Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  8.

  I had an especially brutal case of the flu that spread through my first grade class. On the night my fever came, I thrashed in bed and knotted the sheets, my body doused in sweat. I sobbed in that way sick kids do: snot all over my face, eyelashes soaked, dramatic hiccups. My eardrums pulsed with an infection. At five, I had no idea what was happening.

  What if I die? I asked my mother.

  She tried to soothe me back to sleep. I leaned into her chest. She wore her usual nightgown, an oversized T-shirt printed with Garfield’s face, his mouth hanging open near a thick slice of lasagna. She broke from me to confront my father, who stood by the doorway.

  Lo Gung, she hissed. The hall’s fluorescent light flooded my bedroom. I cried louder. My father had insisted the day before that my parents didn’t need to waste money or time bringing me to a doctor, since my body would take care of this flu on its own.

  Do something. Your daughter is sick, my mother said. We were always his children whenever she demanded he have more urgency—or any urgency.

  Do something, she said again. She hurried back to me.

  I did not know this then, but my parents had recently filed for bankruptcy. Lotus Garden had shuttered. Properties that my father bought decades before were vacant, or he could not collect rent and was finding himself—and our family—deeper in debt. Credit card companies sent my mother stern letters canceling her accounts. She saved each one and stacked them on her desk as reminders. Though she had recently started a new job at Aetna, she was struggling to stretch her new salary to caulk our family’s financial wounds.

  My mother’s eyebrows, plucked to near extinction, pinched together.

  I turned to her and wrapped my arms around her neck.

  I’m sorry I’m not better, I said. I’m sorry I was born.

  I bawled.

  Don’t say that, she said. Never say that. We worked so hard to have you.

  * * *

  About three years before my birth, my mother discovered she was pregnant with her third child. When the ultrasound revealed the baby would be a boy, she and my father were elated. My mother especially understood from her childhood that in Chinese families—hers, at least—baby boys were always beloved.

  My mother settled on the name Jonathan, which Steph and Caroline picked. She thought that if her daughters chose their brother’s name—if she spoke frequently about him—it would help the transition.

  They’d have someone new to look after, she constantly reminded them. Caroline wouldn’t be the baby anymore. She was a big girl and had a lot to teach her little brother. And Caroline, who was born in December, would share her birth month with him. He’d be the year of the dragon, which was particularly auspicious. My mother was always invoking our zodiac signs to confirm or disprove our behaviors, and she assured Steph and Caroline that dragons got along well with dogs and pigs.

  I can imagine our mother driving Steph and Caroline to Lotus Garden to meet our father. He’d been there since five p.m., after his shift at a nearby power plant. He bused tables and checked the kitchen inventory.

  In the car, our mother turned to her girls and told them the news: You two have to be good girls, OK? We’re going to have a little boy in the family now. You have to teach him to be as good as you, right?

  My sisters nodded.

  OK, Gah Leen? She asked Caroline, who stared out the window.

  OK, Mommy, Caroline said.

  Wun Lee, is that OK with you? She tried to meet Steph’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  Yes, Steph said back.

  My sisters will not have a chance to be the older siblings to Jonathan that my mother had hoped. But the fact that my Chinese name, Gah Lee, is a mix of theirs, and that they chose my name, Katelin, tells me my mother must have prepared them for my arrival in a similar way. (It will be Caroline who—sometime in high school—comes up with my nickname, Kat, because she thinks it is hilarious when combined with our last name.)

  * * *

  In the middle of the night as the rest of the family slept, my mother’s uterus began to cramp. It was only month seven of her pregnancy. She shook my father awake.

  Lo Gung, she said. It’s happening.

  From here, my family’s memories diverge.

  When I speak to my father about that night, he can’t recall much of what happened next, just that he brought her to Saint Francis Hospital, where they had originally planned for Jonathan’s delivery. My father doesn’t remember making arrangements for my sisters.

  Caroline is sure that someone—a babysitter?—came in the middle of the night to watch over them.

  Steph recalls that one of my father’s relatives, a woman in her seventies, had lived with them for a few months. My parents’ full-time jobs, plus their attempt to salvage Lotus Garden, left my sisters at home often with this aunt. My sisters mostly remember that this aunt usually lived with my father’s family in Chicago and that she once insisted they eat their cereal with orange juice.

  When my parents arrived at Saint Francis, they learned that my mother’s doctor was vacationing in Florida. The resident physician was flustered. What should he do? Should he try to deliver the baby this early? It would have to be by Caesarean section. Should he wait? The resident insisted he reach the attending before making any decisions.

  Nobody at the hospital had expected this.

  After hours of prolonging my mother’s delivery, the doctor and nurses pulled her into an operating room. Jonathan was born within minutes.

  My father says that the pediatrician tasked with keeping Jonathan alive was excellent at his job. My mother had told my father this; when she worked at Saint Francis as a medical technician, she’d heard of this doctor. But the doctor must have known that Jonathan, frail and in crisis from the start, would not survive.

