Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (52 page)

The Boy does not know what to do for her. He holds out her envelope so that she can see he does not mean to keep it. “I am sorry. I am very stupid. Take this. I did not know it was yours.”

But the ghost girl makes no move. She stands so perfectly still and begins to cry, silent silver ghost-tears making furrows on her cheeks. “Please,” says the Boy, “please, you must not be offended by me. I am my father’s most worthless son.”

And that is when the girl’s mother and father emerge from the lighted house, drawing him to their table with loud congratulations, and calling him “Son-in-law” before they know his name.

On the island where my mother was born, there is a way to trap a living boy into marrying your daughter’s ghost. Even if they were never engaged. Even if he knows her not at all. Ordinarily, the envelope has only a card with the ghost-girl’s birthday in it. But Mother has filled this one with money.

I ought to have known Mother would try to trick someone. It is too easy a hope to nourish, that some unwitting greedy person would come along and take up this money they believed to have no owner, and find themselves bound to take her dead daughter too. Much easier than believing anyone would volunteer to marry her dead daughter knowingly. She must have told herself as she stuffed the envelope with every spare note she had saved, that this was the day my spirit would finally leave her. Perhaps she has wanted this ever since the day my illness turned her son into an unfilial stranger, forcing her to drive him away, into a city that is now burning. Like the angry, hungry men who light Peking on fire, my tired mother only hopes. She hopes I am a cause, a reason. That when at last I am flung away, she will have live chickens and a live son again. And perhaps she is right. What do I know? I’m dead.

“Such blessings!” says Mother to the skinny, fish-eyed boy in a voice I know she has practiced many times. “Who knew there was such a fine young man destined to be husband to our poor daughter? Bless you. Bless you… Have you eaten yet? No, do not go away without sharing our feast.” But once she has him inside, eating from our table, her words dry up, and her face becomes pinched as she pours out the tea, as though she has done all she means to do, having caught the fish and pulled it in.

It is Father who makes all the toasts – barely smiling – and asks questions while the boy stares into his bowl and fumbles his teacup. He answers every one of Father’s questions in a halting mumble, as though he is afraid he will give the wrong village when asked where he lives, or the wrong name when asked who his father is. And he will not stop turning from Father to stare through me with his dull, dark fish eyes. I want to hit him hard. I want to shake him and shout, “Do not look at me, fool, I have no answers! Look at the one who speaks to you, before he decides there is water leaked in your brain!”

I am ill with the smells of the feast, though it is almost the same feast as it has been every year since I died. The light of the house feels already dim and unfamiliar, as though my lonely marriage has already begun. As much as I try to collect it all, as much as I say to myself,
It cannot begin yet! You must seize your last night and keep it with you!
, I cannot seem to stay in the same moment as Father’s small smile, or Mother’s hands on the teapot. There are too many dangerous silences.

Am I already lost? Am I Hungry?

When the boy finally fumbles his teacup badly enough to break it, when he mumbles out a stupid apology, causing his own hand to bleed as he gathers the pieces, I feel I have already begun to waste away.

I make the plates rattle when I shudder, and the tears come again, even though I have vowed they won’t. And that stupid, stupid boy offers me the corner of his napkin, holding it out like he had held out the red envelope, as though I could simply take it from him. My mother’s face only becomes more pinched, my father’s smile only more of a silent laugh. And I am forced to remember that I am an empty seat to them, unseen as I am unheard.

When at last the terrible feast is over, the boy is given a carefully written proposal to take back to his father along with the envelope, and he is shuffled, with very little of the mask of politeness, back out into the night. Mother turns on her husband. “Do you dare to judge me?” she challenges him. “I won’t bear any more from you! I tell you I won’t bear it. She must be old enough!”

Father says nothing.

They have to give the Fisherman two pipefuls of opium along with all the money in the envelope before he will take the ghost girl’s tablet. But in no time at all, on a day that is both hot and gray, the Fisherman’s Boy is married.

