As my dreams return, so does the paralysis. After almost three weeks of waking up bodiless, I should be used to it. The panic lulls after my fingers crack, each piece regaining feeling, as if I’d been disassembled during the night and put back together. I expect Marion to appear, slinking from behind the bedroom door, and every second that she does not worries me that she is elsewhere, haunting my family. I never want to sleep, but I have to. It’s the only way Cam can show me the past so I can figure out how to beat Marion in her own game.
In the last visit, Cam led me through wild gardens screaming with marigolds not yet paved for Đà Lạt’s growth. She shared confused memories of her time in the house, when Marion had first begun to lurk around corners. The food tasted fine, Cam told me after, in that limbo space I’ve started to consider as ours.
And now I’m awake, in the real world that only I can investigate, where sound is both raw and unfiltered. There’s a cost to exploring a ghost’s vivid memories though. My body begs for rest. My mind is dull and fatigued. As I go downstairs to play Ba’s dutiful daughter, I see that the house has remained complicit in good behavior. Nothing new has broken. It gives us no reason to want to leave.
Outside, the reno workers blast music so loud that the windows tremble. They’ve been working around the clock, almost as hard as me. Hearing familiar songs—even when the Viet lyrics are beyond me—is a balm to my anxiety. I am here, and I can be useful. There are dried and packaged starches to prepare for Lily while I eat whatever meal Ba makes. I’m disgusted with how I’m craving those crispy egg rolls stuffed with jícama, wood ear mushrooms, and ground pork from last night, when anything can be in it.
Within the sitting room, our photographs have been returned to their places on the mantel. The hydrangeas are wicked, spilling to either side of their pots. The overstuffed chairs are landmarks in this lush parlor, and feet dangle from the fireplace. The air is thick with a love song as I shuffle toward the kitchen, ready to boil more bland noodles. Yet something is wrong. I face the room again.
Feet dangle from inside the fireplace.
Is this real?
Have I lost it?
Vigilance every waking moment carries a high toll.
Inside the fireplace are two pale legs. A deceptively cheery ankle bracelet shines on the left.
Screaming, I throw myself in, my forearms around her calves, pulling, yanking. The little hairs on her legs scratch me in return. When did you start shaving your legs, I will ask once she’s out, and are you already dead? Please don’t be dead.
The body in my embrace screams too.
“Lily,” I say, urgent, once she’s freed.
She doesn’t see me, even though we’re in this messed-up reality together. Her eyes are narrowed on the feather-thin bones in her hands. Ivy has wrapped into a broken bird-shaped thing, vines reaching flowering through the eye sockets. I grind my teeth harder.
“I heard …” She trails off, slowly blinking at me. Her long hair is twisted around her neck. “I heard some thumping, then chirping. I wanted to check.” Dropping the find, she rubs her hands furiously on soot-covered pajamas. Black smudges across her cheeks to the tips of her ears. Brown eyes behind a wet sheen. Someone ready to cry.
“Let’s get cleaned up,” I say, gently taking her by the shoulders. She hunches forward, folding herself smaller, and follows me upstairs. That dead thing doesn’t move after us. In the bathroom, I help dab soot from the back of her arms and other places she misses. This house has never bothered anyone but me. “Did you see anything else?” I ask when her breaths come naturally. How did I miss this?
Her attention snaps violently to me. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“I’m not helping you leave early,” Lily continues, unburdening herself of this peace. “I’m not using Ba for money.” She throws a damp towel at me before hurrying back to her bedroom. She’s never been good in a confrontation. Where my sister lets off steam in controlled bouts, I have always been fond of a direct, explosive attack.
I stop her seconds before the door can slam. Wood stings my palm, but I shrug off her wince. “Don’t take anything Dad gives you,” I remind her. “Just the dried food. I bought enough for the week.” Her expression twists in irritation, and she answers by shutting the door in my face.
The impact reverberates throughout the house. My eyes flick toward the ceiling, then the hallway closet. My sign, it’s here. Cam, or something else, is responding. Ever since our arrival, the thumping has demanded to be heard. I should’ve investigated sooner, when I was less afraid. Beyond the small door with many locks, the stairway to the attic squeezes me from both sides. I press on. As my feet touch the attic floor, sound erupts again.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
The house’s spine quivers. It echoes in my body. In less than a week, Ba has covered the insulation with new drywall, smoothing the room into a gray landscape. Marion’s writing desk is open, dust stirred from its surface. Nowhere are the baby rats I found last time. Ba has been busy.
