Seeing Ghosts

by Kat Chow

  I wanted to describe my shame to you, to hear you say, Shh, shhh.

  I wanted to ask if you ever felt this way.

  If I wanted you gone before, I needed you now.

  What does it mean to feel so far outside yourself, I wanted you to answer.

  * * *

  I didn’t understand why everything always came back to you, how grief seemed to inhabit so many of my feelings, how I couldn’t think about my own shortcomings or mistakes without considering our family’s history.

  That morning, I wanted to tell you on the phone, I don’t know who I am anymore, and because it was my senior year of college and I had no plans yet after graduation and what was the point of working so hard and taking on so many jobs and internships and loans if I couldn’t get a motherfucking job. I’d worked at the Olympics and had, over the past four years, finished a dozen internships and part-time gigs while enrolled in the university’s honors program. But maybe this was entitlement speaking. Or maybe it was the lie that we existed in a meritocracy, if I worked hard enough, I could do anything, didn’t need anyone.

  I wanted you to say from your end of the phone, You are exactly who you are, for you to return me to myself. I wanted you to tell me the point of it all, and I wanted your words to hold me as a mother’s.

  * * *

  Months passed. This man dumped me, again. On my walk from my apartment to campus for an appointment with my thesis advisor, I bought a bag of miniature Snickers. I devoured them one by one, crying as I tore open wrappers. Between mouthfuls, I called my father because he was the only person who I knew would pick up, because Steph and Caroline were at work and tired of hearing about this ex. I told my father how sad I felt about this breakup in a way that scared me.

  I never talked to my father about my relationships. I never invoked them, or that thing called love, or that someone might stop feeling that way toward me. But I did that day.

  There are plenty more fish in the sea, my father said. I wanted to ask if he felt that about you, if he wondered if he’d be able to find someone else like you. I didn’t want to inflict this hurt on him; I knew there was safety in looking away.

  Later, in my apartment, I began to brainstorm a way out of Seattle, and out of who I was afraid I’d become. After graduation, I’d leave the country. I’d get a fellowship to work at a newspaper in Cambodia. And then I’d head to Boston and look for work in a newsroom there. It was as far as I could get from Seattle in the United States, but close enough to Connecticut and Steph, and I heard it was a good journalism town, anyway.

  I repeated those ideas every day until they became a plan. Because that was resolve, motherfucker.

  7.

  In Wisconsin—where I was for a week and a half before college graduation, nearly eight years after my mother’s death—lightning swung in the fields and far from the interstate. I drove a rental car, my friend Lucas and another classmate with me. We wended our way south to Madison from Green Bay, here for a journalism class to cover the gubernatorial recall election. Lucas was in the back seat with his window open. He aimed his camera lens at the car’s side mirror. In the reflection, he wanted to capture the exact moment the lightning collided with the horizon.

  You can take your time, our classmate said as she gripped the door handle. We’re not in a rush.

  I hadn’t realized I was speeding through the storm, the speedometer ticking up the longer we were on the highway. I eased my foot from the gas, but a few minutes later, we sprung forward again.

  In a few days, we’d return to Seattle, and in less than two weeks, I’d be in Phnom Penh, working as a fellow at an English-language newspaper.

  For now, Wisconsin:

  It was strange how my father had once lived here and my mother had also wanted to attend college here; something about the American heartland must have been compelling. My father first encountered snow here. The first time I saw snow, I thought it was really beautiful, he recalls to me, when it has been years since either of us have been to Wisconsin, but my classmate told me when it melted, it was really dirty. That was the only description he could muster about the snow, that this moment of soft, gleaming sheets of white—all of it new—would soon be mussed by grime. He was always anticipating the worst; always hearing the worst; always remembering the worst. It is an inheritance I do not want.

  I want to go back into my father’s memory with him. I would convince him to enjoy his first snow. Just let it be soft snow for now. Look at snowflakes on your gloves and how they’re formed.

  He learned to sail on a lake near campus. It might have been the same one my classmates and I had sat by when we visited the University of Wisconsin, days before our drive in the lightning storm. I was too distracted to take in the lake and the campus. I had wondered, instead, about the possibility of a state university selling beer on campus, my mind drifting toward potential liquor and liability laws.

  But my father, he figured out how to heel and tack on this lake using intuition, the wind carrying him. I realize now, as he bent his limbs on that sailboat, that his mother was alive then. He must have thought he’d return to Hong Kong to see her; he was likely monitoring his savings to see how much more money he’d need to bring her to the U.S. But he did not think about this then, on that boat on the lake. He just ducked beneath the swinging boon, adjusting to the breeze that glanced off of the water.

  * * *

  A few months earlier, one of my university’s financial aid counselors called me into their office for a meeting.

  I owed the school something like $4,000, the counselor told me. She was accompanied by one of her colleagues. While I studied abroad in Spain the previous year, the office accidentally mailed me an extra loan check. It was a technical detail that related to how I was an out-of-state student, but enrolling in the study abroad program allowed me to pay in-state tuition, which was a cheaper fee. This resulted somehow in leftover, unaccounted-for money.

