What Was Mine (25 page)

We have a routine. I wake at six, with their alarms, which have a funny, foreign sound. You wouldn't think beeps can sound foreign, but they can:
breep, breep, breep.
Sometimes the beeps are superfluous. One of the neighbors keeps a rooster, and many mornings, his riling crow long precedes the alarm. The house is ancient, but the walls are thin. I stay in bed, still woozy from illness, trying not to cough, listening to the sounds of the family getting ready for work. I revel in not having to get up to join them. I am unemployable here, my career is gone, and while that carries terrors and regrets, I do enjoy the prospect of not having to get up in the morning.

There is only one bathroom. I hear the rush of water in the pipes, the hawks of toothpaste into the sink. Then the screech of the tea-kettle, the twang of utensils, the drone of a TV announcer singing the news. Chinese speech is tonal and sounds like song. I'm glad that Chinese news is mostly about China. I smell
baozi
steaming, little pillows of dough that hold delectable meats rolled inside them, like secrets.

They're all gone by seven. Wendy to her job at a cosmetics counter, Feng to his inspector duties, Lin to his bank—and when I hear the front door close, I drift back to sleep if I can, then wake to reheat the water in the kettle for tea. It is a big iron kettle, weighty and old,
its wooden handle indented with impressions made over time by the thumbs of Wendy's mother and grandmother.

Though I've told her not to, Wendy leaves me my favorite breakfast, tea eggs: brown eggs boiled in five-spice powder, then marinated in shells that are cracked so the whites turn speckled, like brown stained glass. Wendy says the eggs are good for my chi.

Her job is a good one, she says. She gets a commission on the makeup she sells. A friend of her family found it for her after she came back from the States. The irony is, she came to the States to make money, but says that while she was gone the Sleeping Dragon woke up and now people who stayed in Shanghai got richer than people who left to seek fortune elsewhere. I wonder if she regrets leaving Lin for all those years, and if he minds having been raised without her. But of course, I don't have the language—nor the audacity—to ask this.

Wendy comes home at three, her net bag full of groceries she has transported by bicycle. She changes out of her work uniform: dark pants and white jacket with her name in red stitching over the pocket. The characters of her name look like little dogs fighting. Then she goes downstairs for exercise. She swing-dances! Apparently, this is replacing tai chi as the favorite exercise here. She meets others her age—mostly women—in the courtyard. I sometimes watch from a window. They gather around a portable CD player bellowing out old American campfire tunes like “Moon River” and dance as people do in black-and-white movies. After an hour, she comes upstairs and I sit in the kitchen with her as she starts chopping vegetables. She won't let me help. She's still afraid of my germs.

Chop, chop, chop.
I am transfixed by the way she jumps a fat cleaver over onions and carrots and ginger and beans, transforming them in an instant from one piece to many.

I haven't yet told her why I am in China. I can't bring myself to confess it to her. What will I do if she turns me out?

I
'm three weeks older than I thought I was. Lucy not only changed my birthday, she changed my birth sign.

All my life, I read horoscopes, thinking I was a Taurus, the bull: plodding, slow, not wanting to move. I used to picture myself as Ferdinand, from the little kid's book, sitting under the tree, just smelling the flowers.

But I never wanted to just sit around smelling flowers. Whenever that book was read to me, I thought how unlike Ferdinand I was. If I were him, I wouldn't have wanted to sit in the field, I would have chosen the more exciting life in the bullring.

Now it makes sense. I'm Aries instead. It's a fire sign, meaning you've got a lot of energy.

For my birthday, Marilyn took me to have my chart read. I didn't want to, at first, but I could see it was really important to her and it was the first birthday she ever got to celebrate with me, so I felt like I owed her. It was a nice ride. The astrologer's house was high in the hills near San Francisco, a redwood cabin she built, way back in the woods. To get to her front door from the driveway, we had to cross a footbridge over a little stream and I was glad I'd worn Vans because the heels of Marilyn's sandals kept getting stuck. The door was an arch made of old wood, the windows were stained glass, and as soon as it opened, you could see cats jumping around on carpeted play
shelves. It made me miss Pumpkin. A girl in our building is taking care of him. We text about him.

