She wrote him back. She kept the tone of her letter light and breezy. She lied and told him she was doing fine, and asked how he was doing. She signed the letter like this: “Your friend, Hildy.”
João and Hildy exchanged a few more letters. They were short and simple, just casual pleasantries and observations about the weather. Hildy still wasn’t sure whether João actually considered her a friend or if he was just being polite. But then he closed a letter with this: “If you should ever find yourself in Coimbra, I would be honored if you paid me a visit.”
She booked a rail ticket to Portugal that very day, packed a trunk full of clothes that night, and early the next morning a carriage arrived to whisk her off to the train station.
“Good-bye, ghosts!” she called out cheerfully from the front door. “I’ll be back in a few weeks!”
The ghosts made no reply. She heard something shatter in the kitchen. Hildy shrugged and started toward the carriage.
It took a hot, dusty week of travel to reach João’s house in Coimbra. During the long journey she tried to armor herself against inevitable disappointment. Hildy and João got along fine in letters, but she knew that in person he probably wouldn’t like her, because no one did. She had to expect it or the pain of yet another rejection would surely crush her.
She arrived at his house, a spectral-looking mansion on a hill that seemed to watch her from cracked-window eyes. As Hildy walked toward its porch, a wave of black crows took off screaming from a dead oak in the front yard. She noticed a ghost swinging by a noose from the railing of the third-floor balcony, and waved to it. The ghost waved back, confused.
João answered the door and showed her inside. He was kind and gracious, and took Hildy’s dusty traveling coat from her and laid out saucers of cinnamon-flavored milk tea and cakes. João made pleasant small talk, asking about her journey, about how the weather had been along the way, and about how they served tea where she came from. But Hildy kept tripping over her answers and felt absolutely sure she was making a fool of herself, and the more she thought about how foolish she sounded, the more difficult she found it to say anything at all. Finally, after an especially awkward silence, João asked, “Have I done something to offend you?” and Hildy knew she’d ruined the best chance she ever had to make a real friend. To hide the tears she felt coming, she got up from the table and ran into the next room.
João didn’t come after her right away, but let Hildy have her privacy. She stood in the corner of his study and cried silently into her hands, furious at herself and so, so embarrassed. Then, after a few minutes, she heard a thud behind her and turned around. The ghost of a young girl was standing at a desk, knocking pens and paperweights onto the floor.
“Stop that,” said Hildy, wiping away her tears. “You’re making a mess of João’s house.”
“You can see me,” the girl said.
“Yes, and I can see that you’re far too old to be playing childish tricks on people.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said, and disappeared through the wall.
“You spoke to it,” said João, and Hildy was startled to see him watching from the doorway.
“Yes. I can see them, and talk to them. She won’t bother you again—at least not today.”
João was amazed. He sat and told Hildy about all the ways the ghosts had been making his life difficult—keeping him up at night, scaring away visitors, breaking his things. He’d tried to talk to them himself, but they never listened. Once he’d even called in a priest to get rid of them, but that had only made them angry, and they’d broken even more of his things the following night.
“You have to be firm with them, but understanding,” Hildy explained. “It’s not easy being a ghost, and like anyone, they want to feel respected.”
“Do you think you could talk to them for me?” João asked meekly.
“I can certainly try,” Hildy said. And then she realized that they’d been chatting for several minutes without a stumbled word or an awkward pause.
Hildy began that very day. The ghosts tried to hide from her, but she knew where they liked to go and coaxed each of them into the open to talk, one after another. Some of the talks went on for hours, with Hildy arguing and persisting while João looked on with quiet admiration. It took three days and nights, but in the end Hildy convinced most of the ghosts to leave the house, and asked the few who wouldn’t to at least keep it down while João was sleeping and, if they must knock things off tables, to spare the family heirlooms.
João’s house was transformed, and so was João. For three days and nights he had watched Hildy, and for three days and nights his feelings for her had deepened. Hildy had grown feelings for João, too. She found that she could talk to him easily about anything now, and was certain they were real friends. Even so, she was wary of seeming too eager and overstaying her welcome, and on the fourth day of her visit she packed her things and bid João good-bye. She had decided to go home, move to an unhaunted house, and try once more to make some living friends.
“I hope we’ll see each other again,” Hildy said. “I’ll miss you, João. Perhaps you can come and visit me sometime.”
“I’d like that,” João said.
A carriage and driver were waiting to take Hildy to the train station. She waved good-bye and started toward the carriage.
“Wait!” João cried. “Don’t go!”
Hildy stopped and turned to look at him. “Why?”
“Because I’ve fallen in love with you,” João said.
The instant he said it, Hildy realized she loved him, too. And she ran back up the steps, and they threw their arms around each other.
At that, even the ghost that hung from the third-floor railing smiled.
Hildy and João got married, and Hildy moved into João’s house. The few ghosts that remained were friendly to her, though she didn’t need ghost friends anymore because now she had João. Before long they had a daughter and a son, too, and Hildy’s life was fuller than she’d ever dreamed it could be. And as if that weren’t enough, one fine midnight there was a knock on the front door, and who should Hildy find floating there on the porch but the ghosts of her sister and her parents.
