Louis proved to be kind and funny, and Ling could see why Henry liked him so much. When she looked up at him, the golden sky at his back, Louis shimmered as if he were carved of sunshine. Ling liked the way he talked, as if his words had been dunked in warmed honey.
“Perhaps you should marry Louis,” Wai-Mae said as she and Ling walked back to their spot in the forest on the edge of the village. “He’d make a fine husband. He is very handsome. Almost as handsome as my husband-to-be. But not quite.”
Ling resisted the urge to roll her eyes. There was nothing Wai-Mae couldn’t turn into a penny-novel romance. “I’m not ready for a husband.”
“You’re seventeen!” Wai-Mae tutted.
“Exactly,” Ling said.
Wai-Mae’s sigh was weary. She patted Ling’s hand like a worried auntie. “Don’t fret, Ling. I’m certain your parents will find someone for you,” she said so earnestly that Ling could only take it in stride and not be insulted.
Wai-Mae’s patience did not extend to Ling’s scientific experimentation. “When will you be finished?” she complained as Ling stared at a house in the village that they had altered earlier, waiting to see if it changed in any way while she observed it. “Science is so dull!”
“Science is anything but dull,” Ling said. “And I need to test things.”
“These atoms you talk about. What are they?”
“They’re building blocks of energy. Everything in the world, all matter, is made of atoms,” Ling explained. “Even us.”
“What about dreams? What are they made of?” Wai-Mae asked.
“They’re born of people’s thoughts, I suppose. Their emotions. Endlessly renewing, endlessly creating,” Ling said. But she wondered: Could an energy field be generated from all the thoughts, desires, and memories inside dreams? Was that how the dead were conjured? And what happened when you put a few dream walkers inside that landscape? Could their interactions transform dream into reality?
Each night, toward the end of her dream walks, Ling conducted her experiments. First she marked her hands with ash from a fire. When she woke, she examined her hands for the marks, but there were none. The next night, she slipped a few pebbles into her pocket to see if she could bring them out of the dream, but it didn’t work. She’d even tried to bring a pheasant feather into the dream world for Wai-Mae, but when she stuck her hand into her pocket, there was nothing there at all.
“Perhaps some things are beyond testing,” Wai-Mae mused as she watched a sparrow hopping from branch to branch before it flew off toward the shimmering rooftops of the village and disappeared altogether. “Perhaps there are things that exist only because we make them so, because we must.”
Henry and Louis spent hours fishing the river or playing music on the cabin’s front porch, Louis on fiddle and Henry on harmonica. Other times, they’d go for long walks with Gaspard, and Henry would tell Louis all about New York and his friends there. “I’ll take you to Evie’s radio show and we’ll cut a rug at the Hotsy Totsy with Memphis and Theta—you’ll love it there. You get that train ticket yet?” Henry asked.
“Not yet, cher. But I’ll walk over to the Lafayette PO in the morning and see if it’s there.”
“Louis, do you ever remember your dreams in the morning after you’ve woken up?” Henry asked, worried. If Louis didn’t remember, then how would he know to go pick up the ticket?
“I reckon I must. Who could forget this?” Louis said, nuzzling Henry’s throat.
“Just in case, I want to try something. Louis: When you wake up, you’ll remember. You’ll remember everything.”
“Everything,” Louis whispered, and he kissed Henry, taking his tongue sweetly into his mouth.
There was only one uneasy moment in the dreams for Henry, and it was the thicket of morning glories. Every time they passed the purple-blue blooms, Louis would pull Henry away. He wouldn’t go anywhere near the thicket. In fact, he seemed downright afraid of it.
“What those flowers ever do to you?” Henry joked on one such occasion.