Water Ghosts

by Shawna Yang Ryan

  A bit more prying revealed this: She was tired of the ointments and powders, of being dolled up like a whore. She despised superficial conversation, and the lewdness she was forced to endure. All she wanted, she said, was to be somebody’s wife.

  Not long after this declaration, she crossed paths with a handsome young man from the east. From that afternoon on, they were inseparable. The young man hid himself in her chamber every night. Young Jade’s heart had never been so light. But her happiness drew suspicion. Her patron became jealous and threatened to denounce the young man to the authorities. The young man had too much to lose, so he stopped visiting Young Jade.

  One afternoon, their boats crossed on the lake. With dainty steps, Young Jade passed into his boat for a few stolen moments of conversation. She told him to disregard her dancing partner’s jealousy. When the young man refused, Young Jade revealed a secret. In her heart, she believed that her bones would be buried with his ancestors. No matter the distance or obstacles, their love would succeed. In order to prove her devotion, she unpinned her hair. It thudded to the floor of the boat. Her hair was her gold, she said, but for him, she would cut it. He nearly cried with joy as her knife swept through her hair. But the sacrifice only heightened the pain he felt at their parting. Within days, he fell ill.

  Young Jade sent her friends to look after him, and after some time, he recovered. His parents demanded he return home. On the eve of his departure, he met Young Jade in a country tavern for one last time. She declared that their match was fated, and so she would wait for him. They passed the night in an inn next to a river. In the morning, they parted.

  Despite the young man’s promise, he was unable to convince his elderly parents that he should marry the singing girl. He spent his days weeping in front of his mirror. He drank wine to ease his soul, but this only worsened his mood. He even wished for death. One day, a traveler brought a letter from Young Jade. The young man’s hands shook as he tore it open, and his eyes caught on the last couplet:

  The spring silkworm ceases spinning only at death

  The candle’s tears cease only when it burns to ash.

  He hastily sent a reply, urging Young Jade to maintain her health if there was ever to be hope of their meeting.

  One evening, as the sun set, a woman with a veiled face came through the haze of the young man’s bedchamber. It was Young Jade. She moved like mist. Incredulous, he reached his hand toward her.

  I wasted away with longing, she said. But I will be reborn as the daughter of the baker down the road. If you remember me, you may visit. I won’t remember you, but my passion will be the same. Again, she vowed her eternal love, then dissipated like sun-burned fog.

  The young man was struck dumb with disbelief. His doubt continued a few days more until a traveler came with the news of Young Jade’s death. From his knapsack, the traveler unwrapped nail clippings and a strand of her hair. With her dying breath, she had urged he take these to the young man as a greeting and a farewell.

  In the context of the rain, it is a ghost story. The chill that awoke Corlissa shakes her again. In the context of this week, it is a love story, redoubling around, like the silkworm’s thread, the faith in fate. She recalls another idiom Howar had taught her. It takes a hundred years of fate to bring two people to a shared boat ride; a thousand years of fate to bring two people to the same pillow. She saves herself from his romantic mumblings: Fate. The excuse that saves us from the terror of our decisions.

  CORLISSA SITS ACROSS the kitchen table from Howar like a shy lover. She holds back the impulse to slither her toe up his bare leg and concentrates instead on her sandwich. The contents of the icebox are spread over the table between them—most of it wilted or rotting. The ice tray is dry—the melted ice has already evaporated away.

  She pushes through her grogginess and tries to emerge from the dream-thoughts of a half-remembered week. Her hair is matted and speaking is uncertain. She notices the thick dust on the table, on the dishes in the rack, over the cupboard panes, and how hard the chair beneath her is.

  I feel like we’ve just met, Howar says. He has left his glasses upstairs and his bare eyes look drowsy.

