“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I won’t go.”
“Promise.”
We linked pinkies. The glow that radiated from her fingers never landed on mine. I wanted to cry but I didn’t. I didn’t believe her. I wanted to believe her.
◊
At the mouth of the banana orchard, I turned and checked for the third time to see that none of the foreigners were filming. I wouldn’t let them make a movie about my sister the ghost. I’d let her kill the entire crew before I did that.
“You’re certain your sister is here,” said Kao, fidgeting with the threads looped around his arms. I had wrapped the whole crew from wrist to elbow before we’d left.
“Her spirit or her body,” I said. “Or both.”
I still wanted to believe that there was no body, that Sopha had shed the world of Psaodung like the rest of us shed clothes, but she wouldn’t be an ap if something worse hadn’t happened to her. Angry ghosts didn’t come out of nowhere. Girls who escaped their fears didn’t wreak vengeance on foreign film crews.
One of the men called out that he’d found something. I followed the sound of his voice, but he was dead when I got to him. The ghost light was sun-bright around me, crackling down my spine until my limbs felt stiff, but I still couldn’t see the spirit that had killed the foreigner.
Kao caught up to me. Seeing the dead man, he cursed in English and then in Khmer. “We need to get out of here.”
“No,” I said. “She’s here. Do you have a knife?”
When I cut the strings from my wrists, the orchard changed. The ghost lights were brighter now, bigger, focused around faces and bodies. They were people but they were wrong. Their features shifted so their faces drooped to one side. Their mouths opened too wide or their sockets had no eyes. Their hands hung down past their knees; their legs ended in toeless clumps. In the dark, I could see them and only them. Hands came out to grab me, teeth showed, and I realized the spirits didn’t care if my sister was a haunted child.
Then they gave way and there was Sopha: sharp incisors gleaming out of her crimson mouth, viscera pulsing like a fish on a spinal line. Her light opened a path through the orchard for me and I stepped through, towards Sopha, then towards what used to be Sopha but wasn’t Sopha any longer.
Sopha’s body had been lying in the grass beneath the banana trees for so long that she should have been gone, but an ap needed a corpse to climb back into when the sun rose. Her spirit had kept her body from disintegrating. Mak’s silver earrings still glinted in her ears. Pink rubber shoes still stuck to her feet. In the banana orchard, my sister was still eleven years old.
“Sopha,” I said. “I’m here to take you home.”
I knew she couldn’t talk to me. I didn’t really think she would. But my eyes still stung when she disappeared, darkening the orchard, pulling the other ghosts away with her.
◊
I went back to the banana orchard in the morning, my wrists bare. The film crew had mashed the undergrowth into a path I could easily follow. Sopha was still lying where she’d been lying for thirteen years, and in the sunlight, she was not a body, she was only my sister.
I carried her out of the orchard, slung over my shoulder. I had planned to conceal her body in a rice sack, but seeing her, I changed my mind. I had also planned to bury her discreetly behind our house. If our neighbors caught me with the perfectly preserved body of a girl many years dead, they would believe that I too was haunted. Already I was wearing white, I had shaved my head, one look at me would reveal that I was mourning someone. But I gave myself up completely and took Sopha to the middle of Psaodung.
The sun had risen an hour ago and the well was crowded. I saw the faces of my neighbors through a veil of sun glare and dust, their shock, their confusion, and they were like something I was dreaming. I felt only distantly afraid. This walk into the center of Psaodung was just another climb across a bundle of electrified wires, and Sopha was still leading me.
By now I had an audience. Half the village at least, men coming in from the riverbanks, children stopping on their way to school. Ming standing on the ladder to our stilt-house, open-mouthed. The film crew, stumbling over themselves to find their cameras before my shovel hit the dust. They were still filming when I finished digging Sopha’s grave and walked away.
I never saw the foreigners’ movie, and I still don’t know whose story they told. But Ming told me they dropped three sacks of rice at our house before they left Psaodung. She didn’t refuse, she said she couldn’t. Pride has always been too precious for us to afford.
