“I’m okay. Being a ghost helps with all the back pain.” Pa tries to smile it off, but I see the slight wince when he touches his head. If not for the powder complexion and the outfit that reminds me of Princess Leia’s from the olderStar Warsmovie Kayla made me watch (the all-white robes one, not the metal bikini one), he could really pass as any other human. Well, any other invisible human.
I block his way when he heads toward the entrance. He insists he’s fine, but I stand firm. “You’re not doing that again.” Ooh, look how the tables have turned. Usually,I’mthe one my family needs to talk out of doing stupid things.
“It just takes some persistence. You can’t give up on the sun when it’s just about to rise.”
“Well…” I rack my brain for some proverbial response that will stop Pa from hurting himself. “What if the sun has already set?”
Pa hesitates and frowns. “Superstar, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why don’t we go somewhere else? There are lots of new things around Manila that you haven’t seen yet.”
“But what about snow?”
“We can do that later,” I say, willing my brain not to worry about why Pa can’t enter the airport. Again, future Nika’s problem. Instead of wasting our time trying to break into an airport,I should get moving and squeeze in every opportunity for bonding time with Pa. “There’s this new museum I think you’ll really like.”
Yet, the pattern repeats everywhere we go. When I bring Pa to the recently opened art museum, his body can’t cross the entrance. I take him to visit a record store in Legazpi Village and he can’t even move his foot past the doors. At our third stop, he hesitates a bit more and waits until there’s no one else around, but his body still bounces off the new Greenhills Mall. Why doesn’t the universe want us to bond?!
I try to ignore the question that grows louder with every failure. If his ghost/spirit is losing his intangibility powers, does that mean his time is running out?
Despite the countless attempts, Pa still doesn’t seem fazed when we return to the car.
“Where to next?”
Unlike all the places we’ve tried going to, his body manages to pass through Martha’s car doors with no hitch. Maybe ghosts have more trouble with indoor places?
But Pa was perfectly fine when we were in the condo…
We both get distracted when my phone registers another phone call from Achi. “She’s fine,” I tell Pa when I grab my phone and press decline. “Achi’s gotten a lot more chill since you last saw her.”
did you seriously skip class again today????
DID YOU TAKE MY CAR
nika, i swear to god
you stole my car and now you’re not answering my calls
IF YOU DON’T COME HOME IN AN HOUR, YOU’RE GOING TO BE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE. I MEAN IT.
That last message was sent fifty-eight minutes ago. When Pasaid that I could get “killed once,” I wonder if he was foreshadowing death at the hands of my sister.
I type in the condo address on my maps and clip it back on the dashboard. “Let’s drop by home first.”
Pa braces himself before entering the lobby doors, but he’s able to float straightaway, kind of like the superhero Flash when he runs through brick walls.
Even in the lobby, Pa’s arm is able to pass through the solid elevator doors back and forth.
“So does the intangibility thing just come and go?” I ask, stepping inside the elevator.
Pa pokes his head in after the doors close. “Hey, I can see rightthroughthis.”
I groan.
We stop on the third floor and Auntie Baby pops up when the elevator doors open.
“Annika?” She stops short. “You’re home early.”
The fact that she’s focused on my presence and not the reappearance of my late father clearly shows that she also doesn’t see Pa. If the passing-through-walls thing has been inconsistent, the invisibility power has been holding up in every scenario.
