Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  Hello? Are you listening? I started to cry. Hello? Can you hear me?

  11.

  One summer, my family road-tripped to Maine to camp near Acadia National Park. On the six-hour drive, somewhere between Boston and Portland, we pulled over at a rest stop.

  Who needs to pee? our mother asked from the front of Mashed Potato.

  I need to pee, I called from the back seat.

  I do, Steph and Caroline said.

  OK, Wun Lee and Gah Leen, she said to my sisters, take your baby sister to the bathroom while we get gas. I was six and could go to the bathroom by myself, I insisted, but I marched behind Steph and Caroline.

  We didn’t realize it then, but our mother had followed us, a roguish grin plastered to her face. She chose the stall next to mine. As I sat on the toilet, she reached a hand under the divider. She grabbed for my ankles, her fingers clamping around them while she laughed.

  I screeched and leapt to my feet. A trickle of piss ran down my legs onto my shorts and her hand.

  Aiiiyaaa, she said. We burst from our stalls and she met me by the sink with paper towels that she dampened with water. She dabbed at my shorts and knees.

  I tensed my shoulders and refused her gaze.

  A tiny smile creased her face in apology.

  All better? she asked.

  All better, I repeated, reluctant.

  12.

  A few years before you died, you went to the grocery store and printed out four-by-six photos of me, Steph, Caroline, and you. You taped each to the side of our refrigerator. In each picture, we are making the face—baring our teeth, biting down, sparks in our eyes. Steph wears a red sweater from MIT, her face splattered with sun freckles, her chin narrow and pointed. She looks like she is about to laugh. Caroline’s eyes are crinkled. Her hair is cropped short and tinted electric red, which means that she must be in college. In mine, my eyebrows are two faint dashes on my forehead, like yours, and my skin is speckled with preteen pimples, which you and I battled together, applying toothpaste or creams you bought from the drugstore. In your photo, your hair is wiry and fluffed, like you used a blow-dryer that morning, though you rarely bothered with that. Your whole face looks swollen. You look unwell and much older than the forty-four years old that you are in this image. In retrospect, I see that this is cancer.

  13.

  Immediately after our mother’s death, Caroline took it upon herself to carry our family’s finances. She pooled her work-study money and savings from the summer, methodically unearthing what our family owed.

  My mother, Florence Chow, passed away recently, and I’ll be taking over the bill, I heard Caroline explain on the phone over and over again. Her voice was low and professional each time. She waited patiently on hold, verifying our mother’s personal information to apologetic customer service representatives. She’d be returning to Pittsburgh to finish college, and afterward, she’d be moving to Seattle to work for the same company where she’d interned the summer before. Though she’d be far away, Caroline was determined to find her own way of helping the family.

  Over the next few years, Caroline settled into her first job in Seattle. Her company would award her bonuses in the form of points. She’d hoard them and keep meticulous accounting. Sometimes, during breaks—the same ones where, back when she was a summer intern, she’d call our mother, who was nearing the end of her day on the East Coast—Caroline would scroll through the prize catalogue. She studied the images of model airplanes or T-shirts with the company logo. The coveted items were the electronics. She would notice a new model of an iPod that she could afford. Would a teenaged girl like an iPod Shuffle? she would wonder. She’d get me one this way, gifting it to me for Christmas.

  I’d tug at the wrapping paper and gasp. I had stopped expecting gifts after our mother passed.

  Thank you, I’d say. Caroline would push back a strand of her hair, cropped short and a muddied green from a box dye she administered herself. Her face would brighten. Of us sisters, relatives say Caroline looks the most like our father, with her rounded face, her tan complexion. But our father says she’s the one with our mother’s best traits—diplomatic, always knows how to navigate any situation, a solution-finder. She would beam at me, teeth shiny.

  * * *

  Not long after my family buried my mother, my kau fu called our house to talk to Caroline. My mother had not been alive long enough to use the two grand that Kau Fu had lent her. But my father cashed the check anyway and put the money toward funeral expenses.

  Two thousand dollars! Kau Fu said on the phone to Caroline. He wanted the money back.

  My father refused. A gift is a gift, he had told Kau Fu earlier.

  I can pay you, Caroline said. I can send you the money.

  No, I don’t want your money, Kau Fu told her. It has to come from your father.

  I can send it to you, Caroline insisted again. She calculated how she would use the money that she earned that summer in Seattle, plus some of the funds that had been disbursed through her student loans.

  My sisters and I knew that this was not an issue of money, though. My mother’s siblings made it clear that they thought my father should have done more in helping their sister when she was sick—that he should have kept her from dying. I wrote in my journal that at my mother’s memorial, her relatives “were so curt” and “mean to Daddy” and how they told me that one shouldn’t borrow money to pay for funerals.

  It was your father’s job to take care of her, they told me then and reiterated over the years—on the phone or at rare family gatherings. I wavered between shame and a brimming, unsatisfying anger.

  She’s dead, I said. This is so pointless. Why are you holding a grudge now?

  I talked back. Shouted: Stop blaming my father. Began to cry, hung up the phone or stormed out of the room.

  I met their indignation with my own.

  You don’t know the full story.