  Corlissa blinks and when she opens her eyes, she looks at her husband as if she has not seen him in years. The lines draw down around his mouth and there are creases beneath his cheeks. His hair fell out strand by strand; this she didn’t notice. She’s always seen him as he was when they married. If they passed on the street, after a separation of those sixteen years, would she recognize him with his thinned eyebrows, broken capillaries across his nose? Her skin is soft and loose beneath her wedding ring, her knuckles swollen. She picks up a spoon and looks at her distorted reflection. She looks like a mother. even in streaked silver she can see the dark moons beneath her eyes. It makes her chest ache, to see herself and her husband, aged around a kitchen table. She runs her fingers over the bones rising in her chest. Rain patters against the window and she wonders exactly how much time has passed. Lightning brightens the sky. The window and everything before it explodes, fast and teasing as a wink.

  WATER RISES TO the doorsills and threatens to spill over.

  DESPITE THE RAIN, Poppy opens the windows. She needs the air against the stifle of so many spirits in the room. She cools herself on the breeze, then takes a light coat and squeezes down the stairs past the line of ghost-men who clomp up, waiting for brothel services.

  One minute from her door to the Men’s Center and she is already in disarray, wet-slick and muddy-heeled. She runs her hands along her stockings to wipe the water to the floor. She puts the umbrella in a bucket by the door and rushes to Uncle Happy in the back.

  Little Poppy, you shouldn’t be out in this weather. He smacks his mouth and smoke pops out in bursts.

  Good evening, Uncle Happy. Never mind the rain. I need to talk to you. She sits on the edge of the bench, hesitant about settling against her wet clothing. She wrinkles her nose at the smell of wet boots and spicy smoke.

  How long do you think the rain will last? he asks. I have this scar, this one, across my elbow here, that aches. I say three days. This feels like a long spell.

  Poppy looks around the room at the ghost-men, who gamble, who crouch on the floor for dominoes and marble games, who drink tea and smoke long pipes. She touches her hand to Uncle Happy’s sagging arm to quiet his words and, for a second, feels the trauma of when he received the cut during a fight in a camp, a month after his arrival. All that surging anger, the swell of young-man pride until the knife sang across his skin so clean and sharp. She drops her hand.

  Remember my dreams? About the ghosts?

  Fong Man Gum’s wife, he says.

  You should see him, Uncle Happy. He looks awful. She’s eating him alive.

  It’s the fifteenth. First day of Ghost Month.

  Exactly. There’s something going on. A woman does not arrive out of nowhere like that.

  Happy laughs. He drags his nails through the kinky hair of his beard. He says, She’s trying to steal his life?

  His spirit, his essence.

  Ghosts are never good at disguises. What kind is she?

  They. There are three of them. And I think they are . . . Poppy pauses and looks through the doorway at the flashes of falling rain. She leans forward to whisper the two words in his ear, then catches herself. She takes a scrap of newspaper from the table next to him and scribbles out the characters. The water off her hand blurs the ink. The words—water ghosts—are too dangerous to be spoken. She shows him the paper as she utters the euphemism: They came from the river.

  Maybe he’s happy. Maybe he wants to be destroyed. There’s a kind of man who will go for that.

  Poppy breathes heavily. This answer does not satisfy her. She wants Richard as she has known him—with his languid eyes, his dawn walk in the hall, his snap and impatience at silliness. She leans forward and whispers urgently, What can I do? What do I do? Do I use fire? Do I give them gold?

  Happy laughs—a long, shaking lau
gh that startles Poppy. He takes her hands between his, and she loses her hope before he even speaks: It’s all superstition. I stopped burning dead money forty years ago. These dates—they stick in my mind: Ghost Month, Tomb Sweeping Day. I try to forget them, but the memory pops up. Things I used to do. But do I believe them? There are no ghosts. There is no such thing, little Poppy. No ghosts—only our regrets.

  AT DAWN, THE rain stops. People stir at the silence. In a half-dreaming space, they nod at the lone drips of water falling off the roof and forget the stopped rain as soon as they fall back asleep. When the town awakes fully, the rain has returned.

  It rains for three days, river rising so high that everything closes, from shops to canneries to packing sheds, and everybody goes home. The Sacramento Bee proclaims in screaming letters: Record Rains Threaten Levees! but no one sends engineers. Decades of work, swing by swing and shovel and scoop, have broken up this wet land and wound it through with hundreds of miles of dirt paths. The same minute-by-minute concern will save it. Men hustle from their homes every hour to check the levees for boils and breaks—arise even in the night with lantern light swinging before them, raincoats over their pajamas, and check the unsteady dirt already weakened by burrowing animals. If the levees go, Locke, built on reclaimed land that still thirsts for the water that used to course across it, will be washed away.

