At the Heart of the Universe (10 page)



While Katie swims, Clio and Pep, sitting at the bar overlooking the pool, open the envelope. Two pieces of paper. One, on orphanage stationery, from Hongyen Ayi:

Dear Macy. I find this in baby Chun's swaddling clothes ten years ago and I ask friend to make translation and keep secret. I give it now because of good
ch'i
today when we meet. Good fortune to you Macy and most to beautiful Chun.

The second note is in Chinese, with the English translation:

In our country-side the thought which man is more important than woman is very popular. I myself don't have the strength to say something against it and overthrow it. But I believe on this big world there must be some kind, good-hearted uncles or aunties who can rescue my little daughter Chun, born June 25. I would do anything for him or her on my next life if I have another life.

Her mother

They read it over and over. They stare at each other, at first unable to say a word.

“
Her
hand,” Clio says. “But I'm not sure we should show it to Katie now—with all she's got to take in already?”

“Right. We'll do it next week, when we're home.” He fingers the document, examines it as he would an insurance contract, as if looking for a catch: the thin, fragile paper, the squid-ink-black strokes of a calligraphy brush, the “Chun,” the “rescue,” the “her mother”—all in a clumsy, concrete-sounding translation. But there can be no catch.
It just is.
How will their daughter react to this, the first real evidence of a mother who loved her passionately but who didn't “have the strength to say something against it and overthrow it,” the “it” being that her girl is worthless, compared to a boy? How will Katie stand it? How will she feel? There's no way to know. He thinks for a moment of hiding it from her, maybe until she's eighteen or twenty-one. But no.

“Yes,” Clio is saying, “maybe when we're all curled up together in our bed, safe and sound.” But her feelings are raging—she can almost
see
the young woman writing this the night before she will give up her baby, tormented but trying to hold the faith that “on this big world”—why “big”? Does she feel hers is small?—“there must be some kind, good-hearted uncles or aunties”—
people like us.
People who she “would do anything for... on my next life if I have another life.” As if this life of hers, with this act, is over—and she's not counting on any other. It's so sad! And yet, when Katie sees this, it will be with her forever. It will make whatever image Katie has of her more real, maybe even make Pep and her less so—no, not less real, but
different
—“uncle and auntie,” not mother and father? Clio's spirit starts to sink—but suddenly revives, fiercely.
Feel for her, yes, feel everything for her, yes! But protect Katie! Katie is ours!

“Very safe and sound,” Pep says, taking her hand. “A low-risk moment, yes.”

Clio folds the letter carefully, puts it back in the envelope, and hands it to him. “Keep it safe, Peppie, it's a treasure.”



At lunch in the hotel. Katie seems subdued, picking at her rice.

“So what did you think of the orphanage, dear?” Clio asks.

“It was all right, but I don't know, seeing all the girls maybe bothered me?” Her tone is dead serious.

“How did it bother you?”

“Well, you and Dad told me Chinese families can only have one child, right?” Clio nods. “And they want boys, and keep the boys? And give the girls away?”

“That's right.” Clio says.
Or worse.
She glances at Pep.

“So like they think girls aren't special. But girls
are
special! I mean don't they realize that girls are
goddesses
?”

“
Of course
girls are goddesses,” Pep says, “we feel that way for sure.”

Katie pushes her rice here and there on her plate, her face somber.

“How did they get there? I mean, how did the mothers get them there?”

“They leave them here in the city, somewhere where they'll be found right away, and whoever finds them takes them to the police station, and then they come to the orphanage, and the birth mom goes back to her family in the country.”

“Who's in her family?”

“Well, maybe she already had a baby girl, and then tried for a boy, and when it turned out to be a girl they decided they couldn't keep her.”

“So I have a big sister somewhere!” Katie's eyes are wide with surprise.

“Maybe,” Pep says. “That's why we went to the orphanage and the police station. To see if we could find out anything.”

“Did you?”

“No, sweetheart,” Clio says. “We didn't.”

Katie nods, but says nothing. They hold their breath. Katie's lip turns down, and she tries bravely to stop it, breathing hard for the longest time. They don't dare move.

“Mom?”

“Yes, dear?”

“I wish I knew who my birth mom was.” Her eyes pool with tears.

“We wish that too, Daddy and me.”

“Yes, honey, we all do.”

Katie just sits there, still as a statue, staring nowhere, tears easing down her face.

“It's sad, so sad.” Clio says. She realizes that for the first time in her life Katie has
gotten
it, the fact of her abandonment, the fact that
they are it
, for her.

Katie just sits there silently, tears lying on her cheeks like pale scars.

“Here, love, come here.” Clio helps her climb over the chair and into her lap. The little body shakes with sobs. Clio hugs her.

Pep scrapes back his chair, goes over to them, and puts his arms around them both.

10

“Even if a Changsha-ese doesn't have enough money for lunch,” Rhett is saying, “he'll find a way to have a big dinner.” He puffs his cigarette, laughs. “We're Hunan Cool, man, we're entrepreneurs.”

It is afternoon, and they are on the way to Yuelu Mountain, just over the Xiangjiang River from Changsha. When Rhett arrived at the hotel, he announced that he had found the perfect thing for Katie to see, an aviary. She asked, what's an aviary?

“Birds, baby, birds!
Free-flying
birds—they eat out of your hand, and do tricks! They've even got lovebirds, like your little Dave.” Katie is delighted.

