Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  Whenever she asked if I wanted to check on our Horse Land stable, I shrugged, barely looking up from my chats.

  Nah, I said, you can go ahead and play later.

  All these years later, I visit Horse Land’s site and find it defunct. There is no more game, no more pretend riders or stables or horses. Still, I like to think that the Sheik, Peaches, Snipper, and Razz of Horse Land are alive and have long outlived their real-life counterparts. Maybe, somehow, my mother has been there in front of a computer, clicking “feed” all along.

  * * *

  A few hours after my father called me at the barn to tell me of my mother’s diagnosis, the two of us visited her at Saint Francis. My sisters had sprung into action that afternoon. Steph was driving back to Connecticut and had announced she was taking a leave of absence from medical school to help care for our mother. Caroline, at our mother’s insistence, reluctantly agreed to stay in Pittsburgh to finish her last year of college.

  I was also angling to take time off.

  You just started high school, my mother said from her bed. You can’t just stop going.

  But I’d rather be here with you, I said. She ignored me.

  What did you learn today?

  I don’t know, not much, I said. I went to the barn, though.

  Oh, yeah?

  Yeah. I didn’t ride.

  Her eyes were glassy, and it was difficult for me to look at her face. Instead, I stared at her hands, which were jaundiced. I thought that, maybe, she wished she could have come, that she hated being excluded from my routines; after all, ever since Steph and Caroline had left for college a few years before, she had directed all of her energy toward me.

  I wanted to ask how she felt, to talk about her diagnosis, or to plead for her to live longer.

  So, do you think I can get a horse? I said instead.

  I didn’t know what else to say. I’d always wanted a horse, and often asked for one. I thought that if I showed my mother that I was dedicated enough, eventually she would get me one of my own. I’d gone so far as to calculate her salary and subtract the amount I thought caring for a horse would require.

  You have so much left over, I had said in past conversations. We can definitely afford to get me a horse. I didn’t understand that when she told me how much she made, it wasn’t because she wanted to brag. It was because when she first came to the U.S., sleeping on her sister’s couch, the prospect of a steady salary that could push our family into the middle class seemed so distant.

  Maybe we’ll get you a horse later, she said in the hospital. She always said this whenever I asked. It was an easy script that we fell into, me with the request, her with the deflection. But now, I understood that it would never happen. I leaned closer to her. I gripped her hand, a hiccup of panic forming.

  She doesn’t have much longer to live, my father told me over the phone. I saw how unlike herself my mother seemed now.

  “This isn’t my mother,” I later wrote in my journal. “This is someone else.”

  What’s going to happen when you’re gone? I blurted out.

  I don’t want to talk about that, she said slowly. Not right now.

  She shrunk into her pillows.

  * * *

  I thought I’d have plenty of time to ease that question into a later conversation. I pictured you and me in the family room on the couch that we’d turned into your bed. It is the same place where you once jokingly requested that I have your body stuffed after you died. You slept here for a few weeks before your diagnosis when climbing the stairs became too exhausting.

  In this scene, you talk softly, and I try to remember every word. I’m a sophomore in high school by now. You have held on for an additional year.

  I’ll get through it, you say.

  Yes, you will, I say. We believe what we tell one another.

  Even in my imagination, I can sense our worry hovering.

  What happens if you’re gone? I replace my previous when with if and I modulate my voice to sift out any concern.

  Just in case, you say, I want you to know that you will get through this.

  Here, you break into a speech. You say something affirming that I carry with me for decades.

  All my Chow girls are so smart, you used to tell your daughters. So maybe, in this hypothetical address, you might begin: You’re going to grow up to be so strong and smart. You’re going to be so successful. You’re going to be so happy.

  I know that these are generic platitudes. But my brain can’t assemble better words. I am scared that I do not know you enough to guess what you’d actually say.

