Caitlín Kiernan - The Drowning Girl

“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.