  Jonathan died at one thirty p.m. He was alive for only an hour and fifty-six minutes.

  He’s dead, my mother sobbed. She balled a pillow and heaved it across the room at a nurse. I know this detail because it is the only one I recall my mother telling me about Jonathan, and I never asked any questions. I was afraid to confront the possibility that had my brother not died, I wouldn’t have been born—and that just talking to my mother about her son would trigger her regret and render me a mistake. How strange it is to think about my existence as a debt to my dead baby brother.

  * * *

  You said Jonathan was alive for a couple hours, I ask my father over the phone one afternoon. Do you remember what Mommy did during those hours he was alive?

  He pauses.

  She was in the bed in the hospital, he says finally. My mother held Jonathan for a little while, cooing and crying at the sight of his tiny form. And then: The doctor just brought him to me to hold on to him because he knew he wasn’t going to survive.

  How did the doctor know he wasn’t going to survive?

  Probably from experience.

  Did the doctor tell you?

  At first, I didn’t want to hold it. My father ignores my question. And the doctor said, ‘Oh, that’s OK. You can hold him.’

  His use of it is likely a vestige of Cantonese being his first language; it does not distinguish pronouns in the same way as English. Still, the way it turns my brother into something inanimate makes me flinch.

  Why didn’t you want to hold him?

  Maybe my father thought that holding the son he knew would die would be too burdensome.

  He was premature, my father says. I wanted the doctor to take care of him. Probably, he handled a lot of premature babies and he knew the chance of survival was not that great. It was a long time ago, so I think right now the technology improved by a lot.

  He sounds wistful, like he’s wondering what might have happened today. But it is hard, nearly impossible, for me to know definitively what my father thinks.

  I ask him how he told Steph and Caroline about Jonathan’s death. His response comes fast:

  We just tell them, he says. When it’s dead, it’s
dead.

  I say nothing for a few beats.

  Do you think about Jonathan a lot? I ask.

  Well. Sometimes.

  Really? What do you think?

  If it’s not going to be, it’s not going to be, he says. What can you do?

  But what do you think about him, when you do think about him?

  My father is quiet for so long that I worry our call has disconnected, or that he’s grown tired of this conversation and hung up.

  Daddy? When you think about Jonathan, what do you think about? I shift in my seat. I am sitting at my desk in my apartment in D.C., watching out the window as elementary-aged children chase one another on a school playground across the street. My father is probably in the family room on the couch with his feet propped up on an ottoman, surrounded by the books and grocery store flyers he’s meant to look through for months.

  Just normal things, you know? But then since he didn’t survive, there’s nothing I can do.

  But what’s ‘normal things’? Like what you’d do if he was alive?

  You know, normal things. What baby boys will do.

  Like what?

  Probably, well, I didn’t think so far ahead, he says. Just the small things, when they’re young.

  I ask him more questions—What do you imagine your son to be like? What would you want to do with him now?—but his answers shrink, the pauses in our conversation lengthening. I want to know if the way he would father a son would be different from how he has fathered me.

  * * *

  On the morning after Jonathan’s birth and death, Steph and Caroline climbed out of bed and scurried downstairs to look for our parents. They were still gone, my sisters discovered. Our aunt tried to run them through their morning routine—sit down, eat breakfast, get washed, get dressed. But Steph and Caroline weren’t interested. They were distracted and wanted to play.

  That’s when our aunt told them the news.

  BB sai lo, she told my sisters.

  Steph was stunned. She thought it was a cruel joke and punishment for her and Caroline misbehaving that morning. How could baby Jonathan be dead?

  Hours later, our father brought my sisters to Saint Francis. They took one look at our mother, her body bandaged, and they knew our aunt had told the truth.

  * * *

  Steph and Caroline remember Jonathan’s wake the most clearly. My father, at first, forgets that it happened at all. He insists he and my mother immediately had Jonathan’s remains cremated, though that wouldn’t happen for another fifteen years. In Steph’s memory, We hear the baby died, and then we bury him.

  At Jonathan’s wake, my mother tried to drape herself over Jonathan’s casket. She reached for his head. She tried to bring her nose to his. In Caroline’s recollection, he was impossibly blue and gray. My mother wanted to trace the shape of his mouth and cheeks and his infinitely small self. But Yi Ma and a cousin pinned her hands to her sides and herded her from the casket. They did so gently; my mother’s body was still tender and healing from the incisions. She yanked from their grip and grasped for her son, howling. Steph says that our family stood watch, unsure how to console my mother, whose grief had split her open.

  Later that day, my family buried Jonathan at the Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, about a ten-minute drive from our house. They chose a plot at the top of a hill. They inscribed his tombstone, a modest one that lay flat, including his middle name: Love.

  * * *

  I’ve asked my family many times why Jonathan died.

  He just came too early seems to be the consensus.

  But when I sift through some family records from my father, I discover a copy of Jonathan’s death certificate. My brother’s cause of death is listed as tracheal agenesis. It is a rare condition where the windpipe fails to develop. It often results in premature birth and, usually, death.