I stand by the chimney, palms over rough brick, and feel the tremble of an angry fist. I lay my cheek against this house, the same way Marion did in the past. The urge to speak is overwhelming. “What are you trying to say?” I whisper, touching its well-laid mortar lines.
An imperfection snags my eye: a single brick jutting from the rest. I dig fingers into the loose brick, pulling, pulling, and pulling until my nails start to lift. Fresh pain sears my hands, but I hold my breath and pry the brick apart. The flashlight from my phone illuminates enough to see paper pinned on the opposite wall. In a move that both Halle and Florence would say is extraordinarily unwise, I shove my arm inside the dark hole, fitting almost to the bicep. The air is impossibly hot inside the chimney, though no fire’s been lit.
The paper is too high from this angle. I need to make the gaping space bigger. I have to get whatever’s inside that wants to be found. A hammer from Ba’s lonely toolbox is perfect for that. Its weight is much less than a shovel, after all. I swing it easily against adjacent bricks, scattering concrete crumbs over the dusty floor. Destroying something tangible is therapeutic. Knowing it’ll piss Ba off makes it even more therapeutic.
With a section of brick chipped off, I reach in again on the tips of my toes. I’m half expecting a vicious bite, another lost bird’s feathers, or the clenching of possessive vines, but the sepia-toned paper dislodges easily. Whereas Marion’s collection had been full of parties, nature, and family portraits, this stash of photographs is smaller and carefully curated. Soldiers stare stoically at the camera, proud, outside an unknown village. Locals work a rubber plantation, unaware someone has immortalized their backs. In another picture, dead faces rest on a tree stump.
Eyes closed. Bodies elsewhere.
These are not photographs you hang up.
The Dumont brothers and their fellow officers have a hunter’s stance with their bloody bounty. History would love to say these executed prisoners were bandits. I would say, perhaps, that they were home when the strangers arrived.
“Did you all die here?” I ask out loud, when really the question I mean is, Have I buried you well enough? And even then, the rotted skulls we hid might not be theirs. No easy answer arrives. My fist tightens around the photographs. Then I realize these might be the only ones their descendants would ever see, and quickly unfold them. All collateral damage, like my great-grandmother in the curtains during another family’s portrait.
The hammer drops with a clang from my grip. Alma mentioned before that Marion’s husband kept order in Tonkin, which means his actions were under the banner of duty. A small, pained laugh crackles from my lungs. If those earlier photographs were worthy subjects of an academic paper, then these belong to a museum. So many would hang them in exhibitions detailing the history on how colonialism ruined lives, without ever naming those lives.
My great-grandmother, too young and full of wide-eyed wonder to understand the dangers in her life. My grandmother, chasing American soldiers for candy while napalm dropped in a neighboring province. Ba, on a packed boat but alone at sea. The holes in Mom’s family history, despite a half dozen siblings to construct stories from. And Cam, whose loved ones stopped seeing her over a marriage that saved them.
I’ve been going about it wrong; I don’t need to know what Marion wants. Racists don’t need reasons to be racist. She lived to be seen. There are so many others waiting to be heard, overlooked and forgotten and written in the margins. My family won’t be free if I play by the rules set by others, allowing the pattern to repeat—relentless and hungry.
It was never only Cam and Marion in this house built to outlast flesh.
“You have been here this entire time,” I say to the walls, spinning slowly at the attic’s center. That’s why Cam said them. “You’ve been listening.” Cam had been too afraid to engage with the supernatural when she was alive, but a house has no loyalty.
We all learn what we need to survive.
We shape the environment, and it also shapes us. The Lady of Many Tongues has been Nhà Hoa’s longest tenant, yes, but others have walked through here and left splinters of their soul—or vibes, as Florence once theorized right out of her ass. I laugh, this time joyful. The splinters led me here, much like the red leaves of that hydrangea bush. Stories have been written into its very bones, even if all this house wants is to never be alone again. Marion is selfish and arrogant. She doesn’t notice these details, and maybe Nhà Hoa doesn’t either. I can be different. There are things this house has yet to learn about me.
And because I am still breathing, I decide which beast to preserve behind museum glass or press between pages of a book that might not be read again. I am alive, and willing, and so this house needs me more than it needs its dead madame. I press my body close to Nhà Hoa’s so that it can hear my heartbeat. Then, I whisper: “I will be your host.”