Ghost

He had always shared a room with them, his three brothers and himself spread out in two beds. But for the first time he was alone, because tomorrow he was turning sixteen and all of the others were grown up by now, and one wasn’t even in the country. The night was dry and cool. Not raining for the first time in six months and he was surprised at himself for staying home. It was the holiday season. School was over until next year. For the next two months the streets would be seething more than ever with people crawling their way to work, entertainers sweating off their gold and silver paint, children running through churches and markets and into the ravines. The ravines like craters in the moon, filled up with trees to level it out. The ravines were the prettiest spots during the day, with leaves filtering in only the most golden sunlight and couples having picnics and wild children pretending to be monkeys. They looked different at night.

He, Flaco, had learned to sleep through any noise. It was because the quality of this sound was different that he woke up. This noise was soft. It was like a soft knocking of wood, the first two knuckles knocking, and even though it did not repeat Flaco felt that it listened before going away. From the other room he heard his mother singing. That was in the living room. There was no clock in the bedroom, but to Flaco it felt to be around three in the morning. He was already sixteen. Very late for his mother to be singing, and it must have been a very bad night if she were in the living room.

Normally for her sake he pretended to keep on sleeping. But with the soft sweet air drifting through their window, perfectly cooled by the torrents of rain, he felt too awake to even lie still. He sat up and listened silently, ear tilted toward the window, trying to decide where the sound had gone. There were many sounds on the street, people always walking, the sound of voices raised in happiness and anger, doors shutting. But never that knocking sound. It was as though he felt the sound, a physical vibration. In the dark his eyes glowed bright. No breath. He sat rigid with his mouth half open.

Something walked by his window. It was close. At first it passed, walking beyond the window and then pausing somewhere near the corner of the house. It shuffled at the wall. Flaco fixed his eyes on the faint lights he could see outside and remained absolutely still. A cockroach crawled on the wall, making a sort of indefinite gentle sound that was less heard and more imagined by the creeping of its raised legs.

His mother had gone quiet. There was the sound of shuffling, something opening and closing, and then the door being locked shut. From behind the window there was the sound of a gentle sigh. Flaco and the other (he knew the other was hiding, listening, for all of this to happen; he could not explain how he knew) listened to the sound of footprints fading away.

The cockroach moved an inch forward. He heard his mother climb into bed.

Now he wondered if he had imagined it all. There was no sound through the wall beside him, nothing from beyond the window or street. It was a weeknight. Now, he felt, it was nearly four.

And yet he could not compel himself to lie back down in bed. He listened carefully; he knew his mother would certainly hear him crawling out of bed if she were awake, but soon the gusty sound of her snoring gave him the courage to slide out of bed. He put his left hand on the wall and froze again, listening. He detected nothing from the night sounds, nothing in the quality of the darkness that suggested movement. Still his right hand clutched into a fist. Without giving himself time to think he jerked his head through the window, looking first towards the corner and then to the left when he saw nobody was there. His body relaxed. His throat untensed and his mouth slackened.

He turned to get back in bed. The cockroach, he saw, was on the wall by his head. It seemed to be deciding whether or not to go completely behind the bed or turn and go up, maybe on the ceiling. Kneeling, Flaco waved his hands at it, trying to scare it away. He reached for a piece of paper to scoop it off the wall and onto the floor for him to kill it, and was rearing his hand back to strike when someone opened his door.

He barely had time to drop the paper and fling himself back into bed. He had totally forgotten about the stranger and now only thought of his mother making sure he was still asleep, watching him breathe, before quietly closing the door again. But his mother was still snoring in the next room.

He felt a flush of blood heat his face. His frantic climb back into bed had twisted the sheets in an unconvincing way, and surely his movement had made enough noise for the man to know that he was poorly faking sleep. The cockroach, startled by his sudden movement, scuttled up the wall toward the ceiling before disappearing into a crack.

