Ghosts of My Daughter

by Malda Marlys

Artwork by Doan Trang

My daughter haunts me.  

Her shadow lingers in doorways that are empty when I look. The cat, older than dirt, wakes only to yowl for her attention. Books tumble, sensible books she bought me for Christmas that I never read. They fall from their shelves and do not open, spines uncracked, while my lurid crimes and highland lovers in paperback suffer accidents.  

I welcome her in. She can have the cat, the books, the shadows. Her business is unfinished. 

At my son’s house after the wake, I look in on the baby. My daughter is here, carved from the tangled glows of nightlights and ceiling stars. She leans over the crib, hair a galaxy in LEDs. A whimper of grief tears free of me. 

The light shivers.  

I am not supposed to be here. This is not a ghost for me. 

She is gone and the baby is crying and I do the offices of grandmother, because one must, even in grief. I scold my son for leaving the childcare to the nearest woman. His sister would have, and in that moment I am her ghost, too. 

Two ghosts, two hauntings. Two lives lived, daughter and auntie. And if there are two, there must be more. 

I call out of work (again) and go looking for more of her. 

She haunts the community garden, tools hung just so to the confusion of volunteers who left them in the wrong place. She haunts the park where she ate lunch, a woman’s shape sketched in forsythia, surrounded by hungry squirrels. She haunts the bookstore. I don’t even have to look for her. Her co-owner has me check the handwriting in the planner, updated without interruption in the weeks since her death. We agree it’s hers. 

Am I greedy? She needed to have her own life, but I want all her deaths.  

I search her computer and her journal for new places where her ghosts might linger. I visit her coffee spot (cool, expensive), her thrift store (cool, cheap), her favored bike path and pool. Is she there in the steam above the espresso machine, in the sound of wheels on gravel? I don’t know if she’s hiding from me, if she was a smaller fragment of herself in these anonymously public places, if I simply knew these iterations of my daughter the least. If she’s here and I can’t find her. 

The ancient cat doesn’t wake one morning, and now there are two new ghosts in my house, a moody teenager and a kitten at her heels. The first remains, a reflection of my daughter from another mirror, all judgmental shadows and literary opinions.  

I try to ask my son about her in a way that doesn’t make me sound crazy, and I fail. My older granddaughter has more useful insight. “Gamma, gamma! Auntie and me play scary bear!”  

Her father shushes her with untoward sharpness, but I can’t blame him. You can’t blame people. Grief. 

In mine, I hoard the pieces of her I’ve uncovered. Her life, shattered into a thousand vivid crystals of itself. Enough to salt the world, and I need to taste every grain of her. 

My behavior is strange, but I’m an old lady whose firstborn was ground into meat and gristle by a twenty-foot pickup truck. People make allowances. I swipe her name badge from the bookstore, her trowel from the garden, a blanket with ducks on it from the baby’s crib.  

I am greedy, but I can’t stop. Enough pieces and she will be whole again, will step out of death to scorn my magazine collection and fast food habits.  

The ghosts I cache are lost and broken. Did I break them when I tore them from their places? Half a shadow. Notes from an educational cartoon through the tinny speaker of an iPad I don’t have. The smells of chlorine and tea and mulch and new book glue waft through the kitchen.  

I bury what stolen pieces I can’t return. She doesn’t fall back into herself. I’ve harvested her and so must reap. Voices in the dark, one voice, one voice a thousand times, soothing, scolding, recommending Radclyffe Hall, a cat’s complaint, the screech of bicycle brakes a moment too late.