Ghost Story by Ananda Lima
I was writing this story about a man who invented elaborate lies to seduce each of his three roommates. To the first woman, he made a confession, walking on Fifth Avenue on their way back to the subway from his special gelato place, his private place he had not shared with anyone until that day, when he brought her. He told her he was a trust fund baby who rejected all the money from his coldhearted parents because it was important for him to prove to them and, most importantly, to himself that he could make it on his own. To the second roommate, he said, wiping his eyes, then hers after the two of them watched All about My Mother on Netflix, that he’d been abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, who in turn had been abandoned by her mother, in a tragic unbreakable cycle. Heartbroken since infancy, he said, irresistibly, he’d never been able to fully let himself trust anyone. To the third roommate, he whispered one evening over takeout, after the cat suddenly jumped on the piano keys, that his lineage was cursed and that the ghost of a distant relative’s lover haunted his inherited piano. Seeing her eyes widen, he put his chopsticks down and took her hand to his chest, asking her to feel his heartbeat.
My Saturday-morning writing group read a draft, but none of them saw the protagonist as a trickster. They believed his stories were true, at least within the text. When I got back to my apartment after meeting them, damp from the thin mixture of rain and snow that followed me across the Manhattan Bridge back to Brooklyn, I called my mother in Brazil:
“So I have this story I’m writing. A guy tells one of the girls he lives with that his parents are loaded.”
“Hm.”
“He tells his other roommate that he was abandoned by his mother.” I sat down on my gray Ikea couch. “And the third woman, about a ghost haunting him.”
“How many women are there?” my mother asked. “Why do they live with him?”
“Well, rent is expensive, etcetera. The usual reasons.” I balanced the phone between my shoulder and ear and removed my wet socks.
“Why live with strangers? Don’t they have families?”
“Mom.” I suddenly felt tired. “Come on.”
“OK, some guy lies to girls stupid enough to live with strange men they find on the internet. What’s new? Sharing an apartment with people you don’t know cannot end well.”
“Mom, if you met Marc, you’d love him. There’s nothing to worry about.” I held my glasses, still foggy, covered with tiny drops of water, and wiped each lens with the edge of my scarf. The world went blurry for those seconds and became clear again as I put my glasses back on. “But, yes, exactly: The stories my protagonist tells the women are made up.”
“Ué, of course, they are. I thought sharing a place was just for when you were going to college.”
The weak diffuse light entering my small living room made it look like it was late afternoon. But the alarm clock on our one exposed brick wall insisted there were two minutes to midday.
“Well, Mom. I don’t do it because I want to.”
“OK, OK. Do you have to live with this guy, though? I mean, have you seen the pictures he posts? The parties?”
“Pictures? Where?”
“I friended him, about a month ago.”
“Mom, you have to stop doing that.”
“What if he was a psycho? A Trump supporter?”
“Meu Deus. He’s not a Trump supporter! Plus, you know what the equivalent of a Trump supporter in Brazil is?”
“Oh, let’s not go there again. You left too long ago to know what it’s like: the corruption! The violence!”
I almost pointed out, again, that she was just repeating words from TV and social media clips verbatim. Or asked what she meant exactly, based on what, etc., again. But I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere, like the many other times we’d tried to talk about the situation in Brazil before. My mother, who was quiet now, must’ve felt the same way. I felt the browning edge of a leaf of my baby ficus plant on the coffee table. I drew a tiny spiral in the soil with my finger. It was dry. I walked to the sink, grabbed a half-filled glass of water, and poured it into the pot then went back to my story. “So my character, the guy sharing the apartment with the three women: People get confused thinking all his lies are true. They get tricked by him.”
“If these friends of yours visited here, they’d be like dodos, falling for any scheme that waltzed their way.” She perked up, her voice excited. “Oh, did you know someone called last week pretending to have kidnapped you?”
“Me?” I looked down at my bare feet on the worn wooden floor.
“Yes, they go, ‘We have your daughter,’ and put on some woman crying in the background: ‘Mom, Mom,’ etcetera.”
It was such a well-known cliché of a scheme, the “we have your child” call. But I found myself wanting something, some reaction from my mother. “What did you do?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“I asked them, ‘Where did you find her, this daughter of mine? Tell her I sit here waiting for her. Every day, I wait and wait, but she never comes.’”
Birds chirped on my mother’s end of the line. Outside my apartment, the trees were dry naked twigs. I didn’t know if my mother had really said that to the scammers or just wanted to say it to me now.
