My Precious

The house was haunted, or so I thought. It had started on the seventh day after my wife’s death, a day on which ghosts are believed to return home for a final visit before moving on to the afterworld for reincarnation. My wife, as it turned out, had decided to stay. She wasn’t violent, at least not for the time being. She could be treating me the way a naughty cat treats an unlucky rat—teasing it before killing it.

She moved things around while I was asleep. Objects turned up in unexpected places: utensils in the fridge, remote controls in the microwave, keys in the bathroom sink, bed sheets on the living-room floor. One morning, I woke up next to one of her dresses. A blue one. My wife had owned many dresses, most of them blue, in varying shades. Blue had been her favorite color as a painter, and the color of her mood in the last two years of her life. I stared at the dress for a few moments, picked it up, and brought it to my nose. A faint scent of lavender still clung to the fabrics. Having made a mental note to switch to another brand of detergent with a different scent, I got out of bed, folded up the dress, and replaced it in the cardboard box stowed in the corner of the bedroom closet. A few days later, another dress crawled into my bed. This time, after putting the dress back, I carried the cardboard box to the study, placed it on top of the bookshelf with the help of a chair.

And it happened again the very next morning. Frustrated and groggy, I sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at my feet. My slippers were nowhere in sight. I bent over to look under the bed. No luck. It was some time before I stood up, snatched the light-blue dress from the bed, and shuffled barefoot to the study. When I opened the door, I was greeted by a strange tableau: a chair beside a bookshelf, a pair of slippers at the foot of the chair, on the seat of which sat a cardboard box with its flaps sticking up.

The sight brought about a surge of relief, for I suddenly realized that I could have been the one who had been haunting the house. I sleepwalked when I was under stress. And I had been under a lot of stress lately. But the relief left as quickly as it had come. Why would I want to spook myself? Why would I want her presence in my life when I’m trying my best to forget her? Why would I cling to the past when I’m struggling to move on?

The house was haunted, I decided.

#

I was haunted by the idea that since she was capable of moving objects, she could easily spike the glass of water I kept on the nightstand, then slit open my wrist with a kitchen knife while I was out cold. So I, ever proactive, called in help, in the form of a Mr. Mao.

Mr. Mao was many things. He was a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, whose father, also a TCM practitioner, had cured me of many an illness when I was a kid. He was a feng shui master, who had helped me pick out a burial site for my mother. He was a fortune-teller, who had foretold that I’d have a life-changing experience at the age of 34, which I took to be my wife’s death. Last but not least, he was a part-time exorcist, whose services I had not been in need of until now.

He arrived around midnight, which falls into the first of the twelve double-hours that make up a day. According to Mr. Mao, this is the period when yin is the strongest and yang is the weakest, when ghosts are the most active. The moment he stepped inside, his brow furrowed. What had provoked that furrowed brow, I didn’t ask, for I had learned from our previous dealings that he didn’t take questions until he had done a preliminary investigation. I closed the door and waited for the man to work magic.

He set his burlap tote bag on the countertop, withdrew a feng shui compass, and proceeded to explore the house, holding the compass before him. I followed behind him, keeping a respectful distance, as he went about the living room, the bedroom, the guest room, the study. Then he stopped short in front of the closed bathroom. He opened the door, hesitated, and walked in. I stood in the doorway.

“This is where she did it,” I offered as he inched toward the bathtub.

He gave me a withering look, as if I had just uttered a profanity. He then crouched down beside the bathtub and hovered the compass over it. “Was she an angry person when she was alive?”

“I don’t think so.” I swallowed hard. “Why?”

“Nothing.”

“Can you, um, talk to them?”

“Them?”

“The spirits.”

“No, I cannot,” he said, offended again. He stood up and came out of the bathroom.

“What do we do now?”

“I’m gonna ask her to leave. Then do something to appease her, if she can be appeased, that is.” He replaced the compass, and took out a copper bell and a handful of joss sticks.

“Okay.”

Mr. Mao lit the joss sticks, and went on to fumigate the rooms, chanting a mantra and shaking the bell every now and then. The bathroom was his final target. He dropped the burning joss sticks in the bathtub before coming out to the living room.

