At the Heart of the Universe (13 page)



Pep is first to spot Rhett reappear around a bend in Mad Dog. The crowd now is large and, from its sheer mass, pushing in on them. For the first time in China he feels real danger. Several of the young men seem to be eyeing his watch and camera and fanny pack, like wolves might eye a stray puppy. Pep is standing with his arm around Clio and his knees tight around Katie's shoulders. Rhett is walking fast down to them.

“I got good news and bad news,” Rhett says, slipping through the crowd as if coated with graphite. “The good news—she
is
Li Ming Tao,
the woman in the police station. She
did
come because she thought you might be there.” He pauses.

For Clio the scene around her fades out, her total focus is on Rhett's lips and on what the next words will be.
Oh God. Everything hinges on this
.

“The bad news—she's not your mother, Katie. She's your mother's older sister.”

“But... but then where is her sister?” Clio asks, but no one hears her, and she realizes she is whispering. She clears her throat. “But where
is
her sister?”

“She knows where she is, she saw her within the last year.” The three Macys stare at each other. “She lives two or three days away. Doesn't have a phone.”

They start to throw questions at Rhett. He motions them to stop. “Ask her yourself.” He looks at his watch. “She needs ten more minutes to get ready.”

They wait silently. Clio and Pep look at each other, see the fear in each other's eyes, and look away.

Katie senses that something weird is going on with them. Even with the crowd pressing in all around, it's really quiet.
Too
quiet.

“Okay,” Rhett says finally, “let's go.” He turns and heads up the narrow lane.

They follow close behind. The crowd spreads out in their wake. The lane is part cobblestone, mostly dirt. As they climb they are immersed in the aromas they have come to identify with the poor of China—waste, smoke, food, sweat, garbage, dirt, burnt coal—and unfathomed others. Water runs down the gutters on either side. Each house is much like another, yet each is in small ways different, immediately identifiable. Clothes hang overhead, woks and pots are being washed. Old women and children sit in groups, pointing and smiling at them as they pass. The climb gets tricky, the cobbles slippery with suspect liquid, the path slanting to one side. They turn a corner and there before them are the two soaring palms, trunks thick as elephant legs, curving up into the murky air—curving, Clio thinks, in great catenary arcs like the Gehry Museum in Bilbao—with dark green leaves stroking each other in the summer morning sun.

Rhett stops before a wooden door. The crowd falls silent. He calls, a woman's voice answers. Rhett opens the door and leads them in, first Clio, then Katie, then, bending his head to slip under the low lintel without scraping his tender scab, Pep.



Clio is startled to actually
see
the woman once again. She wears the same long white silk dress and blood-red sandals. Her black hair flows gracefully down over her shoulders, her oval face—yes, Katie's face, older—is subtly made-up, and her smooth, tanned skin glows. She is sitting before one of two windows, the one catching the sun. The red parasol hangs from a nail on the wall. The kitchen table is covered with a white tablecloth, upon which are plates and cups and glasses. A pot of water for tea is on the electric stove, a coal stove sits forlornly in a corner, and a single bulb in a small pink shade hangs down. The walls are plastered, and the paint is old and dusted with soot. On one wall is a calendar with a faded photo of the strange finger-like mountains and deep gorges of Guilin; on another is a framed photo of a Western woman with platinum-blond hair in a low-cut silver sheath, maybe Madonna several incarnations ago. The ceiling is low. The woman's beauty and clothing—and the delicate jasmine, rose, and vanilla of a musky perfume—speak to Clio not so much of a life trapped in a drab room but of a life trapped in a life, of an enticement, of a possible sorrow, or of a possible nostalgia that blossoms from the sorrow itself.

Clio stares at this woman, the first blood relative of her baby—seeing even more of Katie in her now—and feels a sob rise in her throat, but quickly clicks back into control. Her arm is around Katie's shoulder, protectively.

Pep, despite another hard shock of claustrophobia that makes him duck his head as if he's in a tight tunnel, is stunned again at the woman's beauty. He watches her rise as they enter, and smooth her silk dress down along her waist, accentuating the lines and lace of her bra. Willowy. Sensual. And yes, she does look like an older Katie, remarkably so.

Katie glances up at the woman, their eyes meet. Katie shies away.
Nah, she doesn't look that much like me really. And she's really my birth mom's sister, my aunt?

Rhett introduces them all, pointing to each in turn as if identifying dishes at a banquet table: “Ming Tao, Clio, Pep, and Katie. Katie—this is your aunt, Tao Ayi.”

Clio watches as Ming Tao stares at Katie for a long moment, nodding her head and smiling. As she speaks, her voice is surprisingly coarse—a cigarette voice.