In Sonya's house, the cat smell was strong. There were about five cats there and I saw the place as Lucy would see it: the home of a crazy cat-lady psychic. Lucy would have disdain for what we were doing. But why do I care what she thinks, anymore? Why do I care about the thoughts of someone who isn't my mother, who isn't anything to me.

The first thing Sonya did, she looked at my hands.

“See how the lifeline diverges here?” she said, pressing a bloodred nail into my palm. “That denotes trauma in the first year of life.”

Of course, she already knew what happened to me as a baby. But still, it was interesting to hear how planets play a part in what happens to you.

Like this year, Pluto crosses my sun. It's the planet of profound change, making you conscious of what is happening around you.

“Your wisdom will come in the penumbra,” she said. I didn't know what she meant.

“It's the area between complete darkness and complete light,” she explained. “The shadow that happens when two bodies pass.”

I asked who I was going to marry. But she said she couldn't predict things like that.

S
onya helped me a lot when I first came to California. She helped me trust my instinct that my daughter was still a living light in this world. She taught me to honor my sacred energy. I went to her after I met Grant, to see if he and I were a good match. I wanted to be sure I wasn't making a mistake. Sonya assured me that Grant was a good, loving man who could support my journey. Our charts were compatible.

I often went to Sonya's around Natalie's—Mia's—birthday. All those empty birthdays I ached to hold my firstborn. I'd never gotten to celebrate even one birthday with her. The day she turned one, she'd been gone for eight months.

Last April, Sonya said she felt the nearness of a strong healing. What does that mean? I wanted to know. That my daughter would be found? Or that she wouldn't be found and that I would make peace with it? Making peace with it would have been impossible, I thought.

Sonya said she couldn't apprehend the specifics, could only say that some kind of change felt imminent to her. A few months later, I was in the bookstore, listening to the voice of the woman who had taken her from me.

Spiritual intelligence brought my daughter back to me. I want her to know the power of that kind of intelligence.

A
fter doing my chart, Sonya led us out the back door to a garden with looking-glass balls in the grass and crystals tinkling in the trees. At the edge of a pond was a little stone fire pit where low flames were burning.

Sonya handed me a piece of paper, tissue-thin with gold at the edges. “This is a receptacle for all your fears and worries,” she said, “for all the things you're afraid of, all the things that terrify you. Crumple it up as hard as you can and throw it into the fire.”

I looked at Marilyn. She stood next to Sonya. They were both looking at me with earnest eyes and I felt some sort of wall of resistance crumbling inside me. Why not believe, as they do, in the force of good in the world? Belief in something is the first step to making it happen—that's one of the posters I wake up to every morning. It's above Chloe's bed in the little room she's sharing with me. My snarky New Yorker side tells me it's corny, but a lot of things I believed in turned out not to be true. Maybe I need another system.

I took the piece of paper and rolled it into a ball and crushed the ball with my divergent lifelines.

“Make a wish as you throw,” Marilyn said, and I had to stop for a moment to think what my wish was. What I've wished a lot since
February was that my life could rewind, that I could go back to normal, that everything could be as it used to be, that I wouldn't know what I know, that I could wake up and be just a kid again, happy. I closed my eyes and wished the sun would bore into my brain and burn away my memory of Lucy.

A
fter Mia made a wish—of course I wondered what it was, I hoped it had nothing to do with Lucy—we took her for a walk to the top of the hill, where it's windy and the winds come strong enough to blow away all negativities and you feel new energy, new life coming in.

Sonya and I joined hands, making a tiny circle around Mia, our hands joining at her elbows.

Sonya gave her a life blessing:
Now your life is blessed, rich and full in every direction. You are now connected to the truth of your being, you can never be lost or stolen again.