“I don’t think anyone heard anything,” she continued. “It was such a ruckus, uma bagunça danada, the girl in the background with this loud fake weeping. You know the kind that is interested in declaring itself as weeping? Like you and your brother, when you were children. I told the guy, ‘Tell her to quit being so ungrateful and give her old mother a call.’”
“Mom, I call you all the time.”
“Yeah, yeah, but I thought that was what a mom type would do. I could’ve spelled it out for them: ‘You could not have kidnapped my daughter, for she has left us for America.’” She stirred a drink, the spoon hitting the edge of the cup, tiny clinks with each turn. “But then I would be asking them to kidnap one of us for real. They think you go to America and you’re loaded. Ha!” She paused for a sip.
“Weren’t you scared?” I wondered how she would have felt if the fake-kidnapping victim had been my brother, Miguel, instead of me, but I dropped the question as soon as it took form.
“Nah. Everyone was home. Your father was on the couch, your brother also, right next to Juliana. And you—well. All I had to do was count the people watching the soap opera, and I knew the guy was full of it. Anyway, I put him on speaker. Your brother was laughing. Then he got up with his phone and started recording the whole thing. The video is doing the rounds. Wanna hear it? Wait a second.” Before I could reply, she put the phone down and shouted after my brother in the background (“Ô, Miguel, help me out over here, come find the clip”), TV voices faintly accompanying hers. She came back to the line. “He’s in the shower. You can search the hashtag, something like #sequestra doretiazinha or #tiadosequestro. Oh, I don’t remember. Your brother will send it to you later. Anyway, why don’t you stop this roommate nonsense and come back to live with us?”
At least it wasn’t just me who saw through my character’s lies. But later I checked with two more of my friends. They both thought the stories the man told his roommates were true too. And my mother, the only person on my team, had not even read the story, written in English. In the end, I changed it to fit the prevalent reading. And I did that by changing nothing. No edits to the words printed on the hibiscus tea–stained manuscript. The change happened only in my mind. For a moment, I wished the change would have happened in the readers’ minds instead, but it seemed clear by now that I was only wishing for what I couldn’t have. So I decided that yes, now all the stories the guy told were true, including the ghost one, in fiction I’d initially thought was a little far-fetched but still realistic. And that was the end of the question, at least for now.
A few weeks later, my mother called me:
“You need to do something about this ghost.”
“Ghost?” I opened and closed the kitchen drawer where I usually left my keys. I was late to work.
“Yeah, ghost.”
“Mom, what are you talking about? We believe in ghosts now?”
Not on the table or the counter. Marc must have taken them by mistake, again.
“Whether you believe it or not doesn’t matter. It’s here, haunting me.”
I didn’t understand why she was suddenly talking about ghosts. Was she leading us into some sort of metaphor? I couldn’t see how to interpret it. The microwave blinked 8:13. I had a meeting. I had to get to work right away.
“What are you trying to say, Mom?” Maybe she really thought she had seen a ghost? Was that possible? “Are you feeling okay? Maybe put on Dad or Miguel?”
“I’m fine. And no, I can’t put them on. Your father is out, and your brother”—she sighed—“is traveling with Juliana again. They’re talking about having the wedding in Minas Gerais instead of here. Can you believe it? Those people of hers.” She sucked her teeth. “Well, even if he were here, you’d have to help me with this one. Not him.”
“Why?”
“Because this ghost is yours.”
“What do you mean ‘mine’? It’s not like I have a stash of ghosts to send out like postcards.” I sounded incredulous without meaning to. I didn’t know what to think. If I could only find my keys.
“I mean”—her voice wavered—“it’s you.”
I stopped looking for my keys. My mom sounded genuinely concerned. Something was truly bothering her. I worried about her more and more. Her getting older added another layer of complications to living so far away.
“But I’m here, Mom.” I tried to project something, reassurance maybe, like a parent hushing a child who had awakened from nightmares. I hoped she could really hear me. That I could make her feel better and make this scary ghost talk go away. And even without knowing the exact shape of my fear for her, I felt it, constricting my throat and stomach. I wondered what she looked like at that moment on the other side. I thought I could just hear her breathing, but I wasn’t sure. “I’m right here.”
“If I were going crazy,” she said slowly, as if trying to persuade a child of something she couldn’t quite understand, “I’d probably just see a regular ghost—say, your grandmother, or maybe a great-grandparent, or an old-fashioned count with an ill-timed real estate ambition. Something predictable like that. But it’s you. You are older, but it’s still you. I don’t have the imagination for this kind of nonsense.”
