Chapter 9 #2
The girl tied the sash into a bow, fluffed the crinoline, shook the dress so that it was even fuller, more resplendent.
It made the morning light thicker and more golden somehow as it gleamed in the sun.
Would it do the same for this girl? Gigi wondered.
Would it make her more tangible, no longer a ghost but something closer to human, to flesh that could be touched? Or loved?
“You didn’t want to get married to that boy, did you?” Gigi said. “The one your father chose?”
The girl did not reply, did not nod; she only lifted her head so it seemed as if she could be looking at Gigi, could be assessing the words she had spoken.
“That was you, wasn’t it? The daughter of the man who built this house?
You were the one who started all the bad luck?
You wanted to live, didn’t you? But you couldn’t, not the way they wanted you to.
” Gigi paused. “You wanted to grow up and choose a husband, have babies, make a life. I understand. Maybe you know that already.”
The faceless girl reached out with her left hand and, with the barest touch, ran her fingers over Gigi’s belly. Gigi could feel the coldness of her touch through the fabric, how there must have been no blood underneath the skin and muscle. She felt empty.
And yet Gigi could sense her longing, her wish to be whole again, to feel surprise or desire or embarrassment.
She wanted Gigi, or at least Gigi’s life.
No, that wasn’t right, because who would want this life?
Gigi looked down at the thin bony hand on her stomach, watched it contract as it tried to find a grip. She wanted life . She wanted the baby.
Just then, Gigi heard Auntie’s voice echoing through the hall. “Where is that girl? Always late for everything. You will get no breakfast if you don’t come down in three minutes!”
Gigi turned toward the door and shouted, “I’m coming, Auntie!”
When she turned back to the armoire, the faceless girl was gone. Its doors were still ajar, and an empty hanger swayed back and forth, but there was no girl, no green dress. She had left behind no smell, not a strand of hair, nothing.
gigi could not stop seeing ghosts. Every afternoon, as the sun dropped lower and lower into the tree canopy (the trees, the trees that no one had trimmed for as long as Gigi had been here, the trees with their long skinny branches growing at haphazard angles), she opened her bedroom door and let the draft draw her down the hallways and into Nam Koo’s furthest corners.
It was Gigi they wanted, the taste of her feet against the blood-red runner, worn down but still the colour of old wounds.
She didn’t feel crazy when she was walking through the house, past doors both locked and unlocked; it was only afterward, after she had returned to her room and was hurriedly changing into whatever dress Auntie had laid out for her, that she played back where she had gone and what she had seen and realized none of it was normal.
Was she crazy? Or was Nam Koo, with its dead girls and rotting velvets, making her crazy?
Or was it the soldiers who were making her this way, with those disgusting trails of touch they left on her body that she could never scrub off?
Or was she allowing herself to be haunted?
In one basement room, below the kitchen, she found remnants of an old pantry—string bags filled with powdery blobs that had once been potatoes or onions, a shelf of glass jars that may have contained pickles or jam but were now all varying shades of green and grey.
The stone walls were wet to the touch, as if they were coated in cold fearful sweat.
A rat scurried across the floor, almost grazing her foot, and Gigi jumped back, putting her hands behind her to steady herself.
She could feel the sharp ends of splinters against her palms. When she turned to look, she saw that she had backed into a waist-high barrel.
A girl in a faded blue and white maid’s dress was crouched on top, her chin resting on her knees.
Her hair, dotted with dust, hung in two long braids, so long that Gigi thought they must have been braided years ago and left to grow, the ends tangling more and more each year.
“Hello, miss,” she said, as Gigi covered her own mouth with her hand. “I know you. I have been watching you and the other girls for a long time.”
Gigi rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “Who are you?”
“I lived here too, once, a maid who slept on a bedroll in the room just over there.” She gestured to a short doorway with a dismissive wave.
“The master of the house was cruel, but his sons were even crueller.” The girl jumped from the barrel and stood in front of Gigi.
“Let me show you,” she said as she lifted up the hem of her skirt.