Thin Places
The knock on the schoolhouse door came an hour after dismissal, and Miss Augusta hesitated for a moment before answering. She had never met the child who stood on the threshold, but she knew already that the girl’s name was Lilianne Eisner, that she had arrived in Branaugh only yesterday, and that she was not supposed to be attending school with the other children. This information had come to Miss Augusta courtesy of numerous letters, hand-delivered by children on behalf of their parents. We are concerned, they had begun. We trust that you will act accordingly. By trust, Miss Augusta suspected, they meant, will be watching to see that you do. The girl needed to be sent home at once, and yet Miss Augusta could not find words delicate and sharp enough for the purpose. Instead she found herself opening the door wider.
“You must be the new lighthouse-keeper’s daughter,” she said.
The girl did not reply. Her eyes were large and dark in her pale face, and she did not blink. Feeling that the child would have the upper hand as long as they remained on the threshold, Miss Augusta stepped aside. “Why don’t you come in?”
Lilianne obeyed, collapsing dreamily into a desk at the back of the room. Uncertain what to make of her, Miss Augusta hesitantly returned to the chalkboard she had been scrubbing and recommenced her work. “How far had you gone in school? Back—there?” she inquired after a moment, handling the final word as if it were something slippery and repellent.
Competing stories of the there had fascinated Branaugh for the past weeks, building to a fever of anticipation in the final days before the new lighthouse-keeper’s arrival. No one knew the truth of his origins, for only a name had emerged from the silvery viscera of the fish that the Widow Clary read, and, later, the position of the moon indicating the date on which the lighthouse-keeper would come. No one had foreseen a wife and daughter coming with him, nor the dark and decidedly foreign cast of his appearance.
The girl did not reply to the question, at first. Miss Augusta began to wonder if she could speak. Then, presently, came the words, “Third form, miss.”
The notion of forms being an unfamiliar one, Miss Augusta fetched a slate and a piece of chalk and asked the child to write her name, then dictated a series of exercises to her. “Seventh grade,” Miss Augusta pronounced when the girl finished, smiling to indicate that she should be pleased, and then she sent Lilianne Eisner into the lingering dusk, feeling that she had done as well as she possibly could in her handling of the lighthouse-keeper’s daughter.
Before the Eisners had arrived, Miss Augusta had prided herself on abstaining from gossip, feeling virtuous and superior as she hushed vicious half-formed rumors in the schoolhouse or politely changed the subject at the grocer’s counter. Now she went directly to the grocer with a shopping list she’d scrawled for the sake of appearances, feeling she must immediately make it known that the lighthouse-keeper’s daughter would be attending school alongside the children of Branaugh. Otherwise, she feared, the information would be somehow her secret, concealed deliberately and maliciously.
In the few minutes required to choose and purchase a filet of whitefish, Miss Augusta allowed Mr. Tillman the grocer to gather all the details of her encounter with the lighthouse-keeper’s daughter. As he poked and prodded at the few details she initially volunteered, Miss Augusta feigned reticence, glanced meaningfully over her shoulder at the women lingering within earshot, then let herself be persuaded to
divulge everything.
Mr. Tillman gratefully expressed the appropriate amount of shock at the child’s ghostly twilight intrusion, at her strange quietness, at the negligence of any mother who let a young girl go wandering so close to dusk. Before Miss Augusta was out the door, the story had already reached Mrs. O’Neill, who was certain to tell Mr. O’Neill, who would be on the docks come morning with half the men in Branaugh. Miss Augusta had withheld nothing besides the child’s acuity in reading and arithmetic. She sensed this information would only provoke resentment, and found, somewhat unexpectedly, that she did not want Lilianne Eisner to be resented.
◊
The other children were wary of the stranger among their ranks, as Lilianne was wary of them. She spoke only when directly addressed. She took no part in schoolyard games and would not perform the recitations of facts and numbers that consumed most of the school day. Only one subject commanded her full attention, and that was history. She listened to the lectures with her head tilted slightly to the side, her brow furrowed.