She had a point. She sounded like she was reasoning properly. Except for the whole ghost part. What was happening to her? Whatever it was, I wished it would disappear. That my mom would reveal it was all a misunderstanding or a joke. But she sounded so serious, so worried.
“But I’m alive,” I said gently, “talking to you right now.”
“You say”—she paused—“the ghost says she comes from the future.”
“The future?”
“When are you coming home, Filha?”
When I hung up the phone, I thought again about my plans to go somewhere else, anywhere, for my vacation this year. I imagined myself walking down the cobblestones in Lisbon, passing by graffitied walls in Berlin, parallel universes I would never access. I always ended up going back to Brazil. With my brother’s engagement and now my mom’s ghost thing, I let my tourist other selves disappear in a little puff of blue smoke. In the reality of my apartment, I saw my keys on the couch, glinting in the sunlight.
The plane landed in Brasília close to noon. I passed through the sliding glass doors, squinting at the blinding brightness that marked my visits. The light, permeating everything along with the dry heat, always made my first days back feel otherworldly. Far away, past the parking lots, lay the short patch of grass, the sparse savanna, the few short twisted trees of the Cerrado. The sky was everywhere, over and in between buildings, touching the red dirt on the horizon. I stood holding my hand like a visor. Arms embraced me: my mom and, when she finished with the first round, my dad.
The changes felt more dramatic with each visit, so striking to me, having missed the gradual recording of time on their faces, the invisible pace of the everyday.
When I first saw them, I was startled by my father’s sunken cheeks, his scalp almost naked, save a thin spread of bluish-gray hair. My mother’s papery skin, her softening neck. They were still in their midsixties but looked so much older than the image I carried with me in the US. The changes felt more dramatic with each visit, so striking to me, having missed the gradual recording of time on their faces, the invisible pace of the everyday. But this happened every time I came back, and I knew that within a few minutes, I would start to habituate to their present selves and not notice it anymore.
My mother also seemed shocked when she first looked at me. She kept mentioning how I looked so well, so young. That was not her style. She should have been asking me about the flight, complaining about Juliana’s parents, or frantically looking for her keys, always lost in her large handbag. I looked at my father quizzically. He replied with a small shrug.
But as we walked to the parking lot, still side hugging, she seemed to be getting back to normal, except for the occasional stare and a pause to kiss my right cheek again, as if to confirm I was really there. The car was at the very edge of the lot.
“Your brother took the other car to Minas Gerais,” my mother said, looking for her keys in her bag.
Minas Gerais was a full day’s drive away, and they were with Juliana’s family, which I knew bothered my mother. I was surprised to feel annoyed at that now. Maybe because I liked Juliana and wanted to defend her? No, not that. If were honest with myself, it was that, at least for that moment, I wanted me to be enough.
“Why didn’t he take this car? It’s only the two of them, no?”
“It’s not a problem. We don’t need it,” my father yelled from behind the car, where he was loading the luggage into the trunk.
“Careful, or he will donate it to the church,” I said.
None of us used to go to any church, but as a teenager, my brother announced out of the blue that he was joining a local evangelical youth group. He’d wanted to donate his car, an old Volkswagen Beetle, to them. Fortunately, he’d been a minor, and my parents would not let him. Now, more than a decade later, he’d graduated to convincing others to donate to the church instead. He was good at it, pleasant, relaxed, attentive. And he knew what people wanted to hear, whether it was about charity, “family values,” or the fear of the end of the world. I loved him and had always resented him a little, for being so likable. But now there was more; it wasn’t just about everyone liking him. They also believed him. I thought about my character in the story, his roommates in love with him. Did my brother really believe all he spouted?
“Don’t pick at your brother,” my mother said. “Here, hold this.” She handed me some of the contents of her bag to make the search easier: a few documents, a hairbrush, and the squashed chocolates she still carried in case my brother or I got hungry. “They are all coming for dinner in a few days—her parents too.”
That explained why my mother had called me a few weeks before the trip and asked me to bring a serving dish (instead of the usual perfume for her coworker’s cousin or electronics for the neighbor’s nephew’s girlfriend or whoever it was; I couldn’t keep track). Never mind that I grabbed her dish from the cheap seasonal items displayed by the entrance of Target. She would be proud of it and mention I brought it with me from the US. She had probably been thinking about this dinner for a while, at least since the call, and I was glad she had something to distract her from ghosts.
