Giving Up the Ghost (9 page)

And the biggest mystery: Why Her? There were no dead girls in my past. I had nothing in my family tree about blond girls who died young.

I have spent countless hours over the years going over those dreams in my head, trying to find any connection, any literal, metaphorical, or figurative symbolism or meaning in
any
detail of that dream, and I always come up with exactly nothing.

Which is when it starts to get scary to me. I mean, there has to be
some
connection. It happened to me—and it happened for some reason. She is my Jacob Marley. Somehow the wetness, the people, the forest, the man in the wolf costume—those were somehow Her version of the chains Marley forged in life and had to drag with him through eternity. If I didn’t recognize what they meant, that meant I hadn’t figured something out yet and the connections would present themselves only
after
all the bad stuff She was warning me about eventually happened.

Then there was the message itself. Just as Marley came back to warn Ebenezer Scrooge about the coming visits from the ghosts of his past, present, and future, She was warning me about something, too. Or at least I’ve always accepted it as a warning, but it equally could be a threat, a prophecy, a harbinger of
something
. Something that someone/something else was going to do—or that She planned to do Herself. The only thing I knew for sure was that it almost certainly couldn’t have been good news. The Little Girl did not come into my dreams
to wish me a good day or compliment the shirt/pants combo I’d worn earlier. She had something to tell me that was very important.

I feared that whatever it was had to be
so bad
that only She could deliver it. I feared what She’d do when She tired of trying to communicate with me in my dreams. I feared I had only come so far in my experience of Her. And it could get worse at any moment, any time.

I also feared that it might be impossible to heed Her warning. When Marley came to visit Scrooge, he said it was too late to save his own soul but that Scrooge had time to be redeemed. But what if Marley and the Christmas ghosts spoke gibberish? Would Scrooge miss his one and only chance to redeem himself? Because I couldn’t understand the Little Girl in a Blue Dress, would I miss Her warning? Would I miss
my
chance?

So, it wasn’t an apparition I feared. I was scared of what I didn’t know, simply because I didn’t know it. My life began to feel like that flash of a moment between when you know you’re going to be in an auto accident and the impact itself. Like that moment between when the wave crests above your head and when it comes crashing down on you. Even if it is only for an instant, the waiting is the worst part. Worse than the collision. Worse than the injury and damage. Whenever Little Girl came to me in my dreams, my whole life started to feel like that moment. Just waiting, knowing and not knowing, all at the same time.

Two aspects of my life blossomed as I headed into my teens.

I started to become heavily involved in my church. From simply attending Sunday service I felt increasingly drawn into joining the Sunday school, youth group, and confirmation classes, mostly because I wanted to hang around with the other
kids. I looked to my fellow teen parishioners to fill the human void in my life. My family had kept attending the same church after we moved to the house on Thirty-fourth Street a few years earlier. Since I now lived in a different neighborhood and school district, I rarely saw most of these kids more than once a week. When I was at church, I was on my best behavior. The lack of regular exposure, plus me being on my best behavior, made it easier for me to make friends at church than at school. Though at the time I wasn’t terribly interested in all the Jesus stuff, this group became the one area of my life where I was deeply involved with other people.

I also quickly embraced the self-righteous “stick it to the Man” vibe of the church’s social activism and attitude toward the outside world. This led to the other blossoming area of my early teens: my letter writing, which grew into something more purposeful. As I became more involved in the church, the subjects of my letters switched from complaining about budgets, parks, and proper signage at crosswalks into the need for politicians to address poverty and injustice.

Writing letters soon led to social action—doing walkathons for cancer research, volunteering for food pantries, boycotting products, marching against nuclear arms, and just about anything else I could fit into my schedule. I was a full-time bringer of truth and righteousness. I felt I’d found my purpose and calling, a way to realize my potential. My goal was nothing short of changing the world, but underlying it was a strange and uncomfortable anger. I was upset that there were so many things wrong with the world and that adults had allowed things to get so fucked up. I felt that while it was profoundly broken, it was also profoundly fixable. All I had to do was try.

But of course, nothing changed.

I’d write letters. I’d attend rallies. I’d protest. And nothing ever seemed to change.

Because the world allowed all these horrible things to happen, I believed that it was tacitly saying these things were acceptable. Yet I also slowly came to realize that no matter how many marches I attended, no matter how many letters I wrote or bake sales I ran or cans of food I collected or miles I walked, there was nothing I could ever do to stop it. I thought I could make a difference in the world, but often there was no difference to be made. We march and protest and express our opinions, and all we accomplish is making ourselves feel better. I think I was angry because not only did I know that nothing would change, I felt foolish for thinking that I could ever make any substantive difference in the first place.

Despite my growing apathy, I kept writing letters, kept boycotting, and kept attending protests and rallies. I did this mostly because I was so desperate to hold on to the small amount of human connection that surrounded these activities. I thought it was useless work, but I didn’t want to stop. Even though I felt less and less connection to and tolerance or trust of other people, at the same time I could not bear to let them go. I figured there had to be some formula—some combination of actions—that would result in the world accepting me, and me feeling wanted. While part of me wanted to keep trying different tactics until I got the equation right, I was also feeling increasingly desperate.

During this time I noticed that both the Little Girl dreams and the terror spells in the attic were accelerating. You might think the connection was simply a matter of circumstance and suggestion. At the time, though, the dreams began to feel like a validation of some impending doom.