Still, he kept his eyes closed. He hoped that maybe the man had opened the door slowly enough to not hear any of his movements. Besides, the man was just standing there. His hand still rested on the doorknob. Flaco studied him through slitted eyes, laying at the exact angle he needed to look at the man without needing to open his lids. The man was tall and slightly fat, with hair both wild and balding. His mouth was slightly open and Flaco could see his teeth were yellow and blackening.

They remained like that for some time, maybe five minutes. Flaco listened to his mother snore. The man seemed to be listening as well. Flaco kept up the act so well he feared he might again fall asleep when with no warning the man whispered his name.

Although he had planned to remain unresponsive, something in Flaco’s face must have twitched, maybe a constriction visible in his neck, because the man repeated his name two more times. Silence fell again for about five minutes. He knew the voice and he knew the man, but he had no idea what to do. To stay frozen was to keep life the way things were. To move would be to change them. So he lay there silently as long as it took for the man to sigh, stare at him a while longer, and leave. As he closed the door he turned the knob so the lock did not even click behind him.

The next morning Flaco’s mother wished him a happy birthday, made him a larger breakfast than usual, and asked him if he had gone out in the night. He had not.

“Who unlocked the front door, then?” she asked with a certain bitterness, although whether she was genuinely asking him or herself Flaco was not sure.

It wasn’t until a few days had passed that his mother decided to tell him that his father had been found dead in a ravine somewhere along one of the northern towns.

“He was found on your birthday,” she said decisively, piling up some wet dishes so that she could grab them one by one and dry them. “Found in some ravine. I believe they withheld having a funeral until next week. They say it was gang activity, and he was running away from some debts, something like that.”

“Jose Molina had debts?”

“Not money. Other things. I don’t know, how am I to know? The last time you saw him, you were twelve, maybe twelve. Your older brothers are going to the funeral, I think.”

“I saw him the other day,” Flaco said.

His mother frowned and scolded him for having such a stupid idea, and asked whatever gave him such a thought as that.

“I did,” he insisted. “I saw him from my window, and then he got into my room somehow, you must have left the door unlocked. Remember what you said about the door? He tried calling my name, but I didn’t want to talk. He just left.”

She slammed one of the bowls down harder than she needed to and a small crack ran along the side. Drying her hands, she turned to face her son, leaning back against the counter. “My son,” she said, “That is impossible. God sent him to you in a dream, or you imagined it. What reason on earth would he come to see you, after all this time,” she said, and as if her case was rested she started putting the dishes away.

“I don’t know,” Flaco said. “Did he know he was in trouble? Did he know he was going to die?”

“How am I supposed to know?” his mother said. “What reason could he have for visiting you? You were not his real son. He found that out. But he was a good man. Maybe there was some reason. Did he say anything to you? What does it matter, if he’s dead now.” She said the last sentence as a statement, the question explaining itself.

Flaco thought about his father calling to him, voice hoarse with the whisper, rasping with something else. All he could do was shrug.

He was sixteen now, the last son in the house. His oldest worked in the capital, one worked at a bank, another was in America. America. Jose Molina was dead, and there was nothing left for Flaco to wait for where he was -- no more fathers, no more family, no more ghosts.

He went to the funeral with his brothers, but he did not listen. He watched as his mother cried real tears and talked with some of her friends there. The priest did the reading about the Good Samaritan, to always be kind to suffering strangers in case their situation was like Jose Molina’s. The one who had found his body had found it while it was still alive and fighting, and the only help he gave was to tell someone about what he had seen later. What loss could have been avoided if someone had come to his aid then. And what a loss this was, this loss of Jose Molina, Flaco’s namesake, who had taken on three more sons by marrying the mother and staying long enough to see Flaco reach two years old.

Some time later, as soon as he could manage, Flaco packed his belongings and started the walk to California. He told his mother, and it was true, the work was better there, he could send her money as soon as every two weeks, and as a new man he felt a change of scenery would be good.