The Counting Game

It started when my daughter was two, a few months after we moved into a cramped apartment above a closed-down bakery. My wife worked nights, so I was the one home with Lily. The building always had a sour smell of stale yeast and dust, and the floorboards creaked even when no one stepped on them.

Lily had never seen my wife’s grandfather, Lolo, who passed away in Manila. We couldn’t afford the trip, and Lolo was too ill to travel. We told Lily stories about him, but she didn’t really grasp the concept. A week after we received the news, Lily began playing a strange game, but not in a playful way.

Every evening, right around the time the streetlights flickered on, she would go to the corner of her room behind the dresser, where a single cracked mirror hung. She would stand there, staring at her reflection, and count loudly. ‘One, two, fite, sewen, TEN! Ready or not, here I come!’ Then she would bolt out of the room, her little feet thumping on the floor, shrieking, ‘Papa! Where are you?’

At first, I laughed and told her, ‘I’m right here, baby.’ But she would shake her head, her eyes wide, insisting, ‘Not you, Papa. PANG-PANG.’ I had no idea what ‘pang-pang’ meant. My wife later told me that ‘pang-pang’ was what my wife and her cousins called Lolo when they were little, because he always smelled of anise, from the cookies he ate in the Philippines.

Lily would search the entire apartment, peeking under the kitchen sink, behind the old bread oven, even in the narrow hallway closet. And each time she came up empty, she would cry silently, her shoulders shaking, pointing at that mirror. ‘Pang-pang is hiding in the shiny,’ she would whisper.

One night, I woke to Lily standing at the foot of my bed, perfectly still. In the dim light from the bathroom, I saw her hand, whiter than bone, lifted and pointing to the doorway. ‘Papa, Pang-pang is sad. He lost his name.’ She repeated this three times, each time slower, like a wind-up toy running out of spring.

The next day, I tried to fix the old mirror. As I took it down, a folded piece of paper fell from the back. It was yellowed, with handwriting in faded brown ink, a list of numbers from 1 to 10, but with the number 5 missing and 7 and 8 scribbled over. On the bottom was a name: ‘Estella.’ I didn’t understand until my wife came home from her shift that night. She went pale when she saw the paper. ‘That’s Lolo’s handwriting,’ she said. ‘He used to write lists for his memory, because his mind was going. He used to hide little notes in the house, like charms. But I never saw this one. Estella was my grandmother; she died before I was born.’

That night, I heard Lily’s counting again, but this time it was coming from the bathroom, and her voice was perfectly clear, not a child’s giggle but a somber recitation. ‘One, two, fite, sewen, TEN! Ready or not, here I come!’ I tiptoed to the bathroom. The mirror was open, and Lily was standing inside the cabinet, her back to me, her head cocked at an unnatural angle, looking at the back of the mirror. ‘Come out, Pang-pang,’ she whispered. ‘You’re it.’

I reached out to grab her, but as my fingers brushed her shoulder, the apartment went black. I heard a low, guttural sigh, like a man exhaling after a long climb. When the lights flickered on, Lily was back in her bed, sleeping peacefully. I checked the mirror: it showed my face, but for a split second, I saw a man with a sunken face and white hair, wearing a battered straw hat, smiling at me with black, empty eyes.

I called my wife, screaming. She came home pale and shaking. She told me that when she was a girl in the Philippines, Lolo once told her a story: ‘Every mirror is a door. Every count is a clue. When a child first learns the numbers, they can see the ones who are lost. But if they call them, they must finish the game, or the forgotten will linger in the glass, waiting to be played.’

We moved out the next week. We left the mirror behind, but Lily still counts some nights, and sometimes, I catch her smiling at a blank wall, saying, ‘I found you, Pang-pang. You were hiding in the old bread oven all along.’