Or a painting hanging on a wall.
I’m pretty sure that Saltonstall was, in fact, only trying to exorcise his own ghosts when he painted the nude woman standing in the water with the forest at her back. Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people. So, Saltonstall went to the Blackstone River, and he saw something there, something happened there, and it haunted him. Then, later on, he tried to make it go away the only way he knew how, by painting it. It wasn’t a malicious act, the propagation of that meme. It was an act of desperation. Sometimes, haunted people reach a point where they either manage to drive away the ghosts or the ghosts destroy them. What makes all this even worse is that it usually doesn’t work, trying to drag the ghosts out and seal them up tight where they can’t hurt us anymore. I think, mostly, we only spread them, when we try to do that. You make a copy, or transmit some infinitesimal part of the phantom, but most of it stays dug so deeply into your mind it’s never going anywhere.
Rosemary never tried to teach me to believe in a god or sin, in Heaven or Hell, and my own experiences have never led me there. I don’t think I even believe in souls. But that doesn’t matter. I do believe in ghosts. I do, I do, I do, I do believe in ghosts, just like the Cowardly Lion said. Sure, I’m a crazy woman, and I have to take pills I can’t really afford to stay out of hospitals, but I still see ghosts everywhere I look, when I look, because once you start seeing them, you can’t ever stop seeing them. But the worst part is, you accidentally or on purpose start seeing them, you make that gestalt shift that permits you to recognize them for what they are, and they start to see you, too. You look at a painting hanging on a wall, and all at once it seems like a window. It seems so much like a window that an eleven-year-old girl tries to reach through it to the other side. But the unfortunate thing about windows is most of them work both ways. They allow you to look out, but they also allow anything else that happens past to look in.
I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Which means I need to stop, and go back, and set aside all this folderol about memes and ghosts and windows, at least for now. I need to go back to that night in July, driving alongside the Blackstone River not far from the spot that inspired Saltonstall to paint The Drowning Girl. Back to the night I met the mermaid named Eva Canning. But, also, back to that other night, the snowy night in November, in Connecticut, when I was driving through the woods on a narrow chip-and-tar road, and I came across the girl who was actually a wolf, and who may have been the same ghost as Eva Canning, and who’d inspired another artist, another dead man, a dead man whose name was Albert Perrault, to try and capture her likeness in his work.
And what I said earlier about the girlfriend who puts up with all my weird shit…that was sort of a lie, because she left me not long after Eva Canning showed up. Because, finally, the weird shit just got too weird. I don’t blame her for leaving, though I miss her and wish she were still here. Regardless, the point is, it was a lie, pretending she’s still with me. I said there’s no reason doing this thing if all I can manage is a lie.
So I have to watch for that.
And I have to choose my words carefully.
In fact, I find that I’m quickly, unexpectedly coming to realize that I’m trying to tell myself a story in a language that I’m having to invent as I go along. If I’m lazy, if I rely too heavily on the way anyone else would tell this story—anyone else at all—it’ll look ridiculous. I’ll be horrified or embarrassed by the sight of it, the sound of it. Or I’ll be horrified and embarrassed, and I’ll give it up. I’ll stash it away in a disused suitcase beneath my bed and never reach the place that will, arbitrarily, turn out to be the end. No, not even the end, but just the last page that I’ll write before I can stop telling this story.
I have to be careful, just like Rosemary said. I have to stop, and take a step back.
It wasn’t raining the day I met Abalyn, but the sky was overcast with the deceitful sort of violet clouds that roil and rush by and keep you thinking that it might rain. It was windy, and there was definitely the smell of rain. So I was wearing my galoshes and my raincoat and carrying my umbrella that afternoon, which was two years and four months ago. I was walking home from the bus stop after work. It was one of those last cool days in June, before the weather turns hot and nasty. Below the clouds, the air was sweet, and the trees seemed almost too green to be real. Not too green in any gaudy way, mind you, not as if they were artificial, but as if they had achieved a greenness that was so very green, so lush, it couldn’t possibly exist in nature. Or if it did, human eyes probably weren’t meant to perceive it. I got off the bus on Westminster and followed Parade Street, flanked on either side by those great green whispering chestnut and oak trees. On my left lay the open expanse of Dexter Training Grounds, which is only a park now, despite the name. Ahead of me, at the southern edge of the Training Grounds, the Cranston Street Armory rose up like a fairy-tale castle, its high crenellated turrets and glazed yellow bricks sharply delineated against the clouds. The Armory, from which my neighborhood takes its name, isn’t actually an armory anymore. It occurs to me that a lot of things in Providence aren’t what they used to be, but no one’s ever bothered to give them new names, and names can mislead and confound you.
I passed my street, because I felt more like walking than going straight home. I walked another two blocks, then turned right on Wood Street. I left most of the big trees behind, trading them for the high narrow houses with their mansard roofs and bay windows, gingerbread trim and stingy, weedy yards. I hadn’t gone far when I came upon a disorderly mound of cardboard boxes heaped near the curb. There were DVDs, books, a few pieces of vinyl, and some kitchen utensils. There was clothing (mostly T-shirts, jeans, and women’s underwear) stuffed haphazardly into still more boxes. There were two wooden kitchen chairs, a coffeemaker, a dinged-up nightstand, a floor lamp missing its shade, and, well, other things. I guessed someone had been evicted and their belongings tossed out on the street. It happens, though not as much on this side of town as over on College Hill. I was surprised there wasn’t a mattress, because there’s almost always a mattress and box springs. I propped my umbrella against a telephone pole and began picking through the boxes. A good thing it hadn’t rained, because then everything would have been ruined.
I’d long since learned that it pays to scavenge the castaway belongings of people who haven’t paid their rent, who’ve left everything behind and moved on. Half my apartment is furnished with castoffs, and I once found a first edition of The Great Gatsby and a stack of 1940s Superman comics tucked inside the drawer of an old chifforobe. A used bookstore downtown paid me almost enough for the lot to cover a month’s rent. Anyway, I’d just started sorting through the books—mostly science fiction and fantasy—when I heard footsteps and looked up. A tall girl was crossing Wood Street, her black boots clopping loudly against the asphalt. The first thing I noticed was how pretty she was, in an androgynous Tilda Swinton sort of way. The second thing I noticed was that she looked really, really pissed off.