“Put these up when I’m gone.” He handed me a small deck of paper talismans—red, yellow, and green, each with strange characters written on it.

“Has she left?”

“Yes. But you’ll need these to keep her out. And give me something your wife used. An article of clothing, maybe. I’m gonna perform a ritual to appease her back at my place.”

“I’ve donated all her clothes.” I looked up at Mr. Mao, who seemed disappointed. “I’ll see what I can find.” I found a comb in the bottom drawer of her dresser, which I had moved to the guest room, and gave it to Mr. Mao in the doorway.

“I’ll wire you the other half.”

He nodded and turned to leave. He got into the car parked at the curb and was spirited away into the distant gloom. When I turned around, I spotted my neighbor, an old lady with a full head of silver hair, standing on her doorstep. She was waving her hand slowly. I strained to see what or whom she was waving at, but saw nothing.

I went inside, closed the door, and went about putting up the paper talismans.

#

We had met at a wedding reception, she as the maid of honor, I as the best man. The newlyweds set us up. They said we had stolen a higher-than-normal number of glances at each other at the reception. That’s how we started dating. Five months later, we moved in together. Five months after that, she was almost a week late. A shotgun wedding followed. We were on our way to parenthood, but never arrived.

She blamed herself. I should’ve eaten healthier. I should’ve been more active. I should’ve refrained from sex. I don’t deserve to be a mother . . . I comforted her. You were eating healthy enough. You were active enough. Sex had nothing to do with it. You’ll become a mother, let’s try again . . . She had no time for my comforting words, too busy getting depressed.

I had two pet peeves: unreadable handwriting and unstoppable crying, both effective ways of blocking productive communication. My wife wrote a beautiful hand, but had two tear-prone eyes. They got moist when she was happy, they welled up when she was moved, they shed tears when she felt wronged, they cried a river when she was depressed. She cried and cried, but the river never ran dry.

I went out of my way to dam the river. I got off work early to spend more time with her; I’d have loved to quit my job, but we still had a mortgage to pay off. I read cookbooks and made her feel-good meals. I bought paints, paper, paintbrushes, and whatnot to rekindle her love for painting—she did baby-themed paintings, and I got to see what our baby, if alive, would look like in her head. I got her a British shorthair, only to discover that she was allergic to cats.

There was no cheering her up. One night, when I came out of the bathroom—I used to get up in the middle of the night to relieve myself, I heard a whimpering sound. I debated with myself for a moment before following the noise to the unused nursery. The door stood ajar. I eased it open wider. She was lying in a fetal position, facing away from the door.

“It’s cold on the floor.” I pulled her up to a sitting position and let her lean against my chest.

“Sorry, I didn’t . . . mean to . . . wake you.” She said between sobs. Clutched to her chest was the tiny sweater she had woven when she was pregnant.

“It’s all right.” I rocked her gently, wondering how tired I’d be tomorrow, how many cups of coffee I’d need to get through the day. We must have been sitting there for 15 minutes before I carried her back to the bedroom.

The episode repeated itself. But as time went by, I got up in the middle of the night less and less, and eventually stopped. Her depression had conditioned me to sleep through the night.

#

It had taken her two attempts to successfully take her own life. If not for me, she would have succeeded at her first attempt, and might have failed at her second.

“Sorry,” she had said her catchword when she came to in the hospital bed, her pale complexion in perfect harmony with the snow-white sheets. I reached out my hand to touch her cheek and almost jerked it back. Her cheek was so cold that it burned.

“It’s all right,” I said, not feeling all right. The doctor said I had made the right decision by driving her to the hospital instead of waiting for an ambulance. The hospital was ten minutes away.

“I’ll never do it again,” she said. I believed her.

We stayed a few days in the hospital. When we were home, she went straight to the bedroom.

“Did you find something on the dresser?” She came out a minute later.

“What?”

“A note.”

“Oh, yes. I don’t know where I put it. I must have lost it.”

