,” I said. I probably said it too quickly, with too much urgency. “No, please. Stay. It’s okay, really. I’m just irritable from the heat. I don’t mean to be.”

“Yeah, it’s hot as Hades in here. What color of yellow are you after, anyway?” It was obvious she was just pretending to be interested. The words sounded awkward, but she probably believed the silence would be more awkward. It felt like she had to say something to stop the silence from coming back, so that’s what she said.

“Don’t you mean what shade of yellow?” I suggested. I was busy trying to dilute the unfortunate consequences of the naphthol crimson, and it didn’t even occur to me this might be a picky, even rude, sort of question until it was already out of my mouth.

“Sure. I guess that’s what I meant.”

“Well, bright,” I replied, chewing my lower lip, stirring at the palette. “Sort of like a canary or goldenrod is yellow. But not too bright, right? Titanium yellow more than Aureolin yellow.”

“I don’t know what either of those are.”

“That’s okay. You’re not a painter,” I said. “You don’t need to know. I do. I’m supposed to be able to do this, and if I can’t do this, I can’t paint.”

“I’m worried about you,” she said. I want to say “she blurted,” but I won’t.

I laughed and told her that was ridiculous. “I’ll figure it out sooner or later. I almost always do. Sometimes it just takes a while, and the heat isn’t helping.”

“Imp, I’m not talking about the painting,” she said.

I stopped stirring at the glob of oil paint, and stared at the canvas. “Okay. What are you talking about, then?”

“You talk in your sleep,” she said. In retrospect, I imagine she’d worked out precisely what she intended to say, and I also imagine this wasn’t supposed to be where she started. But it was hot, and maybe none of it was coming out right. I glanced her way, then quickly back to the canvas. So far, it was still mottled red and black, without even a speck of yellow. Abalyn was looking out the window at dusk swallowing Willow Street.

“Abalyn, lots of people talk in their sleep. You probably talk in your sleep sometimes.”

“It’s what you’ve been saying in your sleep.”

“You lie awake listening to what I say in my sleep?”

“No,” she protested. “Usually, it wakes me up.”

“Sorry,” I said, without a hint of sincerity. I was too annoyed to be sincere. The heat had made me irritable, and now Abalyn was making me angry. “I’m sorry I talk in my sleep and wake you up. I’ll try not to do that anymore.”

“You talk about her,” Abalyn said. “You always talk about her.”

“Her who?” I asked, even though I knew exactly what her answer would be.

“That Eva woman,” she replied. “You wake me up talking about Eva Canning. Talking to Eva Canning. A few times, you were sort of singing.…” And she trailed off.

“I most certainly do not sing in my sleep,” I laughed. “No one sings in their sleep.” I had no idea whether people do or don’t sing in their sleep, but when she said that, it gave me a heavy, gelid feeling deep in my belly.

Rosemary Anne, did you sing in your sleep? When they tied you down to your bed in your room at Butler Hospital at 345 Blackstone Boulevard, did you sing in your sleep?

Grandmother Caroline, did you ever dream of songs and sing them to empty rooms where no one could hear?

“Why do you answer the phone when it hasn’t rang?” she asked me.

“When it hasn’t rung,” I corrected.

“Why do you do that? I never saw you do it before you brought her home.”

“How long had you known me before then, Abalyn? Maybe a week, that’s all. I’ve probably been doing it all my life. You wouldn’t know.”

“No, I probably wouldn’t,” she sighed, speaking and sighing in a single reluctant breath. I could tell she wanted to stop, but now that she’d started this, she wasn’t going to. Stop, I mean.

Caroline, didn’t you ever happen to pick up the telephone when it wasn’t ringing?

I thought to myself, Please don’t ask me anything else, Abalyn. I can’t mix the right yellow, and I’m sweating like a pig, and please don’t keep asking me these questions I can’t answer.

“I found something,” she said very softly. I didn’t turn to see if she was still gazing out the window. “It was an accident. I wasn’t snooping. There was a folder on the kitchen table, and I accidentally knocked it off.”