  ON THE FOURTH day, the levees break.

  42

  SHELTER IS PROMISED, a mile down the road, in Walnut Grove. A man yells from the back of a truck, playing a siren salvaged off an old cop car, rousing people from their homes. The levee is crumbling. The town will flood. He is a doomsayer with the premonition of an hour and the weatherman on his side. Water seeps between the stacked sandbags. With any shoes they can find and anything they can carry, people begin to walk out of Locke.

  Poppy hears the warning wail up and down the street and the water slither through cracks. She is a doomsayer of another sort, a soothsayer who finds the source of this trouble in three women. Superstition says that those who die by drowning will seek the living to take their place. Poppy prefers this version to weather reports of an unusual summer storm. She will stay. She chooses known to unknown, mud-choked town to exposed road. Drive out the women and the levees will heal themselves. She carries a metal barrel up the stairs. She’ll burn dead money in the attic. High enough for safety and saved by smoke from spirits.

  On the narrow attic stairs, she stumbles. The barrel clangs to the floor. Ashes spill in dunes across it. The rustling in the attic above stops. She steps back down the stairs and tries to sweep the ashes with her hands. It is soft fur in her hands, coats her palms in gray.

  She tries again. Scrambling up the stairs, barrel hugged to the chest. The water will never find her. At the base of the stairs, the smudge of her efforts lies like a large, dark continent.

  RICHARD PLEADS WITH Ming Wai that they stay.

  We live on the second floor, he says. We’ll be fine. He is loath to rise from bed, to dress, and to walk, hunched and weak, all the way to Walnut Grove. But Ming Wai pleads and crouches beside the bed and clasps his hand and insists, We must go, we must go.

  Richard closes his eyes again. He hears the slide of the suitcase as Ming Wai pulls it out from under his bed. She checks the clasps. He lifts his head, leans forward, looks out the window. Already bits of people’s lives float in the street—papers, a child’s doll, unmatched shoes. Main Street has become a muddy trough that spreads itself against the sandbags lining the buildings. Rats scurry to the tops of the sandbags. The feeling of hurry descends. His feet slap the floor, and he goes to the kitchen first.

  There is the swirling-chest panic of what to take and what to leave behind. Richard reaches for a box of crackers. Inside, a fat roll of bills and some silver coins. He runs back to the bedroom, distracted for a moment by the stiffness in his knees and wrists.

  This too, he says, and hands the box to Ming Wai to put in the suitcase. He flings open the wardrobe door and glances over his meticulous suits, his shiny shoes. These can be replaced. Only the suitcase. Only the suitcase cannot be replaced. He pulls a tin-cloth coat over his sleep clothes.

  When they throw open the front door, they see that the water has already risen above the bottom steps. Ming Wai gasps. She holds the suitcase above her head, like a washer-girl with a basket. Richard leans against the rail. The water hits calf-deep. They slog through. On Main Street, people lug china, paper, clothes, photos, silverware, packed into rice sacks, flour sacks, potato burlap, asparagus crates. Men lift children onto their backs. Women heft children onto their hips, nudged alongside a bag of precious things. Water runs from the roofs. Rust washes from metal patches. Water spirals down from the higher road into town. The paint looks brighter; the buildings are waking in the rain.

  CHLOE RUNS DOWN the stairs and into the red room. She lifts the window and leans out. Rain comes in all around her, turning the pink curtains red, puddling on the floor. She gazes out over the street. People dressed for a day at the beach, at the fair. Clothes to sweat in, to play in. Some in mismatched pieces, put on in the dark, with an eye to the minute after. Choreography only in the exits. They exit alleys, doorways, porches. People come out, arms loaded. A family of cats yowls on the seat of a half-submerged chair.

