At the Heart of the Universe (22 page)

They send the van driver cruising around, his cell phone at the ready in case he spots Katie. Pep will stay in the room with the door open to keep an eye on the hallway, and Rhett with his cell will stay in the lobby and keep grilling the staff and guests for information. Clio wants to go out on the streets to search. Rhett starts to make a sign for her to carry, with Katie's photo and the message that she is missing and that there is a one-hundred-dollar reward for her return. Left with the vision of her child lost out in the chaos of this city in the middle of China, Clio collapses on the bed, shaking. Disbelief turns to horror. From time to time she convulses in sobs. Pep sits on the bed beside her, feeling her shoulders shake the way their daughter's do on the rare times now when she cries.

20

Beepbeep... beepbeep... beepbeep
—

Lying on her cot, hearing the alarm on her Baby-G wristwatch, Katie clicks it off and thinks,
It sounds so loud I hope they didn't hear it—it would ruin everything.
She presses the tiny button for the pale-blue light. 3:00 a.m.

Thinking,
But can I really do this? Maybe it's the only way ever to find her.

She listens for any sound that means they heard it too, but hears only her own breathing. She holds her breath and listens. Nothing. Just her father snoring. She lies there for a moment, trying to shake off her dream. This one was about a tame deer on a path through the woods on a mountain, and a weird dream because the deer had a Chinese face. Thinking,
Now, be as quiet as a deer.

She slips on her shorts and socks and shirt but not her Nikes, which she holds in her hands. She tiptoes on deer feet to the door. Only one lock.
They'll be mad but I'm mad too.
It
is
the only way
,
no question
.
Be gentle-gentle with the lock
—
click! Uh-oh.
She holds her breath again and doesn't move, listening. It's like her mother has eyes in the back of her head and sees whatever she's doing, especially if it's bad. Nothing. Just her dad snoring.

She hopes the door doesn't squeak like it would in a cartoon and wake up Wile E. Coyote after the Road Runner's gone. It doesn't. She squeezes around it and out, closing it softly. Done. She runs. She decides not to take the elevator because when it opens in the lobby someone might hear it. She goes down the stairs. Yuck. Yucky smell, worse each floor down. She puts on her Nikes, runs down all the way, then gently opens the door. Wrong floor, the basement—it's
really
yucky. She goes back up one flight. She's worried that there's a doorman or clerk there who might see her and stop her. She should have worn a disguise, even a boy disguise, like Mulan did. It's too late now. She peeks out. No doorman. The lobby is dim. A clerk has his head down on his arms on the desk; he's asleep. Quickly she dashes across the lobby and the door closes and she's out! It's 3:04 a.m. by her Baby-G.

Nobody is on the street. No cars or trucks or bicycles. It's quiet except for the humming of the street lights like the rays are fighting their way through the foggy night. Now she will just wait from 3:04 to 5:00 and go back in. The train will be gone and they'll have to stay. That's the plan. She hurries down the street a block and ducks into an alley where she sits down on a big wooden crate to wait.
You go girl! That's what Mary always says to me when I hesitate like with Velcro. “You can't hesitate with a horse,” she says, and then when I don't hesitate and that brat does what I want she always gives me a thumbs-up and says, “You go girl!” And I tingle all over at how I did go girl and did good.

As she waits, she goes back over what has happened. She feels that she tried everything to get them to understand how much she wants to stay to find her birth mom. She tried everything and they hardly even listened. Do they think that she didn't
hear
them ask Tao if her birth mom wants her back?
How can I tell them that it doesn't matter if she wants me back? There's no way I'd go back to her—I've already
got
a mother and father, I don't need any others. But a sister's a different story.

Katie finds herself staring out at a little shop across the alleyway, a shop whose sign she can't read but whose window display has all kinds of metal parts and some tools that look already used, rescued from trash. All over China she's seen Chinese people combing through trash barrels and junk piles, hunting for anything of value. She is amazed at how everything in China is used, how anything that is thrown away is recycled.

Thinking,
Like I was
.

The thought surprises her. It's weird at first, but then something else happens. Something else seems to surround it like darkness surrounds day with a shadowy sadness and it pulls her down so that she feels like she's fallen into a black pit in the middle of her stomach and she wants to cry but another brand-new thought stops the falling and stops the something else.

It's not only that I
want
to find my birth mom. I
need
to find my birth mom. That's what they don't understand. When I see them again, when they've missed the train and the plane, I'll tell them that. I never understood that before and now I do and once you understand something like that you never forget it
ever
how can you?

“I'll tell them that,” she whispers to the shop, to the metal parts and orphaned tools, as quiet sitting there in their shop window as she is sitting there on her crate in the alley in the coal-y dark night. She looks at her watch—3:16. She can't imagine waiting one hour and forty-four more minutes just sitting there in the alley, and besides, she has to pee. In China kids can pee on the street, in alleys, in corners. That's an idea, she even carries some tissues in her left-hand pants pocket—like her dad always does.
Good idea, Dad.
She goes deeper into the little alley. If she just makes sure not to let her shorts touch the—God what's
that
? An animal or a plant—maybe a brown furry vegetable—is hiding by the wall a few inches from her feet. She tries to hurry, but it's hard to hurry your pee. She hasn't touched anything but her hands feel gross anyway.
Now
what.

There's a rustling nearby. She jumps, scared. A dog.

