I was eight years old when Esperanza fell off the swing. In the backyard she stood on the flimsy piece of wood rotted from many rains holding the strings as she rocked her body back and forth. At a young age but already with older parents I was especially attuned to these kinds of accidents. After pleading with her to stop swinging I shut my eyes, covered my ears and looked away. She kept calling out to me, urging me to watch her. She laughed joyfully, discarding my dread, swinging higher and higher… 

—

Esperanza was a short woman with a staccato to her voice. Even her English contained a cadence that rolled off her tongue like the Tagalog she spoke to her friends on the phone. Playing on the kitchen floor by her legs, I tried to decipher a language and rhythm so foreign to me I could not tell if she was in a heated argument or reminiscing with an old friend. Once in my notebook, I tried to capture the undulations in her voice by drawing a diagram of what I imagined were sound waves. After her call had ended I showed it to her proudly. She laughed in her usual way, doubling over in a bowing motion before ruffling the top of my head. “Oh Celeste” she said endearingly.

Because I was so young when she started working for my parents, I don’t remember the first time I met Esperanza but her presence echoed throughout my childhood. Every day after school she was there to pick me up. When she was at the house, it smelled of cleaning products in the morning and dinner on the stove in the afternoon. In the early days she fed, bathed, and clothed me. As I grew older she played board games with me, brushed my hair, and listened to me talk about my friend problems at school. I hated coconut, but loved when she made shrimp and rice with coconut milk. At the end of the day she would leave back to her apartment and I would wave to her from the kitchen window, and she would smile back at me from an opening where our garden hedges had not fully grown over.

My mother was always reminding me how little money she had, how she had to work for a Diplomatic family in order to stay in the country legally. My mother told me that her other diplomat employers never bothered to fill out the paperwork but gave her their old TV instead. I remember the first time she took me across the city to her apartment, she told the bus driver that I was younger than six in order to evade the fare, which I thought was excitingly scandalous. We would continue to get away with this lie for several more years as I was especially scrawny for my age. Esperanza’s apartment was one of many in a 30 story building overlooking a sports complex. She lived in a one bedroom with eight other Filipino women. I’d neer seen so many people fit into one room. I marveled at the many bunk beds and pullout couches. As an only child who longed for playmates and wished to hear the chaos of many voices talking over one another, I thought of this arrangement as a huge slumber party every night. 

Esperanza was firm unlike any other adults I knew at the time. My parents, their friends and colleagues all spoke to me with a caressing tone, gently reminding me of rules and responsibilities. Maybe it was because I was the miracle brought into my parents life after they had tried desperately to have a child for so long. Maybe it is because they pitied me, knowing that I was once a baby abandoned on the streets of China, now living in Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world after being adopted by a European American couple. Either way I had become quite a spoiled child by the time I was eight. Like all of the adults, Esperanza would remind me how lucky I was, but unlike them she warned me everyday to work so the luck wouldn’t run out. You finish everything on your plate okay? Don’t talk to your parents that way. Enough of that now, you’re too old to cry, you’re not four anymore. She taught me how to ride a bike. She sat with me through my homework. One day while folding clothes she told me, “I never hit my daughters with anything except for a clothes hanger. Once I did it so hard the hanger broke,” she said and then burst out laughing. 

In between dinner and bedtime, if I had been good, Esperanza would sit at the kitchen table as the stories spilled out of her. Under the dim light I learned how these stories morphed into ghosts. One ghost took the shape of her younger daughter who she left behind in the Philippines. One ghost took the shape of her older daughter who divorced and then followed her to Switzerland leaving behind two children of her own. She would tell me over a glass of wine how her husband cheated on her and how right before throwing herself into the middle of traffic, she thought of her daughters and decided to stay in the world of the living. She alluded to ghosts in the shape of dreams that she had as a little girl, dreams that were too sorrowful to utter out loud over the shame of them not coming true. Ghosts that had other names like employer, visa, insurance, benefits, and other words that I had never heard before her. I thought that she too was a ghost, only tethered to this country through her job which could change any day if my parents were restationed. I saw that part of her was here with me, detained to the kitchen table and this house but part of her longed for the warmth of the Philippines. These stories struck something deeply within me and I hungered for every word. Without knowing it, maybe I understood her better than I realized. Maybe I too held a placeless longing inside my eight year old body, a longing that was still so young it did not yet have a name.

One day Esperanza and I had a huge fight. I don’t remember what about, but I know that her sternness was a difficult pill to swallow for a kid who had never really been told no in her life. I remember sitting with my arms crossed at the top of the stairs. “I’ll just go then” she bit back, her harshness concealing the hurt. At that moment, I started to cry, plead, and reach out for her. She knew what I hated most was to be alone in that house. She gave me a piercing knowing look and said “you see.” I think what she meant to say was, stripped to our core we were two beings who were torn away from everything that we knew trying to feel less alone. We had floated along and somehow ended up on the stairs of this house on this quiet street in Geneva. She never said sorry and hugged me like my parents always did but then she took me to the ice cream store at the bottom of our street. We sat on the sidewalk silently enjoying the sweet crunch of frozen chocolate and I knew we would never fight again. 

—

The day that Esperanza fell off the swing she had a lightness to her step. She pushed herself higher, as if she were going to fly over the hedges, out of our cul de sac to somewhere even more distant. Maybe the swing wasn’t like the ones she grew up with, maybe the swing’s ropes were not long and spindly enough to accommodate such dreams. Maybe with so many years away from the humidity of Asia that softens the skin and loosens the bones she had become brittle so her knees wouldn’t bend in time with the rope. 

When she fell off the swing, I didn’t see or hear it happen. I wondered how long she lay there before I overcame my dread to open my eyes, probably only a couple of seconds. I called out to my parents and ran to her. We brought her inside and she held an ice pack to her chin as she sat on the kitchen chair. “You see” I said softly, throwing her line back at her.