Black Water Sister

by Zen Cho

  “I saw it,” said Jess. “But I’m not sure now’s the right time. We’ve only just arrived, Mom’s still getting settled . . . I need to be here for her and Dad.”

  Sharanya’s face fell.

  “I love that you’re so supportive of your parents,” she said earnestly. “But you have to live your own life, Jess. It can’t always be about them. Your parents wouldn’t want you to give up your dreams for them.”

  They wouldn’t want her to move to Singapore to be with her girlfriend whom they didn’t know about either. But Jess didn’t point that out. She didn’t want to keep talking about her parents; it was a topic that always went wrong with Sharanya. She cast around for a distraction.

  “You know, I’ve been having these really weird dreams lately,” she said.

  She told Sharanya about the bizarre things her brain had been up to in the past few weeks. The dreams interested Sharanya less than the voice.

  “You’ve been hearing voices?”

  “It was only one voice,” said Jess.

  Sharanya wasn’t listening. Because she was out to her family, she was making the call from her laptop, sitting at her desk with the door open behind her. Her brother passed by and waved at Jess.

  Sharanya was typing and studying her screen, her brow furrowed in concentration. “This page says stress can cause auditory hallucinations.”

  Jess had undertaken the same hasty internet research into possible sources of the voice. “Hopefully it’s that, and not brain tumors.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s stress, babe,” said Sharanya. “I mean, look at your life. Maybe you should talk to somebody.”

  “I’m talking to you. I’m feeling better already.”

  “You know what I mean. Like, a qualified professional.”

  Jess looked at her unhappily. Sharanya was typing again. Probably looking up qualified professionals Jess could go and see.

  “Do you think I’m going crazy?” said Jess. “I can’t afford to be crazy. My parents have enough mental health issues for the whole family.”

  Sharanya finally looked back at her, though because she was looking at Jess’s face on the screen instead of at the camera, their eyes didn’t exactly meet. Being in an LDR was total bullshit. “You’ve been carrying a lot, Jess.” Her expression was soft, the earlier tension between them forgotten in her concern. Jess wondered, not for the first time, how she’d managed to score someone like her. “This will help.”

  “What’s wrong with repression and denial?” muttered Jess. “It’s been working so far.”

  “The fact you’re hearing voices suggests it isn’t actually working,” said Sharanya. “Hey, there’s a psychiatric clinic in George Town. Is that near you?”

  “It’s Penang,” said Jess. “Everything’s nearby.”

  They managed to come up with a list of places to call, though it was hard to choose between them. There was limited information available online about any of the options.

  “Can you ask around for recommendations?” said Sharanya. “Maybe your aunt . . . ?”

  There was nobody Jess could ask without her parents finding out, and Mom and Dad had enough on their plate. They didn’t need the discovery that Jess was going crazy, even if it was only a little bit crazy and she was dealing with it.

  “I’ll figure it out,” said Jess.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE CALL WITH Sharanya made Jess feel better about things, rooted in the real world. Of course she hadn’t been talking to a ghost. Ghosts weren’t a thing.

  She had every intention of calling the clinics they’d found together, but she had limited opportunities to make a private call during business hours. She didn’t have a car, so she was stuck in Kor Kor’s house, unless her uncle or aunt or dad gave her a ride. She could get a cab, but not without attracting loud reproaches from Kor Kor, who seemed to take it as a personal insult that Jess didn’t want to treat her as a chauffeur.

  It was like being a teenager again, on a weird summer vacation. Without the framework of classes or a job, the days were simultaneously endless and not long enough for all she had to do. There was no need for Mom and Kor Kor to worry about her being idle. Admin ate up all her time. She had to arrange for their stuff to be put in storage, help her parents look for a place they could rent in Penang, and somehow find the time to job hunt amidst all the rest.

  The last task was the worst. She felt guilty when she searched for vacancies in Singapore, and almost as guilty when she stuck to jobs in Malaysia. Every time she clicked on a job ad, it was like being asked to decide between her family and her girlfriend.