  * * *

  When I ask Steph what she talked with our mother about in her last days, Steph says that in Saint Francis, our mother had started to hallucinate and had become paranoid. Steph shares this with me and Caroline over a series of texts: Our mother was frequently soiling herself. Steph stayed a night at the hospital with our mother and helped her to the bathroom. They stood by the sink, my mother clutching a railing as Steph sponged her legs, then ass. Humiliated that she could not control her bowels, our mother was certain that the nurses were whispering about her. She told Steph that she could hear the mother of Steph’s boyfriend judging her, too. She was worried that she’d be replaced by Steph’s future in-law. Our mother knew these thoughts were not rational, but she could not stop them.

  I think that this was our last night alone together, when she could really share her thoughts with me, Steph tells Caroline and me about that night. We both thought she would have more time…I think we spent much of the night not really talking.

  But Steph and our mother did have a conversation that, in my eyes, seemed final. One afternoon at Saint Francis, our mother asked to speak with Steph alone. She seemed more lucid in this moment. She told Steph that she wanted to be buried in the same cemetery in Fairfield as her father and brother-in-law.

  Steph recalls feeling confused. That cemetery was an hour away from where we lived; the cemetery in Hartford where Jonathan was buried was only ten minutes from our house. It had rolling hills and resembled a park. The Fairfield cemetery was small and sandwiched between a busy road and a neighborhood. Whenever we visited the graves of Gung Gung or our uncle, we heard the shouts of children playing and the creak of swing sets or trampolines. None of this mattered to our mother. The Fairfield cemetery was just two blocks from Yi Ma’s condo. Maybe our mother thought that Yi Ma was the most filial of us all, that she’d always pay respects to the dead—and with greater frequency than our father. Maybe she knew that Yi Ma would tend to her grave and continue to care for her in death.

  There’s something else, too, my mother said. She held Steph’s hand and began to weep.

  Our mother had always expected that she would be laid to rest with Jonathan. So if she was to be buried in Fairfield, she reasoned, we would need to have Jonathan’s remains exhumed and cremated.

  Can you bury his ashes with me? Our mother asked Steph. I’ll finally be able to look after my baby. A mother shouldn’t have to be separated from her babies.

  Steph leaned close, uncertain why she was the one given this responsibility.

  Yes, Steph said, of course.

  11.

  The dining tray was stacked over my mother’s body with a plate of pot roast and steamed carrots, along with a slice of cake. Seinfeld was on TV and George was complaining to Jerry about something that my mother would have normally found hilarious.

  She ate in silence and eyed the dishes, calculating what would stay in her stomach and what was too tiresome to chew. She cut a square of the roast. The Seinfeld laugh track rose. Outside her room, it was already dark and the Manhattan high-rises across the street glowed with office and apartment lights.

  Kau Fu had pulled her from Saint Francis sometime the week before. During the short time she’d been at home, she remained beached on the couch and listless while her siblings and my father called Sloan Kettering, the Mayo Clinic, and other hospitals known for their cancer research cente
rs. When they didn’t return our calls, my uncle persuaded a cousin’s wife—who had co-workers who knew people at NewYork-Presbyterian—to help us get my mother admitted there. When I was at school, Kau Fu and a cousin’s wife hired an ambulance to drive my mother the two hours to New York. I came home that afternoon to find our place empty, though her soiled sheets were still tucked around the couch cushions.

  Steph, my father, and I were in the hospital’s lobby on our way home when I realized I’d left my coat behind.

  Back in my mother’s room, her movements were sluggish as she pushed carrots around her plate. Her skin, in the minutes we’d been separated, somehow had become duller. I’d caught her without her mask on; it was as if she had watched us leave her for the night, and she’d let her expression tumble into the grimace that had been there all along.

  It was then that I understood what a terminal diagnosis meant. In journal entries, I wrote about this frightening new clarity: “All these doctors weren’t just a figment of my imagination, all the visitors—people who came to see my sick mother—weren’t made up, either.” I had tried to pretend that none of this was real, but I knew I could no longer maintain that fantasy.