Across the parking lot, the airport looked small, flattened by all that sky. It had seemed tall up close, much more built up than it used to be when I first started traveling back from the US. Now the ceiling hovered far above, with enough room for three or four additional floors between it and the ground. Its recent renovation nodded to Brasília’s original architecture: a white curving concrete pillar here, a modernist sculpture there, the occasional wall covered with the colorful geometric tiles of Athos Bulcão. A natural growth of the original core of the city, futuristic for the 1960s, but fused with a more recent architectural sense of the future. More metal, more glass, more open space, more light. But to me, even this futuristic architecture was becoming a fossil of the recent past. Too ominous, large and corporate, and, paradoxically, too optimistic to have anything to do with the future.
My parents started arguing about my mother having misplaced the keys. And while they argued about that, they developed a secondary argument on what route to take back home.
I turned around and faced a gap in the chain-link fence around the parking lot, a section of three or four panels missing that had probably just rusted off, given how deteriorated the fence looked. I took a couple of steps forward, toward the horizon, then a few more until I was just past the gap. When I shifted my gaze, nothing changed in the landscape. Because there were no mountains, hills, or tall buildings, if I tried to get closer or look at things from another angle, my perspective always stayed the same. Just a flat line, just as far away. I felt again as I sometimes did when I returned home: as if I had entered a dream. I looked at my hands to remind myself of my physical form. There they were, still holding my mom’s things.
“Where are you going, menina? Come. I found the keys; now I have to look through that stuff”—she pointed to my hands—“to find the parking card.”
The last time I’d seen the house, it had been just a concrete skeleton; the structure had been there, but there had been no windows, doors, roof, or outer layers of smoothed concrete: a ruin in reverse. Now it was finally finished. And it was beautiful. I had expected it to be nice, but not this: a gorgeous modernist two-story house. It was hard to believe it was real, it was ours. Inside was a tall open square of air and light bracketed by plain bright white walls. The floor was covered by large smooth porcelain tiles, with the look of polished concrete but shinier, making them seem like water reflecting the windows. I wanted to touch its surfaces. The floor, the unadorned white walls. And the light everywhere. It came in through the windows, beams of sunlight, and it bounced, filling the house. Soft diffused light on the white sofa and our skin and hair. It was as if I were breathing it, that light. It was cool inside, no air-conditioning needed, despite the scorching afternoon. A solid concrete house. I was never comfortable in the wooden houses in the US, precarious and prone to burning. I understood then I’d been craving to live in concrete again. Within five minutes of being in my parents’ new house, I wanted it to be mine because I felt as if I belonged to it. I began fantasizing about one day saving enough to buy it from them and have them live in it. A gift for them and for me.
It was clear from her satisfaction in giving me the tour, the way her gaze followed its lines, the open space, that my mother loved it too, despite her belief that her brand-new house was haunted. My mother and I had the same taste in most things. We hated knickknacks and clutter. We liked the unapologetic angles and openness in modernist architecture and suffered from a nostalgia for its past imagination of the future.
We went to the guest room on the second floor and stepped out onto a balcony. I knew she was proud of the nice view of the lake over the other concrete houses in the neighborhood, and I praised it, which I could tell made her happy. But after a while, her face grew worried. She walked back into the room, and I followed her. Everything inside was temporarily dark as my eyes adjusted.
“This is my last house.” She fluffed the pillows on the double bed. “I am not going to let a ghost, especially a ghost of someone who’s not even dead, spoil it.”
She didn’t seem angry, but her expression was grave. It was as if she were warning me or the ghost, or both of us. I couldn’t tell, and maybe she couldn’t either. I wanted to comfort her but didn’t know what to say. As I was growing up, it had been common for my aunts and many people we knew to believe in all sorts of things—auras, crystals, past lives, and spirits. Not fanatically so, but on a just-in-case basis. My mom had always humored her sisters and her friends, but she’d never seemed truly interested herself. I wasn’t sure what was behind this ghost thing now, and I was scared for her, for where this was going. And for me. I needed her to be OK, as she had been just a few months before. I wasn’t quite ready to believe the gravity of what was happening. I was waiting to find some rational explanation for why she was talking about ghosts that didn’t involve her beginning to lose grasp of reality. Before I could say anything, she left me to go finish preparing dinner in the outside kitchen they’d built on the verandah.
At dinner, we sat out there, on that same verandah. A cricket was chirping in the dark backyard. My plate was set up for me already, the onioned beef, with tiny crunchy slivers of dried meat, yucca flour, rice, beans, and vinaigrette, pleasantly arranged. The smell, meat, butter, vinegar. It was as if a picture in a coffee table cookbook had fully come to life.
