The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

She’s smiling.

“Yeah,” I say.

I’m smiling, too.

“Yeah, well. Guess what? I’m starting next semester at City College,” she says. “So. I’ll be around. The collective’s got another space lined up for September. In Brooklyn, I’m pretty sure Janeanna said.”

Also without looking at me. Instead she’s twisting a ring on her finger. Some kind of dark brown carved shell. A terrier has his paws up on the chain-link fence across from us and wags, and Maddie smiles and waves at him. The gold band glints in the sun.

“Arlo!” a woman calls from inside the dog park, and the terrier disappears.

“Yeah?” I say. Maddie glances quickly at me, as if gauging to see if I consider her starting at City College to be good news.

“Yeah,” she says.

We’re staring at each other now, and a moment of static electricity passes in the space between us. Her eyes are wide and black and nearly bottomless, the lashes trembling.

“Good,” I say, and I take her cheeks in my palms. I study her, to make sure this is okay, and then I lean in and kiss her.

We stay like that, locked together, tofu on our laps and my hands holding her cheeks, our lips pressed together. My glass Colt 45 bottle rolls unheeded off the park bench next to me and cracks in two on the cobblestones. It’s probably only a minute that we sit like that, a still point frozen in the swirling eddies of life in Washington Square Park.

But a minute can be an eternity, sometimes.





AUTHOR’S NOTE

A few months ago, a man from my insurance company came to inspect my New England house. This is one of those grown-up responsibilities one never thinks about in high school; it turns out that a lot of adulthood involves thinking about things like gutters and doctor’s appointments and paperwork. But I digress. The man nosed around my rickety old house, taking measurements, checking smoke detectors, and before long he noticed a lot of books on the shelves with my name on the spine. It came out that I was a novelist, and he asked me what I was working on just then—I was working on this book, as it happens—and I told him I was writing a ghost story that never used the word ghost. He nodded sagely and informed me without a trace of irony that I didn’t have to worry—my house wasn’t haunted. He’d been in ones that were, of course. Sad houses with thick presence. Houses that wear the misery in their pasts like winding sheets.

Ghosts are hard to categorize, but scratch the surface of reason and you’ll find that most of us harbor secret beliefs about them. While writing this book, I heard innumerable stories from friends, neighbors, and strangers of inexplicable footprints, eerie sensations, and crawling skin. At a cocktail party at a southern university where I was teaching fiction one semester, a woman mused to me that she didn’t see how you could be a Christian and not believe in ghosts. She herself had, at one point, been awakened in the night by the specter of her mother.