At the Heart of the Universe (48 page)

The only sounds are the wood in the stove and, in the fluid stillness of the night as it gathers its dark satin, the calls of birds—magpies, cuckoos, silk-voiced doves, and a lone mockingbird riffing on their songs.

“Well, Pep,” Rhett says, “you owe me.” Pep says nothing to this. “After I got arrested, it was not fun
.
Five hours of interrogation by the thugs in Tienja. Why was I illegally bringing Americans nosing around
a restricted zone
? A night and a day in jail to teach me a lesson. I give them all the cash you gave me. They put me on a train back to Changsha. My boss fires me. All the while I'm wondering what happened to Katie. I was really down, really bummed. But then I lucked out.”

“How?”

“This beautiful lady shows up in Changsha.” He smiles at Thalia, puts his arm around her. “She asks me to find you. An urgent matter—especially as your visas have run out, and you're illegal in China. Illegal
big-time
.”

“Big deal,” Pep says happily. “Big damn deal.”

“Could be, fella, could be a
real
big deal when you try to get home. Anyway, I call the Dripping Cave and find out that Katie came back, and that you went off to find Xiao Lu. But I can't go back
through
Tienja to get here, I gotta go
around
. The
long
way around. A pain in the ass. Days, nights. Bad conditions. But me and this foxy lady do it. The rest is history.” He puffs, pleased with himself.

“Yes,” Thalia says, “there was quite a kerfuffle when you weren't at Annisquam. Not like you, you've never missed, and with no explanation? And then, when we found out you weren't on your scheduled flight? Frightening. I volunteered to go find you. Once I found Rhett, it was easy. It was good fun.”

“My luck is turning, Pep. You owe me,
big-time
.”

Pep says nothing to this.

“I'm talking insurance—life, property, the whole enchilada. Like we discussed before.” Rhett takes out a navy-blue folder embossed with “Deloitte and Touche,” and reads the Chinese title: “‘The Platinum Rice Bowl: Private Insurance in the New China.'
Y'see, Pep, when Mao guaranteed everyone a level of security—starting with having enough food—he called it the ‘Iron Rice Bowl.' Now, the safety net is gone. ‘Platinum' is good, don't you think?” He waits for Pep to answer. When Pep doesn't, he goes on with his pitch. “The market? At
least
nine hundred million people. Market cap? Billions. What better collaboration than you and me, Pep? Chinese-American. Cutting-edge. The New Millennium. Look! Spreadsheets, Pep, spreadsheets! Like I said, ‘With your good looks and my brains...'” He laughs. “What do you think?”

Pep wishes he'd stop talking and go away, and remains silent.

Thalia seizes the opportunity. “Good,” she says. “Right. Now. Let's organize our trip back. Tomorrow, first thing, back to the monastery—it's so quaint, isn't it?—almost Disney—and then Changsha tomorrow night at that great hotel—I hear Kate
loves
the pool, don't you, dear?”

Katie's head lowers a millimeter farther toward the tip of her calligraphy brush.

“So then,” Thalia says cheerfully, “the five-star hotel, and then home?”

The question floats around the tiny room like a moth with bad timing.

Clio feels her body stiffen. “No, we're not ready to leave yet.”

“Why, why not? You've been here for days and days, and... and to be honest, sis, you're a
mess
!” Clio's vehemence seems to startle her. She tries to stop, but like a car engine that keeps popping after its power has been cut, she blurts out, “You're
all
a mess!” Clio looks at Pep, and Katie looks up too—and they all laugh. “Go ahead, but you can't think only of yourselves. What about your family, your friends—your
dog
, for Christ's sake? Your friends are frantic, and the kennel fellow is at his wit's end!”

“We've got to make sure that Xiao Lu is all right. She was bitten by a monkey.”

“All the more reason to get her good medical care.”

“As soon as she's up and about, strong enough to walk,” Pep says, “we will.”

