“Or you simply didn’t notice her for a second or two.”
“I’ve tried hard to believe that, over the years, Sarah, but it’s not the truth. The truthis, I looked down those granite steps at the balcony, and one second she wasn’t there, and then, the next, she was. That’s the truth, whether you believeme or not. That’s what I saw.”
“But. you know. whatever you saw is not necessarily what happened. Optical illusions—”
“I won’t finish this story if you’re not interested,” she said. “I mean, if you’d rather argue, we can do that.”
“I’m not trying to start an argument.”
“Then just shut up for a few minutes and listen. It wasn’t an optical illusion, or a mirage, or whatever. Yeah, there was some fog, but I know what I saw. She looked a little older than me, no more than twenty, say. She was wearing a dress and boots, and my first thought was this was one of those Society of Creative Anachronism types, or some sort of goth or something, because the clothes were tailored and the boots. It was like seeing a postcard or an old photograph from the Nineteenth Century. And she had this antique-looking pistol gripped in her right hand, and the barrel was set against her temple. She was looking out to sea, and so her back was turned to me.”
And at this point, I have to admit, Constance had my attention, and I just sat there listening, staring at the smoldering tip of my Camel.
“I stopped where I was, there on the steps, and for a minute or two, I just stood there, watching her. Her finger was on the trigger, and I could hear that she was crying. Well, sort of sobbing, softly. I almost couldn’t hear it over the breakers. And then I took another step or two towards her, though she hadn’t seemed to notice I was there, and I said, ‘The fall will probably kill you. The gun. I really don’t think it’s necessary.’ Something to that effect. And she turned around, turned and looked straight at me, and her face. ” Here Constance trailed off and was silent for a while.
Finally, I said, “You can tell me the rest some other time, if you’d rather.”
Her eyes still tightly closed, she shook her head and took a deep breath, as if summoning some necessary courage, as if filling her lungs with the requisite will to finish her story. She breathed out slowly, and, sitting there, I thought of Lamaze classes and childbirth and of taking a very deep breath before a dive into cold saltwater.
“I’m fine,” she said. “So, anyway, she turns and looks at me, this woman with her revolver and her dress that looks like she just stepped out of a Merchant-Ivory film. And the look on her face, Sarah, I knew, then and there, that expression was exactly what people mean when they say someone looks like she’s just seen a ghost. The woman lowered the revolver, letting her arm go limp at her side, and very slowly, very carefully, without ever saying a word, she climbed down off the wall onto the balcony. And vanished.”
“Vanished. ” I said, not meaning to sound skeptical, but sounding it anyway.
“Just gone, Sarah. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a minute. Two minutes, at the most.”
“And there were no other witnesses?” I asked.
“No, no one. I walked over to the wall, and stood there a long time, staring down at the sea sloshing against the boulders. It’s all charcoal-colored shale there, and the sea foam looks so white against it, and the sea is so many shades of green and blue, and I remember seeing strands of kelp in the surf that day, down there below the Forty Steps. There was no one else, just me and a few cormorants and gulls.”
She paused again, but this time I didn’t say anything. Just sat listening to the wheezy AC and the birds outside the old house far from the sea, but maybe not far enough. When she started talking again, Constance opened her eyes, but she didn’t look at me. She lay there, very still, staring at the ceiling.
“A few days later, I went back to Newport, to the public library, and found this book there on local ghosts. I don’t remember the title. Oh, wait. yes, I do— The Hauntings of Newport—written by a history professor up at Harvard. Right near the end of the book, there was a story — not really a ghost story, not exactly — about a woman in 1901 who went down the Forty Steps to kill herself. She’d found out that her husband was sleeping around on her, getting it on with the maid or some such, and she’d brought his gun with her. She planned to shoot herself and fall over the edge, let the current carry her body away so that no one would ever know she was a suicide, and she’d never have to face the shame of her husband’s infidelity. Maybe people would just think she slipped on the steps and fell, whatever. But she didn’tshoot herself, Sarah, and she didn’tjump, either. Decades later, when she was an old woman, when her husband was dead, she told all this to a newspaper reporter. She said that she heard someone, right as she was about to pull the trigger, and turned to find this strangely dressed girl watching her, and the strangely dressed girl told her that the gun was unnecessary, that the fall alone would do the job. And then the girl just. wasn’t there anymore. That’s precisely how she described it. ‘Then the girl wasn’t there anymore.’ The woman’s name was Anna Turner.”
There was another silence here, and I stubbed out the butt of my cigarette and set my empty beer bottle on the floor, waiting, because I wasn’t sure if she was finished, and, really, what do you say to something like this? She rolled over on her side, towards me, and the air mattress complained with a rubbery, scrunching noise.
“I promise, I’m not making any of this up,” she said, and I either nodded or shrugged, I can’t remember which. Constance furrowed her eyebrows again, like someone trying to solve a trigonometry problem, and licked nervously at her lips. “I imagine the book’s still in the Newport library, if you ever wanted to look it up yourself.”
“Did I say I don’t believe you? I don’t think I did.”
“No, you didn’t,” and she sat up, reaching for her unfinished beer. She took a swallow, then returned the bottle to the wet ring of condensation it had left on the unfinished hardwood. “What I reallythink, Sarah,” and here she lowered her voice as if someone might overhear. “About ghosts, I mean — is that there are weak spots in the universe, or thin places in time. In the fabric of time or the quantum foam, whatever physicists are calling it these days. And where these weak spots exist, they essentially act as windows, connecting two moments that otherwise would be separated by months or years or even by centuries. Maybe they only last for an instant or two, maybe a few minutes, then wink out of existence. Maybe, sometimes, they recur at the same place and time repeatedly. It explains what I saw that day, and what I found in the book later on. It explains what Anna Turner saw, and why she didn’t kill herself. You stop and think about it, well, it explains a lot of things that people call ghosts.”
“It does,” I agreed, lighting another Camel and blowing smoke towards the ceiling.
“But you don’t buy it?”
“Well, come on. You haveto admit, it does seem rather too convenient, or fortuitous, whatever, that a randomly occurring flaw in spacetime would just happen to manifest at a point that would have allowed you to save this woman’s life that day, the two of you ninety-four years apart.” I took another puff, exhaled, and squinted at her through the smoke.
“I never said I believe that it’s necessarily a random event. Maybe, somehow, human consciousness plays a role in the process. Perhaps, Sarah, consciousness, like mass, can distort space and time. So, traumatic emotions can act as a catalyst, if certain conditions are just exactly right. Or, maybe, there’s some greater mind — maybe Jung’s collective unconscious, let’s say — that determines when and where these thin spots appear.”