“You came back!” Hildy cried, overjoyed.
“We came back a long time ago,” her sister said, “but you’d moved away! It took forever to find you.”
“No matter,” Hildy’s mother said. “We’re together now!”
Then Hildy’s two children came out onto the porch with João, wiping sleep from their eyes.
“Pai,” said Hildy’s little daughter to João, “why is Mamãe talking to the air?”
“She isn’t,” João said, and smiled at his wife. “Honey, is this who I think it is?”
Hildy hugged her husband with one arm and her sister with the other, and then, her heart so full she thought it might burst, she introduced her dead family to her living family.
And they lived happily ever after.
Cocobolo
As a boy, Zheng worshipped his father. This was during the reign of Kublai Khan in ancient China, long before Europe ruled the seas, and his father, Liu Zhi, was a famous ocean explorer. People said there was seawater in his blood. By the time he was forty, he’d achieved more than any mariner before him: he had mapped the whole eastern coast of Africa, made contact with unknown tribes in the heart of New Guinea and Borneo, and staked claim to extensive new territories for the empire. Along the way he had fought pirates and brigands, quelled a mutiny, and twice survived being shipwrecked. A great iron statue of him stood at Tianjin’s harbor, gazing longingly at the sea. The statue was all Zheng had of his father, because the man himself disappeared when Zheng was just ten.
Liu Zhi’s final expedition had been to discover the island of Cocobolo, long thought legendary, where it was said rubies grew on trees and liquid gold pooled in vast lakes. Before leaving,
he told Zheng: “If I should never return, promise you’ll come looking for me one day. Don’t let grass grow under your feet!”
Zheng duly promised, thinking even the wild ocean could never best a man like his father—but Liu Zhi never came home. After a year with no word, the emperor held a lavish funeral in his honor. Zheng was inconsolable, and for days he wept at the feet of his father’s statue. As he grew older, though, Zheng learned things about Liu Zhi that he had been too young to understand while the man was alive, and his opinion of his father slowly changed. Liu Zhi had been a strange man, and he’d grown even stranger near the end of his life. There were rumors he’d gone mad.
“He would go swimming in the sea for hours every day, even in winter,” said Zheng’s eldest brother. “He could hardly stand being on land.”
“He thought he could talk to whales,” said Zheng’s uncle Ai, laughing. “Once I even heard him trying to speak their language!”
“He wanted us to go and live on an island in the middle of nowhere,” said Zheng’s mother. “I said to him, ‘We banquet at the palace! We entertain dukes and viscounts! Why should we give up this life to live like savages in a sandpit?’ He hardly spoke to me after that.”
Liu Zhi had accomplished a great deal early in his life, people said, but then he’d begun chasing fantasies. He led a voyage to discover a land of talking dogs. He spoke of a place in the northernmost reaches of the Roman Empire where there lived shape-shifting women who could stop time.12 He was shunned by polite society, and eventually the nobles stopped funding his expeditions—so he began funding them himself. When he’d exhausted his personal fortune, leaving his wife and children near bankruptcy, he dreamed up a mission to find Cocobolo in order to harvest its riches.
Zheng saw how his father’s eccentricities had led to his downfall and, as he entered manhood, he was careful not to repeat Liu Zhi’s mistakes. There was seawater in Zheng’s blood, too, and like his father he became a mariner—but of a very different sort. He led no expeditions of discovery, no pioneering voyages to claim new lands for the empire. He was a thoroughly practical man, a merchant, and he oversaw a fleet of trading ships. He took no risks. He avoided routes favored by pirates and never strayed from familiar waters. And he was very successful.
His life on land was equally conventional. He banqueted at the palace and maintained friendships with all the right people. He never uttered a shocking word or held a controversial opinion. He was rewarded with social position and an advantageous marriage to the emperor’s pampered grandniece, which put him within a hairbreadth of the nobility class.
To protect all he’d accumulated, he took pains to disassociate himself from his father. He never mentioned Liu Zhi. He changed his surname and pretended they weren’t related. But the older Zheng got, the harder it became to push away his father’s memory. Elderly relatives often made comments about how similar Zheng’s mannerisms were to Liu Zhi’s.
“The way you walk, the way you hold yourself,” said his aunt Xi Pen. “Even the words you choose—it’s as if he’s standing before me!”
So Zheng attempted to change himself. He copied the loping gait of his older brother, Deng, whom no one ever compared to their father. Before he spoke, he paused to rearrange the words in his head and choose different ones that meant the same thing. He couldn’t change his face, though, and every time he walked past the harbor, the giant statue of his father reminded Zheng just how much they resembled each other. So one night he snuck out to the harbor with a rope and a winch and, with a great deal of effort, he pulled the thing down.
On his thirtieth birthday, the dreams began. He was plagued by nighttime visions of the old man—starved and leathery, white beard to his knees, no longer resembling Zheng at all—waving desperately from the desert shore of some sunbaked island. Zheng would startle awake in the wee hours, sweat beading his brow, tormented by guilt. He’d made a promise to his father, one he’d never even attempted to fulfill.