  Hi, my mother said.

  I forgot my jacket. I gestured to the coat. It was thick fake suede and it swallowed my shoulders, making me look younger than thirteen. It was a hand-me-down from my mother’s cousin, Lai Yi Ma, who sometimes showed up to family gatherings with bags of her old Coach purses and leather boots that she distributed among the relatives.

  On TV, Jerry opened the door to a harried Kramer. He was all slapstick force, all wiry arms that stretched everywhere and palms that hit the doorframe. With my eyes on the TV, I bent to kiss my mother’s cheek. She smelled stale.

  Can I have a bite of that cake? I pointed to the slice on her tray.

  Sure, she said. It’s German chocolate cake.

  I slid a piece into my mouth. It was treacly sweet. I was mid-chew when I remembered.

  They’re waiting for me downstairs, I said. Bye, Mommy.

  I took another bite and headed for the door.

  I love you as high as the sky, she called after me, invoking the expression of affection she often told my sisters and me. I heard this from the hall and turned back into her room.

  I love you as high as the sky and as deep as the ocean, I said, still chewing her cake, not at all aware that this would be our last conversation.

  12.

  I haven’t wanted to kill you, so I haven’t written about your passing. I can write around your death. I can write about the events that inch up to it, and the ones that illuminate its aftermath. But ask me to write about the day itself, and I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. It’s like killing you. I want to keep you, in memory, alive.

  But since this is about losing you, I need to try.

  * * *

  If I want to summon the feel of my mother’s death all these years later, I listen for the sigh of the ventilator. Specifically, the mechanical whir-whir-whirring it makes when her body gives way and allows the machine to breathe for her. At Saint Francis, she was more rubber and latex than human. At the New York hospital, we were past that. Now she was a robot having a panic attack. Her automated lung. A big sigh of breath into a paper bag, slowly deflating and then inflating.

  I felt the warmth of my mother’s knuckles.

  She is here. I took this body heat to be a sign of life, and I later wrote about this moment in my journal. “We’re going to be alright.” But my mother’s hands were warm only because I’d been holding them.

  * * *

  It’s OK, it’s OK, we told my mother in 2002 after the surgery to remove the cyst.

  It was like I delivered a baby, she said when she came home from the hospital, unsure how to break the worried silence. She sat on the couch in the family room beside me and closed her eyes. A couple of years before, tired of looking at the stained pink couch, its blue and green flowers faded, she bought a sofa cover from Marshalls that was the color of pine needles. She spent hours at the kitchen table with her sewing machine, trying to make it fit. She couldn’t get it right. The itchy fabric popped off the cushions too easily, and she constantly had to tuck the cloth back around the pillows. Now, as my mother let the couch hold her, she didn’t care that the cover was askew, or that the room was cluttered with towers of newspapers.

  Later I followed her into Caroline’s bedroom, where she now slept. She called each of my sisters.

  What doing? she asked them in a cheerful voice. It was jarring how sticking to her usual scripts—the shortened sentences, the same chirpy lilts in her voice—made this call seem normal.

  I’m just taking it easy, she said after a few beats. She sat on the edge of the mattress and looked out the window at the neighbor’s fence. She tried to pull a smile onto her face, but her lips caught on her teeth and formed a snarl.

  Good, I heard Steph exclaim. The conversation moved on to what Steph had eaten that day. I watched my mother slump into her familiar rhythms.

  It’s OK, it’s OK, my mother told Lai Yi Ma at a relative’s wedding just a couple of months after her cyst was removed.

  I didn’t hear about this story until my mother was long dead, but as Lai Yi Ma told me, the two of them sat next to half-eaten plates of dessert. I imagined my mother staring at the bowls of sweet red bean soup with tapioca while the bride and groom swished their hips to Cantopop on the dance floor. She wasn’t joining them because her stitches were still sensitive and she didn’t want them to tear.