  It didn’t help that Kor Kor seemed to think Jess was there on holiday and needed entertaining. Kor Kor’s idea of entertainment was sitting in her living room with a bunch of other retirees talking interminably about people they knew and what property they owned over cups of Lipton tea. Jess couldn’t duck out, since it wasn’t like she had anybody to see or anywhere to go.

  The only silver lining to these auntie salons was that Kor Kor’s friends lived in a completely different world from that constituted by reality. This occasionally proved entertaining.

  “There was something dark right there,” said Auntie Grace, gesturing at the ceiling. She was speaking English, which meant Jess could actually follow her. Her Hokkien was all right, but she couldn’t keep up with the pace of the aunties and uncles’ conversation. “I saw it few days ago.”

  Auntie Grace was the granddaughter of Jess’s paternal great-grandfather’s mistress. She wasn’t actually related to Dad’s side of the family, because she was the product of the mistress’s first marriage to another man. Jess’s great-grandmother had not been enthusiastic about the mistress or her children, which had resulted in an estrangement spanning generations. But it hadn’t been able to survive Kor Kor’s expansive hospitality. Auntie Grace was a regular visitor to the house.

  “Could see out of the corner of my eye,” she went on. “I didn’t dare look directly. But it was like a black cloud like that, hanging there.”

  A frisson went through the assembled guests. The uncles and aunties were all unquestioningly superstitious. They talked about the supernatural with the same mixture of matter-of-fact acceptance and caution with which they discussed politics, and for much the same reason—you never knew who might be listening.

  Kor Kor, owner of the maligned ceiling, shifted in her seat. She obviously wasn’t thrilled by the suggestion that her living room was haunted.

  “Maybe it was dirt,” said Mom, trying to be helpful. “Malaysia so humid, easy to get mold.”

  Everyone raised their eyes to the ceiling. It was spotlessly white.

  “We don’t have mold,” snapped Kor Kor. She turned to Jess, saying, with affected nonchalance, “Your interview with the American company is when ah? Will you have to fly to US?”

  “No,” said Jess. “We’re doing it over Skype. It’s for a job at their KL office.”

  “Not mold,” said Auntie Grace, ignoring Kor Kor’s attempt to change the subject. “I could feel there was something not right.”

  “Choy,” said the aunties and uncles, looking at Kor Kor with pity.

  “If you can feel there’s something not right, why didn’t you tell me?” said Kor Kor.

  “You weren’t there,” said Auntie Grace, wide-eyed. “You went out of the room to talk to the contractor about your toilet. I was alone here and I was so scared! Didn’t dare move. I held my cross”—she touched the silver crucifix on a chain around her neck—“and said the Lord’s Prayer. After pray a few times, then only felt the room was lighter.” She spread her hands, suggesting the dissipation of a presence. “I looked and the shadow went away already.”

  “This house was built when?” said an uncle. “Nineteen seventies? I tell my children, never buy an old house. You never know what’s inside.”
>
  “Last week your husband had fever, right?” said Auntie Grace to Kor Kor. “For all you know, there is some issue. I can ask my pastor to come here. Pastor Cheah, when he prays, you can really feel God’s presence!”

  “I can ask my pastor to come also,” said Kor Kor. “But there is no reason for us to be scared of this kind of thing. We are all Christians.”

  “Not everybody here is Christian,” said Auntie Grace. She gave Jess’s mom a pointed look.

  The moment God had entered the conversation, Mom had exited it. She was discussing the stock market with an uncle and showed no sign of having heard Auntie Grace.

  Undeterred, Auntie Grace raised her voice. “You’re not Christian yet, right, Poey Hoon?”

  “Poey Hoon Chee is a freethinker,” said Kor Kor.

  Auntie Grace nodded sagely. “When you are in between—not here not there—you’re more likely to attract these things. You got feel or not, something following you?”