The minibus is clean, cool, and provisioned with bottled water. From the bridge across the Xiangjiang, Katie spots boatmen fishing with cormorants. Rhett knows about cormorants. “They're the only diving bird without oil sacs, which is why they sit with their wings stretched out—to dry them in the sun. The fishermen tie a rope around their necks to keep them from swallowing the fish, and mostly take them out at night. They put oil lamps on the bows of their boats, 'cause cormorants are afraid of the dark.”

“Cool. When my dog Cinnamon was a puppy—he was afraid of the dark too.”

“My pets
love
the dark,” Rhett says. “All twenty of 'em.”

“What kind of pets?” Katie asks.

“Crickets. Fighting crickets, each in its own little bitty cage.”

“You're like kidding me, right?”

“No way, little José! I'll bring my best fighter—Goliath—tomorrow.”

On the footbridge that runs across the river to the north, there is a horse pulling a heavily laden wagon, and then another, and another—a horse caravan. Katie's eyes are glued to the bus window. The traffic jam is fierce. She gets a good look. Rhett points out, in mid-river, Juzi (Orange) Island. “Mao was born near here, and as a teacher he often met with students on the tip of that island, and composed the poem ‘Changsha—To the Tune of Quin—'” His cell phone rings. With a slick movement he flips it open, barks, waits, shouts a torrent of what seems extremely harsh Chinese, flips it closed.

They drive through a pleached arbor of plane trees on the campus of Hunan University—Rhett's alma mater—past a forty-foot-tall statue of Mao in alabaster, and then past the Yuelu Academy of Classical Learning, founded in 976 during the Song Dynasty. Rhett recites the slogan on the stone tablet entombed there, “‘Loyalty, Filial Piety, Honesty, and Chastity'—in that order—haha!”

“So, Little Britches,” Rhett says to Katie now—she recognizes the term from Disney's
Jungle Book
—“what music you dig?” Katie, shy, shrugs. “Rock? Country? Reggae?”

“Mom loves Bob Marley.”

“Get
out
!” Clio laughs, and nods. “Momma, you are
bad
! How 'bout you, Katie?”

She hesitates a moment, then risks it. “Britney.”

“Britney?! No way! I
love
Britney!” He sings the first few bars of “Oops!... I Did It Again” in a brassy Britney falsetto. “C'mon, c'mon, I
need
you with me, girl!” Katie joins in, at first softly, then louder, as the bus climbs the winding road up Mount Yuelu.

At the summit they get out for the view. It's as if they've entered a blast furnace. Rhett takes Katie off for an ice cream. Clio and Pep climb the pagoda, and at the top they wade through a wind-scattered deck of playing cards to the railing. To the east, shrouded in urban smog, they see the glittering skyscrapers of Changsha, surrounded by a gleam of sprawl, threaded by superhighways. To the west is a range of green mountains piled up as if by a big hand pushing earth, the far western peaks blending with haze and obscuring the horizon. Ribbons of rivers feeding the distant Yangtze curl through dark-green valleys that rise to terraced rice paddies, sparkling like shards of glass in the afternoon sun. There are rare shrouded clumps of small towns and villages.

As Clio stands there, the aura of the woman in the police station seems to coalesce—a concrete image of the dream woman she has lived with for ten years.

“Out there, honey,” Pep says, pointing toward the river valleys, “is probably where she came from.”

Clio is startled. She strokes his back. He smiles, and takes her hand—in the special way he always does, one finger interlaced between two of hers, the rest clasped.
Sensual, yes, like before.
Their eyes hold. His innocent, curious look reminds her of the moment they met.

Now, a gust of wind from the distant mountains catches the playing cards. They float and flicker like chanced-upon butterflies, down from the pavilion, away.



“Stop! Rhett, please tell him to stop!” Clio is up out of her seat. Rhett gets off the phone, shouts something at the driver. The minibus stops.

“Hey, this isn't the aviary,” Katie says. “What's going on?”

“It's on the way, hon, it's the Lushan Temple. We came here the day we met you—just after. I just want a quick look in. It'll only take a second.”

They climb up the steep path to the entrance to the temple, pay their next-to-nothing admittance, and walk in.

“Pep, look! Look, it's magnificent! Just as it was, unchanged!”

He's already shooting pictures. “Beautiful.” He looks around. “And for the first time in China, we're alone! It's deserted! It's breezy and shady and roomy... and
quiet
!”

Clio floats through the first courtyard to a large building. Her eyes are drawn up to the graceful oblique way that the temple columns and beams handle the stress of the arches. Song and Yuan constructions. The cantilever arms—or
angs
—ride freely, balancing the bracketing system, a play of forces like the arches at Chartres. She looks down to the great open space within. There, fifty feet tall, are the three golden Buddhas, each on a golden lotus blossom, each holding its hands in a different position.

This time around she feels more awed. Through her meditation lessons, she understands something of the person who gave birth to this sacred and beautiful place—and this time she isn't focused on the four-month-old baby she's just held in her arms for the first time and then had to leave for another day in the orphanage, but on the ten-year-old who is achingly real and right here with her and loved in a known way. She is tempted to kneel on the carpeted bench and light a stick of celebratory incense, but no.
Not yet.
Feeling guilty for taking time from her daughter, she moves quickly away, along through the silent courtyards and past the barred-up classrooms and through an arched moon gate framing a garden. She stops, staring at the garden. Mountains are symbolized by water-pocked rock; water is symbolized by a current of gleaming pebbles cracked off a mountain and worn smooth by thousands of years of river.