“Hear what, Gracie?” Ling asked, irritated. She hated the way Gracie drew out her gossip in breathless fashion.
“It’s George!”
Ling went cold. “What about George?”
Gracie burst into tears. “Oh, Ling. He died!”
Everything in the park narrowed to a point. Ling could scarcely breathe.
“That’s why they’re here now,” Gracie said, pointing toward the man with the bullhorn. She wiped away her tears. “His mother found him this morning. His entire body was covered in blisters, like he’d been eaten up from the inside, and there was nothing left. And when they went to move him, his bones…” Gracie choked back a sob. “His bones crumbled like ash.”
Ling remembered the very end of her dream. Something terrifying had been closing in on George, and he already looked dead, like a man who knows his executioner waits. Ling Chan—Wake. Up, he’d said, a command.
A warning.
“You’re awfully quiet tonight, Miss Chan,” Henry said from his perch at the piano as he and Ling waited for the train into the dream world. Down below, Ling sat on the edge of the fountain, her fingers trailing absently through the water.
“My friend George died today,” Ling said numbly. “He had the sleeping sickness.”
She watched the goldfish zipping through the water, an agitation of orange.
“Oh, Ling. I’m awfully sorry to hear it,” Henry said, coming to sit beside her.
“Thank you,” Ling mumbled. “I dreamed about him. Last night.”
Henry was quiet for a moment. “Maybe he was saying good-bye.”
“Maybe,” Ling said. But the dream hadn’t been peaceful in any way. George’s death had hit Ling hard. Somehow, all along, she had believed he would beat it. He was young and strong. But she understood that illness was capricious and unfair. After all, Ling had been young and strong, too. And it hadn’t made a bit of difference to her legs.
The train whooshed into the station. Without a word, Henry offered his arm, and Ling did not refuse it.
“What’s the matter, Little Warrior?” Wai-Mae said the moment Ling got off the train in the forest.
“She lost her friend George to the sleeping sickness today,” Henry said, and the three of them stood listening to the soft chirrup of birds, not knowing what to say or do next.
“We should give his spirit rest,” Wai-Mae said at last.
“What do you mean?” Henry asked.
“It is very important to honor the dead. To make certain they can be happy in the afterlife, especially if it has been a very hard death,” Wai-Mae said. “Otherwise, the spirit can’t rest.”
Henry thought of his mother sitting in the cemetery working her rosary beads, all those painted saints giving her comfort. He thought, too, of burying Gaspard with a soup bone. Rituals were important. “I’ll get Louis,” he said, patting Ling’s shoulder. “We’ll do this right, Chinatown–New Orleans style.”
Henry, Louis, Wai-Mae, and Ling gathered on the hill above the golden village. Louis played a slow tune on his fiddle and Henry sang a hymn he’d learned as a boy. Wai-Mae plucked a twig from a nearby tree and transformed it into incense, which she lit with a candle made from a stalk of grass. Its sweet, smoky fragrance joined the pine and gardenia.
“How did you do that?” Henry asked, astonished.
But already Wai-Mae had gathered a handful of pebbles and was squeezing them in her fist, a look of fierce concentration on her face. When she opened her hand, it held a cup of tea.
“For your friend,” she said, and Ling left the offering on a bed of wildflowers.
“I don’t have a picture of George,” Ling said to Wai-Mae. “We should have one.”
Wai-Mae handed her a stick. “Draw.”
Ling did as she was told, dragging the stick through the dirt to make a simple representation of a face—a circle, two slashes for eyes, a line for a nose, and another for a mouth. Ling looked to Wai-Mae.
“You know what to do,” Wai-Mae said, guiding Ling’s hands to the image in the dirt.
Ling shook her head. “I don’t think I can do it.”