I apologized again and told her to please continue, to finish whatever it was she had been about to tell me. And then she said she blamed the heat, that if the day weren’t so hot, we’d have gone out to the tree as we’d planned, and this conversation would not have happened, and I wouldn’t think she was a crackpot.

“I never said I think you’re a crackpot,” I protested.

She stared at me a few moments, then shrugged and said, “It was fairly implicit, don’t you think?”

I closed my eyes tightly, seeing yellow-white afterimages of sunlight and restraining myself from blurting some smart-ass quip or another—“Do we have to have our first lovers’ spat beforeI get to fuck you?” Something equally self-destructive.

Instead, I told her, “I’m sorry, Constance. I honestly didn’t mean it that way. I think maybe I’m a little drunk,” and I probably was. I opened my eyes, and she was still staring at me. “No, really,” I said. “I was notcalling you a crackpot. You’re just gonna have to take my word on that, okay?”

And she smiled at me and lay down on the air mattress, and I was glad for the smile, whatever it might mean, and glad that those cinnamon eyes were now trained on the sloping attic ceiling and not on me. “Do you want to hear it or not?” Constance asked.

“I do,” I replied, and she furrowed her brow, making what A. A. Milne might have called a thoughtful face. Only, it was obvious this was a sort of mock-thoughtful face, and I knew this expression was some part of my punishment for having implied she was a crackpot.

“You have to swear that you won’t just use it as an excuse to make fun of me again.”

“I wasn’tmaking fun of you.”

She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and pointed straight at me with her left index finger. “You have to fucking swear,Sarah Crowe. Otherwise, you’re never gonna hear it.”

“And that would ruin my day,” I muttered, and her brow grew more furrowed, the thoughtful face edging towards an impatient face.

“Fine. I fucking swear,” I said, before she could withdraw the stipulation and any chance I might have of hearing whatever it was she was trying to decide whether or not I should hear.

“Scout’s honor?”

“Sure. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Yeah, that’s better,” she said, smiling again, and the creases wrinkling her forehead began to relax. But she didn’t open her eyes. In fact, she didn’t open her eyes again until she was almost finished telling me her ghost story, as though she needed to try and shut out the sunlight filling up the little attic in order to recall the events in question. I sat in my metal folding chair, smoking, and she lay there on her makeshift bed, while the window unit droned and gurgled wetly to itself. I’ll freely admit, I’ve never been a very good listener, and yet, there was something in the way she stacked the words. and I seemed to hang on every one, every syllable, every pregnant pause. Then again, maybe it was only lust and a peevish libido keeping me focused.

“Back when I was in high school, just after I got my license, I used to drive out to the Cliffwalk in Newport whenever I could. Usually, I went alone. In the summers, I’d try to find the days when the tourists weren’t so bad, but it’s Newport, and so that’s always a crapshoot.”

I exhaled smoke and cleared my throat. “Constance,” I said. “I know I’m interrupting you again, but. I’ve never been to Newport, and I have no idea what this Cliffwalk thing is. Keep in mind I’m just a dumb redneck from Georgia and this will go better.”

She sighed very loudly and shook her head in disgust or disbelief. “The Cliffwalk,” she said, speaking very slowly now, the way one might talk to a small child with attention issues, “is a trail leading along the cliffs, over on the east side of Newport Island, behind Salve Regina College and all those great fucking mansions that people like the Vanderbilts put up back in the 1890s. You haveheard of the Gilded Age, right? The fallout of the Second Industrial Revolution? John D. Rockefeller, Silas Desvernine, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, all those guys?”

“I think maybe I heard of it once,” I said, not bothering to smile because her eyes were shut. I took another drag on my cigarette.

“So, behindthe mansions,” she continued, “there’s a pathway. It was just a dirt trail back when, a long time ago, kept clear by the Indians and the colonials and then the Victorians and whatnot. It runs on for miles, and in some places the drop to the sea is seventy feet or more. But over the years, hurricanes took their toll on the path, and finally, I think, the Army Corps of Engineers came in sometime in the seventies and paved it and repaired all the storm damage, fixed the walk up all nice again. Better than new, I’m sure.”

“Our tax dollars at work,” I said.

“It’s nice,” Constance said. “Maybe I’ll take you sometime. Anyway, so I used to drive out there, back when I was sixteen, seventeen, hoping there wouldn’t be crowds of sightseers. And one day it was foggy and sort of cold for summer, so there was hardly anyone, and I pretty much had the place to myself. July 21, 1995, so that’s what. thirteen years ago?”

“Almost,” I told her, counting on my fingers. “Sixteen days from now, it’ll have been thirteen years.”

“Fine, so twelve years, eleven months, and spare change. And there I was, alone at the Forty Steps, down at the end of Narragansett Avenue—”

“What are the Forty Steps?” I asked, and she shook her head again, so I added, “A Georgia redneck, remember?”

Constance made an exasperated sound, and somehow managed to roll her eyes without opening them. “At the east end of Narragansett Avenue, on the Cliffwalk, there’s a granite staircase leading down to a sort of balcony above the sea. Used to be, the steps were wooden, and back in the Gilded Age, the Irish servants from the mansions would gather there for dances and socials and whatever the Irish immigrants called such things. There’s a Gaelic word for it. ”

“Céilí,”I volunteered, and she nodded.

“Ten points to the ignorant redneck dyke from Georgia,” she laughed. “Yeah. Well, so they had their parties at the Forty Steps, to blow off steam, back in the 1880s and 1890s and so on. Nowadays, though, the old wooden steps are gone, and there’s a sturdy red granite staircase enclosed by walls made from blocks of limestone and mortar, so it’s a lot safer. It was still new, in 1995. There’s a name engraved on each step, the name of the person who ponied up the dough to pay for that particular step. It cost something like three thousand dollars a step. And then, from the little balcony — which is probably two-thirds of the way down the cliff — it’s, I don’t know exactly, but I’d guess another twenty or thirty feet down to the rocks and the sea. Far enough you wouldn’t want to fall.”

“Or jump?” I asked. And Constance frowned, and I thought for a second she might even open her eyes.“

Or fucking jump,” she said. “Far enough that if you didn’t die outright, you’d be pretty busted up. I used to sit there on the limestone wall of the balcony, because it’s a good view, and there are lots of fossils in the limestone. That rock didn’t come from anywhere around here, but I don’t know where it did come from. Also, there’s a sea cave, below the south side of the balcony, and it’s great to just sit there and watch the water rushing in and out again. But that day in July 1995, I was just coming down the stairs, and I looked up, off towards Purgatory on the other side of the harbor, and for a second I didn’t see her, just the sea and the far shore—”

“Didn’t see who?” I asked.

“I am absolutely sure that she wasn’t there when I first looked up,” Constance went on, ignoring my question. “And then she was. Like someone throwing a light switch, like a magic trick. She just. appeared.”