as these gentlemen.
She leaned toward Mai Lin and whispered, "Has anyone informed the Reverend?"
Mai Lin shook her head and made that sorry tsking sound. The poor woman was worn out. She took Mai Lin's hand in her own and held on tight.
"Not to worry," Grace said. "We will manage without him."
She went toward the one person in the place who mattered at this time: the child's mother. Mildred sat by herself beside the small coffin, her hand up to her mouth, a handkerchief gripped in white knuckles. The coffin had been made here in the parlor, and fresh sawdust dotted her black lace-up shoes.
Grace did not pause but knelt down before her friend, although it made her dizzy to do so. "Dear one," Grace began, and she studied Mildred's sorrowful countenance and saw that it was a mirror of her own after losing her son, "the untimely departure of a child is the greatest trial God sets before us. We are so sorry for your loss."
Mildred's gaze drifted away from the coffin and landed on Grace's face. Her brow tightened and became furrowed, and a look of confused amazement passed over her, as if perhaps she didn't recognize her friend. In her own grief, Grace remembered, she had mistaken people for apparitions. It was understandable that Mildred might do so now.
But Mildred didn't speak with a dazed or confused voice. Instead, she asked quite firmly, "Whom do you mean by 'we'?"
Grace squeezed Mai Lin's hand. "Why, Mai Lin and I."
Mildred looked at Grace with a cold stare and asked, "Where is your husband, Mrs. Watson?"
Grace stood unsteadily, and heat rose up from her collar. She looked about the room and noticed the others watching and waiting for a reply. And yet she had none. "I'm afraid," she said after a long moment, "I don't know."
"Of course you don't know," Mildred said with no kindness in her voice. "For many months now, you haven't known a thing, have you? You have no idea what we have gone through without anyone steering us or leading us forward. Those of us who have survived have done so with no help from your errant husband."
Grace could feel herself beginning to sway and was grateful when Mai Lin steadied her. She wished to be back in bed. Mai Lin's potion had worn off, and the swishing of her blood in her ears was like a rising tide that might soon drown her.
Mildred continued, "But that is behind us now. We are leaving, my husband and I. The other families are departing as well. As soon as we bury our daughter in this wretched soil, we shall abandon this land, and, God willing, we'll never see it again."
Grace did not appreciate her friend's harsh tone one bit. It made her feel feverish and more alone than ever. But when she looked down into Mildred's distraught eyes, Grace understood her hardened heart. Her friend was doing all that she could to remain strong precisely because she was not. Grace wanted to pat her friend's hand, which was damp with tears, and tell her to let the sorrow take her. There was no point in railing against it. Her grief, the grief of any mother whose child has been stolen away, was far too much to bear.
Strangely, Grace wanted to welcome Mildred into the painful society she had come to know and now champion. Mildred didn't yet understand that the ghosts win out in the end. It would be so much easier if she simply let them do so. It didn't matter if Mildred left this land on the next boat out of Shanghai, or if she stayed here for the rest of her days. She, like Grace, would never leave behind the plains of North China. There was no escaping this vast and desolate land. Grace understood that now. Once entered into, this desert of loss surrounded even the sturdiest of souls forever.
Then, as if to prove Grace's assumptions correct, a miserable wail escaped from the lips of her friend. In an instant, her husband was beside her. The other gentlemen stepped nearer, too. They bent forward and offered concerned faces. Grace looked around and saw that the ladies had slipped in closer as well and glared not at Mildred but at Grace. She wondered if they thought she had done something to produce her friend's outcry. Yet how could they imagine such a thing when the true culprit was death itself?
"I am deeply sorry, Mildred," Grace