At the Heart of the Universe (26 page)

“There's the sign for the trail, guys,” Katie says. “Let's go.”

Clio's guidebook says that the path up to the Elephant Temple is winding, steep, and rises almost two thousand feet. At first the incline is gradual. The path, though ancient, is well marked, with stone steps chiseled into the mountain. Starting out at well over four thousand feet, they hike only an hour over an increasingly steep path before they have to stop. They sit, panting like puppies chasing their breath, unable to quite catch it. Pep wonders, at what altitude do you have to worry about altitude sickness?

A long line of Chinese men starts coming down the mountain toward them. They wear thin-soled rope sandals, either long pants with the legs rolled up or shorts, and polo shirts or singlets. They seem emaciated, without an ounce of extra fat. Wiry. Their calf and thigh muscles bulge, strung to bone with tendons that look like guy-wires. Most are smoking. Each has a four-foot-tall wooden carrying harness on his back from which dangles a half-gallon plastic water bottle and a sweat rag. The harnesses are empty. Clearly they have carried their loads of supplies several thousand feet up the trail to the temple, and now they are coming back down.

Seeing Westerners is an obvious rarity for them. They seem cheerful and curious, and ask Katie questions. Through sign language Clio conveys that they are going up the mountain to the Elephant Temple, and tries to ask how far it is. Several of the men indicate that it is far, and a hard climb. They offer to carry each of them up, for a price. Clio is astonished—these little men carry them up? How? On their backs. A startling idea, which Katie pronounces “Gross!” They decline, and go on.

After another hour or so on the trail, Pep and Katie, in the lead, find themselves at a clearing on the banks of a stream. A shelf of rock reaches out into a natural eddy of the water, a deep pool. Rocks pop up all around, a seating arrangement. Pines, larch, immense rhododendrons in red, purple, pink, and white, and a gathering of giant azalea shelter the glade. The afternoon sun seems caught between hot and easing. Hanging from a tree are a few tin ladles. The grotto is of an altitude to discourage serious insects. The only litter is cigarette butts. Pep cracks the seal on a fresh bottle of water and hands it to Katie. It isn't cold, but it is safe, and both of them sigh contentedly. Clio arrives and sits next to Katie on the natural stone seat. Pep goes upstream a little to wash his face.

Katie sits there picking at her fingers—a bad habit Clio has tried to stop, using umpteen strategies gleaned from the good doctor Orville Rose and a book called
How To Stop Your Child Picking
, with no effect. She vows not to say anything now. Katie keeps on picking. She can't stand it. “Please, sweetie, don't pick, okay?”

“I'm thinking about your birthday before we left home. How old were you?”

They had celebrated in Columbia with dinner at Gourmet Restaurant, a brand-new place between the hospital and the cemetery. “I was fifty-one.”

“So when I'm twenty you'll be sixty-one and when I'm thirty you'll be seventy-one and when I'm forty you'll be eighty-one! And fifty, ninety-one!”

“That's right, but—but I'm—”

“I mean if I get married when I'm thirty-five you'll be... what?”

“Seventy-six,” Clio says, she too feeling appalled. What a sad, awful image.

Katie does some counting on her fingers. “And if I adopt a baby you could be like eighty?” Clio nods. “Why did you wait so long to adopt me?”

“We told you—we didn't meet each other until we were older, and then we tried for a while to have a biological baby, and as soon as we could after that we—”

“You're not going to die, Mom, I mean before some of this, are you?”

“Are you worried about that, dear?”

“Yeah, you're old and Daddy's older even than you and I'm thinking you might die, you
both
might die, and then you'd never get to see me married or become a mother?” She glances up at Clio, and looks away again, picking. And then, after a sad, harsh sigh, she says, “You're older than
any
of my friends' parents or any in China Culture Camp, and if you die soon, who's gonna take care of me?”

In Katie's eyes Clio sees a terrible vulnerability—it always makes her think of Katie's abandonment. Yet in that same vulnerability is a steely focus that Katie's always had, calling her and Pep to be
real
. Abandoned, yes, but also found. “It's scary, it really is, and not just for you but for us. But Daddy and I are in good health—you don't have to worry—”

“I
am
worried, Mom.” She falls silent and looks past Clio, as if to something else.

Clio recalls the only other time she has ever seen Katie this way. She must have been about three. Pep and she had just finished singing and reading to her; had put her into her crib. “Goodnight, dear, love you.” Usually Katie would have said, “Love you too,” and gone right to sleep. But that night she just lay there and looked up at them, and asked, “Does
everybody
die?” Startled, they looked at each other. Clio thought to lie, but she could see that Katie had already seen her hesitation and knew her answer. “Yes, dear, you live a long time, a long, long time hopefully, and then you die.” “Am
I
going to die?” Again she hesitated. Pep started to say, “You're really young, honey, and”—but Clio put her arm on his and stopped him because in Katie's eyes she saw the realization, the first glimpse of her own mortality. As she watched, her baby's eyes got glassy. She saw that Katie
knew
. Clio reached down and picked her up but Katie didn't make a sound. The tears stopped. When they put her back down, she was calm. Her eyes were dry, but now she was looking past them, elsewhere.

Clio and Pep talked to her, sang to her, rocked her, and tried to get her to play, but she wouldn't. It was as if part of her had gone missing. Clio held her, and Katie stayed that way for a long time in her arms, quiet, not crying, but with a—what?—yes, a first distance between daughter and mother, as if saying,
How could you do this to me, bring me into your world when I have to leave it, when I have to leave you! How? Why?
She stayed that way, quiet and still and somber, almost sorrowful, and distant, until she fell asleep. It broke Clio's heart—Pep's too, he said.