The history of Branaugh was but a well-worn catechism to Miss Augusta and to the other children, an almost ceremonial gesture beside the more urgent matters of multiplication and grammar. Yet the look of terrified wonder on the girl’s face as she listened made Miss Augusta hesitate sometimes, her tongue stumbling on words she’d spoken hundreds of times across her life. At the end of December, after the wild night when all Branaugh danced beneath the brightly glowing eye of the lighthouse, the girl came to Miss Augusta’s desk with her eyes swimming, holding her slate in a white-knuckled grasp.
“Is everything you say in the history lessons true, miss?” she said.
Miss Augusta had anticipated with dread the conversation she would have to have with Lilianne since the moment she saw the child’s spectral face staring down from the lighthouse tower. Seeing Lilianne and her father watch them, Miss Augusta had stepped for a moment outside herself and realized how they must all look to strangers. The savagery of their ritual joy.
The old lighthouse-keeper would have stayed indoors. Perhaps in midsummer Lilianne Eisner’s father would do the same, now that he knew. But that night, he had watched and so had the little girl. Stranger still, his wife had come outside and danced as if she belonged to Branaugh, although she so visibly did not, with her dark hair loose, her garments thin, her feet bare on the frost. Miss Augusta suspected that the girl was not nearly so troubled by the dance as she was by her own mother’s participation.
Miss Augusta could not comfort Lilianne, at least not truthfully, so instead she dabbed at the girl’s wet eyes with a handkerchief and asked what she meant, expecting an inquiry about the island’s winter death and summer life, the imperative for bi-yearly dancing, the wildness that consumed them all on those ritual nights.
“The thin places,” Lilianne said, instead. “I think I found one. I think I live inside one.”
◊
Miss Augusta had ceased to be entirely a person when she became a schoolteacher. She had surrendered any hopes of marriage, even of close friendship. She was to walk the well-trodden road laid out by schoolteachers past, from bright young novice to weathered schoolmarm, and then fill a casket remarkably like her predecessor’s. To this fate she had already resigned herself. The sound of a knock on her door was only a shock, not a pleasure.
When Miss Augusta opened the door, Mrs. O’Neill was smiling apologetically from the threshold. She had a loaf of bread wrapped in cloth, a quiet and devastating gesture of her pessimism about Miss Augusta’s hostessly preparedness. She was not wrong; Miss Augusta had nothing fresh, certainly nothing suitable for the occasion. Still, the assumption stung.
“I assume you have preserves,” she said while Miss Augusta stared ponderously down at the lump of cloth.
“Of course,” Miss Augusta said. “Of course I do. Come inside. This is such a lovely surprise. Really, just lovely.” She led her visitor through the narrow foyer to the crowded little kitchen. Mrs. O’Neill seated herself while Miss Augusta filled the tea kettle and slathered a thick greyish paste across two slices of bread, scraping the sides of her last jar. Harvest would not come again for months, but she would not let Mrs. O’Neill think she needed to scrimp.
“It’s lovely to see you,” she said, her back still facing the woman. “You know, Evelyn is such a wonderful student.”
When Miss Augusta turned with the tea-tray in her hands, Mrs. O’Neill’s face was hard. “Evelyn tells me you haven’t been teaching Branaugh’s history for the past two weeks.”
Miss Augusta forced herself to set the teacups down without spilling. “That’s true,” she managed, adapting the same steadfast posture she took with the unruly older boys in the back of the classroom. “I’ve been paying attention to their reading. A few of them—Evelyn included, I’m sorry to say—have fallen behind.”
“The lighthouse-keeper’s girl is quite a strange little thing, I hear,” Mrs. O’Neill said in the decisive tone of one barreling past a small and insubstantial obstacle. “I knew as soon as I heard she was enrolling in school that she would be trouble, and I am only surprised it took so long for me to be proven right. Did her mother protest? Was that the trouble?”
“Not at all,” Miss Augusta said. “I’ve never met the woman.” She could not, in fact, even think of the lighthouse-keeper’s wife without seeing her wild dance, her bare feet, her disheveled hair. Whatever Mrs. Eisner had been before she had come to Branaugh, she was not quite that thing anymore. “I haven’t met the father, either,” she continued. “And Lilianne Eisner is perfectly well-behaved.”