“I need a bath. I stink.” She smiled weakly. The bathroom had been cleared of all traces of her attempted suicide. I had made a quick trip home when she was out of danger but hadn’t come to. That’s when I found the suicide note, written in her beautiful hand.

I tried to be happy for you, I really did, but it felt like a betrayal of my baby boy. I can’t take it anymore. Sorry that I have to go like this. You’re a good husband, a good man, you deserve better. I hope there’s no pain in heaven, and if I’m lucky enough to be allowed a place there, I’ll watch over you from above.

The second attempt came six months later. I came home late from a business meal on that fateful night. I rang the bell, and when no one answered, I unlocked the door with my key and let myself in.

“I’m home.” I put the briefcase on the living-room sofa. On the table was a plastic bag with a few oranges and a receipt in it. “I’m home…”

The half-digested meal churned in my stomach, threatening to come up, as I made my way toward the bedroom. On the nightstand sat a self-help book called Seven Habits to a Happy Life, an empty glass, two gutted blister packs, and a container for Warfarin, a blood thinner her father had been using for his heart condition up until his death near the end of her pregnancy.

I dashed out of the bedroom. The bathroom door was locked from the inside. I kicked it open. There she was, lying in a pool of dark-red blood, eyes closed, mouth open. I grabbed a towel from the rack and knelt beside her. As I wrapped the towel tightly around her wrist, I noticed how her mouth widened and narrowed, like that of a water-deprived fish, how she had only one slipper on, how her dress was tainted with blood. She moaned when I picked her up in my arms.

“Everything is gonna be all right,” I whispered to her. I rushed her out of the bathroom, but stopped dead before the front door. Looking down at her pale face, I felt a sudden resentment; my mind found its way to the suicide note tucked between two pages of the English-Chinese dictionary on the bookshelf.

My heart calmed down, my head cleared up. I carried her back to the bathroom, placed her carefully on the bathmat, like a delicate china vase, next to a brand-new blood-glazed kitchen knife. My hand touched a bump on the back of her head as I rearranged her into position. I removed the towel from her wrist and submerged it in the warm water. She had stopped moaning, but her chest was still rising and falling.

I went on to mop up the blood on the floor. My whole body was buzzing. I felt like a long-distance runner on the home stretch.

#

On the first anniversary of my wife’s death, her younger sister visited me. I was watching a comedy about a man who passes out and wakes up in his dog’s body, when the doorbell rang.

“Mei, what brings you here?” For a second, I had thought it’s my late wife who was standing in the doorway. There was a resemblance between the two siblings.

“It’s cold out here.” She was holding a scroll in one of her gloved hands.

“Sorry.” I let her in. She stood in the middle of the living room, looking around.

“Mr. Mao said these can comfort her soul,” I said. Mr. Mao was famous all around town, and would be more so many years later, when he was caught stealing his neighbor’s lingerie.

“Green or black?”

“I’m cutting down on caffeine.” She touched her belly. “Three months.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” She sat down on one of the armchairs.

I went to the kitchen to fetch her a glass of water. I had barely sat down opposite her when she blurted out, “You feel her presence too?”

“What?”

“My sister. You said these paper talismans comfort her soul.” She took a sip of water. “I dreamed about her last night. Has she ever come to your dreams?”

“Sometimes.”

“She was painting, in my dream. She motioned for me to come forward. So I walked over to stand at her side. Then she removed the painting from the board and asked me to give it to you.”

“Me?”

She nodded and took another sip of water. “After I visited her tombstone today, I went to our parents’ house. And when I went through her old stuff, I found this.” She picked up the scroll and handed it to me.

I unrolled it. It’s a painting of a woman in a blue dress standing in a meadow before an easel. She’s holding a paintbrush in one hand, a palette in the other, looking back over her shoulder, as if at someone outside the bounds of the painting.

“That’s the painting I saw in the dream. Now it’s yours.”

“You don’t want to keep it?”

“She asked me to give it to you.” She smiled and stood up. “I better get going.”

After she left, I burned the painting in the bathroom. That night, I dreamed about my wife, for the first time in a long time.

