Water Ghosts

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  A splash of icy water. His coat fills and weighs him down. He fights his way out. His hands catch in the sleeves. He shakes until the coat blossoms away and sinks. He has lost his direction, can’t find the shore, either by fumble or sight. My wife. The thought strikes him. Years pass as he treads his way through the spitting water and looks for Ming Wai. There she is, her hair spread around her like moss. She lures him over with her smile. My wife, my wife. She can’t swim, he remembers. He swims toward her, pushing through the wet papers that have burst from his suitcase, his body growing heavier with every stroke.

  CORLISSA WALKS ALONGSIDE her daughter. In San Francisco, there’d been sirens, a tentative crawl down the fire escape as the smoke threatened too close, but not this. Not so much water that mud washed into the house and the rugs soaked. The water there is contained, herded by the beach. She tells Sofia, Don’t walk so close to the edge. Come in a little, So. Sofia clutches her arm. Howar glances over at her and gives a tired smile. His smile, the smile shared between two parents in a moment’s claim on intimacy, barely clears his daughter’s head. Their family—the triangulation of adult, adult, and child—is being refigured between three adults with the eye to judge. Sofia senses her exclusion and quickly looks up at her mother with the hint of a scowl pushing at her eyes.

  Corlissa says quickly, It’s just rain. The comment belongs in no conversation, a line exposed as a feint.

  Sofia rolls her eyes. She turns her head and tiptoes for glimpses through the crowd as she shuffles forward with her mother. Who’s she looking for? Corlissa turns too. She turns in time to catch the collective gasp, the single shout, the accompanying wail, the subsequent panicked push. The caravan of travelers stops for the sideshow.

  Someone has fallen. Howar rushes into the crowd before Corlissa can call Stop! Sofia faces the trouble, but her eyes draw away to other parts, still searching. The two boat-women press themselves to Corlissa. So Wai covers her mouth. Corlissa takes it for horror.

  She holds out her hand. Don’t worry.

  The two women draw even closer. So quick that it could be imagination, the women push her. Corlissa stumbles. Her shudder throws off Sofia’s hand.

  She twists her ankle on the edge of the crumbling levee and slips down the side. She presses herself to the dirt. Her body weight will slow her. All those circled thoughts of falling into the levee now realized: when driving, the dizzy focus of the wheel on the river’s edge, the daring to speed off. Now on her own feet she’s made it true. Confronted with the clear gray day of her nightmare, she can only give in to the fall, wait for the water. Commotion and sliding mud above her—rescuers or other unlucky ones—then the splash. The water sucks her under. She paddles her way up through current and over a froth of water. Back beneath again. She’s been fighting blind. She opens her eyes. Water-blue women are below with her, bubbles lighting on their skin. She stops her thrashing. It might be lovely to stay.

  Her first thought in the stream that comes in the body-lit dark beneath the surface is looking up at her mother’s face as she lay in a tub of soapy water, no desires beyond food and drink and sleep. She saw the mildewed ceiling above her moth-er’s head, the dun light, and the magic of her own foot rising pudgy from the water, a delightful plaything. Her mother’s hand on her stomach, warm and big, and Corlissa uttered, Ma, which made her mother laugh.

  Corlissa shakes her head. The water squeezes the air from her lungs. Sai Fung floats before her. She smiles at Corlissa and reaches for her. Corlissa knows that the extended hand, algae-soft and water logged, offers safety. Sai Fung’s hair swirls softly, tangled with twigs, leaves, river trash.

  Two hands. Holding hands. Corlissa fights whatever Sai Fung is trying to tell her. She thinks, instead, of her first day at school, locked in a dark coat closet during recess by another girl. Dirty-knickers, dirty-knickers, the girl taunted. Corlissa could feel the unbodied coats within, and pleaded through the door with her hand seeking out the held-tight knob. She screamed. The teacher opened the door and the whole class stared at her tear-stained face.