Of course, it was the manila file I’d begun keeping years earlier, the one labeled “Perishable Shippen.” What I’d learned about “the Siren of Millville” and The Drowning Girl. A day or two before, I’d added Eva Canning’s name to the tab. I’d written it in green ink.

“My hand hardly brushed against it.”

I kept my eyes on the palette; the paint there had turned a very pale and sickly orange.

“Everything inside spilled out across the floor,” she continued. “I was gathering it all back up, to return it to the folder, Imp. I swear, that’s all that I was doing.”

“You read it?” I asked, biting down on my lip hard enough to taste a faint hint of blood, like iron in water.

She didn’t respond.

I set my palette down among the scatter of paint tubes and brushes. “That stuff is private,” I said, and my voice wasn’t any louder than hers.

“It was an accident,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to knock the folder off the table. I was cleaning up after lunch yesterday.”

“But it wasn’t an accident, reading what was in it. No one reads by accident.” I didn’t sound angry anymore, and I realized that I wasn’t. The anger had come and gone quick as lightning, and now I just felt sort of tired and weary of the color yellow.

“I’m worried about you, that’s all. I wouldn’t have brought any of this up, except I’m worried about you. You’re obsessed with this woman.”

I turned towards Abalyn, and when I moved, the stool wobbled, and I reached out for the easel to steady myself. She wasn’t still staring out the window; she was staring at me. She looked concerned. She almost looked frightened. All I wanted to say was that she shouldn’t worry, that sometimes I get a thing stuck in my head, but it eventually passes. Just like I always find the colors I need, stuff that gets stuck in my head always gets unstuck, sooner or later. But I didn’t say any of that. What I said instead was only meant to make Abalyn stop talking and leave me alone again, not to reassure her.

“I pay a doctor to worry about me,” I told her. “Frankly, it seems kind of presumptuous, giving me the third degree when you hardly know me that well. This really isn’t any of your business. You’re not my keeper. You’re only just barely my girlfriend.”

She sat there a moment, watching me, before she nodded and stood up. She dusted off the seat of her blue jeans.

“If that came out harsh, it wasn’t meant to. But I don’t want to discuss this with you.”

She nodded and said, “Tell me when you get hungry, and I’ll make us something to eat. Or I’ll go for takeout. Whichever.” She left, easing the door shut, the same way she had eased it open when she came in. I went to the window and stayed there until it was dark.

I’m almost done here. With the pretense of a fourth chapter. Soon, I know, I’m going to quit, and when (or if) I come back to this manuscript, I’ll type “5” seventeen lines down a new piece of paper. No particular reason. The events of that summer are flawless in their continuity, and a more honest woman wouldn’t divide it up into episodes. There wouldn’t be section breaks, pound signs, and numbers denoting new chapters. If I were telling my ghost story the way I should, there might not even be punctuation. Or spaces between one word and the next. I don’t hear punctuation marks in my head. My thoughts all run together, and I slice them apart and nail them into place here. I might as well be a lepidopterist neatly pinning dead butterflies and moths onto foam boards. These words are all corpses now, corpses of moths and butterflies. Sparrows in stoppered jars.

By accident, cleaning up after herself, Abalyn knocked a folder off the kitchen table. I shouldn’t have left it there, but I wasn’t used to having someone else around. I wasn’t accustomed to concealing my fixations. It wasn’t her fault. Gravity took over and the pages spilled out, and she read what was on them. What was there, it would have struck her as odd, and we are curious animals, people are, human beings. The folder held an assortment of photocopies from newspapers, magazines, and library books, some of them going back almost a hundred years.

Had she asked, I might have shown them to her.

Or not. She didn’t ask, so I can’t know.

I never learned which of the pages she read and which she didn’t. I never asked, and Abalyn never volunteered the information. She may have read them all, or only a few of them. Those sheets of paper are only butterflies trapped in a killing jar. They’re only the feathers of broken, fallen birds. I did wonder, though, which she read. Sitting here in my blue room, I still wonder. But that’s only natural, right? It’s normal to wonder, even if knowing doesn’t matter and wouldn’t change anything.