  Chloe shuts the window and nearly slips on the water around her feet. She catches herself and hurries out of the room. The door across the hall is shut. Chloe grabs the knob, puts her ear to the door before she knocks. There are people inside, oblivious to the rain. Chloe scoffs at her own shock. Of course sex still happens in the rain. She knocks lightly, just in case, then runs back upstairs.

  In the corner, Madam See screams firework sounds against the rain and claps stained hands. She looks crazed, and Chloe feels shame for her.

  Madam See! Let’s go! Let’s leave!

  Madam See squints back at Chloe.

  Let’s go! We’re packing! Chloe says.

  Madam See shakes her head. She turns back to her fire and song.

  Chloe’s been planning to leave anyway—her bag has been packed for a week. She grabs her jacket, and pauses as she watches the other women. Lisel rolls up a poster pulled off the wall, Beatrice tosses trinkets into her pillowcase.

  Are you mad? she asks. Beatrice pauses. The light through the window behind her halos her brown hair red. You don’t need that. You should just go. We should just go. Chloe shakes her bag a little to settle the insides.

  Beatrice rolls her eyes and puts a ceramic ballerina in her bag. She clears out other things from the tiny table next to her bed.

  You don’t have time, Chloe says. The water’s already through the door.

  Beatrice slows her hand. Lisel shakes out her bedding and spins it into a heap. Neither of them speaks to her. Beatrice looks Chloe up and down, then glances at Chloe’s fat, full bag.

  The distance between them now. When Chloe first came, she’d sometimes crawl into Beatrice’s bed, fit herself against her body. Chloe knows she looks like someone who thinks herself too good. An apology catches in her throat. She drops the bag on her bed, grabs her jacket, and runs out of the room.

  THEY WALK ALONGSIDE a river that frolics with spitting rage. Small boats tied up at the opposite bank knock together and pull against their tethers. Cars rumble past with people clinging to the sides, to the back. One boy, his feet safe from puddles as he rocks along on the edge of a truck bed, waves and smiles. Drought then flood, flood then drought; this is the cycle. In the ten years Richard has been in California, the fear of drought haunted many of those years, when the snow-melt wasn’t enough and the summers burned off the reservoir waters. Ming Wai touches his arm. She smiles up at him. She blinks away raindrops.

  What are you thinking of?

  Richard shakes his head. He turns his face into the rain. Eight in the morning, but the sky looks like early evening and the birds are songless. Even from the first night, their wedding night, she held the look of someone too fragile to touch, someone
he wanted to hurt. She gave herself up so easily, didn’t even mew in protest when he shoved his fingers up between her legs. The rain lulls Richard. He is amused by the thought of Ming Wai’s patient, scared breath.

  A mile seems like ten in the drumbeat of the rain. An implied mutter rises up from the parade of small-town refugees, but when Richard looks behind them, he sees ranks of downcast eyes, set mouths, trudging feet. The crowd is chest-to-back in the traffic of evacuation. He hopes water will not leak through the seam of his suitcase. He coughs into his sleeve. With his thumb and finger, he rubs away dead skin from the corners of his mouth. He licks the rain from his lips, suddenly thirsty.

  Hold my hand, Ming Wai says. Her voice is sweet. He sees a flash of blue beneath her coat. She’s wearing her silk dress, bleeding electric blue into the gray day.

  Aren’t you cold?

  A sudden anger wells up. She’s flaunting her pleasure in the face of the group’s misery. A refugee’s trudge through the cold is a field trip to her—what lies over that path of water? What lies beyond this dip of land and town? She totters along, looking this way and that, smiling.

  Hold my hand, she repeats. He can only comply. He takes her tiny bird wing into his hand and feels her hand like a burning ember in his palm.

  The mismatched pace of an anxious family and Richard’s ill shuffle opens up a space in the crowd. With the humming sound of whipped batter, the dirt turns to mud that turns to water. Before Richard can rear back, the road begins its slide into the river. Air eats its way through land. Half the road is suddenly missing. With his cough and dry throat and dizzy head, Richard thinks a second too late. He pinwheels his arms, feeling ridiculous even as he stumbles over the gap and into the water. He drops Ming Wai’s hand, also too late. With a wail, Ming Wai comes tumbling after.