  What check? I could not remember any checks. It must have gotten lost in the mail, I insisted.

  They read out the address. My father’s.

  I don’t understand.

  The check was cashed, one of the counselors said, careful not to assign blame. You’ll have to pay it back.

  I don’t have that money. Sweat soaked my lower back. I don’t know what happened. That’s a lot of money.

  The counselors assured me that I had options. I could return the money. I could borrow another loan to pay off that one, for example.

  I’d always been meticulous about my loans and my tuition payments. Caroline taught me this; she’d been the one to encourage me to study abroad.

  We’ll figure it out, together, she’d promised. You might not get another chance to live abroad. You should do it, Sticky. When I arrived in Spain, she wired me $800. She included a note: This is a gift. You should travel while you’re there. I was thrilled, and did not think then how that sum of money was not insignificant for her, only twenty-seven at the time and with her own loans to pay off.

  All throughout college, I lived off of scholarships, government grants, and student loans. I juggled various gigs to cover my rent and tuition and also had tried to freelance and complete unpaid internships that mostly only kids with rich parents could afford. I did not sleep much, and I went about my life with flashes of anxiety that I was not doing enough. At the time, I was proud of how I thought I was doing whatever it took to make it. When friends who also wanted to be journalists worried about job prospects or the economy or how so many newspapers had folded, I was confounded by their discouragement. Just apply, I said. It can’t hurt. What else can you do besides just keep applying? It would only occur to me later how much I’d started sounding like my father; how I believed that work and success translated to survival and independence.

  Except for me, I was certain, it was less about money or success, since each of those things seemed so distant. It was more about what the promise of a career could afford me. But it was a luxury to not wor
ry about money. I never had $4,000 in my bank account, unless it was a loan disbursement, but then, I understood the money was not mine.

  I excused myself from the meeting in the financial aid office and called my father while I walked to my apartment.

  Well, he said. His voice was curt.

  Well?

  You wanted me to visit you in Spain, and I needed money to take the trip, he said, so I cashed the check.

  But it wasn’t yours to take. The check wasn’t in your name. I knew this hadn’t stopped him before. After my mother died and my father could not access her bank accounts, he used her checks. When we found a few addressed to her that she had not deposited, my father signed his own name on the back and brought it to the bank. As long as you use your signature, it’s OK, he had explained. It shows you’re cashing it for that person.

  Over the phone, he started to yell, and my voice grew with his.

  Hey, he said. I’m the father. You’re the daughter. You and Caroline say, ‘Oh, let’s visit Spain,’ and I needed the money. You wanted me to come visit you, so I come.

  You needed it, huh? I was confused and started to cry again. Was it that he’d thought that money was his to take—that he’d spent so much parenting me and that it was my turn to look after him? Was it that he was really so broke? I was not opposed to helping him. Just not like this.

  You need to respect me, he said.

  Respect you, I said, over and over, still shouting, unsure if I was asking a question or repeating his words or trying to will this into myself.

  * * *

  When my father settled in Connecticut a decade after leaving Wisconsin, he was nostalgic for his days there on that lake. He bought a sailboat with aspirations for towing it often to the water, either the Connecticut River or Long Island Sound. He only used it once or twice before he claimed that neighborhood kids had stolen its parts, all of which were too expensive to replace. What remains of his boat sits in his backyard by the shed, just a few feet from where our dead pets are buried.

  I always forget that separate from my father, my mother had originally wanted to enroll in this university, as well. She would have enjoyed sitting on the lakeshore. She would have been a remarkable student, majoring in whatever she wanted, finding a job near Madison that paid her well and provided her and her family with excellent health insurance. Maybe in this alternate reality, she would have wound up with the man she dated when she was in her early twenties, before meeting my father. I do not know much about this boyfriend, just that the letters I’d come across years ago and have not read since were filled with pining. They were earnest and pleading, which made me think she had left him and he was eager to get her back. But the fact that she had saved their correspondence must have meant something. I imagine her in Wisconsin, possibly still with this boyfriend, though this is an unfortunate exercise in picturing me and my family’s non-existence. Year after year, she would have been in awe of the snow, both as it fell and days after; in my fantasy, she would have thrived, is what I’m trying to say.

  8.

  It’s not good, I told Steph over the phone. Really dusty. I mentioned how, whenever I arrived at my father’s house, my fingers and eyes tingled and my face became bloated. My body always adjusted, but the initial response was concerning. I’d returned from a fellowship in Phnom Penh, and by September, I’d run out of money and needed to find a full-time job. I applied to public radio stations and newspapers along the East Coast without much luck.

  Maybe we can clean out the house for him, Steph suggested, before adding, We should get him an air purifier.

  Steph took a conciliatory tone as we swept peanut shells that overflowed from potted plants—the hulls were a natural fertilizer, our father insisted—and into trash bags. She tossed out the moldy scallions he’d attempted to grow in empty yogurt cups, the scraggles of their roots coated with slime, while I collected the empty containers of tofu and oatmeal that were scattered on the kitchen counter and in the dining room.

