One more thing I knew about Sopha’s disappearance:
She never came back to haunt us.
◊
When I stormed home, dragging my reclaimed sack of ricebehind me, Ming blinked like she’d never heard the word murder before.She gave up when I repeated her exact words back to her. “They thought thecurse would lift? Who thought?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it wouldn’t matter if I did.What could we do? Take vengeance on them? You think that would help us?”
“You lied to me. I thought she left us because she wantedto.”
“Better to believe she was still flitting all over Psaodung,than that she lay in some hole in the ground, used and battered and hurt,” Mingspat. “I didn’t want you afraid of all our neighbors because maybe they werethe one, maybe they’d do you too.” She prodded the bag of rice with her foot.“I see you sold me back to them. Did they make you a deal?”
“It’s not your rice,” I said. “It’s mine. There’s an aphaunting the foreigners and I’m helping them. If you don’t want to eat it, thendon’t.”
Ming cursed under her breath. “You will get torn inside outwith the rest of them. I hope you know that the ghosts feel no kinder towardsyou than they do towards the foreigners.”
I didn’t believe the ghosts would hurt me. I was Sopha’ssister. I was almost one of them.
I didn’t understand.
◊
Another foreigner died that night. They found his body torndown the middle and gutted. His blood slicked the grass like dew when the firstmembers of the crew woke in the morning. Now that the director had died, andnot only a production assistant, some of the crew wanted to get internationalauthorities involved. American police would paw around and investigate and findnothing, I told Kao. “I know,” he said. “I tried to explain to them that thereis only one way to get rid of the ghost.”
“If we don’t know who it is, we can’t look for the body,” Isaid, but I had a sick feeling that I already knew who the ghost was. I justdidn’t know where her body had been buried. “The crew’s seen nothing but alight?”
Kao glanced towards the site where the director’s body stilllay, awaiting the arrival of a helicopter that would transport the remains toSiem Reap for examination. They would find no fingerprints, no evidence. Whenwe killed in Psaodung, we killed each other.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m sure Mr. Lethem could tell us more,but…” He motioned to the body and drew air between his teeth.
“Mr. Lethem was the one who planned the film, correct?” Isaid.
He nodded.
“And he was interested in my family.”
Reluctantly, Kao nodded again. He wasn’t telling me anythingI hadn’t already figured out. No one besides Ming got a 25-kilo sack of ricefor a couple of short, unsuccessful interviews. We were the perfect centerpiecefor the foreigners’ story of lightless misery. Ming’s single-minded focus onthe spirit world must have come as a great disappointment. I said, “Let me seethe interviews you have. All of them.”
In the interviews of our neighbors, the foreigners askedabout the caves where we slept when the heat in our houses became unbearable,the flashlights we clenched between our teeth while we cooked our eveningmeals, the fires we built at night on our dirt floors. Then they asked aboutthe people here. For all the director’s eagerness to avoid spirits, theylingered in every frame of the film, peeking out from accounts of schooling orfishing or child-rearing to haunt the story of Psaodung.
People were afraid, but mostly they were angry. They saidthe haunted people who lived in Psaodung worked like magnets, drawing the ghostsclose. Some of them mentioned Sopha by name. More than a few talked about Ming,who I knew couldn’t even see the spirits. Some talked about a pair of girls whoflitted through the air, lights trailing from the palms of their hands.
Most of our neighbors had something to say about the ghosts,but one interview was different. The man was my age, maybe a little older. Hetold the camera that he used to know a girl who could kill children by lookingat them. When he was ten years old, his mak lost a baby after she stared toolong. That girl belonged in a banana orchard with the other ghosts.
“Why did you think she was a ghost?” a foreigner asked onthe tape.
I stopped the tape, blurring the man’s face.
“Do you know him?” Kao said.
“Yes,” I said. “But that’s not what I needed to know.”
◊
Banana orchards were supposed to be haunted, which meant thatsensible people avoided them and boys on dares flocked to them. So did Sopha.We could see one from above if we hopped power lines long enough to the west.Miles away from Psaodung, as far as we could get before our arms ached toobadly to hold us, we would watch ghost lights drift among the banana fronds. Weheard no screams there; we saw no bodies among the trees. Maybe we weren’tlooking hard enough.
A few weeks before she disappeared, Sopha and I stayed along time over the banana orchard. I straddled a utility pole and got ascomfortable as I could, but my muscles always wore out before Sopha’s did.
“Wait,” Sopha told me when I moved to go. She was tugging atthe red strings around her wrists, trying to loosen the knots that Ming hadyanked tight. “Wait, I want to see.”
“See what?” A flicker of unease passed through me. Not fearyet, because I knew Sopha too well to believe I could really lose her, but Ifelt out of control. “Keep the strings on, Sopha. They’ll take you.”
“What if they do?” she said.
“Sopha, no.” I tried to make my voice hard and sure likeMing’s, but we both knew I couldn’t make Sopha do anything while I crouched ona wire like a gecko. “We’re going home.”
Something in my voice made Sopha stop, even though I couldtell she didn’t want to. She let go of her bracelets and shimmied down thepole, out onto the wires. As soon as she touched the wires, they began to glow.I wondered
