The Refugees(5)

He nodded, unblinking, curled up on the sofa like me, our knees touching. The parrot crouched on my shoulder, roosting there ever since we let my brother go into the sea, and it came to me that letting it speak was the only way to get rid of it.

“Tell me something,” it said. “Why did I live and you die?”

He regarded me with eyes that would not dry out no matter how long they stayed open. Mother was wrong. He had changed, the proof being those eyes, preserved in brine for so long they would remain forever open.

“You died too,” he said. “You just don’t know it.”

I remembered a conversation with Victor. A question struck me one night at eleven, so urgent that I telephoned him, knowing he’d be awake. “Yes, I believe in ghosts,” he said, not surprised to hear from me. I could see him curled up on his chair, head aflame on his candle-wax body, as if he were lit up by the memory of the airplane crash that had taken the lives of his family. When I asked him if he had ever seen any ghosts, he said, “All the time. When I close my eyes, my wife and children appear just like when they were alive. With my eyes open, I’ll see them in my peripheral vision. They move fast and disappear before I can focus on them. But I smell them too, my wife’s perfume when she walks by, the shampoo in my daughter’s hair, the sweat in my son’s jerseys. And I can feel them, my son brushing his hand on mine, my wife breathing on my neck the way she used to do in bed, my daughter clinging to my knees. And last of all, you hear ghosts. My wife tells me to check for my keys before I leave the house. My daughter reminds me not to burn the toast. My son asks me to rake the leaves so he can jump in them. They all sing happy birthday to me.”

Victor’s birthday had been two weeks ago, and what it was that I imagined—him sitting in the dark, eyes closed, listening for echoes of birthdays past—became the opening of his memoir.

“Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?” I asked.

Over the line, in the silence, the static hissed.

“You aren’t afraid of the things you believe in,” he said.

This, too, I wrote in his memoir, even though I had not understood what he meant.

Now I did. My body clenched as I sobbed without shame and without fear. My brother watched me curiously as I wept for him and for me, for all the years we could have had together but didn’t, for all the words never spoken between my mother, my father, and me. Most of all, I cried for those other girls who had vanished and never come back, including myself.

When it was published a few months later, Victor’s memoir sold well. The critics had kind things to say. My name was nowhere to be found in it, but my small reputation grew a little larger among those who worked in the shadows of publishing. My agent called to offer me another memoir on even more lucrative terms, the story of a soldier who lost his arms and legs trying to defuse a bomb. I declined. I was writing a book of my own.

“Ghost stories?” Her tone was approving. “I can sell that. People love being frightened.”

I did not tell her that I had no desire to terrify the living. Not all ghosts were bent on vengeance and mayhem. My ghosts were the quiet and shy ones like my brother, as well as the mournful revenants in my mother’s stories. It was my mother, the expert on ghosts, who told me my brother was not going to return. He had disappeared when I turned my back on him, reaching for a box of tissues. There was only a depression in the sofa where he had sat, cold to the touch. I went upstairs to wake her, and after putting the teakettle on the stove, she sat down with me at the kitchen table to hear of her son’s visit. Having cried over him for years, she did not cry now.

“You know he’s gone for good, don’t you? He came and said all he wanted to say.”

The teakettle began rattling and blowing steam through its one nostril.

“Ma,” I said. “I haven’t said all I wanted to say.”

And my mother, who had not looked away from me on the deck of the boat, looked away now. For all the ghost stories she possessed, there was one story she did not want to tell, one type of company she did not want to keep. They were there in the kitchen with us, the ghosts of the refugees and the ghosts of the pirates, the ghost of the boat watching us with those eyes that never closed, even the ghost of the girl I once was, the only ghosts my mother feared.

“Tell me a story, Ma,” I said. “I’m listening.”

She found one easily, as I knew she would. “There was once a woman,” she said, “deeply in love with her husband, a soldier who disappears on a mission behind enemy lines. He is reported dead; she refuses to believe it. The war ends and she flees to this new country, eventually marrying again decades later. She is happy until the day her first husband returns from the dead, released from the camp where he has suffered as a secret prisoner for nearly thirty years.” As proof, my mother showed me a newspaper clipping with a photograph of the woman and her first husband, reunited at the airport some years ago. Their gazes do not meet. They look shy, uncomfortable, forlorn, surrounded by friends and reporters who cannot see the two ghosts also present at this melancholic meeting, the smudged shadows of their former selves.

“These kinds of stories happen all the time,” my mother said, pouring me a cup of green tea. This evening séance would be our new nightly ritual, my mother an old lady, -myself an aging one. “Why write down what I’m telling you?”