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.