  You’ll feel better if you don’t have this mess around you all the time. Steph’s tone was firm but still gentle, ever the geriatrician. I circled the perimeter of the kitchen and mumbled about the potential dangers of everything that lined the floor: grocery store flyers, a yo-yo, paint cans, a fire extinguisher, lumber, an old boombox, crates heaped with crumpled papers and power tools.

  What if you tripped over these, I said out loud to my father, antagonistic and worried while I envisioned him falling and unable to get back up, alone in this house.

  As Steph and I worked our way through the refrigerator, my father pulled from the trash a softball-sized glob of neon orange cheese that was rimmed with soggy, molded almonds. It looked like the log that Caroline had bought a couple of Christmases earlier.

  Cheese is mold. He brandished it in my face and returned it to the refrigerator. You shouldn’t get rid of this. So wasteful. He had declared the same of the milk, too, which had spoiled, but he insisted he’d use it to make cheese. It was a familiar debate about whether or not lactose intolerance was experienced in the body or the mind.

  It’s psychological, my father often insisted. He cited a celebrity doctor from one of the morning talk shows.

  The gas, Caroline’s husband had once protested, isn’t psychological. I interrupted the argument to pitch my head back to laugh, full-bodied and delirious, not caring if I was being dramatic or rude. Our father ignored us all.

  Psychological! It’s true, he insisted. Look it up. Fact.

  Do you eat this cheese? I asked.

  Sometimes, he said.

  When was the last time you ate a piece of it?

  Hey, he said, irritated by the quiz. It’s none of your business.

  If I pressed, he might try to make me eat the cheese, or he’d do so himself. I shut my mouth.

  We want to help you, Steph said, taking her turn. She set down a pile of newspapers and rubbed her eyes. The dust was starting to get to her, too.

  You’re just stressing yourself out, he said, his voice growing louder. He hovered by her as she flipped through his mail.

  He took her lack of response as an invitation to keep talking.

  That’s why you can’t get pregnant. You’re putting too much strain on yourself.

  Steph yanked herself back as if slapped.

  I can’t believe you would say that, she said. She swiveled to face him. How could you say that?

  He repeated himself. All this stress is why you’re having trouble.

  If I ever get pregnant and have kids, Steph said, I don’t want them around you if you’re going to say things like that.

  My father and I watched her retreat upstairs to her childhood bedroom, and I ripped up a few pieces of his junk mail.

  You shouldn’t have said that, I said. That was a really shitty thing to say. She was just trying to help you. We both are.

  He studied my face and let out a whistle.

  You’re trying to help me? He laughed. Geez.

  You think this is funny? You think she’s joking? You need to say sorry to her if you ever want to see your grandchildren.

  In high school when we shouted at one another, I would tell him sorry at dinner the next day, and that I didn’t know where my anger came from. It was overwhelming, I wanted to say, having so much feeling sitting there. I always hoped he’d return the apology. Instead, he would only nod. You always had a temper like your mommy, he’d say, matter-of-factly, as if that were the only explanation and it had not come from him.

  When you do tell Steph sorry, you need to explain what you’re sorry for, so she knows you mean it, I said.

  I wondered if he had ever apologized to anyone; if he and my mother had said sorry to one another.

  You can’t say that you’re sorry she feels a certain way because that puts this on her, I said. You have to say sorry for what you said.

  I continued to toss his grocery store flyers into the recycling.

  * * *

  My mother loved rea
ding a children’s book called Owly to my sisters and me. Owly is, not surprisingly, a baby owl. He has endless questions about the world, and he poses them all to his mother.

  “How many stars are in the sky?” He asks his mama owl. She tells him to count.

  “How deep is the ocean?” He asks her. She tells him to find out.

  He tells her he loves her. This time, she asks: “How much?”

  To which Owly replies: “I love you as much as the sky is high, and the ocean is deep.” It was, not surprisingly, the book that we insisted our mother read most nights.

  It will take me years to realize that it was no coincidence that most of the books you read to us did not have human characters, that instead you chose books with talking owls or cats or dogs with hats or monsters. This strikes me now as a protective measure, that you wanted us to imagine ourselves like these anthropomorphic animals, instead of people who looked nothing like us, as if you were worried the absence of us in these books might hurt something within us, like it did you.

  I love you as high as the sky, our mother told me and Steph and Caroline when tucking us into bed. This was a misquote of Owly, but we didn’t notice or care.

  I love you as high as the sky, we repeated.

  And as deep as the ocean, she said.

  Years later, when that saying has become a refrain of the Chow women that we recite when we leave the house, or when we hang up the phone, or when our mother is dying, we add a couple more lines to the verse: I love you as high as the sky and as deep as the ocean, we say. And as tall as the tallest tree. And as far as space can go. We abbreviate it to LYHSDO, appending it to our texts and emails.

  Sometimes, we say this to our father, cheerily and in a never-ending competition with one another to see who might be able to get him to say it back.