That evening during dinner neither of us said very much. Afterwards, she went to the parlor and the sofa and her laptop, her digital, pixeled worlds. Her time displacement. I went to the bedroom, where I sat reading back over my “clippings” (I think of them that way, even if that’s not what they are). I scanned headlines and notes I’d scribbled in the margins. There are two photocopied newspaper articles, in particular, I can remember reading that night. Reading start to finish, I mean.

One bears the headline “Search for Mystery Woman’s Body Halted, Hoax Suspected,” from The Evening Call (Woonsocket, Friday, June 12th, 1914). It describes how two fifteen-year-old boys had been paddling a canoe along the Blackstone River near Millville, Massachusetts, when they’d happened upon the body of a woman floating facedown in the murky water. They prodded her with an oar, to be sure she was dead, but didn’t try to pull her from the river. They went at once to a local constable, and that same afternoon, and again the next day, men from Millville probed the river with poles, and used a fishing net to drag the area where the boys claimed to have sighted the corpse. But no corpse was found. Finally, everyone gave up and decided there’d never been a dead woman, that the boys were bored that summer day and fabricated the story to get everyone stirred up.

And the other article I’m fairly certain I read back over that night comes from the Worcester Telegram & Gazette (“Bather Claims Attacked and Injured by Unseen Animal,” Tuesday, September 4th, 1951). Three girls (their ages aren’t given) were swimming above Rolling Dam in Blackstone, near Millville, when one screamed and began thrashing and calling out for help. Her name was Millicent Hartnett (Millicent from Millville); her friends’ names aren’t given. When the girls reached the shore, they were horrified to see a deep gash in Millicent’s right leg, just above the knee. The wound was serious enough it required twenty stitches. Authorities suspected a snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) was responsible, or that the girl had caught her leg on a submerged log. Millicent claimed otherwise. She said she’d seen what had bitten her, and that it wasn’t a turtle or a log. But she refused to say what it had been. “I saw it up close, but no one will believe me,” she said. “I don’t want people thinking I’m crazy or lying.” Millicent’s mother told reporters that her daughter was a good student, that she was practical, trustworthy, and not the sort of girl given to tall tales. Swimmers were advised to avoid the dam, and the three girls were said to have been so upset they swore they’d never swim in the river again.

Both boys became soldiers and died in France four years later. Millicent Hartnett grew up, got married, and lives with her oldest son in Uxbridge. It wasn’t very hard to find these things out. I’ve often thought about contacting Millicent, who would be seventy-six or so, and trying to get her to tell me what she saw in the river that day. But I don’t think she’d talk to me. She might not even remember, though she must still have a scar on her ankle.

If Abalyn didn’t read either of those articles, there are others just as peculiar she might have read, instead. About eleven o’clock, I closed the folder and slipped it under my side of the bed. I switched off the lamp and lay in the dark, listening to the noises rising up from the street and the sounds from the apartments above and below mine. Abalyn slept on the sofa that night, and in the morning we didn’t talk about the folder. Mostly, more than anything, I was embarrassed, and was glad I had to be at work early. She was gone when I got home, but had left a note saying she was with friends. The note promised she wouldn’t be late, and she wasn’t. I didn’t tell her how it scared me, coming in and finding she wasn’t there, how I’d thought maybe she’d left for good. How I checked to make sure all her stuff was still there. When she got home, Abalyn was a little drunk. She smelled like beer and Old Spice aftershave lotion and cigarette smoke. She told me she loved me, and we fucked, and then I lay awake for a long, long time, watching her sleep.

“The next day,” Imp typed, “I apologized.”

I’m not sure if I really did. Apologize, I mean. But I like to believe that I did. Regardless, I am sure that was the day I asked her to read a short story I’d written and that had been published a couple of years earlier in The Massachusetts Review. If I didn’t apologize in so many words, letting her read that story was another and more personal sort of apology. I no longer have a copy of the magazine, but I’m attaching the typescript, because I know it’s part of my ghost story. It’s a part that I’d already committed to paper well before I met Eva Canning, the first time and the second time, in July and in November. The story’s not factual, but it’s true. I’m stapling it to this page because I can’t find a paper clip.