I stole a delicious bite of farofa soaked with vinaigrette, even though we were still waiting for my father, who was in the shower.
She updated me on the wedding plans. Yes, it would take place in Minas Gerais. But the date was not set, “and venues book up; things change.” She smiled. But at least they gave her the engagement party, which she would host here, in her new house. They would be discussing the wedding details when Miguel, Juliana, and her parents came for dinner in a couple of days. “I’ll make sure the dinner is good and the party is very chique. You never know. Maybe they’ll change their mind about having the wedding over there.”
I nodded, my mouth full, vinaigrette-soaked yucca still melting on my tongue.
“Can I make you anything else? You are so skinny. You look so skinny and so young.”
“Thanks?” I said, finishing my stolen bite.
“I guess I got used to looking at you older?”
“Huh? Oh, that.”
“Never mind. Maybe she’ll show up for you one day.”
“What does Dad say about all this?”
“Ask him later. He promised to be quick to shower. He got a new polo at Carrefour to wear at dinner with you. Now he’s taking forever, probably can’t help but steal some glances at the novela. Ô, velho,” she yelled out, “a menina ’tá com fome!”
We both giggled. In his old age, he had become addicted to the 9 P.M. soap operas (still referred to as the “8 P.M. novelas,” because of their original scheduling several decades ago). Though he never admitted it, saying he liked having them as a background to his naps. To be fair, at least 50 percent of the time, when I walked past him in front of the TV, he was sleeping. How I missed him, without always realizing it. And now he was so close to me for real. He would be down from his shower anytime now.
“Anyway, it’s very unfair,” my mother continued. “No parent is perfect. You will learn that, once you have your own . . .” She stopped herself and swallowed, her eyes traveling up and slightly to the right, as if she remembered something, something sad. “Anyway, we tried our best. I did everything for you two, but I wasn’t perfect. It’s the same for your father. But she only haunts me.”
Just then, there was a loud bang behind the kitchen counter. I jumped in my seat. The cricket stopped chirping.
My mother got up and ran to stand just behind the counter. “Shhhhhh, shhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh.” She waved her arms up and down. “Shhhhhhhh.”
She stopped for a second. I could hear the TV commercials (“After your novela, stay tuned for Big Brother Brasil”). The cricket had not returned yet. My dad stopped at the door, looking at my mom, waiting.
Another noise in the kitchen. This time my dad joined in, both going, “Shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhhhhhh,” flailing their arms like birds.
That was it, I thought, both parents had gone insane.
Something dark and furry ran out of the kitchen. They relaxed.
“What’s for dinner?” My father lifted the lid of a pot on the stove.
“What was that?” I asked.
“What? Oh, that was just the neighbor’s cat. It found a way to get out again.” My dad shrugged. “She said she’d take care of it. Yet here it is again.”
The cricket was chirping again.
“Don’t worry.” My mom brought me a glass of guava juice. “She likes to come during the day.”
“What kind of ghost is that?”
She raised her eyebrows, tilted her head to the side. “She says she misses the light.”
I shivered. Was there no light where she was coming from? I tried to tell myself again that there was no ghost, to convince myself the whole thing was nonsense, as I ran my hands over the goose bumps on my arms.
After breakfast the next day, I sat at the outdoor dining table, looking through the feedback I had received from the writing group on another of my stories. They asked for more details on the father character, who was not by any means my father. But my dad was gardening right in the yard, possibly making sure everything was in order for the dinner, at my mom’s request. So now I began to write about the father gardening without gloves, red dirt covering his hands, stuck under his fingernails. Yes, the dirty red hands suited the story. My dad lifted his hat and wiped his brow. It was a legionnaire hat I’d brought him from the US last time. I knew he hated sunscreen, which I made him wear when I was around. But most of the time, I wasn’t here. I’d thought he would find the hat cool. “Like an explorer in the desert,” he’d said when I’d given it to him. But it had been suspiciously clean until now, when he took it off, leaving red finger marks in the otherwise-pristine khaki fabric. He’d worn it today just for me. He looked at me and waved—a sweet, goofy smile. In the story, I made it a red baseball cap and made the father’s appearance menacing. The writing group had also said nothing much happened in the story. Which was true.
I needed to take a break.
I got a cup of coffee in the kitchen. My dad came in holding three yucca roots. “For lunch,” he said proudly.
“So, what’s with Mom and the ghost thing?”