  So Wai swims toward her and flashes a smile that looks green in the depths. Corlissa feels as if she’s being courted—Sai Fung on one side, So Wai on the other. The edges of her vision gray toward black. She tries to kick toward the surface, but So Wai holds her back. Corlissa swears that she hears So Wai’s voice: He said he would be back.

  He said he would be back, but neither of them could account for the capriciousness of laws. In the mornings, she combed her mother-in-law’s hair, brought her tea and a soft-boiled egg in rice soup. She swept the floor, then went out to the post office to see if any letters had arrived. Nothing had come since November. It was now January. She decided she must look for him and her mother-in-law agreed. She would leave in April; her twenty-four-carat gold bracelets would gain her passage and forged papers.

  The two women embrace her. Their hold feels like her daughter’s arms around her, needing her as if Sofia is five or ten again, when a mother’s love is more treasure than curse. They need her. Corlissa relaxes into their grip and like a stream of music, their stories enter her thoughts.

  They entered the boat in the middle of a moonless night. each of them hammered into crates like pieces of chinoiserie. Through the slats of the crates, through the sweet smell of yellow straw, there was the musk of the cows and the mildew of the damp room. eventually, they pushed against the nails, lifted the lids, and peeked out.

  They heard the strike and sizzle of a match and one of them lit a candle to a litter of scared faces—men and women—and even a solemn-eyed child on whose flesh the importance of silence had been beaten.

  Most days, they sat still in their crates and left only to shit with the cows.

  When the days one man had ticked off with the soot of a match-head equaled the number of days they knew it would take to reach their destination, they heard a shudder. They reached their hands through their crates and felt damp walls. As the cows began lowing and the chickens fluttered, the water seeped through the straw they sat on. The water crept up their ankles. Fearful of being caught, they remained silent until the water circled their chests. Who knows if the people stomping about in panic above heard them through the boards and the rush of water?

  There was only cold and darkness.

  To stay here, surrounded by mermaids and memories. She knows why they chose her. They risked life for hearsay. She tries to hold on to her desire for water, her yearning for gas, her hunger for branches. Sai Fung and So Wai press against Corlissa, whispering in her ears like reeds. More memories flutter by and then, finally, there is this: saved at the church where she met Howar. An old man dunking her into a bathtub set up in the central room of the building. Beneath the water, silence. Drawn up, dripping. People clapping. Approval shining in Howar’s eyes. The man’s gravel-rough words as he pulled her out. That which is born of the flesh is flesh. You must be born again. You’re saved.

  Corlissa kicks and fights, feels their hands slipping over her ankles.

  We need you, and then there is a plunge, and the press of another body against her.

  MING WAI IS just within reach. Richard lunges toward her with a mmmph! of his weak body. His hands slip under her shoulders. Her weight drags him down. They fall under the murky water. He kicks harder. Her hands grab his waist. They dance in the water for the life of one or both. He doesn’t know if she is fighting with or against. Her body is dead weight under his hands. Her fingers press harder into his waist. The banks disappear, the levee gone. Only river and his wife. Some primeval instinct keeps him holding on. My wife. He takes a breath and a second later they are both swept beneath again. He hungers for air, but he does not let go of her. Beneath the surface the clear water is a surprise.

  There are so many of them down here—bodies snagged on underwater roots, clothes caught on branches or between rocks like webs. Ming Wai whispers in his ear: Fong Man Gum—breaking through the heartbeat quiet of water-rush and he wants to sleep to the sound
of her voice.

  He opens his mouth to respond and water fills it. With a start, he realizes the incongruity of her voice with the underwater world. A water ghost. He has been living with a water ghost. The words that can’t even be spoken, only called, in a whisper, with euphemisms. His wife. She’s found her place in a superstition. A servant to the water god, exchanging her life for that of another. His.

  He wants to weep when he pushes away her hands. She holds on to his arm. The fingers settle, one by one. The lightness of her land-touch is gone.