It passes like a funeral, full of solemn light and unsmiling faces. The Boy is even hungrier than usual, skeleton-skinny in his brother’s blue and black robes, and the bright paper effigy they have made has none of the girl’s face in it. It has no person’s face, living or dead, that the Boy has ever seen. It is well made, pale, with graceful dark paper eyes, and deep red paper lips, and thin red paper bride’s robes. Before he had seen her – before he had seen the skinny ghost girl that is the real Ling – he might have thought this paper thing was beautiful. As it is, he does not want to look at it, all the way to his father’s front door.

She herself is missing. She is hiding, all through the wedding feast, the Joyful Wine that is not joyful. The Boy sits by an empty chair to eat a thin bowl of shark’s fin soup with nothing in it. And he waits, and he waits for her.

It is only after all the guests have all made excuses and gone far away from the dark little fishing hut, and the bright, doll-like effigy burns along with its paper bride gifts, that the Boy finally sees her, standing deathly still on the high shelf where he has placed her tablet. Her eyes are dry this time, but she does not look at him.

“Hello,” says the Boy, and he knows it is not the right thing for a husband to say to his wife.

She nods at him, unsmiling.

“Do you like where I have put your tablet? I have put you near to my mother, and to my great-uncle who used to tell me very good stories…”

She nods again, but dips her head, and he can see her shuddering, a bright, silvery ghost-shudder. The Boy shifts in his worn red wedding shoes, not knowing at all what to do.

“If you would like it better,” he tries, “I will move you to the window so that you can look out over the sea… or perhaps you will want first to see more of your house…? Do you like the house?”

Her shuddering grows worse, and she cradles herself, head still bowed. The Boy chews his lips, afraid to see her cry her silent silver ghost-tears again. “I am sorry that I gave you no proper letter of betrothal,” he says suddenly in his stupidest voice. “I am sorry that I have no proper bride gifts to give to you. I am sorry that my house is dark and small and stinks of fish guts. I am sorry you are dead… I am sorry that I can only wish you were not dead. I am sorry that my brother is not here to marry you. I am sorry that you have only a weak, stupid husband with no brother and no name. But please… say something.”

I do not know what to say. It isn’t only that the house is the darkest, barest house I have ever seen. It isn’t only that it is cold and fireless, or that I can no longer distinguish the gray of the City of Ghosts from the gray seeping in at my window. I do not know what to say because the house seems changeless. It seems as though the man sitting in the rickety chair with the smoke hanging thick around his head has been sitting there for years, thinking of nothing. He does not even seem to know anybody else is alive.

But the boy is alive. “How is it you can see me?” I say, quiet as a flea. “And how is it I can stand here, outside my tablet, when the Festival day is past?”

“I do not know,” he says, and thinks for a long moment. “Perhaps it is because we are married, and this your home now.”

“This is my home now…” I do not mean for my voice to sound so faint, so sick.

“Do you hate it very much?” His eyes suddenly do not look dull or dead at all.

“I do not
know
it, that is all,” I say quickly. “It does not seem a home to me. Do not be offended. I am a very rude little ghost.”

“You are not rude. You are very quiet and very sad, and beautiful.”

“You are kind,” I say. I try hard not to look at the man sitting still as a statue in his opium dream. “Is there… anyone else who lives with you?”

“Me and my father, only.”

“Oh.”

He blinks a nervous blink. “Do you… you must have a splendid house in the Lower Realm.”

“No,” I say, my voice feeling hard in my throat. “I have nothing in the Lower Realm. And no one. No one even comes to visit me.”

“I cannot believe that no one comes to visit you.” His smile is so funny and slanted. Not like Father’s small one, but somehow I feel it means the same.

“And I cannot believe you have no name. Why do you say you have no name? I do not even recall what name you gave to my father.”

“I don’t need my name. You only need a name if someone must tell you apart from your brother, and my brother is gone, and will not come back.”

I want suddenly to touch his arm, but I do not know what he will do, if he will flinch, or twist away. “My brother is gone also,” I say. “My mother believes he has burnt up in a Christian temple and gone to the City of Ghosts. He hasn’t, but I search for him every day, half-hoping that he has so that I will not be alone anymore. So you see, I’m wicked as well as rude.”

