The Drowning Girl (6 page)

“A
nd 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
.

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.