Page 43 of I'll Be Waiting

“Do you have one, Nic?” she asks.

I think of Patrice and flinch. Then I take a quick sip of my tea. “No.”

“Jin? You’re up.”

“Me?”

She grins at him, and I can’t help but smile. I’d worried she’d be too shy to be comfortable here, especially when Jin and I are goodfriends, but she started to relax at Jin’s cocktail hour—the two of them sharing war stories about working in the medical field.

“Anything,” she says. “Any experience that you’ve had that could be a little scary.”

“Well…” He slants a look my way. “There was the time Nic offered to cook the turkey for Thanksgiving.”

I whip a decorative pillow at him.

He looks at Shania. “I’ve never actually had a paranormal experience myself, but there was a story my grandmother told me.”

“Yes!” she says, looking ten years younger as she pulls her feet up under her. “Grandmother ghost stories are the best.”

“Okay. This is my maternal grandmother, who’s Chinese. I’m not sure how much you guys know about Chinese ghosts.”

“There’s one that haunts bathrooms,” I say.

He whips the pillow back. “That’s Japanese.”

“Whoops.”

He looks back at Shania and Dr. Cirillo. “There are plenty of ghosts in Chinese culture. Beyond ancestral spirits, though, most of them aren’t exactly Casper the Friendly Ghost.”

“They are mostly considered malevolent,” Dr. Cirillo says. “Which is interesting, because that hasn’t been my experience with spirits.”

“We grow them different over there,” Jin says. “But there’s one particular type called the chang. The way my grandmother explained it, a chang is a person who was killed by a tiger. They come back as ghosts doomed to help the tiger forever, by luring in more victims.”

“That’s not fair,” Shania says. “It’s punishing the victim.”

“Well, I suspect the idea is that you might be pissed off at having been killed by a tiger, and so, being a ghost and not in your right mind, you want others to suffer the same fate. Anyway, that’s the myth. Now here’s the story.”

He sips his tea before beginning. “My grandmother came to Canada when she was seven. They lived in Toronto’s Chinatown, which made it easier, with both the language barrier and the cultureshock. It was her first summer in Canada, and her parents didn’t want her leaving Chinatown. They were very clear on that. But my grandmother made a friend, and one day the two girls decided to break the rules. They went deeper into the city and got lost. Then they argued. My grandmother wanted to try asking for help because it was getting dark. Her friend wanted to find the way back on their own. One of them stormed off, and they were separated.”

Jin takes a shortbread piece and tortures us by eating it before continuing. “Night is falling fast, and my grandmother only speaks a few words of English, and she’s in a strange city with no idea how to get home. She’s wandering around, hoping to see a police officer or a Chinese person, but she’s in a residential area, and it’s completely quiet. She thinks of going to a door and knocking but… Well, the reason her friend didn’t want to ask for help is that she’d had some bad experiences. My grandmother is too afraid to knock on doors. She’s walking and trying not to cry when she spots a girl playing hopscotch in a driveway. As she’s thinking of what to do, the girl sees her and waves, smiling and beckoning her over.”

Jin stretches his legs and looks at the fire. “Is it warm in here?”

“Stop that,” I say. “You’re stalling.”

He grins at me. “Fine. Okay, so my grandmother approaches the girl and tries—using sign language and her smattering of English—to explain that she’s lost. The girl understands and—with a bit of charades—says that she’ll get her parents to help. My grandmother said she could have cried from relief. She starts toward the front door, but the girl motions no, she needs to come in the back way. My grandmother knew that Canadian kids often use the rear door, so this made sense. Once she was back there, though, the girl led her through the yard and climbed the fence, indicatingthatwas her house, the one behind.”

“Okay, that’s weird,” Shania murmurs.

“That’s what my grandmother thought. Still, she didn’t know Canadian customs and maybe the other house didn’t have a drivewayto play in. So she starts to climb the fence. Then she stops. Or something stops her. She said she felt as if an invisible hand pulled her back. Then her insides went cold, and without even thinking, she turned and ran. She made it two streets and then spotted a police cruiser and flagged it down. She managed to tell the officers she was lost, but she also tried to tell them about the girl. She said she was certain something was wrong and the girl was in danger. Of course, the officers couldn’t understand anything except the part about being lost.”

Jin nibbles his shortbread, and I try not to glare at him.

He takes far too long eating that teeny bit of shortbread and then, of course, has to wash it down with tea.

Finally, he continues, “So they took my grandmother home, and she told her parents about the girl, but they thought she’d just gotten spooked. The poor English child had been trying to help, and my grandmother misunderstood. Two weeks later, my grandmother is with her mother and a neighbor who’s been using the newspaper to teach them both English. There, on the front page, is a picture of the girl my grandmother saw.”

Shania sucks in an audible breath.

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