He put the yuccas in the sink and looked at the garden. “You know, I—I mean, we, your mother included—are not the type to be talking about witches, ghosts, and fairies. You know that. She never brought up something like this before. Now, have I seen any ghosts? Ever? No. I don’t believe in ghosts. But I believe your mother. So that’s that.” He turned on the sink to wash his hands. “At the very least, it is true to her. And I respect that.”
“Easy for you to say.” I sipped my coffee. “It’s not your ghost.”
He put his arm around my shoulder. “I know. But be patient with her. The ghost has been hard on her lately.”
“But you don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I don’t know. You have always been too sure of things, how things are, how things work. Even more so since you left.”
“Because I don’t believe that I am a ghost?”
“No, not just that. What is happening there, what is happening here . . .”
“That man is the Devil, Dad. How can anyone in their right mind vote for him?”
“Yeah, he is far from our first choice. But the Workers’ Party has been a disgrace for this country.”
“Who said anything about the Workers’ Party? What about everyone else? You’re beginning to sound like Miguel.”
“See?” He tilted his head slightly as if pointing at me.
I took a deep breath and sat back down in front of my laptop. When my brother had first joined his church, my parents had been as unhappy as I was. It was the kind of church that constantly asked for money, despite the Audis and BMWs that always carried the pastors, CEO types who had found the Lord only after getting their MBAs overseas. Miguel was not stupid. It was baffling to us that he didn’t see this. And the church required his presence too much; once he joined, he was never home anymore. Instead, he went to services between five to seven times a week. But over the years, with me living overseas and him living right here with them, me combative and him always pleasant, he began gaining ground. Now I was the weird one in the family.
But over the years, with me living overseas and him living right here with them, me combative and him always pleasant, he began gaining ground.
Although my parents never joined the church, they no longer criticized it, not even the fact its high-ranking pastors were getting too cozy with politicians or running for office themselves, with the full and blind support of their congregations. The previous year when I was back here on vacation, I found their car, the nice one that my brother liked to borrow, with a campaign sticker for one of the deputados pushed by the church. His platform included a pledge to end “gender philosophy” and return to “family values.” The conversation had begun okay. They were just humoring my brother, they had said, then: “We don’t agree with the guy on everything, but he goes to your brother’s church. I mean, Miguel knows him. And that Workers’ Party . . .” It had ended with a big ugly fight close to the end of my last day. I knew that talking further now was useless.
“What’s Miguel’s take? I mean, what does he say about the ghost?” I asked my father now.
“He listens to her.” My father finished washing the dirt off the last yucca and left it to dry on the dish rack. “Tells her he knows what it’s like to know something is true, even when others might not believe you. Talks about faith. It works. Makes her feel better about the whole thing.”
Of course, Miguel went along with her, and, of course, they loved it. I almost said that out loud but kept it in. I knew it was no use.
“I don’t know, Filha.” My father placed a glass of water on the table next to me. “The older I get, the less sure I am of anything.” He kissed the top of my head and went inside.
I stayed in the same spot at the table outside, but after staring at the screen for a while, I stopped working on the father story. A light rain began, stirring up a smell of rain and earth, the red dirt where my father had been working turning a shade darker with each drop. I opened the roommate story. It was now a ghost story, I reminded myself. I typed “Ghost Story” at the top of the page and wondered where to start. Maybe trying to inhabit the ghost, to understand it better. This ghost, who hadn’t been there in the first place, who’d snuck in there without my knowing. In the story, the ghost had been stuck in a piano. I thought of its vaporous spirit, a vaguely human-shaped blue smoke, squeezing under the lid into the wooden case, undulating between the strings, silently running its steam fingers through the hammers, circling the inner walls of the case, so similar to the walls of its coffin, and curling itself, lying on the key bed, like a sleeping cat. Until someone came in to play a song, a tribute to the ghost’s former self, jolting it awake, beating at it with the hammers, making its smoky body dissipate and sink into the fibers of the wood, the ivory keys, until it merged with them. And the player’s fingers touched the ghost as they played the song. And it was so nice to feel touch again. And it was as if the ghost were playing the music too.
