The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(28)

The lights flickered as thunder rattled the windowpanes.

“I thought we could save them,” Lois said, shaking her head, staring down at the bowl of noodles that she hadn’t touched. “I used to think we could save everyone.”

Faye nodded. She’d once been that hopeful. That na?ve.

Then something caught her eye.

A shape. A figure. A man, passing by, walking in the rainstorm.

Faye watched him but he was already moving down the street, his back toward them. He wore an oil-stained pilot’s uniform, now soaking wet. He walked briskly, but with a familiar limp. Faye hesitated for a moment, unsure of what just happened, what she’d seen, and then she leapt to her feet, shoved chairs out of the way, and scrambled to the nearest window. She wiped the condensation off with her sleeve and saw the man disappear into a crowd on the far side of the street.

“What are you doing?” Lois called out. “Are you okay?”

“He’s alive…,” Faye said under her breath.

She left her coat and Lois behind and ran out the door, stepping off the boardwalk into a deep puddle that was as warm as the rain. She felt the water fill her shoes as she splashed her way across the street, past pack mules, a diesel freight truck in the process of being unloaded, and stray dogs that barked at whoever was near. She caught a glimpse of the man walking away from her as townspeople dashed into buildings and slipped beneath awnings to avoid the storm.

“Wait! It’s me! Wait!” she called out, but her voice was lost in the downpour.

She kicked off her shoes before they were nearly consumed by the mud, and carried them as she ran, splashing in wet stockings that grew muddier with each step.

Faye brushed aside her wet hair, wiped her eyes as she caught a glimpse of the young pilot through the rain. He turned down an alley.

Faye’s heart raced as she followed him around the corner.

He was gone.

She walked down the vacant alley that was lit by hanging oil lamps, the walls painted dark yellow. There was a stone footpath covered in mud that led to the street. Directly across the roadway was an ornate iron door beneath a stone arch, the entrance to a small building, a chapel that had recently been repurposed.

“Now I really am losing it,” Faye whispered as she approached the door.

She reached into her pocket for the photo, but the image, printed on old newsprint, had been soaked, waterlogged. The wet square came apart at her touch. The more she tried to squeeze the water out, to keep it whole, the more it fell to pieces. She dropped to her knees in front of the chapel, trying to salvage the fragments of muddy paper.

“No, no, no, no, no…”

She felt hollow inside. Her strange hope disappeared and her heart ached as she realized the photo—all that was left of him—was now gone, and all that remained was longing and confusion. Unanswered questions. The sweet and terrible memory of catching him, holding him as he collapsed in her arms. How he made her feel whole again for the first time. Losing that piece of paper was like losing him all over again. She shook. She raged. She sobbed for what she’d lost and what she never had, letting out a cry that had been inside her body for decades.

Then she heard the sound of a heavy door opening on rusty hinges.

“Hello,” a voice said in Chinese.

She looked up and saw a man standing beneath the stone arch. Faye recognized him as a Buddhist monk by his amber robe and crimson sash. She glanced back through the drizzle, down the alley, searching, wondering what happened.

He regarded her with concerned eyes, for her shoeless, bewildered state, covered in mud, soaking wet in the dark night. Then he recognized her nurse’s uniform and switched to English, tinged with a heavy British accent, a by-product of the decades foreigners had spent trying to connect Burma and Yunnan Province with a colonial railway. “You’re welcome to come in if you’d like? To pay your respects or just to get warm. The chapel has been repurposed as a place for the newly deceased, but there are extra sheets, blankets. You can dry off.”

He stood aside, inviting her in. “Please.”

She rose to her feet, stepped inside, dripping wet. The monk fetched her a blanket that she used to towel off and dry her hair. She wiped mud from her legs and tried desperately to remember the photo. In it she was young, smiling. But her expression was more than the blissful, unjaded na?veté of youth. She had the regal bearing of contentment, belonging. She looked satisfied in a way that’d she’d never felt whenever she viewed herself in a mirror. The photo was like a version of her that she’d always hoped for—daydreamed about while lying in her bed in nursing school, staring up at the ceiling—the life she’d always felt she was meant to live. A stark contrast to the heaviness she was resigned to when her eyes adjusted to the dimly lit room and neat rows of wooden tables appeared in front of her, each with a body covered by an old sheet. The monk was lighting sticks of incense placed in wooden holders near the head of each of the deceased. Near the feet were small ceramic teacups.

“I know this might be startling to most people,” he said as he worked. “But since you’re a nurse, I’m sure you understand the need for a temporary morgue.”

Faye nodded, then stepped closer, surrounded by musky swirls of agarwood smoke, traditional incense that smelled like a forest of flowers and ripening fruit. As she walked between the tables she recognized the shapes of men and women and the tragic outlines of children beneath their thin shrouds of cotton.