There on her thighs, above her stockings, bruises in all colours: purple, yellow, blue, green.
Gigi could see her underwear; it was soaked with blood.
Gigi didn’t know if she wanted to embrace this girl or if she wanted to push her away. But she knew she couldn’t bear witness to another woman’s pain by saying nothing or doing nothing, so she stepped forward and held out her hands. An invitation to remember.
The girl shook her head. “You should go. You’ll be late.
” And she closed her eyes and leaned back against the barrel, her head hung low.
“If you misbehave in any way, they won’t hesitate to make you disappear.
” Once Gigi had one foot on the stairs, she glanced back.
There was no one on the barrel, no rat running circles on the compacted dirt floor, no movement in the cobwebs sticky with damp and grease.
Later, as she sat in a pale blue satin dress in the ballroom, waiting for the soldiers to make their decisions, she wondered if she would ever see the same ghost twice, or if she was destined to see a different woman every time.
What did their words mean? The strange sentences that sounded like warnings but could have been dream words pushed together?
Why was she trying to apply logic to a phenomenon that defied sense?
Was this what growing crazier and crazier felt like?
Gigi reached out and grabbed Xuan’s hand. “Do you ever feel like there are real ghosts here? Not the stories we tell each other to pass the time, but real ghosts, who watch us, who know us even when we can never really know them?”
Xuan turned her head and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Sometimes I think we are the ghosts, Gigi. One day, outside of this place, we will be nothing more than a scary story.”
the next time, it was a middle-aged woman with hair permed in perfect waves, wearing a silk blouse and tailored pencil skirt.
Her face was fair, painted over with makeup that was rose-coloured and fine-lined, the kind of makeup that wasn’t so uncouth as to loudly announce its presence.
But her eyes. Turned downward at the edges, drooping from fatigue or sadness or the weight of betrayal.
Gigi found her standing by a window, face close to the glass. The birds were singing loudly, wild cackles and whoops that were equal parts piercing and joyful. The woman sighed and closed her eyes, as if this temporary blindness could help her understand what the birds might be celebrating.
“It was never going to be easy for me,” she said. “My mother warned me that marrying for money would mean I had to give my whole self away, but I didn’t listen.”
Gigi felt heavy in her own body, as if a stone was buried deep in her belly, making her movements slow and her thoughts even slower.
She wanted to scoop up this woman in her arms, though she knew that she could not lift her, but she wanted to try; she wanted to smooth out the wrinkles in her forehead and whisper that it would all turn out in the end, it would all be just fine.
“He had affairs, of course, but one night I heard someone walking through the halls. I opened the door a crack, and I saw her looking at me looking at her, and it was then I knew he had invited her to live in our house, the house he had built for me .” She turned her head and stared at Gigi.
“He controlled all the money, of course, and I couldn’t leave our children.
And so I stayed and tried to make the best of it, tried to remember the hallways I should avoid, the rooms I should never enter.
I loved our children so much I stayed for them.
And even then he made me lock our daughter up the night before the wedding, as if she were nothing more than a possession, a trophy from one of his stupid hunting trips.
I was the one who found her the next morning, hanging there.
” She bent her head and covered her face with her hands.
“This house eats up all the women, all the girls. And then we are trapped here forever.”
“But how do we get out?”
“I wish I knew. But wherever you escape to, don’t forget us. Don’t forget that we will always be here.”
Gigi took a step forward. “I won’t forget. I promise.”
The woman nodded and then turned and walked away, her body growing smaller and smaller until Gigi could no longer see her. If Gigi wanted to run after her, it was too late now. The shadows were long, and Gigi knew she was gone.
gigi had a choice to make, but she wasn’t good at decisions.
No, the truth was that she couldn’t remember ever making one.
She wore a school uniform. She was dragged here into Nam Koo on a dark, rainy evening.
She was told she could never leave, that the Japanese soldiers would find her if she ran away, and they would bring her back, beat her, and tie her to the bed.
Some of them beat her anyway. And so she stayed. But it was not a choice.