Our Wives Under the Sea (37)
I get her home again; I couldn’t say how, it just happens. As I said before, things go on. I get her into the bath and keep her there until, by degrees, she seems to feel better, and eventually I manhandle the television into the bathroom, balance it on the toilet seat and plug it into a long extension cord I have rolled in from the bedroom. I put on Jaws and ask her to watch it with me, sit on the mat beside the bath and keep one hand on the side of the tub so she can touch me, if she wants to. I think about the first time we watched this movie together, the way she cut herself off in the middle of talking about sharks and told me she didn’t want to be boring. She says nothing now, though she seems to follow the movie, flicks water at the back of my head the first time the shark appears. I feel exhausted, a feeling of catching up, a feeling of something finding me. My heart is a thin thing, these days—shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.
LEAH
Jelka on the floor with her ear against the escape hatch, saying something I could not hear. When I asked her what she was doing, she looked up at me, her expression dim in the hard fluorescent light.
“Ghosts don’t speak,” she said to me. “People misunderstand this. They think that when you’re haunted you hear someone speaking but you don’t. Or not usually. Most of the time, if you hear something speaking, it’s not a ghost—it’s something worse.”
Her face was not its normal color; it had the look of something sunk in milk. She lowered her ear to the escape hatch again, closed her eyes as if in concentration. “My priest used to say that,” she continued, though I hadn’t asked for an explanation, “my last priest, before I stopped going. When I was eighteen, I thought I saw a ghost in my mother’s house. It was just under the stairs—the place we used to keep shoes—not someone I knew, just someone. It was the middle of the night and it told me it needed help, that it wanted to speak to me. But when I told my priest, he said that it couldn’t have been a ghost because a ghost wouldn’t have spoken. He said that demons masquerade as ghosts to try to tempt us, to drag us into sinning. You’re not supposed to speak to the dead,” she added, “it’s somewhere in Deuteronomy. There shall not be found among you any one who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, any one who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord. It means you’ve stopped trusting in God, that you’re trying to bypass Him, to bypass His plan. A ghost that speaks is just a demon, trying to tempt you into making that mistake.”
I said nothing, only sitting down beside her by the hatch and touching her arm very gently. She hadn’t eaten, it occurred to me, in however long. Matteo was somewhere else, presumably on the main deck, though I wasn’t aware of this as fact, just as something that had to be. I had woken this way, to Jelka talking in a way I couldn’t understand, to the press of electric light and the certainty of darkness without. Jelka didn’t respond to my touch, only pressed her ear closer to the hatch. “So what is that,” she said, “if it isn’t a ghost—what is it?”
I looked at her, took my hand away from her arm and looked down at the hatch. I could hear nothing, not even the sound that so frequently ringed itself around us, not even the sound of the ocean, not even Matteo, wherever he might be. There was no sound at all, in fact, except for Jelka talking, asking aloud what it was, what I thought was talking to her through the hatch.
* * *
When my father died, I was in the other room. He hadn’t been ill—or rather, he had but not in a way that seemed threatening. A long and aggravating cough, an occasional breathlessness. I was nineteen and I saw him a lot in the weeks immediately following his death: at the end of my bed, twice in the garden at my mum’s house, though at that point they hadn’t been on speaking terms for several years. My mum was actually pretty good about it when I told her. I think seeing things is fine, my love, she said to me, I think seeing the things you want is completely natural. She hugged me a lot during that time and I was grateful for it, though we both knew I had always been closer to my father. It is strange, in a way, to think how much better our relationship became in his absence. When she died, ten years later, I cried harder than I had over my father and felt the drag of her loss in a fiercer and somehow more desperate way. It surprised me, the ache of my missing her and how long it lasted. I didn’t see her afterward the way I had seen my father. Once gone, my mum stayed gone. I didn’t tell anyone about seeing my father, except for my mum and, much later, Miri. I don’t know anything about ghosts, except that I guess I’ve seen one, which makes me believe that other people probably have, too. When I told her about it, the first time, Miri widened her eyes at me and said, I thought you were a scientist, adding that she didn’t believe in ghosts, in a manner that should have been rude but actually wasn’t. I mean I’m jealous, she said, I suppose. When I was a kid I really wanted to believe in that sort of thing.
When my father died, I inherited most of his possessions and sold a lot of them. I kept the things that already felt like mine: the books and the diving almanac, the boxes of magazines and the good, big coat that he always let me borrow when we walked on the beach. I saw him many times in the direct aftermath of his death, waved whenever he appeared and never felt compelled to speak to him. There was really no unfinished business, which I think is what stopped that whole thing being frightening—that and the fact that, ghost or not, it was still only ever my father. There was no sense of haunting, to be honest, only ongoingness, until one day he ceased to appear and I really felt fine about that, too.