* * *
When my father died, I was in the other room. He hadn’t been ill—or rather, he had but not in a way that seemed threatening. A long and aggravating cough, an occasional breathlessness. I was nineteen and I saw him a lot in the weeks immediately following his death: at the end of my bed, twice in the garden at my mum’s house, though at that point they hadn’t been on speaking terms for several years. My mum was actually pretty good about it when I told her. I think seeing things is fine, my love, she said to me, I think seeing the things you want is completely natural. She hugged me a lot during that time and I was grateful for it, though we both knew I had always been closer to my father. It is strange, in a way, to think how much better our relationship became in his absence. When she died, ten years later, I cried harder than I had over my father and felt the drag of her loss in a fiercer and somehow more desperate way. It surprised me, the ache of my missing her and how long it lasted. I didn’t see her afterward the way I had seen my father. Once gone, my mum stayed gone. I didn’t tell anyone about seeing my father, except for my mum and, much later, Miri. I don’t know anything about ghosts, except that I guess I’ve seen one, which makes me believe that other people probably have, too. When I told her about it, the first time, Miri widened her eyes at me and said, I thought you were a scientist, adding that she didn’t believe in ghosts, in a manner that should have been rude but actually wasn’t. I mean I’m jealous, she said, I suppose. When I was a kid I really wanted to believe in that sort of thing.
When my father died, I inherited most of his possessions and sold a lot of them. I kept the things that already felt like mine: the books and the diving almanac, the boxes of magazines and the good, big coat that he always let me borrow when we walked on the beach. I saw him many times in the direct aftermath of his death, waved whenever he appeared and never felt compelled to speak to him. There was really no unfinished business, which I think is what stopped that whole thing being frightening—that and the fact that, ghost or not, it was still only ever my father. There was no sense of haunting, to be honest, only ongoingness, until one day he ceased to appear and I really felt fine about that, too.
MIRI
The phone rings at midnight and I do not answer it. Leah is in the bath and I am in the bathroom with her. The sound machine is playing its usual noises and for the first time I don’t register it as an imposition, so much as a constant element of the space we share. The phone rings again at one and we are in the same position. I’ve been reading to Leah from a book she bought me once and ignoring the way she moves her hands through the water, ignoring the thought of the way a body moves when it’s been broken, the backward drift and slip of something functioning incorrectly.
“Did you know,” she says at one point—the dreaming lecture-voice that tells me she has, for the moment, forgotten me—“did you know that we all carry the ocean in our bodies, just a little bit? Blood is basically made up of sodium, potassium, calcium—more or less the same as seawater, when you really get down to it. The first things came from the sea, of course, so there’s always going to be a little trace of it in everything, a little trace of salt in the bones.”
Shortly after this, I ask her if she wants to come to bed. “You’ve been soaking all day,” I tell her and she nods and tells me that ideally, she’d like a little bit longer. “The water’s cold,” I say and she tells me that’s fine and I think, in a peculiar way, of how similar this is to before, despite everything—the way that Leah was so often fine when I wasn’t, the way that I seemed so endlessly clenched and tense and prone to discomfort where Leah was simply happy to sit as she was. The reason you get heartburn, she used to say, is because you’re letting your whole body squeeze you too tight. She would sit me down on the sofa and hold a hand to my rib cage, mime the breaking of a grip as though someone had clenched a fist around my lungs and was wringing them.
“I still think you should come to bed,” I tell her, but she shakes her head peaceably and turns her attention back to the water. I’m not sure why I press the matter, except to say that it seems easier, in the dark, with the sound machine playing over the tops of my words, to speak and imagine the things I say might land. “I’d really like you to come to bed,” I say, and when she doesn’t respond I take her hand and try to pull it, “just for a bit,” I say, and I don’t know why I’m angry and I don’t know what it is that I want or why I pull so hard that she half stands in the bath. “I don’t want to,” she says and I tell her I think this is silly, that it’s all so silly. “I don’t want to,” she tells me again, and I’m trying to heave her out of the bath and then she is leaking water from the beds of her eyes, from the insides of her ears, from the side of her mouth, and her legs are not supporting her and my skin is screaming and I catch her beneath the arms to stop her falling and to stop this moment from being my fault.