bundled up in a flannel jacket and wore halfgloves to keep my hands from getting too cold as I wrote.
I looked up when Ben stirred beside me, fur bristling, sliteyed gaze focused on the narrow mouth of an alleyway that cut like a tunnel through the town houses on the north side of the courtyard. I followed his gaze in time to see her step from the shadows.
She reminded me of Geordie’s friend Jilly, the artist. She had the same slender frame and tangled hair, the same pixie face and wardrobe that made her look like she did all her clothes buying at a thrift shop. But she had a harder look than Jilly, a toughness that was reflected in the sharp lines that modified her features and in her gear: battered leather jacket, jeans stuffed into lowheeled black cowboy boots, hands in her pockets, a kind of leather carryall hanging by its strap from her shoulder.
She had a loose, confident gait as she crossed the courtyard, boot heels clicking on the cobblestones.
The warm light from the streetlamp softened her features a little.
Beside me, Ben turned around a couple of times, a slow chase of his tail that had no enthusiasm to it, and settled back into sleep. She sat down on the bench, the cat between us, and dropped her carryall at her feet. Then she leaned back against the bench, legs stretched out in front of her, hands back in the pockets of her jeans, head turned to look at me.
“Some night, isn’t it?” she said.
I was still trying to figure her out. I couldn’t place her age. One moment she looked young enough to be a runaway and I waited for the inevitable request for spare change or a place to crash, the next she seemed around my age—late twenties, early thirties—and I didn’t know what she might want. One thing people didn’t do in the city, even in this part of it, was befriend strangers. Not at night. Especially not if you were young and as pretty as she was.
My lack of a response didn’t seem to faze her in the least.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Christy Riddell,” I said. I hesitated for a moment, then reconciled myself to a conversation.
“What’s yours?” I added as I closed my notebook, leaving my pen inside it to keep my place.
“Tallulah.”
Just that, the one name. Spoken with the brassy confidence of a Cher or a Madonna.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
Tallulah sounded like it should belong to a ‘20s flapper, not some punky street kid.
She gave me a smile that lit up her face, banishing the last trace of the harshness I’d seen in her features as she was walking up to the bench.
“No, really,” she said. “But you can call me Tally.”
The melody of the ridiculous refrain from that song by—was it Harry Belafonte?—came to mind, something about tallying bananas. “What’re you doing?” she asked.
“Writing.”
“I can
“I write stories,” I told her.
I waited then for the inevitable questions: Have you ever been published? What name do you write under? Where do you get your ideas? Instead she turned away and looked up at the sky.
“I knew a poet once,” she said. “He wanted to capture his soul on a piece of paper—really capture it.” She looked back at me. “But of course, you can’t do that, can you? You can try, you can bleed honesty into your art until it feels like you’ve wrung your soul dry, but in the end, all you’ve created is a possible link between minds. An attempt at communication. If a soul can’t be measured, then how can it be captured?”
I revised my opinion of her age. She might look young, but she spoke with too much experience couched in her words.
“What happened to him?” I found myself asking. “Did he give up?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. He moved away.” Her gaze left mine and turned skyward once more.
“When they move away, they leave my life because I can’t follow them.”
She mesmerized me—right from that first night. I sensed a portent in her casual appearance into my life, though a portent of what, I couldn’t say.
“Did you ever want to?” I asked her.
“Want to what?”
“Follow them.” I remember, even then, how the plurality bothered me. I was jealous and I didn’t even know of what.
She shook her head. “No. All I ever have is what they leave behind.”
Her voice seemed to diminish as she spoke. I wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder with my hand, to offer what comfort I could to ease the sudden malaise that appeared to have gripped her, but her moods, I came to learn, were mercurial. She sat up suddenly and stroked Ben until the motor of his purring filled the air with its resonance.
“Do you always write in places like this?” she asked.
I nodded. “I like the night; I like the city at night. It doesn’t seem to belong to anyone then. On a good night, it almost seems as if the stories write themselves. It’s almost as though coming out here plugs me directly into the dark heart of the city night and all of its secrets come spilling from my pen.”
I stopped, suddenly embarrassed by what I’d said. It seemed too personal a disclosure for such short acquaintance. But she just gave me a lowwatt version of her earlier smile.
“Doesn’t that bother you?” she asked.
“Does what bother me?”
“That perhaps what you’re putting down on paper doesn’t belong to you.”
“Does it ever?” I replied. “Isn’t the very act of creation made up of setting a piece of yourself free?”
“What happens when there’s no more pieces left?”
“That’s what makes it special—I don’t think you ever run out of the creative spark. Just doing it, replenishes the well. The more I work, the more ideas come to me. Whether they come from my subconscious or some outside source, isn’t really relevant. What is relevant is what I put into it.”
“Even when it seems to write itself?”
“Maybe especially so.”
I was struck—not then, but later, remembering—by the odd intensity of the conversation. It wasn’t a normal dialogue between strangers. We must have talked for three hours, never about ourselves, our histories, our pasts, but rather about what we were now, creating an intimacy that seemed surreal when I thought back on it the next day. Occasionally, there were lulls in the conversation, but they, too, seemed to add to the sense of bonding, like the comfortable silences that are only possible between good friends.
I could’ve kept right on talking, straight through the night until dawn, but she rose during one of those lulls.
“I have to go,” she said, swinging the strap of her carryall onto her shoulder.
I knew a moment’s panic. I didn’t know her address or her phone number. All I had was her first name.
“When can I see you again?” I asked.
“Have you ever been down to those old stone steps under the Kelly Street Bridge?”
I nodded. They dated back from when the river was used to haul goods from upland, down to the lake. The steps under the bridge were all that was left of an old dock that had serviced the Irishowned inn called The Harp. The dock was long abandoned, but The Harp still stood. It was one of the oldest buildings in the city. Only the solid stone structures of the city’s Dutch founding fathers, like the ones that encircled us, were older.
“I’ll meet you there tomorrow night,” she said. She took a few steps, then paused, adding, “Why don’t you bring along one of your books?”
The smile she gave me, before she turned away again, was intox—
icating. I watched her walk back across the courtyard, disappearing into the narrow mouth of the alleyway from which she’d first come. Her footsteps lingered on, an echoing taptap on the cobblestones, but then that too faded.
I think it was at that moment that I decided she was a ghost.
I didn’t get much writing done over the next few weeks. She wouldn’t—she said she couldn’t—see me during the day, but she wouldn’t say why. I’ve got such a head filled with fictions that I honestly thought it was because