  How are you? Lai Yi Ma said. She and my mother were similar ages, and of the cousins, they were the closest. My mother took a slice of orange and tore into it with her front teeth.

  Insurance is so expensive, she told Lai Yi Ma, remarking how the doctors told her she should return for follow-up tests. My mother gnawed on another piece of orange.

  Lai Yi Ma set her spoon on a plate.

  Ah Mui. She covered my mother’s hand with her own. You need to go to the doctor.

  It’s so much money, my mother said. They want all these tests.

  Money doesn’t matter, Lai Yi Ma said. The only thing that matters is your health.

  * * *

  Mommy, I know that I’m still drifting from your death—that writing about the illnesses that led up to your last moments is not the same. Let me try again.

  At the hospital in New York, I pulled a chair up to your bed.

  It’s OK, it’s OK, I said to you and our family.

  Hi, Mommy, we’re here, Steph said. It’s Stephanie and Katelin and Daddy.

  Caroline is catching a flight from Pittsburgh tonight, Steph offered.

  The machines beeped in response.

  My father sat on the other side of the bed. His face was frozen as he searched his bank of memories for a solution or any indication of what had gone wrong.

  He’d spent the past evening dozing in a chair, waking every now and then to tend to his wife. Steph’s story about her night with our mother makes me realize that my father’s last one with her had not been restful. We have never talked about this, but I realize now that it must have been nightmarish and soaked in a surreal worry.

  That morning, my father had helped his wife with breakfast. She sat propped up by her pillows while he carved her waffles into squares. He dipped them in syrup and brought them to her mouth. His lips parted automatically, not unlike how he used to feed us daughters when we were little. That role reversal must not have been lost on her.

  Suddenly, mid-chew, a piece of waffle caught in my mother’s throat. She began to choke. Her eyes watered and the monitors screeched. She looked around the room and gasped.

  My father, unsure what to do, repeated his nickname for his wife.

  Ah Mo, he shouted, Ah Mo. My mother’s body spiraled into cardiac and respiratory arrest. By now, the nurses had rushed to her side. They ushered my father from the room and placed defibrillator paddles to her chest. They sent a violent charge through her that shook t
he bed. Then another. And another.

  Her body rippled with energy. Though she was unconscious, her heart resumed beating.

  * * *

  It was midmorning when I understood the end had begun. I was a hundred miles away in a European history class. I pressed my face onto the desk, not bothering to pretend I was paying attention to the lecture. Something about World War II.

  That morning, Caroline was in Pittsburgh, a couple of months into her senior year of college and learning about different programming languages. Steph was home in Wethersfield, washing the dishes and readying herself for her day. That’s when Daddy called Steph to relay the news. Key words: waffles, cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest.

  By the time Steph’s message reached me at school, our mother’s body had settled into its new rhythms. By the time Steph and I were in the van racing down I-95 toward Kau Fu’s house, where we would then drive with him to the hospital in New York City, the entire family had been alerted. By the time we reached my mother, the chaos of the day had flat-lined, and we soon understood there was nothing to do but wait. We had so much time now.

  * * *

  Through the gaps in my mother’s hospital gown, I saw where the defibrillator irons singed her. I wanted to touch where her flesh had burned, to will her to wake and to gather her in my arms the way she used to hold me.

  For hours, we sat by her side. I worked my way through a copy of Howl’s Moving Castle I’d found in the lobby. I was captivated by this world of wizards and scarecrows, tearing through the pages with the same speed my mother used when she read her kissing books. I wanted to know if the young girl would be able to save the wizard, curmudgeonly and cranky, from his curse, and if their love would free him. (I fear this novel does not, like many, age well. Howl strikes me as a bit of an ass, and a misogynist.) It was a world of hope and joy and magic. I wished I could cast a spell and use this power to cure my mother. I wished I could travel back in time to warn her about her sickness.