  Then tell it to me.

  You’re too young. You’re just a kid.

  Neither of those things matter! I wasn’t too young for her to die.

  * * *

  Years later, I ask Kau Fu if he’ll tell me about my mother. I want to learn more about her childhood. Other relatives had mentioned vague stories about how she was charismatic and a flirt, often with a crew of boys around her. Once, I’d heard Kau Fu refer to how my mother seemed to always get her way, and how one holiday in Hong Kong, when their father gifted all the kids oranges, my mother managed to cry enough so that Kau Fu gave her his. These were small stories; that’s all I wanted.

  To my surprise, Kau Fu agrees to chat. I arrange to drive the six hours to Connecticut from Washington, D.C., so we can talk in person. But a few days before my visit, he calls.

  It’s too hard talking about your mother, he says on the phone. He can’t do it.

  OK, fair, I say. I get it. That stuff’s hard.

  One summer in my early twenties, I visited Kau Fu and Yi Ma for the first time in years. I stood in Kau Fu’s living room during a small gathering with his family, uncomfortable and not knowing what to say. I curled my bottom lip under my top teeth and aimed my gaze at Kau Fu. I held my mouth this way for a few seconds. I did this suddenly. As if a reflex, he made it back and laughed, the lines around his eyes deepening. But then his expression shifted, and ambivalence flashed across his face. He looked away. I wondered if this playfulness was something he and my mother originated together—if that face was their inside joke that she’d passed on to her daughters. If maybe there was something about looking at me that twisted something inside of him.

  You look so much like your mother when she was your age, her siblings told me frequently when I was a kid, and then a teenager, examining my face as if in search of an answer to an unspoken question. It made me want to peel my dead mother off of myself and to step out of the bodysuit that was becoming more and more like hers.

  With fits and starts, Kau Fu tells the story he’d hinted at for more than a decade.

>   In the years after my mother’s death when I was in high school, he said, he felt guilty that he rarely saw me and that he didn’t take care of me like he’d promised. But it was just too hard. So much of me reminds him of his baby sister. Too hard. He keeps using that phrase—too hard—as if it would soften me. His apology surprises me; that was all so long ago. But considering my past fury and the way I lashed out—refusing to talk to him, since he didn’t want to talk to my father—I couldn’t blame his tentativeness.

  I begin taking notes as we talk, afraid of misremembering my uncle’s words. I say little, not wanting to derail him or risk turning him away. After my mother’s death, I watched our families retreat into ourselves and our corners of Connecticut.

  I offer: It was hard for all of us. For you, for Yi Ma, for me and my dad and Steph and Caroline. Everyone.

  He tells me that after I’d asked him to share stories about my mother, his mind kept returning to how she died.

  How she died? I say, knowing already that our conversation will be elliptical. You mean from cancer?

  I can’t, he says. You need to know about your mother’s cancer and your father’s involvement. But I can’t tell you now. Maybe later. But right now, you need to respect your father.

  Our conversation persists this way. Kau Fu explains that since my father hadn’t worked for such a long time, my mother had opted for a cheaper insurance plan. This is familiar territory, my mother’s family never thinking my father earned enough money.

  A low-class insurance, as my uncle puts it.

  You have to pay a lot of co-pays, even though you see a doctor or you go for a physical, you have to pay a lot. That’s why she never had a physical for three or four years, and every time she visited the doctor it was like $100 or $200, he says. He’s describing my mother’s HMO plan. She hadn’t been feeling well for two years and she didn’t go see the doctor. And then, two weeks or three weeks before her death, she started mentioning to me and Yi Ma that she didn’t feel well.

  Kau Fu says that when my mother was in the hospital, he and Yi Ma looked in her purse and discovered a large bottle of Tylenol. They found another in her car.

  How painful the last stage of her cancer must have been, he said. She must be taking a lot of those every night.

  As he speaks, I hear in his voice a familiar anger loosen. How easy it is for my family to become derailed this way.

  His hurt is contagious, though I don’t fully understand it. I have caught it, it merges with mine now, and as much as we’ve all tried to tamp down our specific strains of loss, here we are. I worry that my instigating conversation will allow grief to haul my uncle back into its pit.

  What do you mean ‘what really happened to my mother’? I ask.

  He insists I call Steph. He wants her to promise not to get mad at him if he tells me the truth. He keeps mentioning how things are finally good between me, my sisters, and him—how we actually visit him now—and he’s afraid sharing this story will damage our relationship.

  You’re so ma fan, I say to him, though my voice is teasing. What he’s saying is harmless, I’m certain. This is just how he’s always been since I was a child, making outlandish demands that my family either diplomatically ignored or begrudgingly humored. Steph is at work. She probably won’t care about this.

  Katelin, Katelin, Katelin, he says. He makes his case again: Please just call your sister and ask that she not get mad at me.

  I call Steph. When she doesn’t pick up, my uncle launches into his story.

  Right after my mother was diagnosed with cancer, Kau Fu visited her at Saint Francis Hospital with his wife and my yi ma. According to Kau Fu, the doctor asked my mother why she never had the spot on her liver checked.

  What spot on my liver? my uncle claims his sister asked.