“Come. Look what I’ve painted for you.” She turned to me. My reluctant feet carried me to her side.

“There’s nothing on it.”

“Touch it.”

The moment I touched it, I was sucked into the blank piece of paper. I found myself back in the bathroom of my house, where in the overflowing bathtub, water was bubbling. The water took on a red hue after a while. Then she crawled out of the bathtub, and to where I stood riveted to the spot. She kissed each of my insteps before she stood up, grabbed my hand, and bit into my wrist. When she pulled away and smiled at me, I saw two rows of bloody shark-like teeth. I looked down, my wrist was spurting blood. That’s when I woke up, in the middle of the night, covered in a cold sweat.

In each of her subsequent visits, my dream always started with the scene depicted in the painting. But what happened after me being sucked into the blank piece of paper differed from visit to visit. She was creative when it came to contriving ways to scare me.

#

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy…” My daughter’s voice reverberated around the house. She burst into the study, where I had been making a PPT for my department’s third-quarter performance, rearranging the data for a more desirable effect.

“What is it?”

“I know what I want for my birthday!” She gave me a toothy smile, her hands behind her back.

“Yes?” I glanced at the computer screen. Her upcoming birthday was still one week away. It had been ten years since I sold my old house and moved to another city, nine since I met my second wife and got married, seven since my first wife stopped haunting my dreams, right around the time my daughter was born. I had a feeling that it was my daughter who had been safeguarding my dreams.

“I want a cat.”

“A cat?”

“Ta-da!” She showed her hands, holding an iPad over her head. She had a flair for melodrama. “Play the video.”

It was a one-minute video of a British Shorthair chasing after a red dot controlled by an unseen hand. Near the end of the video, the red dot took a sharp turn, and the cat hit a wall head-on and was knocked over. It staggered to its feet, shaking its head.

“Cats are hilarious, aren’t they? Can I have one?”

“That’s not a very good idea.”

“Please, please, please… I’ll take good care of it, I promise.”

“If you get your mom on board, then yes, you can have a cat.”

“Consider it done.” She patted her chest and ran away, yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy…”

#

On the drive to the pet store, she babbled away about princesses, aliens, cats.

“Cats have nine lives. How do they come back?”

“As kittens, I guess.”

“Do they remember what happened in their past lives?”

“They do, I guess.”

She fell silent, for the first time since we had gotten in the car. I glanced at her: brow furrowed, head tilted, forefinger and thumb on her chin. After a short while, she exclaimed, “I’m gonna learn cat language.”

“Why?”

“So I can ask them what my great-grandfather was like, or what happened a hundred years ago. That’ll be so cool.” She paused for a second before adding, “I wonder how many lives a human being has.”

“We’ll never know.”

“Daddy, do you know where people go after they die?”

“Beats me.”

“Feifei told me her mother is in heaven,” she said.

“Heaven?”

“Yes, heaven.”

“What happened to her mother?”

“She’s dead. Something bad was growing inside her, and the doctor couldn’t get it out.”

“And why does Feifei think her mother is in heaven?”

“Her father told her. He believes in gods. He says good people go to heaven, and bad people go to hell. Feifei’s mother was a good person. So she’s in heaven.”

“I bet she is.”

“Do you know what heaven is like?”

I shook my head.

“It’s like Disneyland, but better,” she continued. “I’ve never been to Disneyland. But Feifei said people in heaven have cotton candy for breakfast, ice cream for lunch, tanghulu for supper. And they have bouncy castles, giant stuffed animals, and many other toys. You can have whatever you want if you think really, really hard about it.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” She had a big grin on her face. “Do you know what hell is like?”

I shook my head again.

“It’s a scary place. There are a million giant pots down there. A lot of steam, like in a sauna. There’s a fire under each pot, and there’s water boiling in it. Do you know what’s being boiled?”

“Bad people?”

“Yes. And the King of Hell assigns one ugly creature to each pot. Their job is to feed wood to the fire and add water in the pot. So the fire burns forever.” My daughter was a great storyteller. When she got into the mood, her arms moved around like a conductor’s. “They look like the ugly thing in that movie about rings.”