She doesn't touch it. They told her that just about every animal in China has rabies—but she doesn't have to touch it to be friends with it. It's more scared of her than she is of it—she can see that. It looks like a dingo dog in Africa or is it Australia, big, wide, pointy ears and a narrow black snout, and mostly yellow but you can see her hungry ribs. Her nipples are really big and black and her breasts are full of milk so that means she's got
babies
!
“
Hey, little dingo dog!” Her tail's wagging. Anything she can give her to eat? There's that dumpling Mom put in her pocket just in case. She takes it out and offers it. “Here, dingo dog, here you go.” The dog slinks back, so she tosses it. The dingo edges closer, sniffs, grabs the dumpling, and gobbles it up, then turns to go.

“Hey, wait! Wait for me!” The dog waits. Katie follows her. The dog keeps on, turning her head away and then back like she wants to show Katie her babies. “Okay, let's go!”
That's what we say to Cinnamon Our Fluffy Pup I call him Dad calls him Our Pampered Pooch or Our Yuppie Puppy when we take him for a walk.



She is lost. She looks around, and the small street she is on looks exactly like every other small street she has been on. There are street signs and other signs, but all of them are in Chinese, and she wishes she tried to learn the language when she had the chance. She feels bad that her parents tried so hard, and she didn't see the sense in it. She wanted to take Spanish because her friends at Spook did.
Big
mistake. She lost her friends and didn't learn Chinese or even Spanish that well either. Now she feels bad at how worried they'll feel when they wake up for the trip back and find her gone. She should've written a note but she was too mad. They'll go bananas.

The night seems even darker; the air is really wet and even thicker and smells a lot like coal dust. She thought she could remember which way she came, but now she can't. Dingo dog is looking back at her, still trying to get her to follow. Maybe if she did, she'd lead her back, because dogs have an instinct to find their way home. But maybe that wasn't her home and she was just out hunting for food, and her babies are where her real home is. She knows she shouldn't follow her any farther. This is no joke. It's 3:44.

Her mother has told her that if you're lost the most important thing is not to panic. She takes a deep breath and looks around. She decides to find her own way. Little streets have to lead to bigger streets. If she can get to a big street where there are lots of people or a park or a bus station or train station or even a police station, someone might speak English and take her back to the hotel. The Dripping Cave Hotel.

She wishes she could say it in Chinese, but all she can say is “hello” and “goodbye” and “thank you” and the word for “American,” which she thinks now is “A-mo-ran” or “Meg-oh-ran.” So she figures if she walks far enough she'll come to a big street and maybe somebody will speak English and she will say, “I am lost please take me to the Dripping Cave Hotel?” The Chinese people are kind. If they understand her they will help her. Safer than in America, her father always says. She feels better now that she has a plan. But it's so dark and misty and there haven't been any people around, none! and her plan doesn't seem that good a plan really, and she is getting more and more scared. She walks on. She tries to keep her spirits up by whistling, but the sound is so lonesome in the dark, tight streets, disappearing into the bitter-tasting coal mist like light into a long, curvy tunnel, that she stops, and just walks.



She walks for almost another half hour and has not found a main street or a person. She finds herself in a maze of tiny alleys lined by darkened shops and low, dead buildings, and once in a while, behind a high fence with barbed wire on top, a huge pile of coal glistening under a humming streetlamp. The only things she recognizes are signs for Coca-Cola. It's after four, which means that her parents are up. Up and panicking, wondering where she is. She thinks they'll probably figure it out, but still. And even if they knew why, they wouldn't be able to find her.

Nobody who knows me can find me!

Exhausted, hungry, and thirsty, she sits down on the edge of a stone, next to where water is dripping out of a metal pipe sprouting out of a stone wall. It's drinking water probably—but she knows not to drink it, it's drinking water only for Chinese. Suddenly she feels scared, and then
real
scared. She is alone and unknown in the middle of nowhere and she can't even take a drink and can't tell anybody anything and she starts to panic—it hits her belly and then goes up into her head so everything goes fuzzy and she feels totally alone, abandoned but not out in a wilderness with nothing in sight but under something, in and under something cool and damp and all ridgy and leafy, closing in, rubbing against her, weighing down and over her so she can't breathe and no one's there no one hears her cries no one! She starts to cry, just lets go and wails.
Please God help me please let them find me please I'm sorry I'll never do this again just get me back to them safe and sound!
Her body shakes, everything blurs, she screams, “Momma! Momma!
Momma
!”

Stops. Hears her voice echo off the stone walls. Silence. Nobody answers. She has stopped sobbing, but keeps on shivering inside. She sits, waits, not knowing what she's waiting for, except to be saved.

After a while, the far end of the narrow street brightens, and then glows. Dawn is a relief. The first angel rays of sun thread their way through the opening of the street, making the coal dust sparkle, and hit the tops of the buildings, changing the stone all around her to a weird-like rosy color. She checks her watch—5:21. They missed their train. She sits and sits.



Pa-clop pa-clop pa-clop pa-clop...

A horse coming up the small street toward her, totally black. He is pulling a wooden cart with car tires and a man is sitting on the cart. The man has a round straw hat like a big nipple on a bottle. It's pulled down so he can see into the blinding low rays of the sun. Half his face is hidden but what she can see of it is all black too. He wears a black long-sleeved shirt and she can't tell what he's sitting on in the cart but it's black too
.
Like in
Orpheus and Eurydice
where the Underworld People were all in black including her and the two others playing Cerberus the three-headed dog guarding the Gates of Hell.
Maybe this is help. Maybe I'm going to be saved!

Pa-clop! Pa-clop! PA-CLOP!

She loves the sound of horseshoes on stone. It's coming right along toward her. She wishes she had a carrot or a peppermint like she gives Velcro at Mary's Farm. She wishes she had something to give him, to make friends and be saved by the man on the cart. The horse starts to turn a corner, away. She runs.