After a few very good dates, Rosa and I were finally spending time together at her apartment, me pulling her close on the couch, definitely not anticipating a conversation about a childhood ghost.
“I love this show,” she had said, and we had both laughed hearty, getting-to-know-you laughs. Then, suddenly, she sat up, hand clutching mine on the couch.
“Joe,” she said, eyes downcast. “Can I tell you something?”
“Anything.” I squeezed her hands, in the style of a good new boyfriend.
“Since we’ve been dating for a while, and you’re here, and,” she laughed and took in a shaky breath. “And this feels pretty serious, doesn’t it?”
I laughed, in a fuller way. “I feel serious about it too, Rosa. I really like you.”
She brightened. “I really like you too.” It was her turn to squeeze my hand. “That’s why I need to tell you something.”
As I looked into her beautiful eyes, I thought: Oh crap. I knew it was too good to be true.
She took a deep breath.
She’s married. Or she’s a murderer. Or she’s married to a murderer.
“There’s this ghost that haunts me. She’s been with me since I was a kid. She’s probably around here right now.”
A few beats of silence - what else are you supposed to do when your new girlfriend says she’s haunted by a ghost? - and then I asked, “What does that even mean?”
She pulled her arms back and crossed them, hard. “Exactly what it means.”
“So you think that, right now, there’s a ghost watching us? That’s kinky.”
She snorted. “I don’t think, I know. And she doesn’t watch, she’s just always ready to pop out.”
“Pop out of what?”
“I don’t know, ghost land! The spirit realm! Wherever ghosts come from.”
“And you’ve been haunted by her for...years?”
She frowned. “Pretty much. As long as I can remember.” She ran a hand through her hair. “To be honest, she’s really affected my life. I’ve lost friends, I’ve lost jobs, I’ve lost so much sleep.” As if to emphasize, she yawned. “Really, Joe. I don’t know what life is like without her, but I know that with her it’s hell.”
“Maybe being tied to you is hell for her.”
She threw a pillow at me. “Stop teasing! I’ve told a couple other boyfriends about her and they either leave immediately or they stay and act all brave. But those are the ones that get all freaked out when they see her for the first time.”
“See? Her?”
“Or, well, no one’s ever seen her but me.” I couldn’t tell if she was smiling or grimacing. “But she does throw stuff around, sometimes make me float over the bed and stuff.”
I sat back on the couch. “Don’t mess around with me, Rosa.”
“I’m not!” she also sat back, hugging a pillow to herself. “I am really sorry about this, Joe. I wish she wasn’t a thing. But she is.”
“Have you tried like...calling a priest? Or something?”
“I actually have.” She rose and pulled a thin folder out of a nearby bookshelf. “Here’s some information he sent me about her.”
“The priest sent you a ghost bio?”
“I wish. Look.” She opened the folder, revealing only one page. “He said he’s usually able to get at least a few pages of historical info on spirits. Who they are, where they’re from, maybe even how they died. But here’s all we were able to get on this ghost.”
I sat up next to her to inspect the paper and saw the word “unknown” repeated throughout:
Name: unknown
Age: unknown
Nationality: unknown
And so on. The only line that was filled read, “Gender: female.”
“And that’s how I confirmed she’s a she, though she looks really feminine so I should have already known,” shrugged Rosa. “But that’s all I know.”
I returned the folder to her. “This is really weird.”
“I know,” she said, rising to push the folder back into the shelf, hidden until the next time she needed it. I wondered how many times she had performed the same sad push.
“I think I should leave.”
“I understand,” she said, sitting next to me on the couch.
“But I won’t.” She looked up at me, eyes wide.
“Don’t joke, Joe.”
“I’m not!” I took her hand again. “Look. I really like you. Also, I really want to see a ghost.”
“I told you,” she swatted my hand away, though she was smiling, “you won’t see her.”
“Then I’d like to see what she does. I believe you, and I want to understand.”
She looked so happy. We sat on the couch for hours, watching more movies. And, as if to taunt me, the ghost didn’t do anything that night.
#
My first encounter with the ghost happened the week after. I was sitting in the living room, ready to bring Rosa out to dinner, when a stack of books on her coffee table toppled over.
“Rosa! Rosa!” I ran to her. “The ghost! The books! I saw her!”
“You saw her!?” Rosa ran past me into the living room.
“Well, no, but I saw that stack of books fall.”
She frowned at the toppled pile. “That was pretty wobbly in the first place. It probably wasn’t her.”
“It was, I swear it. I felt her.”
“You can’t feel her.” But just as Rosa was shaking her head and turning away, she jumped back. “Oh, she is here. I guess it was her. Maybe you can feel her.” I felt very proud of myself.
“Hello, ghost!” I called. Rosa shook her head, staring past me. I was facing the wrong direction.
“She’s not responding to you,” said Rosa, peering over my shoulder, “though you are the first guy who’s ever acknowledged her like that.” As I turned, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, she said, “and there she goes. Oh well. Let’s go get dinner.”
Over our meal, I asked her what the ghost looked like.
“Kind of just a normal girl? I guess she’s kind of spooky-looking, with long, straight black hair.”
“I have straight black hair!”
She rolled her eyes. “Hers is really long and covers her face. But she’s really not that ghosty-looking, apart from the fact that she can disappear. Also, she has a large scar on her face.”