Mrs. O’Neill seemed to take pity on her, then. “I know,” she said, “what a sense of duty you must feel to help that child. How, being childless yourself, you must develop some, well, attachment to a girl who is not being well-mothered. But you know as well as anyone that the children of Branaugh must be taught how to care for their island. Even if it frightens the Eisner girl. Even if it upsets her. She is not the subject of those lessons.” She leaned across the table and laid her hand on Miss Augusta’s. “Dismiss her from your classroom, Augusta. Don’t let this go further.”
“I’m afraid I have an errand to run,” Miss Augusta said, standing abruptly and wrenching her hand out from under Mrs. O’Neill’s. “I’m so sorry to run out on you like this. It really isn’t like me. So few visitors. I’m very grateful. I suppose I’ll see you around the grocer’s very soon.”
Mrs. O’Neill remained seated. Miss Augusta was clearing the threshold of her own front door when she heard the woman say, “Branaugh will come back to life soon. And what will you say to the Eisner girl then?”
◊
All the children of Branaugh knew that the island changed sometime between February and May. If they were too small to remember the preceding year’s changes, they at least remembered the bright insipid little rhyme whose words they intoned sometimes with ritual solemnity, other times in a succession of joyful screams:
Thickening, thickening, filling the crack,
The sun comes out, the water goes back.
White stars in the night, red rain in the day
There’s grass on the shore, there’s fish in the bay.
The children reincarnated the song each year before the end of January, and never let it rest until each line had come to fruition. Miss Augusta had sung the song in her own schooldays, clasping hands with the other girls in the schoolyard; she could not do anything besides bear it patiently now. Yet she was sorry to see how Lilianne Eisner absorbed the words with terror and bewilderment, making the same face that she made during history lessons. By mid-February, she had begun avoiding the schoolyard in order to avoid hearing the song. At midday recess, she sat prodding at her food until Miss Augusta called the class back to order. At the end of the day, she hung back to help clean the chalkboard or the slates, whatever she was permitted to do, as long as she could stay until all the other children had gone.
Miss Augusta dispensed these unnecessary aft
er-school chores to Lilianne in a show of sympathy, because she had no power to do anything more, because she thought Lilianne was getting pale and sickly-looking, her glossy dark abundance of hair thinning. Lurid theories about the lighthouse-keeper’s domestic life circulated Branaugh, staples at the grocer as reliably as salt or flour. Some believed the wife was a violent hysteric, and her misbehavior had forced the family into exile from wherever they’d originally come. Others blamed the father, with his dark-lensed little spectacles and over-fine clothes, certain that he must harbor pretensions beyond lighthouse-keeping, that he must be continually shoving his work off onto the poor frail-nerved wife and daughter.
Miss Augusta had not wanted to credit any of those stories before. Now Lilianne’s eyelids sagged wearily, and she wore her hair in disheveled plaits that unsuccessfully covered a coin-sized bald spot on the crown of her head. When Miss Augusta dismissed the girl each night, she always felt morbidly certain that she had seen the last of Lilianne: that somewhere between the schoolyard and the lighthouse, the girl would simply crumple into the earth like a wilting flower.
Miss Augusta did not want to see Lilianne wilt. At the very least, she did not want to feel responsible for the wilting. If she could interfere in some way, she would feel that she was guiltless in the matter, whatever happened. But she did not want to be dragged in too deeply. She waited to make her overtures of concern until an afternoon when Lilianne scrubbed the chalkboard with unusual strength and quickness, appearing at least a little revived. “Lilianne,” Miss Augusta said, coaxingly, “would you tell me, if you had trouble at home?”
The question had been framed carefully, to avoid receiving any answer besides yes, miss or there’s no trouble, miss, or another suitably benign substitute. But still Miss Augusta stood in a fugue of terror while she waited for the girl’s answer, knowing she had opened herself to the possibility of hearing a real plea for help that would have to be answered.
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