And I gave her a mother's blessing. My voice shook as I said
: I love you and have loved you since this day twenty-two years ago when you came through me, onto the earth.
She has my grandmother's laugh, my father's eyes. I leaned in to kiss her and her hair grazed my neck and I brimmed with gratitude for her blazing nearness to me.

Her face was flushed. She smiled shyly at us and I wished we could stay in that magical moment, on top of that hill, protecting my daughter forever in the womb of our arms.

W
hen we got home from Sonya's, there was crepe paper and balloons.

I never had a homemade birthday cake before. Ayi didn't bake. Lucy always ordered cakes from a fancy bakery on the East Side. They looked perfect and tasted good, too, but it was awesome having a homemade cake. This cake was lopsided, icing pink with pomegranate juice and animal crackers in a parade all around the sides to remind me, Chloe said, of the Central Park Zoo, which I'd told her was one of my favorite places to go as a kid. I loved to go sit in a dark room and watch polar bears behind glass doing water ballet, and Chloe said that even though she's never been there, now it is her favorite place, too.

How different this birthday is than last year. My friends gave me a blowout party for twenty-one. We started in Middlebury and ended up in New York, watching the sunrise over Coney Island. I feel a tug, remembering them. They wouldn't recognize me now. I don't recognize myself.

Where is the girl who always knew what she was about? I made to-do lists when I was in kindergarten, even ones for the cat. I asked for a Filofax for my twelfth birthday. I had five-year plans when I was a teenager. Where is that girl so sure of herself? I don't know.

After I cut the cake, presents. Chloe gave me a Magic 8 Ball.
Connor and Thatch gave me funny yoga socks. Grant gave me a wooden box that he made and inside was Marilyn's gift: photos taken when I was a newborn, pictures I'd never seen before, snapshots of a tiny baby wrapped in a striped blanket and a little knit hat. Staring at that baby, I swallowed back tears, knowing what was about to happen to her.

A
pril 4. Today is a national holiday here. Not because of Mia's birthday, of course. It's the Qing Ming festival, Chinese Day of the Dead.

I imagine Mia celebrating her real birthday for the first time and I feel the breath knocked clean out of me. Other years, I'd celebrate this day without her knowing it, taking her out for a prebirthday dinner, or letting her have one of her presents early.

Wendy and her family are out of the house, having gone to sweep the graves of their ancestors and to bring them gifts. They left carrying bowls of bananas and litchis, kumquats, and pears. Lin brought a bottle of maotai and millions in paper money. He told me that in the old days, people used to bring real gold. But there were too many grave robberies. Now, people burn gold paper instead.

The air-quality app is orange today, which means the air in Shanghai is clean enough to open the windows. As I pull back ancient wood sashes, spring breezes blow in, clearing the air of smoke from the joss, little sticks of incense. They're burning in front of a little altar to Wendy's parents and grandparents set up atop a dining room chest.

How can I repay Wendy and her family for their generosity to me? Here, in their country, I have nothing to offer. I burn a dollar on their altar, between sticks of incense, murmuring my thanks.

Sad songs of mourning float in from the street, the volume rising and falling, from families on their dutiful way to the graves. I, too, mourn someone lost, overcome with desire for the company of my daughter. How glad I am to find myself alone in the house, to be able to pace the rooms and sob with abandon, instead of having to muffle my cries in a pillow as I do when thoughts of what I have done, of what I have lost, trouble me so that I can't sleep at night.

I find a square of golden paper on the floor. Lin must have dropped it on his way out the door. I put it into an ashtray and take it to my room—Lin's room—and sit before a photo of Mia, in a silver oval frame. It used to sit on top of our piano. I use one of his lighters to set fire to the paper, watching it light up her smile, then relegate her to darkness as it burns down to nothing, as I mourn, along with millions, the loss of my loved one.

O
nce, years ago, I came upon Wendy standing at the living room window, looking out. I asked if something was wrong. She turned to me with tears in her eyes. “I am not a Chinese anymore,” she said. “I am also not an American person. I'm a no-country woman.”