  I am perplexed; this answer had been so easy to find, and yet it upends the story my family had always maintained about Jonathan’s death. I’d assumed that a lack of proper medical attention killed my brother—the doctor on vacation in Florida, the inexperienced resident. I had never considered the possibility that from the start, Jonathan only had a slim chance of survival.

  At the bottom of his death certificate, there is a stamped date from when my parents had requested this particular copy. January 10, 1991. Just a moment earlier, I had come across this same stamp and date on my own birth certificate. Only a few months after I was born—and a little more than two years after Jonathan’s passing—my parents must have visited the health department and requested these records, celebrating one child’s birth and honoring another’s death.

  My father recently told me that after Jonathan died, my gung gung warned my mother against trying to have another baby.

  Two children is enough, he told his daughter. Your body is not strong. Don’t risk it.

  That my mother chose to have me—despite her aches and her father’s wishes—seeds in me a worry that perhaps my birth weakened something within her; my body taking from hers. I want to tell myself that this is irrational. But my mother’s own entry into this world, regarded with fearful apprehension, seems to be a family prognosis.

  * * *

  For years after Jonathan’s death, my sisters and I accompanied our mother to Cedar Hill, stopping first at the large pond near the cemetery’s entrance. I’m not sure where our father was; he’s often absent from memories like these, and I can’t tell if that’s because he wasn’t present, or if my mind has excised him.

  My mother brought stale Wonder Bread, and she showed us how to tear the end slices into pieces and toss them into the water for the mallards and Canadian geese. She pointed out the drakes, with their bright, bold feathers, and the hens, with their trail of ducklings waddling after them.

  Over the hill, not far from the pond, we stood by the stone with Jonathan’s name. We bowed a few times, my sisters and I mirroring our mother. She mumbled at the grave and invoked her own mother.

  Take care, OK? Your po po is also there. She’ll look after you.

  And then: I love you. I love you so much.

  * * *

  I’ve kept one childhood memory of my father at Cedar Hill. All five of us were there. It was Mother’s Day, and after my sisters and I cooked breakfast—pancakes shaped like hearts—my family visited Jonathan’s grave.

  We were headed toward the cemetery’s exit when my father pulled Mashed Potato—named because my mother thought the van, which was white with wood paneling, resembled potatoes and gravy—to the side of the road.

  Lotus, my father exclaimed. He gestured at the pond, which was carpeted with magenta blossoms. He hopped from the van and fell to his knees at the lip of the water while he reached for the flowers. His hands plunged and yanked out fistfuls of mud. We crowded around him.

  Gah Lee, he said to me. Run to the car. See if we have a hammer or a shovel. Something to dig.

  He thought he could harvest the roots. He’d use them for a soup with red dates, peanuts, pork bones, and thin slices of lotus tubers. He was already listing off all the possibilities, leaning farther into the water.

  Lo Gung. My mother’s voice was a warning.

  I did as I was told and skipped back to the van. This was an adventure similar to when my family went camping and we tied fishing line around chicken bones to catch crabs, which we boiled on the camp stove and ate for dinner. I pulled a flathead screwdriver from the trunk and sprinted back to my family, pumping my arms and legs as hard as I could.

  My father skewered the earth with the screwdriver, over and over. We stood near him so that if he slipped into the water, we could drag him back to us.

  9.

  When power cut during thunderstorms, you untangled yourself from my arms to play hide-and-seek in the darkened rooms of our house.

  Come and find me, you said to my sisters and me during every storm. You raced from the room to hide.

  Noooo. We wailed and reached for your legs.

  Com
e and find me! you repeated. Your voice faded into the walls. We fumbled as we waded through the humidity that dampened the house.

  We crept into the living room, where we suspected you waited, and rubbed our dirty toes into the short fringe of the carpet. We took in the profiles of the potted fern and jade plants illuminated by the gray light from the window. Behind those would be a good hiding spot, we whispered to one another. Thunder rattled the house, then lightning split the sky with a shock of yellow. We whimpered.

  Where are you? we said to the plants.

  We parted the fern fronds. There were only inky outlines of more leaves.

  Where are you? we said again, our voices unsteady.

  Then, a giggle rose from behind the couch. It flickered, your laughter striking an entire matchbook. You sprang from where you had crouched this entire time.

  I’m here, you bellowed. We screamed and giggled while we scattered in search of our own hiding spots.

  Come and find us, we yelled while we tucked ourselves behind doors and underneath beds.

  I will, you shouted. I’m coming to find you.

  In high school, after you are dead, I think of those hide-and-seek games as I walk past the living room and up the stairs. I imagine taxidermic you, stuffed and stitched and posed in a kneeling position behind the couch. I worry that if the light shifts, if I look too closely, I will see your face in the shadows.

  Jesus Christ, Mommy.

  10.

  You were in bed, at Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford, where you once used to work and where each of your four children were born. Your body was inflated, like someone had pierced a hole in your arm and pumped helium into you. A slow swell. As though if it didn’t stop, you’d burst.