  He speaks at a fast clip. He brings up that period two years before my mother’s death, after she had a cyst removed. As I had always understood it—and as she’d relayed to Lai Yi Ma—the doctors told my mother that her cyst was benign, but that she needed to return for tests.

  Kau Fu has a different version of the story, one that seems clouded by his grief. He maintains that after my mother’s surgery, my father reviewed her results and kept them from her. Kau Fu believed that my father allowed the spot on my mother’s liver to remain untested—an act of negligence, purposeful or not. It turned out to be cancer, which slowly killed her.

  But Kau Fu’s logic does not add up. In reality, my mother was lucid enough that the doctors would have released any information to her, the patient, instead of my father. As Kau Fu’s story went: At Saint Francis, learning of her diagnosis, my mother was apparently furious. She told Kau Fu that she wanted to transfer the power of attorney from my father to her brother. She wanted all of her funds allocated to her daughters, instead of my father. It takes me months after my conversation with Kau Fu for this to occur to me, but I wonder if my mother’s cancer-fueled paranoia—the one that Steph told me about—might have contributed to this.

  And, Kau Fu tells me, a year before, your mother told me that she’d taken out a life insurance policy—one of the highest premiums.

  Life insurance?

  This is my first time hearing this. I later learn that my father, who took a short-lived gig as a financial advisor, had persuaded my mother to take out a policy for them both.

  Yes. You didn’t get anything?

  No, I say. I mean, we got some money from her retirement account, a couple thousand dollars each, if that.

  Kau Fu lets out a huff that mottles the phone.

  She didn’t have the chance to switch the beneficiaries, he says.

  I am stunned. Kau Fu, it seems, has accused my father of letting my mother die because of greed and negligence. I want to say, This is absurd, to start shouting like I would have as a teenager. But something in Kau Fu’s voice, so earnest and troubled after all these years, like he might cry, sits in my chest like heartburn. My cousins tell me that ever since my mother died, Kau Fu has not been the same; he no longer hosts holiday gatherings; his mood has soured; his energy restless.

  I could not dispute the way my father led our family down precarious financial paths; I could not deny the way my parents argued, their resentments festering. I understood how my mother’s siblings were still furious with my father. In the years right after my mother’s death, I frequently used the word scapegoat in my journal to describe how my mother’s family treated my father. In their fury, they could not see something so basic: how my father had cared for his wife, and that he wanted her alive. It is that simple.

  On the phone with Kau Fu, I try to keep my voice neutral. I am worried that if I start to cry or raise my voice, this might somehow be construed as me turning against my father, or my uncle; that my emotions might make them stop sharing stories about my mother.

  Are you OK? I ask Kau Fu finally, my voice soft. How do you feel after telling me this?

  Better, Kau Fu says. He laughs. You know I’m like you and your mother. Explosive. As soon as we say something, we get it off our chest. We feel much better. How are you?

  I’m fine, I say. My head is starting to hurt. I look at my phone’s call timer and see that we’ve been talking for more than an hour.

  Listen, Katelin. A layer of worry has returned to his voice. Don’t get mad at your father. He’s all you’ve got, OK? Don’t be mad at your father.

  I’m not mad at him. I’m too exhausted by this to be upset, I want to tell my uncle. I’m almost impressed that after levying this claim, he still thinks that daughters should always respect their fathers. I laugh a little at this, and he begins to also.

  Go to the hospital and get the records, Kau Fu says. He sounds sheepish, though relieved, and I wonder how much of what he’s told me he believes, or if this is a narrative he’s created to soothe his grief. He hedges one last time. If it turns out I’m wrong, I’ll apologize.

  * * *

  When I mention to my father that Kau Fu claims he withheld in
formation about his wife’s illness so that she would die and he could collect her life insurance, my father spits out a laugh.

  Ridiculous. Boo-oy.

  I am in Connecticut for the afternoon, passing through for work. The two of us are in the living room. He and my uncle have rarely spoken since my mother’s death, ignoring one another during the handful of times they’ve been in the same room. This accusation does not surprise my father.

  You just laughed, I say. So you think that’s a big lie?

  We never know, my father says. He had never seen any surgery results, like Kau Fu had said. He shrugs. We only find out when we were in the hospital, and that resident told us, ‘Oh, this is stage four on the liver cancer.’

  And then he asked me, how come you guys have insurance and don’t do it? The “it” he’s referring to are the tests. The gynecologist was a very young female doctor, and then we saw in the experience—even during the surgery, she needed help from a general surgeon to help her remove the cysts.

  My father leans forward in his seat and speaks louder. Most people would call it yelling, but he would disagree. When my sisters and I were little and he raised his voice, suddenly tense, we would say: Stop yelling, don’t yell.

  He’d lift his chin. At this point, he usually vibrated with outrage, which made the denial of raising his voice all the more vexing.

  I’m not yelling, this is my normal speaking voice. This becomes such a common refrain that years later, when my sisters and I recount arguments with him, all we have to do to invoke him is lower our voices and shout belligerently: This is my normal speaking voice, I’m not yelling.

  The doctor, my father recounts, was optimistic after removing the cyst from my mother’s stomach.