  Mom said stiffly, “I am lucky. This kind of thing, I cannot sense one.”

  Jess had been enjoying the conversation, but her enjoyment dried up at Mom’s expression.

  “When you talk about attracting things, what kind of things do you mean, auntie?” she said.

  She’d noticed that everyone had avoided naming what they were actually talking about. Sure enough, Auntie Grace looked uncomfortable.

  “You know . . .” Auntie Grace glanced at Mom, who gave her no help. She switched from English to Hokkien. “Lasam eh mikia. Dirty things.”

  “But you said it wasn’t dirt,” said Jess in English.

  “No, not dirt,” said Auntie Grace. “I mean, those things, it’s not so nice to talk about. You don’t want it in your house.”

  Jess drew her eyebrows together. “Like flies?”

  Auntie Grace was starting to look desperate. “No, not flies. Some people call aoboey kong.”

  “No lah,” disagreed an uncle. “Aoboey kong is different. Aoboey kong is a god. People pray to aoboey kong to keep them out.”

  “What is aoboey kong?” said Jess. She rummaged in her rusty store of Hokkien. “The god at the back?”

  “Yes, a god,” said the uncle. “Sits by the back door there, protecting the house. Good things come in from the front one mah, right? From the back, it’s all the not-so-good things, the floating things. You need a guardian to protect you from them. Aoboey kong is the guardian.”

  “Some people call the other things aoboey kong also,” Auntie Grace insisted. “Nicer to say.”

  “Could be, could be,” said an auntie peaceably. “People give different-different names. Some say ‘ho hia ti.’ Means the same thing.”

  Jess sat up, forgetting to look innocent. “People call ghosts ‘good brothers’?”

  The word “ghosts” sent a ripple of unease through the group. Kor Kor gave Jess a sharp look.

  “Less scary to say ‘good brothers’ mah,” said Kor Kor. “People don’t like to talk about spirits directly. But this house doesn’t have such things, so you all don’t need to worry.”

  Her tone said the discussion was over.

  Jess decided not to push her luck. She was feeling a little shaken herself.

  This changed nothing, she told herself. She must have known that ghosts were referred to as “good brothers” in Hokkien, even if she hadn’t consciously remembered it. The raspy voice hadn’t told her anything she didn’t know, because it was impossible for a voice in her head to belong to anyone but Jess herself.

  Given what her family was like, it was no wonder her brain had decided to interpret her stress-induced auditory hallucinations as the rantings of a ghost. It was true Mom and Dad never talked about ghosts or spirits. They weren’t especially pious and they tended to be wary of people who were. Their approach to religion was to leave the gods alone, in the hope the gods would return the favor.

  But superstition was built into their worldview. A fundamental belief in the supernatural had permeated the home Jess had grown up in. Despite her Western acculturation, it was one of the things she’d absorbed passively from her upbringing, like a taste for spicy food and a familiarity with Cantopop standards. Officially she didn’t believe in ghosts, but part of her wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

  Over the next couple of days, her unease faded. The voice didn’t make a reappearance, and she was feeling OK. She’d managed to persuade herself that the voice had been a one-off—a weird side effect of jet lag—when the dreams started up again.

  They weren’t like the ones she’d been having before. In these new dreams, she was herself, with only her own burdens to bear—no screaming baby or household chores. There were no longer any rubber plantations or old-fashioned bathrooms with water tanks instead of showers. Instead, she was always in Kor Kor’s house.

  Yet she wasn’t quite her waking self. Her vision was hazy, her center of balance altered. She stumbled around rooms that should have been familiar, bruising herself against furniture, stubbing her toes on doors. It was like she’d forgotten how to be in her body.

  She didn’t do much in these dreams. Only wandered around the quiet dark house, touching things, sometimes lifting them with great care. She didn’t want to break anything, or give away her presence. She needed this time to work things out.

  She always woke up exhausted.

  She remembered the voice saying, Who do you think has been sending you all those dreams? But she pushed the memory away, squashing down the accompanying panic.