“Kate, dear, aren't
you
ready to go home? It's only early July—the summer awaits!”

“No way,
Thal
.” She looks up, says, “Trust me,” and lowers her head again.

Thalia blinks, as if slapped. Her jaw drops. New dental work, mostly gold.

Clio sees that her sister finally has understood something of what has gone on here. She watches as the worry lines that grew and deepened all through Thalia's catastrophic marriage to—and endless trench-war divorce from—her Beverly Hills
uber
-Freudian analyst, Shapiro, now spread across her face like a fractal pattern in a cracked windshield. She looks so
old
. Feeling sad for her, Clio takes a gentler tone. “You see, Thalia, we've been with Xiao Lu for several days without a translator. This, now, is a very special time. Rhett, we need your help.”

“Fine.” He looks at Pep. “Deal?”

“No,” Clio says. “No deal.”

Her directness surprises him. “Why not?”

“If you're going to translate for us, it's important you be here in the right spirit.”

His face curls in distaste, as if he's bitten into a bad scallion pancake. “You're too much! Hitting me now, after all we've been through, with this touchy-feely shit?”

“Welcome to the insurance industry,” Pep says. He spreads a banner in the sky and quotes his slogan: “Insure With the
People
People—Whale City Insurance.”

Rhett stares at him, at Thalia, who shrugs and rolls her eyes. He gets it, and groans. “Let me get ready.” He closes his eyes, and takes three deep breaths. Three more, less deep. He opens his eyes. “Ready.”

Xiao Lu listens, through Rhett, as they tell her about their lives in a village called Columbia New York America. Chun tells her about her dog and bird and school. To Xiao Lu it seems very strange. She asks how can Chun have a dog made of spice and a bird with a face of a peach, and a school make of spooks?—of evil spirits? When Chun and the others hear this, they laugh. At first she hears their laughter as anger, and is embarrassed. But then Wong translates it better, and she laughs too. Then it's their turn to ask questions.

She tells them about her own mother and father, about growing up on a farm near the river, about being born in the last Year of Starvation when the fish and frogs and even snails were gone and they combed the hillsides for
anything
to eat, and about the disappearance of First Sister. The Macys tell her about seeing Tao at the police station, Rhett finding her, about her taking them to visit her husband's family, and about the vicious reception they got from her mother-in-law.

“Did you see Xia?” Xiao Lu cries out. “Did you see daughter Xia?”

“No,” Clio says. “We tried, we asked people and looked around as much as we could—for her and your husband—but we had to get back, for the train.”

“No, we didn't.” This is from Katie, without looking up from her work.

“We had planned to,” Clio says. “But that's another story.”

“What is that story?” Xiao Lu asks. Katie tells her how she ran away to keep them from leaving. “I thank the gods, Chwin-Chwin, that you ran away. Maybe some day you will meet your big sister, Xia. She is twelve now.”

“Yes!” Katie says, giving a thumbs-up. “My big sister! Like lately I've really missed not having a big sister or brother, and now it's coming true? Mom? Dad? Can we?” As soon as she says it, she senses like a bad jangly sound in the air their discomfort at how she's put them on the spot in front of everybody, especially Thalia, and feels bad. “Sorry,” she says quickly. “Like sorry
really
. Okay?”

Clio is startled at Katie's sensitivity to her and Pep. Has she ever done that before, tuned in so acutely to the feeling in a room? It's a giant step for her, coming out of all this pain. Clio glances at Pep, sees him seeing it too, and she smiles at Katie and nods. Pep puts his hand on Clio's shoulder.

Katie, having made herself the center of attention, shies away again, head down. She feels sheepish for blurting it out, but also feels a glow, a tingly warmth all over from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.
Mom understood, and Dad too.

Clio asks Xiao Lu, “What happened to First Sister?”

Xiao Lu visibly stiffens, and bites her lip. She asks to look at the little jade on the red thread around Clio's neck. Clio shows her. She inspects it carefully.