She was talking about Gollum. I had made the mistake of watching The Two Towers with her the other day. But she didn’t scare easily. She even helped her mother get rid of the occasional cockroach or spider.

“That’s scary.” I faked a shudder.

“Don’t worry.” She reached over and touched my arm. Sometimes she behaved as if she had a much older soul. “Only bad people go there. You’re a good dad.”

A good dad, but a bad person.

She was listing the atrocities committed by Ms. Zhou, her math teacher, as we drove down into the underground parking lot of the shopping mall. Then we took the elevator to the third floor. In the pet store, she strolled around with her hands behind her back, like a miniature ancient Chinese intellectual, examining each and every cat before deciding on a British Shorthair.

Down in the parking lot, she insisted she hold the cat on the drive home. I let her, as always. In the car, she started talking to the cat, which meowed weakly in response. But halfway home, she gave a violent sneeze that made the cat jump.

“Daddy, it’s itchy.” She was scratching her forearm and sniffing.

I pulled over and turned to her. “Give me the cat.”

“Why?”

“Honey, I don’t think we can keep the cat.”

“Why?”

“You’re allergic to cats.”

She was still sniffing.

“No, I am not.”

“We have to return the cat.”

“No, we don’t.”

I wrenched the cat from her hands. She started crying. I shoved the cat into the cage, put it in the trunk, and got back behind the wheel. I reached over to wipe away a teardrop caught in her long lash. “How about we get you a dog?”

“But I don’t want a dog.” She said through her sobbing.

“Dogs are cute.”

“I’m a cat person.”

“We’ll think of something else for your birthday.”

“Why can’t I keep the cat?”

“You’re allergic to them.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Look at your arm.”

A small batch of redness had appeared on her forearm. She was still crying, and she could keep it up for hours.

“You know what,” I said, “we’re going to Disneyland.”

She stopped whimpering. “Disneyland and two chocolate ice cream cones.”

“Deal.”

We pinky-swore on it.

#

It was late afternoon when we left Disneyland. We were waiting at a red light when I heard someone calling my name. I turned my head. Seated in the passenger seat of the SUV in the adjacent lane was my former sister-in-law.

“Oh my god, it is you! What are the odds?” Mei squealed.

“It’s been a while.” I stole a glance at the countdown. Fifteen seconds to go. I then gave her husband a nod of acknowledgment.

“What brings you here?”

“I took my daughter to Disneyland.” I turned to my daughter. “Say hello to your Auntie.”

“Hello, Auntie.” She leaned forward and waved.

“Oh my god. She looks just like my sister when she was little.” Mei’s eyes were wide with surprise.

“Really?” I knew how melodramatic she could be.

“You’ve got to come and visit our new home. Just ten minutes away.”

Before I could politely decline her invitation, a prolonged honk sounded. And twenty minutes later, I found myself sitting on a long sofa in a spacious living room, my daughter by my side. Mei excused herself.

“Green, black, oolong?” her husband asked. On the table before me, were three tin cylinders, a heavy-looking wooden teaboard holding a tea set, and a mini-induction cooktop with a glass kettle on it.

“Oolong would be great.”

He pressed a button on the appliance, and a slender stream of water flowed out of a hook-shaped metal tube to fill up the glass kettle through a hole in its lid. He pressed another button to set the water to boil. All the while, he went on about which type of tea was best in which season, how he only used high-quality loose leaves. He was about to launch into a speech about the benefits of drinking tea when Mei reappeared.

“I only found two.” She sat down and handed me the photos, her eyes fixed on my daughter. “The resemblance is uncanny.”

The one on the top was a wide shot; I could barely make out the subject’s face. The second one was a close-up, and the sight of it sent my heart palpitating.

“Daddy, why am I in the photo?”

I looked from the photo to my daughter, and back to the photo, stomach acid traveling up to my throat. The appliance chirped. My eyes went to the churning water in the glass kettle, steam pouring out of its spout, and my mind was transported back to the scene of hell my daughter had described to me on our way to get the cat she was allergic to.