  He cannot leave. He becomes her. She had barely known him before he left. She shivered beneath him on the last night, her last chance to secure her position in the household with a baby boy. But there was no baby, and living in the house of his younger brother, she lost all status. In the stories floating through the household, around the tables, and through the ears and the mouths of the servants, he was not the noble son on Gold Mountain. He was the ne’er-do-well who had left his wife on their wedding bed.

  She mended clothing and cleaned the toilets while the servants watched. She went to parties where women wore the latest european fashions and sucked on cigarettes in long holders, and when they danced, she sat, afraid for her reputation. And then one whispered to her a way to get to America. Ming Wai slipped off her gold bracelet and gave it to the woman with the bright red lipstick and permed hair. The woman kept her eyes on Ming Wai as she bit into the bracelet—red curving around gold—and Ming Wai’s heart began to shake.

  Richard thinks of her unsympathetic voice at their kitchen table: I lost face—how do you remedy that?

  Ming Wai pulls his hand to her eyes. Richard relents.

  He relents because of the smell of urine coming acid through yellow straw, the oven heat and ice cold that bore down for a month without relief. He relents because of the nights he spent not thinking of home, the days he spent making plans to never return. He relents when she pulls his arm around her neck, when his heart thumps against her hollow chest and her hair tangles in front of his eyes. She presses her mouth to his and he is kissing his wife. He holds the moment until he feels himself go limp in bursts of joy and pleasure that pop and pop. The words I love you do not come to him; instead, he thinks, like the rush of a deep-sea current: I’d give my breath to you.

  Her hand closes into a fist at the back of his head, strands of his hair bristling out between her fingers. The tenderness of his scalp pulses and fades. His toes and legs empty out. She holds him tighter. His stomach calms. He forgets air. His head goes light. He fades until she is so full she must push him away and let him shimmer to the bottom of the river. She lunges up, crowns through the surface, and gulps air.

  43

  CORLISSA SWEEPS SALT and dried mud from the church floor in preparation for the funeral. She has swept it off the chairs where So Wai and Sai Fung slept and gathered it from the corners of the room into a small pile in the center.

  Just as she had begun to struggle upward, she’d felt the push of a diving body. Arms wrapped around her. A man dragged her to the surface. People were waiting with ropes to pull them out of the water, but the rescue was too slow for the other two women. She knows now she has been death-touched that she should take a new joy in the day, but all she can think of is the missing bodies of the two women, and Richard’s body on ice in the living room. His mouth has been sewn shut, the river debris combed from his hair. People have been in and out all day, talking of death. There’s death on the cross, death in the body salt, death in the living room. Corlissa wishes she could let the talk fall around her, ignore the dust settling on the furniture, and take pleasure in fiddling with her daughter’s hair, or watching her sleep. That is how miracles would affect storybook mothers.

  But this is what Corlissa thinks of instead: being beneath the water. Edging her shoulder under a limp body, nudging a woman toward the surface as her own body sinks. She pauses in her sweeping to hold her breath and imagine the pain of airless lungs. She looks around quickly to see if anybody has seen her. She has never noticed before how the church windows, with their trapped bubbles, make the light look blue. She drags her broom over and looks out on a blue world. Red roosters tinted purple; leaves turned the color of sea foam.

  She leans against her broom and breathes again. She looks toward the pulpit. It needs flowers. The Christ on the cross behind the pulpit hangs with strained tendons. She’ll have to buy flowers.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, she sits near the front of the church, dressed in funeral black. When Howar speaks in a calm monotone about the brevity of life but the eternity of heaven, she looks at Richard’s widow and his friends. Ming Wai keeps her eyes on Howar. Corlissa fastens on the slow steady pulse in Ming Wai’s neck. There seems to be no shaking, no inside break. Farther down, Manny Chow swipes the back of his hand to his eyes, pinches his nose with the other. The other men of the Lucky Fortune are the same: nostrils flared, tears falling, a rupture in their usual liquored, smoke-tainted bravado.

