Lair of Dreams

A day later, her parents received the telegram informing them that Auntie Hui-ying had died on the very night Ling had seen her. The family was frantically searching for Auntie Hui-ying’s comb, which they knew was her favorite, but they’d been unable to find it. “It’s in the painted chest, the second drawer, behind a false back,” Ling had said, parroting her aunt’s words.

Later, Ling’s father had taken her with him to the farm on Long Island. Under the warm sun, they worked side by side, gathering long beans. Ling’s father was a quiet man who tended to keep his thoughts to himself. They were alike in that way. “Ling,” he’d said, stopping to smoke a cigarette while Ling ate a peach, savoring the sweetness on her tongue. “How did you know about Auntie’s comb?”

Ling had been afraid at first to tell him the truth, in case it was some sort of bad luck she’d brought to their house. There’d been a baby before Ling, a precious son dead at birth, the cord wrapped around his neck. Two years later, Ling had come along. There’d been no other children after her, and both parents doted on Ling. She was their everything, and Ling often felt the burden of carrying her parents’ hopes and dreams, of being enough for all that love, of shouldering the obligation alone.

“Whatever it is, you can tell me,” her father had promised.

Ling had told him everything. He had listened, smoking his cigarette down to nothing. “Do you think I’m cursed, Baba?” Ling had asked. “Have I done something wrong?”

There had been tenderness in her father’s smile. “You’ve been given a gift. A link between old and new, between the living and the dead. But like all gifts, you must accept this with humility, Ling.”

Ling understood what he meant: Don’t draw bad luck to you with pride. Outwardly, Ling remained humble, but secretly, she loved walking in dreams and talking to the dead. It made her feel special and powerful. Nearly invincible.

The week before Ling took ill, she’d gone on a picnic outing to Long Island organized by the Chinese Benevolent Association for the students of the Chinese school. It was one of those warm October days that are a parting kiss of summer. Ling and her friends had gone to the water’s edge, taken off their stockings, and waded into the chilly Atlantic, reveling in the soft coolness of mud squished between toes that wouldn’t see the sun again until June. It had been a perfect day.

That night, her elderly neighbor, Mr. Hsu, died, and Ling saw the old man in a dream, faint and golden, sitting at his favorite table in her family’s restaurant. “One last cup of tea before I go,” he’d said. At the door, which opened onto a vast canvas of stars, he’d looked back at her with an unreadable expression. “We are made by what we are asked to bear, Ling Chan,” he’d said.

Days later, Ling woke tired, with a fever and a terrible headache. Her mother sent her to bed, but the aching and fever got worse. The muscles in her calves stiffened until she couldn’t move them without pain. And then she couldn’t move them at all. Infantile paralysis, the doctors said. Too much pride, Ling heard.

In the hospital, nurses held Ling down as the doctor immobilized her legs in heavy plaster casts. “You have to be brave and keep very still, Ling,” the doctor scolded as she cried out against the fire of the infection racing along her nerve endings. Holding still was worse than anything.

“She has to learn to be strong,” the doctor said.

“She doesn’t have to learn to suffer,” her mother shot back, shutting him up.

For a month, Ling had endured the agony of the plaster, unable to touch her skin when it burned and itched or massage the brutal spasms of her dying muscles. And when the casts finally came off, she was no better than before.

“You’ll need to wear these now,” the nurse said, buckling on the ugly metal braces that caged her shriveled legs and bit into the tender skin above and below her knees till there were permanent scars there.

But the worst part was the pain it brought to her parents. Ling could hear them just outside the door, asking the doctors and nurses again and again if there was any new hope of a cure, or at least an improvement.

Stop hoping, she wanted to tell them. It’s easier that way.

Secretly, she thought: I deserve this. I brought it on myself. No matter how much Ling believed in science, in the rational, she couldn’t escape the clutches of superstition, of luck—both good and bad—shaping her life. After all, she spoke to ghosts. Deep down, she couldn’t help thinking that it was her pride that had brought on her illness. And so, just before Christmas, she’d insisted on working in the restaurant again to help her parents. When the spasms gripped her, she did her best to hide it; she was tired of pity. Every night, she escaped into the dream world, where, for one blessed hour, she could run free. Every morning, she dreaded waking up.