“You are not wicked. And you are not alone,” the boy says. His eyes are so earnest they make me shudder. I want to believe he is right, that I have not entered such a terrible and desolate place.

“You must give me your name, now,” I tell him, because I know it will make him smile at me again. “If you are to be my husband, I must call you something to tell you apart from all the boys who are not my husband.”

“My mother called me Qing Yuan,” he says, his mouth nicely slanted.

“Then,” I say, bowing bravely and gracefully as I can, “I am Ling, wife of Qing Yuan.”

The man – my father-in-law – begins to twitch in his chair as soon as his pipe is empty.

Qing Yuan hardly feels the days pass, he is so busy being a husband. He brings home rice and dumplings and sometimes fish for them to share, and he makes for her everything he can think of, with every fine bit of paper he can find: joss paper robes as bright as flowers, a great joss paper bed piled high with paper cushions. She refuses him every time. “These beautiful things only serve to make my gray little house look like a decorated grave!” she says. But a wife never really refuses her husband, and he can see her eyes dancing like the eyes of the living girl she used to be.

On the day he presents her with her own small paper inkstone and writing brush, she forgets that she is not solid enough to kiss him, and they fall into each other like lapping pools of water. That is the day Qing Yuan decides he will build her a home, in the way a true husband would. He will change his father’s house. He will make it into a house she belongs in, a house that makes her feel she is come home.

He begins that very day, an exact and clever replica of the Fisherman’s cottage, with shining joss paper roof tiles, and shining extra windows to rooms the cottage does not have. Even the Fisherman stops smoking to smile on what he has made, and touch his son on the top of the head.

They are together every day, and every night they walk and talk together as a husband and wife should. She cannot stray too far from her tablet on most nights of the year, and so Qing Yuan carries it, Ling flowing beside him like a quiet stream.

It’s only the Fisherman’s moods that make her disappear into her tablet and not come out.

“They are just exactly like storms,” Qing Yuan tries to tell her. “He will only scream and weep and hit me until he remembers, and then he will collapse into his chair to dream again.”

But Ling shakes her head. “The dreaming is worse,” she says, as she reaches to touch the blood on his face.

Somehow, I have stopped counting the days of my death, and Ghost Day is upon me again before I know it. And because I am a wicked ghost, and a wicked daughter, and a wicked wife, I decide this morning to run away.

After all, I can go out and wander the world every year without anybody knowing or caring. What could possibly happen to me were I to keep on wandering? Who will make me enter that dark changeless house and sit in silence with that weak, bleeding boy and his father on this, my only day among the living? Who says I belong to them? Who says I belong to anyone?

Who can make me face this day?
I say to myself, as I drift in the morning mists, following them out to sea. I am as good as a Hungry Ghost, with no mother, no father, no brother. I haven’t got a family. No one can make me say I have.

But then, the boy, my silly, stupid husband, smiles nervously behind my eyes, and something in me is sighing. There are so many Hungry Ghosts, both living and dead, growling low with hunger, or quietly aching in rooms full of smoke.

When the sun goes down, I make myself go back to the Fisherman’s house.

It is only when I am inside that I realize the house is changing. It is becoming somewhere else, full of ghost-bright beauty. Full of rugs and lamps and beautiful screens that only Qing Yuan could have made. There is a whole wing of bright rooms that was not there before. I sob horribly as I watch the smaller house, the one my husband must have blistered making, burning away in a living fire.
He has done all this for you, you ungrateful, wicked little ghost
, I say to myself,
he has made all this great, beautiful, sad empty house for you
.

It must be enough. A bride must learn to say goodbye to her old life, and enter the new without shedding a tear.

“There you are,” he cries when he sees me. “I was afraid you would not come back in time. Do you like our house? Have I made enough rooms?”

“It is the most beautiful house any wife ever lived in,” I say, and blink away the blur of tears, and make myself sit at the great empty table.

He smiles then, the widest, crookedest smile I have ever seen. “Oh, but don’t sit down!” he says. “They will arrive, soon, I think.”