“Yes,” Clio says now, “I know how worried you are. It's the scariest thing in the world, to think of someone dying. We'll try to live a long time for you, dear, but if we die, we've arranged for you to be taken care of till you can take care of yourself.”

“Who'll take care of me?”

“My sisters. Aunt Thalia and Aunt Faith.”

“I don't want
them—
Aunt Thalia doesn't even call me my right name—she calls me ‘Kate'—she's
retarded
! Aunt Faith's older than you! I want Carter and Sue.”

“Do you really?”

“Yeah. They're really cool and they live close by and they let me stay up real late and sleep late and they have
two
real
dogs—like Cinnamon—not
goldens
. Can I?”

“Sounds good to me, hon. I'm sure that Dad will agree, and we'll tell them when we get back. But why are you thinking about all this now?”

“'Cause of your birthday.”

“And maybe because we might meet your birth mom soon?”

“Maybe, yeah.”



It is the last slip of afternoon by the time they emerge from the tunnel of thick, tall trees onto an open terrace. The terrace is under construction, stone being chiseled from the mountain. Tripods of bamboo poles hold pulleys and ropes for lifting. In a pit of muddy earth below, a dozen barefoot men in an assortment of faded shirts and long pants are digging. They haul dirt up to the terrace in woven wicker baskets with open tongues, two baskets per carrying pole across their shoulders, dump it, and then walk back down into the pit, their empty baskets dangling, tongue-side down, as if in supplication. From a different direction two men, a carrying pole sagging between them, are struggling valiantly to move a coffin-sized chunk of red stone across the terrace to its place in the scheme of things.

When they see the Macys, they stop and stare and, laughing loudly, call out to Katie. The Macys—even Katie—wave back at them and offer up Nee hows. Clio's guidebook says that a paved path leads along to a final two-hundred-step stairway up to the Elephant Temple. Sure enough, they spot a path of square concrete stones snaking around between tree trunks, leading away on level ground.

“This is it,” Clio says. She looks up the narrow path. It tunnels through a grove of old bamboo. The trunks are thick and dark green. Her eyes are led up the lattice of stalks to the feathery tops, soaring high above, caressing the breeze. “Isn't this divine?”

“Wonderful!” Pep says, starting on ahead. “Lush green lush green...”

Clio walks behind Pep, with her arm around Katie's shoulders. A great old eucalyptus rises at the edge of the path, leaning over it. Clio ducks to pass under it, holding on to the trunk to stay on the path. Katie, talking to her, walks upright under it. The trunk is worn to silk from many decades of human hands holding on.

A young Chinese woman wearing a bright orange plastic vest is sweeping the path. When she sees them coming, she stops. Pep passes her. As Clio draws near she notices the woman staring intently, first at Katie, then at her. Clio nods, and says, “Nee how.” The woman says nothing. She looks again at Katie. The expression on her face is peculiar—Clio reads it as embarrassment, or even fear. They pass by.

24

There is a commotion at the mouth of the path. She turns to look.

The construction workers are laughing and chattering.

Soon a large white man comes up the path. He puts his hand on the trunk of the great leaning eucalyptus and, with care not to hit his head, ducks under and goes on. Behind him is a white woman, wearing shorts that go down to just above her knees, and a tan shirt with many pockets all over it. With her is a girl.

A Chinese girl. A Chinese girl who could be ten.

As she watches, her heart starts to strike hard in her chest. Her eyes are riveted to the Chinese girl. She holds the woman's hand. Her step is light, like a deer, easy and fluid. She and the woman are talking, and seem more caught up in each other than in the world around them. Xiao Lu understands then that the white woman is the girl's mother. The little girl is trying to get her mother to understand something, or agree to something, and waves her arms and nods her head. The girl, focused on the woman, doesn't notice the leaning eucalyptus and barely passes under it; the woman, at the last moment, ducks.

Could it be? Could Second Sister have found them?

She watches them approach. The stones of the path are narrow. There is only room for two people side by side. Over and over when people come up the path she steps off it, onto the packed dirt of the bamboo grove. Steps off it because they are tourists and she is a worker. Most people are Chinese. It is rare to have white people come here. The cable car will bring more white people.

They come closer. She is straining to see her more clearly, to find, in this girl, the baby she placed in the pile of celery ten years before. She is slender, graceful. She wears blue shorts and a bright-pink shirt and carries a yellow beaked cap with a chicken on it. Her long hair is tied back. And her face? Oval more than square, her lips could be
her
lips, her eyes
her
eyes—and look!—she smiles. Is it
her
smile?

Could be, yes. They are here now. They have come to this particular place at this particular time. Of all places this place; of all times this time. Has to be!

They are upon her, the mother and girl. She steps aside but watches them. The girl doesn't look at her. The mother glances at her and smiles and says something that maybe is “Ni hao” but sounds strange. She nods and says nothing and turns her eyes again to the girl, who is staring ahead and talking a foreign language.

They pass by. She sees the double crown, two whorls from which her hair flows.

Say something! Talk to them. Run up to them. Even if they are not them, the price of saying nothing is too high. It is better to be wrong. Shout out her name!

It is the moment she has waited for, ever since she turned away from that woman at the vegetable stand who was screaming, “Whose baby whose baby?” It is the moment she has waited for to undo the regret, the fierce, relentless guilt, the shame. It is finally, for someone whose heart had stopped fully beating ten years ago and who has lived for something in the future—for this very moment—it is finally that moment.

And in that moment something inside of her says no.

Do I want to do this? What will happen if I do this? I have a life now. I have a life that I can live. I have reached a level of peace. Why disturb that? Who am I to do this? Who am I to disturb these people, this child? It is all for me, me! I, I. Selfish woman! Selfish!

They are walking down the path. Their lives are whole. Let them go. Let
her
go.