It wasn’t working. I swayed on my chair, pushed it back away from the table a few inches, and tried again. I closed my eyes and imagined myself as the ghost, not seeing it from the outside this time. I imagined looking down at my fingers. There were my mother’s white-tiled verandah floors through the faint blue smoke that was me. I brought my hands to my face, silently, I had no mouth. And my body was not constant; I had to think of its shape, its limits, or it would disappear. Grasping for the human form, I thought of the statues, Os Candangos, the two figures at Praça dos Três Poderes, and I was there. I was able to keep close to a human shape, as one of them. I was made of bronze and eight meters tall. But then the two spirits who lived there already asked without saying anything, as the hole in their heads was neither eye nor mouth, what I was doing there. Before I could reply, they continued, reminding me that the sculpture had been a gift to them, named after them, in exchange for their bodies, which remained to this day trapped in concrete at the base of a lecture hall, the education auditorium, at the then-new university and, unless I was planning to bring them back, could I, kindly, remove myself from their statues. I had to leave. So I went then to the only place I knew I could go: my parents’ house. I tried to find an outline for myself again and couldn’t. I was thinning out into nothing. Until my mom went to the bathroom to wash her hands and looked at herself in the mirror. And I felt a pull toward that shape, her face in the reflection, I fit myself into it, and the fit was right. I was so happy to have found an outline that I started to laugh. I lifted my hands to touch my face, an old woman’s face, and it felt so good to feel something with my fingers again. Right then, I looked up and saw my mother, her hands on her cheeks, screaming.
“A bunch of thieves in the government. And all these criminals, these marginais, vagabundos, killing and raping. The country has never been worse,” a man was yelling on TV.
I opened my eyes and closed my laptop, not having written a word.
“Back when the military was in power, no one would dare,” he continued.
“Well, I must say, here we agree,” a woman said. “Even if I, unlike Senhor Rodrigo here, think there were troubling incidents then, I keep thinking, what’s worse? Having a curfew and watching what you say on TV, or fearing for your life every time you step out of the house?”
“When they kill your son, this bunch of marginais, when they rape your daughter, I want to see if you come to me speaking of human rights. These Workers’ Party people, these red criminals, they only care about filling their coffers.”
I felt nauseated. I covered my ears with my hands and walked toward the TV room.
“Dad, can you please turn this down?” I asked. But I found him sleeping on the sofa. I turned the TV off.
Dinner was a test run for the next day, when my brother would arrive and Juliana’s family would join us. My mother was in a bad mood, stressed about impressing them. My dad, who was accustomed to her, stood up and grabbed his plate as soon as it was ready, claiming he couldn’t wait for her delicious cooking and was going now to watch his novela. Mom and I ate the bobó in silence. Although she had cooked it for my brother, it was also my favorite dish, and tonight’s bobó was especially good, the smell and taste of dendê infused in the yucca. But I didn’t say anything. I knew my mother was probably not yet satisfied with dinner and missed Miguel. I didn’t let myself admit it often, but I missed him too. The old Miguel, but even the new one, who was not so new anymore. I thought about his face as a child, the two of us racing and playing hide-and-seek at Praça dos Três Poderes, his round little kid cheeks, his mouth always open, following me around, asking, “Where are you going?” I missed him, even though I didn’t understand who he was becoming.
My mom was stabbing at her food aggressively. I didn’t want to fight. But it was getting to me.
“What’s bugging you, Mom?”
“What’s bugging me,” she repeated flatly.
“Yes, what’s bugging you?”
“Well, you.” She huffed. “I mean, she won’t give me a break.” The poor woman and her ghosts.
“What’s she saying now?” I put an arm around her.
“Even knowing about Miguel, she can’t give me a break.” She closed her eyes, ran her hand over her forehead.
“You mean the wedding? Mom, Juliana is great, who cares if the wedding is in Minas Gerais? I bet you your party will be better than the wedding, especially if you make this bobó.”
“No, it’s not that. I forget what I tell each of you.” She sighed. “They are planning to move away.”
“Move away? To Minas Gerais?” No wonder she was unhappy. “No. To Canada.”
My poor mother. It was probably hard on her when I moved. But Miguel leaving her . . . this would nearly kill her.
“Oh, Mom. I’m so sorry.”
She let go of my hand and stepped away. Her expression wasn’t sad anymore but angry again.
“And your ghost said I prefer your brother.” She looked at my face, searching for something. “The nerve of her, so ungrateful, after all that I have done for you.” She paused as if waiting for me to say something, then continued. “After you left me.” Her lips tightened. She looked toward the grass and the darkness, where the cricket chirped. “I have always treated you the same way.”
She wanted me to contradict the ghost, to assure her I thought the ghost was lying. And I almost gave her what she wanted, but my throat closed up, and the words pushing against it made me feel sick. I couldn’t do it. I felt it’d always been obvious to everyone that my mother preferred Miguel. But my mother had a delusion that no one noticed.
