This house isn’t haunted, has never been, but that will change when, some years from now, I will sometimes feel a chill, and sometimes I will feel alone, and sometimes a voice will say, “Who are you and what have you done with Donna?” And I will try to respond, but I won’t know who Donna is, won’t even know a Donna. I fear I might someday learn.
With time, the chills will grow more pervasive and the loneliness will become crushing, though I will have no reason to feel lonely, have never even been the lonely type. I will tell myself these are not signs of a haunting—it’s something else. Even the incessant, irritating repetition of the name Donna won’t mean the house is haunted, but I will gradually come to accept that the house will, in fact, be haunted, though at present, it still isn’t.
To be clear, I don’t believe I will ever meet a Donna, nor do I believe that a Donna will ever live in this house, at least not while I am living in this house. The Donna the voice will ask after, I suspect, will be from before my time, will be some residual memory. That will mean the house has actually always been haunted, and the ghost dormant. Or maybe the ghost will have arrived at the wrong house.
With time, I will begin to expect Donna. Despite not then, or perhaps ever, knowing anyone named Donna, I will begin to wonder where Donna has gone, why she isn’t here. I will try to imagine what she looked like, how she might inhabit a room—curled in the corner armchair? Sitting straight-backed at the kitchen table? Would she boil water for tea at the stove or pace in front of the window, smoking, letting ash drop on the floor?
Donna is gone. Of that I am now sure. She is supposed to be here. Should be there, curled up on a chair in the corner of the room beneath the light of a single lamp, reading Ernaux or Gombrowicz or solving the Times Sunday crossword, brushing a strand of her short blonde bob out of her face, sipping coffee from a handmade mug she bought from a local artisan, even in the evening when she knows the caffeine will only keep her up.
One night, before bed, as I place a bookmark in a volume of Cortázar short stories, I am compelled to say, “Good night, Donna,” and when I look up across the room from the sofa where I sit, I see her there, curled in the chair across the room beneath the light of a single lamp, a book spread open on her chest as she dozes. But this is not, cannot possibly, be Donna. I don’t know how I know this, but it’s true.
Later that night, the voice will stop asking after Donna. There will be no Donna; there never was. There will be only a girl who reads in the corner chair, Ernaux or Gombrowicz, I think, and who sometimes works the Times Sunday crossword, though I’ll have already completed it. She will trace over my letters, correct my rare mistake. Her name will not be Donna. She won’t ever speak, but when I say “Donna,” she will look through me, confused, make a sound like a star dying and return to the crossword.
Though she will resemble an apparition, the woman in the house who is not Donna will not be a ghost—the house had not been previously and will, in the future, be not haunted. At night when I go to sleep, I will not feel the presence of anyone but myself, even though the woman who is not Donna will be reading in the next room. I will wonder if when I awake, the woman who isn’t Donna will be there still. She will always still be there.
During my waking hours, the woman who isn’t Donna will read her book while I pace the room. She won’t be anything, will be mist, the subtlest whiff of peat, the quiet rustling of cotton on cotton. When I try to touch her shoulder, I will feel nothing. Soon, the existence of this very house will come into question. I will try to touch my home’s southern wall, try to pick at the carpet with my fingernail, try to jiggle the loose knob on the bathroom door—I will feel nothing. In the house that will no longer be there, I will kneel down before the woman who isn’t there, who isn’t Donna, and beg her to tell me something honest, something real. She will open her mouth to speak.