“A scar?”
“Yeah, it covers the top left part of her head, over her eye and into her hairline. It used to scare me a lot as a kid. Now, it’s how I can tell she’s the same ghost.”
“Well, that’s something. A one-eyed ghost.”
“No,” huffed Rosa, “she has two perfectly good eyes. It’s just that she has a scar going over one of them.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. How can you tell that she can see if she’s a ghost.”
Rosa rolled her eyes again, as if it were so obvious. “She’s my ghost, Joe. I know her well.”
#
The ghost made many appearances in our relationship after that. She pushed over another stack of books when Rosa and I shared our first kiss in her apartment. “Rude!” I had said. She turned the radio on to “My Boyfriend’s Back” when Rosa first visited my place. On our anniversary, she hid Rosa’s favorite earrings, which upset her so much that I bought her a new pair. She didn’t show up on our wedding day or on the honeymoon, but the moment we walked into our new house, Rosa said she saw her peeking out from over the staircase.
“She’s here.”
“Ah, figures. I missed you, old girl. Hello!”
The ghost made so many regular appearances in our married life, I half expected her to throw around some stuff in celebration when we found out Rosa was pregnant. But it wasn’t until just three months away from the due date, when we were building the crib, that we realized we hadn’t seen her in a while.
“You mean I haven’t seen her,” said Rosa, turning a page of instructions right-side up.
“You know what I mean,” I said, setting out tools. “Where’s our ghost friend?”
“I don’t know. She’s never been away for this long,” She pushed herself up to stand. “Isn’t that funny? You’re the only person who’s ever truly been ok with her being around me. And now that we’re married and starting a family together, she’s suddenly gone.”
“I know.” I wore an exaggerated frown. “I’m a little sad about it. It’s almost as if...she was part of the family.”
Rosa laughed. “Not that extreme.”
“In a way! Like a transparent, clumsy grandmother who bumps into things. Or maybe a spooky, incompetent maid who follows you around.”
She smirked and we continued building. After a few hours we stood, my arm around her, admiring the crib we had created together. She leaned her head on my shoulder and mused, “I kind of wish our ghost was here to see this.”
#
Despite our searching, the ghost didn’t come back. Not even when Rosa went into labor and began screaming at an unholy hour, prompting me to rush her to the hospital.
As my wife pushed, my mind wandered, strangely enough, to her and to the ghost. How odd was it that she haunted Rosa all her life, only to leave now? Perhaps she was just waiting for Rosa to reach this stage in her life. Maybe when she was alive, she was never able to have children, and the thought of a newborn in the house scared her (can ghosts get scared?) Or could it be that Rosa would pass the ghost onto our daughter and she’d show up again when we returned to the house? I pictured an anonymized black blob, following our little girl like a puppy as she toddled around our lives. I realized I still didn’t know what the ghost looked like.
With a final push, Rosa gave birth to our daughter. The doctors bundled her up and handed her to me. “Congratulations!”
“Thank y-” I looked down, and looked again, closely, at the baby.
“Rosa. Do you remember that ghost?”
“Our ghost? How could I forget?”
“What did she look like?”
“What? What now?” She was exhausted but she sat up, looking straight at me.
“Just tell me what she looked like.”
“Black hair, scar on the left side of her face. Why?”
I held the baby out gingerly. “Look.”
She turned and saw what I saw: a healthy baby girl with light brown curls and perfect peach skin. Rosa said she was so, so mad, and that it was terrible to play a joke like that right after she had just given birth. Then we both laughed, me holding her and she holding our baby.
#
Lily grew up a strong, healthy child, and during the first few months of her life, we anticipated that the ghost would return to meet her. But nothing. Lily grew up only hearing stories about the ghost.
“Mommy,” she’d ask, “Me and ghost?”
Rosa would shrug and smile, saying, “I don’t know, baby. I don’t know where she went.”
I’m sure any other couple would have forgotten the ghost. She never did show up again. But I couldn’t help but think about her when Lily would knock over the piles of books we had had sitting on our coffee table, or when she’d pick out mommy’s special earrings whenever we let her open the jewelry box, or when she’d ask why her hair was getting so dark and straight.
One day, we got the news that Lily had fallen off a slide at preschool. The teacher called us, voice strained, saying that we would have to meet her at the hospital.
“It’s her eye,” she said, her voice cracking over the phone’s speaker. “I’m so sorry. It seems that when she jumped she hit a nearby pole and…”
“Is it her left eye?” Rosa asked. We stared at each other, and we already knew the answer.
“Yes, actually, it is. Good guess.”
We gave each other half smiles.
“Don’t worry. She’ll be ok,” said Rosa. “We’ll see her soon.”
We rushed to the hospital, where Lily met us with a sizable gash on her face and two bright, perfect, seeing eyes. The doctors said we were lucky. We got her bandaged and, in the car, I played “My Boyfriend’s Back” for her. Even with the stark-white wrappings covering half her face, she sang every line all the way home. I knew she’d like it.
Tami Orendain is a Filipina-American writer who wanted to write for a living and got her wish. By day she handles communications for a children's hospital and by night she freelances for magazines and nonprofits. She writes stories in between and currently has pieces published at Marias at Sampaguitas and 101 Fiction. Find out what she's been obsessed with lately on twitter @emmabeltami or at emmabeltami.com.