“And I think all her talk about the fires and the forest and the blue smoke is just a front.”
“What fires, Mom?”
“She talks about all that stuff, but I think she’s just angry because of the will.”
“What will?”
“She must be angry because I’m leaving the house to your brother.”
“What?”
“See?”
“See what? Why?”
“He was here when we built it, and he was going to be here. And we used to talk about his and Juliana’s children ruining the paint job with crayons. Where were you?” Her voice faltered, but she gained control of it again, hardening her face further. “Also because he would never come back to haunt me over material possessions.”
The thought of my mother’s love for Miguel’s unborn children made me remember her looking at him as a child. I wanted to go back in time and hold my child self, run my fingers through her hair. Love her. But the sadness of that thought and the fear of where it would take me made my limbs go limp as if I were losing my grip on my body, and I grabbed on to my anger instead. “Who says she’s haunting you because of that?”
“Well, you appeared the night after I signed the will.”
“After? You did this before she showed up? But then you can’t have changed the will because of her.”
“Why not?”
“Because the will came first.”
“Talk to me after a ghost comes to haunt you, from the future, from after you’re dead.”
“You’re dead?”
“Well, that’s not exactly a spoiler. The ghost is old herself. It is not like I’m going to be around forever.”
This was a thing my mother liked to bring up, not too often, but often enough so that it would be remembered. How I would realize things once she was gone, and by “realize,” she meant “regret.” I usually ignored her attempts to guilt me. But my mother looked so old right now. She would be gone one day, and I would have no one to come back to. And I would have chosen to spend all my time so far away.
I held her hand. “She told you that?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry, Mom.” I hugged her. “Maybe she’s just sad. Maybe she has nowhere to go. Or maybe she just misses you.”
I thought about longing for my mom in the US and feeling her real self, not a disembodied voice on the phone, her body as I hugged her now. It was so easy and so hard to be with her. I had her with me now, and now was all I could be sure about. That terrified me.
“The thing that gets to me is that she is not angry when she says these things,” she said, letting herself lean into my embrace for a moment. “She says the house doesn’t matter. She says so many things we think matter don’t. She tells me she’s glad I am gone.”
I gasped. “Mom, that’s horrible. I would never say that.”
“No, she says it kindly. She says things are not easy for those who survived and that I did a fine job as a mother. That it’s okay to have some regrets. But that those who are still around have regrets of a magnitude we can’t yet comprehend.”
I held her hand, to comfort both of us. This ghost, I reminded myself, was nothing—could be nothing—but my mother’s imagination. Her guilt, maybe. I was worried. But worried about her, I told myself. And me living far away while this, whatever it was, was happening to her. How things would change over here, how she, an old woman seeing ghosts, would manage, now and in a few years. And my fear for her here mixed with my fear for myself in the US. I told myself to focus. This was not some postapocalyptic story. This was my mother.
But still, I asked, because I had to, “Did you actually change the will before the ghost appeared?”
She got up and took our plates to the sink, her lips tight, her nose raised in disgust. She grabbed a cloth hanging on the kitchen faucet and started wiping the counter. “This is my house. I do with it what I want.”
The ghost was right. It was not the house that mattered. But something else here did.
She kept wiping, looking down at the black counter. “You didn’t want anything to do with this place. What do you want a house for? You left us”—she paused for a few seconds and began wiping again—“first.”
The counter reflected part of her arm. The rest of her disappeared into the stone’s darkness, making it look like a phantom limb following her movements under the surface, my mother and her ghost, cleaning the counter from both sides.
I was about to cry, and I didn’t want her to see me this way. I went to the bathroom and cried quietly, hearing the muffled sounds from my dad’s dubbed American movie, and, in the moments when the movie went quieter, my mother clearing the kitchen. I removed my glasses, and I wiped my eyes, washed my face and hands in cold water. Then, for a second, I thought I felt her, the ghost. It was as if she were there with me. I looked up at the mirror and saw a blurry version of my face, our face, mine, my mother’s, the ghost’s. We were all so sad. I cupped my cheek with one hand and touched the mirror with the other, our eyes, out of focus, met. I wanted to take the ghost with me, for my mother’s sake and for the ghost’s, so that she had somewhere to go, where she was welcome. But I put my glasses back on, and she was gone. I ripped a piece of paper towel and wiped my fingerprints from the mirror. I decided, when I got back home, I was going to revise that story. Make a clear decision on the ghost: one way or another.
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