Chapter 5

Chapter 5

That night was the first time Lin Wan and I spoke openly.

She stood outside the door of 704, the dim, yellow glow of the old hallway’s motion-sensor light behind her. She wore a long dress that had faded from too many washes, her hair falling over her shoulders. She still looked like the girl in her early twenties from the photograph, but it was as if she were behind a pane of damp glass-no matter how close or far she was, she didn’t feel real.

“When did she find out?” I asked.

“On the Seventh Day.”

Lin Wan’s voice was flat.

“On the third night after my burial, she was in the kitchen heating some porridge for herself. I was standing in the doorway. She glanced at me, and the bowl in her hand dropped. But she didn’t scream, and she didn’t run. She knelt down, picked up the shards piece by piece, and asked me through her tears if I was hungry.”

I remained silent.

“After that, she just acted like I was still alive.” Lin Wan looked down at my shadow. “During the day when people are around, she answers for me. At night when it’s just us, she tells me that groceries were two yuan more expensive today, or which neighbor downstairs got into another fight. She tells me to remember to avoid mirrors when I go out so I don’t upset myself.”

At this point, she finally looked up at me, then quickly averted her gaze.

That look was brief, like a scrap of paper caught in the wind only to fall again.

“What about you?” she asked. “Do you also not remember how you died?”

“I can’t remember clearly,” I said. “I only remember that I died in this residential compound. It’s been three years, and I’ve never been able to leave.”

“Me neither.”

She was silent for a moment, her fingers gripping the doorframe tightly.

“I stayed because my mother’s life is moving too slowly on her own. She waits for me to come home every day. If I leave, she’ll truly be all alone.”

I looked at the half-open door of 703, my throat feeling as if it were blocked by a mass of cold mist.

“I didn’t tell her that I knew something was wrong with you,” I said.

Lin Wan nodded.

“And I didn’t tell her that I knew the same about you.”

“Why?”

She didn’t answer immediately this time.

After a long while, she whispered, “Because you look even more like someone with nowhere to go than I do.”

The next night, I continued reading Granny Wu’s diary.

What she wrote wasn’t a ghost story; it was more like a household ledger filled with excessive worry.

“May 8th. Bought new slippers for Wanwan. Even though she makes no sound when she walks, a girl shouldn’t be barefoot when she’s home.”

“May 11th. Xiao Cheng from next door was out in the hallway catching the breeze again. I asked him if he wanted some soup, and he said thank you. Ghosts can say thank you too-they’re better than those two sons of Old Liu downstairs.”

“June 20th. Raining. Wanwan stared out the window for a long time; she probably wants to go out. I don’t dare keep her, but I don’t dare urge her to leave either. Her coming back is already a blessing from the heavens; I shouldn’t be greedy.”

I flipped through the pages one by one, feeling worse the more I read.

Granny Wu didn’t treat us like monsters; she treated us like two children who had never grown up.

Once, she wrote in her diary:

“The people downstairs say I’m getting senile, always talking to thin air. But they don’t understand. The living have their excitement, and the dead have their grievances. Both children are very quiet and have never frightened me. How much more could it possibly cost to make an extra bowl of rice?”

I remembered when winter set in. My room was so cold that even the plaster was damp and peeling off the walls. Granny Wu had knocked on the door of 704 and said through the wood, “Xiao Cheng, I’ve left an electric blanket for you. It’s old, but it works. Don’t turn it on during the day, but use it to warm up at night.”

I had leaned against the back of the door then, unable to speak for a long time.

As a dead man, I obviously couldn’t use an electric blanket.

But that feeling of being cared for was something I rarely experienced even when I was alive.

Flipping further back, the handwriting began to grow messy.

“The Property Management people came by. They said they’d pretend they didn’t see anything. They said things would naturally dissipate after the Seventh Day. But Wanwan didn’t dissipate, and neither did Xiao Cheng.”

“I asked them what to do. That young man in the uniform said it’s best not to keep them. The longer they stay, the harder it is for them to leave.”

“I didn’t agree. My child finally made it home, and that boy next door looks so pitiful. I want to keep them a little longer.”

There was a blurred water stain on the edge of the page, like a salt mark left behind by a dried tear.

I closed the diary, and for the first time, a thought occurred to me.

Perhaps Granny Wu didn’t just see us.

Maybe she had been bargaining with something on our behalf this entire time.