Chapter 24 If She’d Loved You More #2
Incredibly, they have done it. The ghosts have liberated the little fishing boat from the docks where you left it tied. The fishermen spirits prove surprisingly adept at fading in and out of corporeality as they take it in turn to steer its course.
It’s a bit of difficulty getting to the boat, but you manage. It can come into shallow water, being small, but not all the way into shore. The ghost fishermen pull it up close to an outcropping of rock and you both clamber in.
By now, the ghosts behind you are starting to mill in agitation. They seem distressed, with signs you have learned to recognize: teeth baring, heads swiveling, seeking danger. Those who can speak are whispering or muttering.
“What’s wrong with them, Mami?”
Then you hear it, echoing through the rising winds: the high-pitched scream of a little girl.
“Sea Sister,” you whisper.
“Let’s go!” Mami picks up the oars to begin rowing, and so do you.
Ten feet from shore, lightning strikes.
God-bright beams come arcing from above. The first bolt lashes the assembled ghosts, branching into multiple forks which each hit a different spirit.
The second bolt hits you.
A booming clap drowns out all other noise.
White heat strikes every nerve in your body, pain like a million acupuncture needles, and then blankness.
For a split second you exist in a place without sound, sight, or feeling.
Then your eyes open, your lungs gasp, skin tingling as a body-wide ache sets in.
The blast has flung you clean out of the boat, slammed you into the water. Everything hurts and you smell like a bonfire.
Ears ringing, vision blurred, you struggle to the surface of the ocean, miraculously still conscious, fighting the choppy water.
At least all those months with Sea Sister have made you a good swimmer.
There is blood coming from your ears, your nostrils, your mouth.
A livid burn sears down one shoulder, as if lightning has patterned itself on you; it hurts like hell.
On the shore, the milling ghosts are gone, either frightened away or temporarily dispersed. The fisherman ghost who steered the boat is also gone.
Again, that eerie cry on the wind. Only now it is more of a howl, a scream heard through the rising storm. The typhoon is landing, and somewhere at its heart is the anguished water ghost of Shek Ham Chau.
“She’s here.” Mami sits frozen on the boat, eyes so wide that the veins show around the edges. “My sister is here!”
“Wait!” You are trying to swim toward her even as the current carries the boat away, but feel so dizzy, sick, and weak. “Bring … the boat … closer! Please!”
Mami doesn’t appear to hear you, or else no longer cares. “No, no, no,” she cries. “I refuse to face her again!”
You cannot believe what you are hearing. “Mami, don’t go!”
She begins rowing, then, energetically throwing her weight into the oars, crying and gibbering incomprehensibly. Complete terror has driven her over the edge.
“Mami?” A wave rolls you under and you struggle yet again to the surface, pummeled by rain and battered by wind. Still bleeding and burned from the lightning strike. “Mami, wait for me!”
The boat grows smaller. The waves grow bigger. Down you sink, hollering in the green. By the time you breach the air for a third time, her little vessel has caught a current and is picking up speed. There is a heaviness in your body; you won’t stay afloat for long.
One last try. “Mami!”
Sung Daiyu doesn’t look back. The last sight you have of her is the curve of those rigid shoulders, forever bowing away, head fixed in another direction.
If she’d loved you more, perhaps she might not have abandoned you.
But her fear was stronger.
You sink for a final time.
That moment. When sound plunges into a muted dullness, when the raw noise of the atmosphere above is softened by the sea.
Reach both hands out, grasping at nothing. A foolish instinct. Mami can’t save you now, even if she wanted to. Terror and trauma have driven her into madness, and away from you. The way despair drove Baba from you, months ago.
Someone else, though, reaches back.
The ghost you call Sea Sister rises from those shadowed ocean depths to catch your wrists in hers. Just like she did the first time you met.
There is no joy or surprise in her face today, only a stark and filthy darkness. She is not here to show kindness. Not anymore. You have joined the ranks of those who abandoned her, and she will not forgive that.
For what it’s worth, I truly believe Sea Sister did love you, in her twisted and warped way.
In another life, perhaps she might have even loved you enough to let you live.
But in the end, Sea Sister has been too hurt by existence.
She cannot bear to slink back to the ocean and watch you depart.
She knows that if she saves your life, you will go forever, and she will be alone.
The heart can live with loneliness if it has never known anything better. What it cannot live with is finding companionship, and then losing it again.
I told you, Sea Sister says, but she only sounds sad, not accusing. I told you she would leave. Everyone always abandons us. Everyone always will.
You can’t argue with that. First your father, now your mother. The world at large recedes from you like a tide, impossible to hold. Your fingers are made of water, and life slips through it.
Stay with me, forever, she murmurs, and brushes a kiss across your cheek. Shark teeth leaving a scrape across your skin. You can be just like me, free and strong and swimming endlessly. Isn’t that what you wanted, ghost girl?
It isn’t, not anymore, but it’s too late. One of her claw-like nails stabs into your ribs. The lung deflates, crushing what little air was left out of you. You open your mouth to scream underwater and your throat seizes up, closing reflexively.
She gathers you close amidst the churning currents. Never doubt that I will always love you, she whispers, and she dives.
This time, there is no going up. No return to the surface. There’s a certain strange peace in that knowledge.
At least you won’t be alone, you tell yourself. Even if the only person who stays with you is your murderer, it is still better than dying by yourself.
You do not resist as she bears you down, nor do you cry (no tears beneath the ocean, after all). Instead, you think of Baba, crouched over the kitchen table as he whispers, All things are transient, because now you understand him, so perfectly well.
Darkness encroaches, still and quiet; the storm cannot touch these depths. Pressure compresses your lungs and bursts in your ears and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. Your silence matches Sea Sister’s in this salt-tinged world she inhabits.
Then death arrives like a sudden breeze, and blows your spirit clean away.