Come and find me.
His herbalist prepared him a draught of strong medicine, which he took each night before bed, and it kept him sound asleep and dreamless until morning.
Shut out of his dreams, Zheng’s father found other ways to haunt him.
Zheng found himself lingering by the docks one day, entertaining a mysterious impulse to jump into the ocean and go for a swim—in the middle of winter. He choked back the urge, and for weeks did not allow himself to even look at the sea.
A short time later he was captaining a voyage to Shanghai when, belowdecks, he heard the song of a whale. He put his ear to the hull and listened. For a moment he thought he could understand what the whale, in its long, unearthly vowels, was saying.
Co . . . co . . . bo . . . lo!
He plugged his ears with cotton, ran upstairs, and refused to go belowdecks again. He began to worry that he was losing his mind, just as his father had.
Back home on land, he had a new dream, one even his nightly draught of medicine could not suppress. In it, Zheng was bushwhacking through an island’s tropical interior as rubies rained softly from the trees. The muggy air seemed to breathe his name—Zheng, Zheng—and though he could feel his father’s presence all around him, he saw no one. Exhausted, he lay down in a patch of grass, and then suddenly it grew up around him, the sod peeling away from the earth to wrap him in a suffocating embrace.
He startled awake with his feet itching like mad. Throwing back the covers, he was alarmed to discover that they were covered in grass. He tried to brush it off, but every blade was connected to his feet. They were sprouting from his soles.
Terrified his wife would notice, Zheng leaped from the bed, ran to the bathroom, and shaved.
What on earth is happening to me? he thought to himself. The answer was clear enough: he was losing his mind, just as his father had.
The next morning, he awoke to find that not only had his feet sprouted grass again, but long ropes of seaweed had grown from his armpits. He raced into the bathroom, tore the seaweed out—it was very painful—and shaved his feet a second time.
The following day he awoke with the usual growths from his feet and armpits, as well as a new wrinkle: his bedsheets were full of sand. It had oozed from his pores in the night.
He went to the bathroom, ripped out the seaweed and shaved his feet, still convinced it was nothing but madness. But when he returned the sand was still in his bed, all over his wife, and in her hair. She was awake now, and very upset, trying in vain to shake it out.
If she could see it, Zheng realized, it had to be real. The sand, the grass—all of it. Which meant he wasn’t crazy after all. Something was happening to him.
Zheng went to see the herbalist, who gave him a foul-smelling poultice to rub all over his body. When that didn’t help he went to a surgeon, who told him there was nothing to be done, aside from amputating his feet and plugging his pores with glue. That was obviously not acceptable, so he went to a monk and they prayed together, but Zheng fell asleep while praying and woke to find he’d leaked sand all over the monk’s cell, and the angry monk kicked him out.
It seemed there was no cure for whatever was wrong with him, and the symptoms were only getting worse. The grass on his feet grew all the time now, not just at night, and the seaweed made him smell like a beach at low tide. His wife began sleeping in a separate bed in another room. He worried that his business associates would hear about his condition and shun him. That he would be ruined. In desperation, he began to entertain the idea of having his feet amputated and his pores plugged with glue—but then, in a sudden flash of memory, the last words his father had spoken to him came ringing in his ears.
Don’t let grass grow under your feet.
Now that mysterious sentiment, which Zheng had wondered about for many years, made perfect sense. It had been a message—a coded message. His father had known this would happen to Zheng. He had known because it had also happ
ened to him! They shared more than a face and a walk and a way of speaking—they shared this strange affliction, too.
Come and find me, he had said. Don’t let grass grow under your feet.
Liu Zhi had not gone off to seek a mythical fortune. He had gone to find a cure. And if Zheng ever hoped to rid himself of this strangeness and live a normal life again, he would have to fulfill his promise to his father.
At dinner that evening, he announced his intentions to the family. “I’m mounting a voyage to find our father,” he said.
They were incredulous. Others had tried and failed to find their father already, they reminded him. Searches had been financed by the emperor, but no trace of the man or his expedition had ever been found. Did he, a merchant who had never sailed anywhere but his safe trading routes, really expect to have better luck than they did?
“I can do it, you’ll see,” said Zheng. “I just have to find the island he went searching for.”
“You would never find it even if you were the world’s best navigator,” said Aunt Xi. “How can you find a place that doesn’t exist?”
Zheng left determined to prove his family wrong. The island did exist, and he knew just how to find it: he would stop taking his sleep medicine and let his dreams guide him. If that didn’t work, he would listen to the whales!
His first mate tried to discourage him, too. Even if the island existed, he said, every mariner who had claimed to see it swore it couldn’t be reached. They said it moved in the night. “How can you land on an island that runs away from you?” the first mate asked.
“By commissioning the fastest ship that’s ever been built,” Zheng replied.
Zheng spent the bulk of his fortune building that ship, which he named Improbable. It nearly bankrupted him, and he had to issue promissory notes to hire the crew.
His wife was livid. “You’ll land us in the poorhouse!” she cried. “I’ll have to take in laundry just to keep from starving!”