  Sofia sits beside Corlissa, glassy-eyed, as if viewing an alternate fate. Someday, Sofia will leave home and it will be only Corlissa and Howar again. They will pass each other in the same way—Howar off to do this or that, Corlissa off to straighten a cushion or polish the cabinet knobs again—but there will be no common subject. Corlissa will not say, Sofia did this today and Howar will not smile, or reach out to touch Corlissa’s wrist when she tells her story. A photograph of Richard is propped against a vase of flowers. He rarely smiled in life; he doesn’t smile in the picture. His hair is slicked flat, shiny. His eyebrows arch in a cocky way, and his skin is as smooth as the photograph paper. What was the meaning of his life? Corlissa glances again at Ming Wai, at Richard’s friends. Prostitutes line the wall, alongside those who lost money from Richard and those who won. The value of his life defined by his mourners? A church full of passive town members? Corlissa wonders about the little redemptions in his life, because she knows only of the larger shape: he lived, he sinned, he died. That is as much meaning as Corlissa can give and she prays for his soul.

  THE ECHO OF his voice flutters up from the floorboards. Poppy looks up from the mud-swollen ledger where she marks down numbers next to a yellow light and listens to Richard’s voice speaking unclear words until the memory hides itself again in another part of the brothel. All her burned spirit money, the chants she cried as the river rose, made no difference. She was in the attic calling out superstition while just two hundred yards away he was drowning. She saw nothing.

  She didn’t catch any panic or pleasure drifting over the crumbled levee. This grief is worse than regret or ghosts.

  In the quiet, she hears the rustle of Chloe’s leaving. It is Chloe’s body that lassos up the sounds and the phantom scents. When Chloe leaves, she will carry Richard away with her. Poppy tries to think her way upstairs, into Chloe’s mind. She can get only as far as the stairs, where straggler ghosts—the last to return to hell—linger, smoke, and gossip. She tries again to hear Richard’s whisper. She begins to cry—a relief, because the house goes quiet and she is left with only her five senses, a stomach cramped by sadness, and a thudding in her head.

  She shuts the book and takes up her scissors. When she flips back the magazine cover, pages with missing centers untwist, and already-cut pieces fall to the floor. She picks up the small, trimmed illustrations of children, a bicycle, a car, a house, a mowing machine. She arranges them on her desk. She flips through, still sniffling, looking for other luxuries of an imagined life. She works on appliances today. She glances at two pictures, one of Richard and one of herself, leaning side by side against the wall.

  She has built a model house and placed it on a paper sheet of green lawn. Inside, she has attached these clipped pictures with a brush of glue. A four-poster bed for the bedroom, a toilet with a pretty brass chain to accompany the claw-foot bathtub. With paint, she’s colored red trim around the windows. After she is done, she will unclasp the backs of the frames, take out the wood and glass, and carefully cut
out her own face and Richard’s. Then she will burn all of it. Together, they will live as spirits in their finely appointed spirit home. Footsteps make her put down her scissors and turn off the light. She touch-walks her way from office to kitchen, brushing over warm brick stove, crumb-pebbled tabletop, smooth-wood doorway, fresh watermark. The black boots descending from the shadows of the stairs make her catch her breath and dab her eye. She bites her lip in anticipation of one last look. She’s sure Richard’s spirit must be wandering, dying as he had under such unfortunate circumstances. For a moment, she puts aside her resentment of Ming Wai, who crawled out of the river as dull and flawed as the rest of them in a living body.

  It is only Chloe. Chloe pauses after each step to listen for any rustling throughout the house. She tucks some hair behind her ear and takes another step.

  This is what the dreams of coyotes meant. Chloe is racing away; she is kicking up spirals of dust behind her. For now, Poppy’s life exists in clipped paper, and she doesn’t mind if Chloe leaves. But she wants to touch her first, to see if any last remnants of Richard will pulse into her vision. She misses him. As Chloe passes the doorway, Poppy reaches out her fingers and their tips crackle across Chloe’s wrist. The colors are so bright that the sight of a new baby-life turning with a tiny red beat inside of Chloe flashes for only a moment before the vision shatters to black.

  Chloe jumps and lets out a tiny whimper. Chloe whispers, You scared me, Madam See!