I was just a teenager, and I was already haunted. Haunted by my own disappointment. Haunted by a disconnection from the world around me. Haunted by a festering depression. Haunted by loneliness.

I never knew why or how, but I felt the Little Girl in a Blue Dress was the harbinger of my own self-destruction. I had no idea who She was. I had no idea how She was connected to me. All I knew was that the Little Girl in a Blue Dress knew the truth.

I felt trapped. Trapped between the world I didn’t understand and a ghost that I didn’t understand. That’s when I asked my mother if I could move my stuff up into the attic playroom. I wanted to make it my bedroom. It was like I was magnetically drawn to the attic. As much as I was scared to face down whatever I felt was there, I equally couldn’t stand the thought of staying away. Given the choice between my fear of the outside world and my fear of Little Girl, I had to choose which I wanted to be closer to and which I wanted to distance myself from. Even though I was terrified of Her and what She might mean, She also felt like my future, my journey, and my path.

My mom was a little shocked that I wanted to be up there. I just shrugged it off, saying I thought it would be cool.

“This room is a little drab,” my mother said. “We should paint it. Any color you’d like?”

I thought for a moment.

In confirmation class, we’d just finished learning about the colors of the liturgical seasons in the church year—white and gold for Epiphany and Easter, red for Pentecost, dark blue for Advent, and purple for Lent. I really had had no idea what Lent stood for before we talked about it in class. But afterward I thought about it all the time. Most people think of Lent as
being the six weeks before Easter where you give up chocolate or swearing or something. In the church year, Lent is supposed to be a time of prayer and preparation, of introspection and self-examination. Most people also mistake the purpose of giving things up for Lent. It isn’t to deny yourself something, it’s to let go of distractions. To focus on your true calling.

“Purple,” I answered.

She probably wasn’t surprised, as I had recently decided to adopt purple as my official color. Anytime I could have anything in purple, it was the color I chose. The color of Lent.

I never admitted this to anyone. I just told them that I really liked purple.

But in truth, I saw myself as preparing for something. Something I didn’t know. Something I didn’t understand. Little Girl was trying to tell me what it was, but I wasn’t ready to hear it yet. So I waited, and reflected, and prepared.

A lot of church literature refers to the season as the “Journey of Lent”—as if it is not a mark of time but a passage with a destination. I knew I was on a journey myself, though I had no idea where or why. I just wanted to be alone, surrounded by purple walls, ready for Her and as far above the rest of my life as possible.

After that first drive, Laura and I talked on the phone just about every night for a week. Then we went driving again. Then we talked on the phone every night again for another week.

It didn’t take long to pick up that Laura had a habit of interrupting conversations with non sequitur questions like “When you think of ravioli, do you think of meat ravioli or cheese ravioli?” Or “Did I ever tell you that both of my grandfathers died in gruesome train accidents?” Or “If you could start today over again, what would you do different?”

Here I was trying to blow her mind with deep thoughts about truth, art, hypocrisy, and whatever—and she couldn’t stick to the same topic for more than a minute before uttering something like “Do you think you’d make a good burlesque dancer?”

“I’m not even sure what a burlesque dancer is.”

“You know, a striptease dancer.”

“Well, it depends who I’m stripping for.”

“Well, let’s say you were a woman and were stripping in a bar. Do you think you’d be any good?”

“That’s like asking, ‘If you were a potato, do you think
you’d taste good with sour cream on top of you?’ It makes no sense.”

“What kind of question is that?” she responded. “Of course you’d be delicious. What kind of potato
wouldn’t
taste good covered in sour cream?”

“I think you are missing my point,” I said.

“No, I think you asked a question and I answered it.”

That was annoying thing number two: She was nearly impossible to peg down about anything. She often answered questions with more questions. Whenever you tried to force her into a yes or no answer on something, she’d just smile and masterfully work her way to talking about something else. For example, for all the time we spent together, she rarely would eat in my presence, even when we went to a restaurant. I’d ask if it was because she wasn’t hungry or had just eaten or didn’t have money. She’d then tell a story about how she used to try eating paper as a child, because she imagined it would taste delicious, completely ignoring my question.

Yet, for all her evasiveness, she had this otherworldly, enchanting quality that made you never want to stop talking to her. She made you feel that she was keenly interested in what you had to say; that everything was about the moment the two of you were sharing. You could tell she was absorbing everything and was deeply interested in knowing as much about you as she could. She’d often recall, verbatim, things you’d forgotten you had shared months earlier.

We gradually started to see each other more, settling into a few times a week. Something would come up in a phone call that would segue into a suggestion that we hang out. Hanging out usually meant me picking her up (I was always told to wait in the car and not approach the house), then, without much discussion about where to or why, I’d just start driving off
down some road. The car was like a rolling clubhouse, a safe place where we could say anything, do anything, and be anything without anyone staring or judging or wondering what we were up to. But the motion was important, too. We both were often desperate to get away, even when we had no idea where to go. Driving, motion, not being still—it all felt as essential as breathing.

But moving required gas. Gas cost money—something neither of us had in any measurable quantity. So we started to seek out places, hidden, secluded places, where we could camp out for a few hours unnoticed. Places where we could just be.

On the night we played Beer Golf with Jimmy, we spent the rest of the evening just driving around back roads, talking endlessly about anything that came to mind. As we drove back toward town, Laura lay down on the bench seat, resting her head on my leg, and fell asleep.