Ghost 19

by Simone St. James

When he’d walked out my door yesterday, I’d thought it would be the last time I would see him.

“There was something in the cellar,” I said, my voice rusty. “Last night. Something dead. It tried to come up through the door.”

And that was when I knew that Detective Ian Challis actually believed me.

They watched Mad Gin, and they made notes about her, and they asked about her father over and over again—I felt like making up answers, but I knew they’d find me out—and eventually they let me go.

And here I was, on 19 Howard Avenue, to rest and recover.

The place had a feel that wasn’t lived-in; the bed linens were impersonal, and someone had bought that awful embroidery from a flea market.

The children grated on me at first. I have never been the maternal type, part of what is wrong with me.

It wasn’t a landscape I had ever seen, except in movies or plays, and it fascinated me. It was also the landscape of my own madness.

think we can all agree that the mechanics in my head are faulty. The propellers are intermittent, and there’s a leak in one of the fuel lines.”

“I’m saying that agoraphobia or not, I think something happened to make you this way. Something happened in this house.”

When I think of going out there, I think that maybe none of it is real, except me. And then I think that perhaps all of it is real, except me, and that’s much worse.

If the agoraphobia isn’t faked, and the scratches aren’t faked—Ginette, that means you’re trapped in this house. With whatever it is that made those marks.”

“Well, thank God,” Mother said. “Cigarettes and alcohol. It’s unseemly for a girl your age.”

“Ginette. Why can’t you be more like Mrs. Perry’s daughter? Two children, and she doesn’t even work. I’ve never known what to do with you, ever since you were a girl.

I was starting to think that this tearstained monster—this woman of rages, of sobs, of hysterical laughter—was the real me, and that the woman I’d been for my first twenty-nine years was the fake, the imitation.

I used the toilet and cleaned my face and took my time making myself up—not too much (the local home-wrecker) and not too little (the local mental patient, wasting away).

I put my hand on it—and something screamed.

What makes an artist, after all?

It is a bleak moment indeed when you realize that you don’t actually like yourself—that you’re the kind of person you wouldn’t want to be friends with. That you don’t know how you came to be that person, and you don’t know what to do about it.

It was only when that thing started trying to kill me that I realized: When I came to 19 Howard Avenue, I had turned myself into nothing at all.

“Darling, I never had any wits to begin with.”

knew that kind of weeping. I’d cried like that—not just put out, or angry, but a storm of emotion let loose in an unstoppable wash. It had all the marks of a cry done in secret, let out in that judicious moment when no one can see, when no one will know. A cry done on schedule so that no one around you is inconvenienced and life can go on. I’d cried like that in dressing rooms and on the fire escape of the apartment I’d lived in with Henry. All over America, women cry like that in toilets, in their cars, and on their back stoops every day.

No, there is no girl who looks at that and wants to be there.

The horrible half-sleep, half-dream state I’d been in. And Mother-in-Law, standing outside on the path, pulling her hair and saying those words over and over again. I’ll have to do it myself. Had I really seen that?

I was worried about myself, and no one had worried about me in a very, very long time.

There were no pills, no alcohol, and no men in my system—none of my usual addictions.

I’m difficult, I’m mad, and I can’t leave this house, but I’m also right.

“Old Mrs. Lowell was murdered, I’m sure of it. But if she’s out there, then who is the ghost in here?”

My theory about Mother-in-Law was not only conjecture. I was absolutely positive that woman was dead.

I was starting to understand that it wasn’t any safer in this house than it was out in the garden.

a few hours after you made your phone call, the old woman, who you call Mrs. Lowell, was found dead on the street two blocks from here. There were no signs that she was attacked. It looked like her heart stopped.”

“You need to leave this house, Ginette.”

This wasn’t a good quiet, a peaceful quiet. It was a quiet that waited and watched. Breathed. I only seemed to be alone. I wasn’t.

How many times had I heard it? How many times had I watched Trixie in her yard with her doll? How many times had I seen a little girl who had died a long time ago, a little girl who wasn’t there?

She was in the cellar, and she was trying to get out.

“It was before my time, but the neighbors told me about it,” Ian said. “Her name was Patricia, but no one called her that. Everyone called her Trixie.”

“You’re very forward,” I said. “You’re very beautiful,” he said back. “And very stranded.”