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.
Far above them, Ling and Henry could hear muted hoofbeats and the clatter of omnibuses rumbling down unseen streets. But these sounds came and went, like postcards of sound sent long ago and only now arriving at their destination.
“Well, this is certainly interesting,” Henry said.
They’d come to an iron gate, the bars of which had been fashioned with steel roses. The faintest glow seeped through them, warm and golden.
“Do you see that?” Henry whispered. “I’ve never seen light like that in a dream walk before. It’s always…”
“Gray,” Ling finished.
“Yes,” Henry said and smiled. Being with Ling was like traveling in a foreign country and finding the one person who speaks your native language.
Ling tested the bars with her fingertips. “The gate. It’s… cold,” she said, more in astonishment than fear.
“Shall we go inside?” Henry asked.
At Ling’s nod, he lifted the latch and pushed open the gate.
Henry had seen many odd things in dreams before—noblemen with owl faces peeking above their ruffled shirts. Trees made entirely of fireflies. Steamer ships resting on mountaintops. But he’d never seen anything quite so realistic or beautiful as the lovely old train station where he and Ling found themselves now. This was nothing like the mundane subway, with its creaking wooden turnstiles and harried New Yorkers rushing and pushing. It was as if they were trespassing in some wealthy, eccentric aristocrat’s private underground lair. High above their heads, a herringbone pattern of cream-colored brick fanned out in an undulating plain of cathedral-worthy arches. White-hot gas flickered behind the frosted-glass globes of four brass chandeliers. The light spilled across the smooth surface of a fountain whose water seemed frozen in time. The waiting area boasted a velvet settee, three gooseneck lamps, a colorful Persian rug, and an assortment of fine leather chairs more suited to a library than a train platform. There was even a grand piano with a goldfish bowl resting on its broad back. The entire room had a warm amber glow to it—except for the subway tunnel, which was as dark as funeral bunting.
“Where are we?” Ling asked. She tapped the goldfish bowl and was rewarded with the tiniest quiver of orange.
“I don’t know. But it’s glorious!” Henry said, grinning. He sat at the piano. “Any requests?”
Ling scoffed. “You must be joking.”
“I don’t know that one, but if you hum a few bars…” Henry said, noodling around on the keys. “Now this is the elephant’s eyebrows. Elephant’s eyebrows is in the same dictionary as pos-i-tute-ly, by the way.”
Ling took the gleaming wooden stairs down to the passenger-loading platform and walked to the tunnel’s entrance. An arc of gas-jet bulbs, long dead, ringed the brick opening.
“Beach Pneumatic Transit Company,” Ling whispered, reading the plaque on the wall.
“I don’t suppose the dead are here to tell you which way I should go to find Louis,” Henry called from the piano.
“No,” Ling said. Her voice carried faintly. “Hello,” she said, more forcefully, and it echoed: Hello, lo, lo. A thread of wind caressed Ling’s face. There was a faint hiss and a pop of blue flame as, all at once, the gaslight bulbs blazed white-hot. A ghost of sound came from inside the tunnel—the whine of metal against metal.
“What’s that?” Henry leaped up from the piano and bounded down the stairs to Ling’s side.
A bright light pierced the tunnel’s darkness. The whine grew louder. A small wooden train car rattled down the dusty tracks, its oracular headlamp bright as noonday sun as it whooshed into the station and squeaked to a stop. The doors sighed open. Henry poked his head in, then turned back to Ling with a grin. “Ling, you’ve got to see this.”
They peered in, gawking at the mahogany paneling and two plush seats, the delicate kerosene lamps resting on end tables.
“Come on,” Henry said, climbing inside.
“What are you doing?” Ling cautioned.
“What if this takes us to our mysterious dreamer? What if this is somehow Louis’s crazy dream?” Henry’s pale, freckled face was so serious. “I’ve tried everything else. I have to know. Please. We can always wake up, Ling.”