  There was no need for an esoteric explanation of the dreams. In her waking life Jess felt like a tiny baby deer staggering around, perpetually on the verge of fucking things up irreparably. In the dreams, she was confused by things she knew, unable to master her own body. You didn’t have to be Freud to work out the connection.

  Still, after the third wandering-around-the-house dream, Jess finally rang the numbers Sharanya had found and booked an appointment. She didn’t have health insurance, but she had some money saved up from photography jobs that her parents had refused to touch, and she’d benefit from the exchange rate. She’d be able to afford one session, at least. As for how she’d pay for more—and how she’d get to her appointment without her family finding out—she’d figure that out later.

  THREE

  Jess rose early for a job interview the next day. She was recuperating over a mug of Milo when her aunt came in from the garden.

  “Min, you’re up already?” said Kor Kor, glancing at the clock. She started working in her garden at six thirty every morning, when it wasn’t even light out yet, so as to get in as much gardening as she could before it got hot.

  “Skype interview.” Jess rubbed her eyes. Last night’s wandering-around-the-house dream had been especially long and tedious. She felt exhausted, even though she’d gone to bed at nine. “It was a guy in KL and his boss in California.”

  “Ah, your interview! Forgot it was today,” said Kor Kor. “How was it? You made Milo, is it? Very good!” She said it as though pouring hot water on chocolate powder was an amazing feat of cooking. “You want to try chicken biscuit? Auntie Poh Eng brought from Seremban.

  “You must eat. Gives you energy,” she said when Jess tried to refuse. “Not good you’re still suffering from jet lag. How long since you came back—two weeks?”

  “Almost, yeah,” said Jess.

  It felt like longer. Her time in Malaysia felt like a dream. She couldn’t quite make herself believe that she wasn’t going to wake up to her real life in America.

  Something niggled at her. What was it Kor Kor had said?

  “I’m not suffering from jet lag,” said Jess, but she was so out of it doubt crept up on her. “Am I?”

  “So long already and you’re still waking up at two a.m.,” said Kor Kor. “You scared me. I thought must be a burglar. Otherwise why got people moving around the house in the middle of
the night?”

  Jess hadn’t stirred till her alarm went off at five. “I didn’t wake up at two a.m.”

  But Kor Kor had the typical auntie trait of being better at talking than listening.

  “I didn’t know your Hokkien is so good!” she said. “Can beat your cousins any day. Kor Tiao and I spoke English to them when they were small. Didn’t want them to be confused. We thought English is better—they’ll be able to read books, watch TV all that. Nowadays they say good for children to learn different languages when they’re small . . . Aiyah, back then we didn’t know!” She sighed. “Ching Yee they all can speak, but can order food and get around only. Not to your level.”

  Jess spoke Hokkien haltingly, liberally mixed with English, and only ever to her parents. Her first thought was that Kor Kor must have confused her with someone else.

  “I can’t speak that well,” she said. She saw that Kor Kor took her self-deprecation as a social nicety, expected and meaningless. “Uh, when were we speaking Hokkien?”

  “When you woke up in the night,” said Kor Kor. “You don’t remember?”

  “I didn’t wake up last night,” Jess repeated, but her certainty faltered under Kor Kor’s surprised gaze.

  An indistinct image surfaced in her mind. Her own feet, going down the stairs, step by step . . . But that had been part of the dream, hadn’t it?

  Or had it? Other sensations returned to her. Making her way around a dark room, running her hand over a countertop, feeling cool tiles under the bare soles of her feet. A light had come on, the harsh glare startling her. Kor Kor’s voice had said, “You’re awake, Min? Why you didn’t on the light?”

  Jess passed a hand over her face, unnerved. “I forgot.”

  “We talked for so long some more!” said Kor Kor. “Must be you really went back to sleep afterwards. That’s good. At your age you shouldn’t take so long to adapt. My children, after a few days they’re OK already—no more hangover.”