“It's a Kwan Yin,” Clio says. “I got it in Changsha.”

Xiao Lu nods. “After I had Xia, they wanted me to have a boy. I went to a temple and prayed to Kwan Yin for a boy. But it was a beautiful girl. It was you, Chun.”

“And then what happened?” Clio asks.

Xiao Lu lowers her eyes, and doesn't speak.

Thalia comes over to Clio and whispers, “Do you think it's right for Katie to be hearing all this? I mean, she's only ten, and it could get, you know, worse?”

Clio looks up into those familiar eyes of shallow blue, and all at once sees the shallowness as a sign of the depth of the suffering beneath, sees the damage to her sister's soul, leached out not by what Thalia feels, but by the soul-death of not being
shown
how to feel.
These are the tarnished emblems of my own past.
She puts her hand on her sister's arm. Thalia seems to stiffen. “Katie's ready,” she says, as kindly as she can. “Trust me.” She turns to Xiao Lu. “You kept her for one month?”

“Yes.” Again she falls silent.
Shame! Shame! You set this horror in motion and now you're paying for it. Tomorrow they are gone and you will die.
She takes a deep breath. “I wear this.” She shows Clio her own jade. Clio and Pep lean closer, trying to make out the image. “My mother prayed to many gods—to our ancestors, to the Tao, to the sun god and moon god and the day-after-tomorrow god and to the Buddha. She gave me this Buddha when I left home. It is very old, and rubbed so much over many centuries that it is almost gone, but I know, and anyone who wears it knows, that it is a Buddha.” She gets up, falls back into the chair, and then, with Pep's help, goes to where Chun is sitting and shows her the worn jade Buddha. “When my mother—your grandmother—died, the only thing I took with me was her little box of gods. Here, look.” She limps over to a hollowed-out shelf in the rock wall, takes a little faded red box, brings it back over to the calligraphy table. She takes out, one after the other, carved and chipped wooden and jade figurines of animals and suns and moons and stars and a Buddha or two. Katie finds a statue of a tiny ox, says the Chinese word for it, and matches it up with an ox calligraphy they have done.

“Pep,” Clio says, “your fanny pack?” She unzips it, looks in the packet of the tickets and passports, and finds the carefully folded piece of paper. She hands the fanny pack back to Pep. “Xiao Lu?” She turns. Clio gestures to her to sit down beside her again. Without a word, Clio unfolds the piece of paper.

Xiao Lu feels as if she has been hit by a hammer. It is the note that she wrote and put in her baby's swaddling clothes before leaving her in the celery, ten years ago. Seeing the note, seeing her own desperate characters, seeing the traces, in the slight tremble of the hairs of the brush, of her grief and rage, she feels the phrases like daggers: “
I myself don't have the strength to do anything against it, let alone 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 July 25. I would be happy to be a cow or a horse in my next life to repay your boundless favor and infinite kindness.”
It all comes back, her sitting up against their once-beloved guava tree, alone and unloved at dusk, writing. She tries to control her feelings but they break out in a flood. She bends her head into her lap, ashamed to show this to
her
, this weakness, bends down over the paper in her lap and sobs—it is there all over again,
there
, her doing that terrible thing to this tiny, delicate baby. Head down, she sobs. The spasms rip at her fresh wound, making her cry out in pain and sob even more savagely.

And then she feels, as she hasn't felt for many years, a woman's hand on her shoulder, a woman's arm around her neck, drawing her to her, and she lets herself be drawn to her, and buries her head in her breast and lets herself cry and cry, murmuring, “Mama, Mama... Mama,” over and over again, hoping it will not be heard but ferociously wanting it to be heard, not only now but in the past. Wanting
her
to understand she always loved her more than life and letting her go was her death sentence. She weeps, and when she feels the woman holding her weep with her, weeps on, as if she will never stop.