“She says Katie is very beautiful.”

“And so is
she
,” Pep says, with a broad smile. Rhett gives him a look, and translates. Ming Tao laughs, pats her hair, extends her hand. Each of them shakes it. Tao says something to Rhett.

“She says please sit down and she will make you some silver needle tea.”

They sit around the table, on four unrelated wooden chairs.

“Silver needle tea,” Clio says. “That sounds so fascinating. What is it?”

Ming Tao speaks for a while, to Clio's ears all clangs and bangs, and gestures gracefully out the window toward the palms—are they to think that the tea comes from palm fronds? Tao puts a hand on each hip and, smiling, waits for Rhett to translate.

“She says it is a very special tea that comes from Junshan Island. It is one of the greatest teas in all of China. It will amaze you because when you put it in your cup it stands up on its end like silver needles, and emits a fragrant odor.”

“Tell her we will be very happy to share her silver needle tea,” Clio says.

“Can I have a Sprite?” Katie asks.

Rhett translates. Ming Tao seems embarrassed, and says that she does not have soda, just water. Bottled water? No, from the tap. She offers to go out and buy some.

“No, no, it's okay,” Pep says quickly. “Tell her we don't have time.”

Rhett tells her, and she nods. She prepares and pours the tea. Sure enough, the leaves are all silvery, and in the cups, they do stand up on end. Clio watches Pep put his nose almost into the needles to catch the fragrance. By his glance she knows that he hasn't smelled anything, but he nods and smiles at Ming Tao as if he has.

“You don't smell anything?” Ming Tao asks, through Rhett.

On his face is a startled look—Clio knows he realizes that Ming Tao has read him correctly. “Nope,” he says, “I can't.”

“I smell it,” Clio says, “and it's delicate, very wonderful. Very fragrant, yes, yes. Thank you so much. Shay shay. Want a taste, Katie?”

“Mom, you
know
I don't like tea.”
Why's she embarrassing me, in front of her?

More smiles, then silence.

Pep looks around. A tiny room. A door leads to another, what has to be a bedroom. A narrow stairway up. Cement walls, gray and unpainted. Two small windows, one partly blocked by the palms. Little color, no plants. He finds himself staring at a spot above the stove where there is a wooden panel to which spidery wires come, join up with each other in little boxes, and then go out again. The wires travel on the wall making right-angle turns here and there, walking to the stove and snaking up across the ceiling to the hanging wire of the light bulb, the wires tacked to the bare wall and ceiling by small steel brackets. No covering for the wires, the wooden panel, the little boxes. No insurance coverage possible. A risk.

From a large nail on another wall, a black plastic hanger hangs. On the crosspiece, two plastic clothespins, in pink. The higher up he looks, the sootier it grows. It is overwhelmingly ugly, dead ugly. As he looks back at her he is startled—she has seen, in his eyes, his sensing the ugliness and maybe even the potential danger of living here. She holds his glance for a second, and he realizes that she feels the same. She shifts in her chair and runs her hand through her luxurious hair, sending fresh fingers of alluring perfume into the air, and smiles at him—a smile he takes to mean “Yeah, it's a dump. I deserve better, maybe even deserve what you've got, and I'll do what it takes to get out.”

“I saw you at the police station,” Ming Tao says suddenly, through Rhett.

“Yes, we saw you too,” Clio answers.

“But I did not see her,” she says, pointing to Katie.

“She was lying down in the bus.”

Ming Tao laughs heartily. She takes out a pack of Chinese cigarettes and offers them around. Rhett smiles, and proudly produces a pack of his own, clearly a luxury brand. Tao nods appreciatively and takes one. Rhett flicks his Tang-Dynasty-warrior lighter. They puff contentedly. To Pep, the smoke is as harsh as Ming Tao's voice. He starts to worry about his and his family's breathing. He looks around the tiny hot kitchen for a source of circulating air, and finds none. The room grows dim.

“And if you don't mind us asking,” Clio says, “why were you there?”

13

Ming Tao tells the story rapidly and in a voice that seems to Pep way too loud for the room. He worries that the crowd outside is hearing it all, and wishes they had some privacy. Rhett translates rapidly. “I am Second Sister, Big Sister to your mother.”

Katie looks up quickly, then back down. She keeps her face stiff, not showing anything, but she feels her belly go funny.

“Okay,” Pep says, in a tone of let's-get-down-to-it, “what about her mother.”

Clio locks eyes with him. To her he seems incredibly blunt about this, a delicate matter, and his imbecilic use of the term “mother” instead of “birth mother” feels to her like a betrayal. Should she ask Rhett to clarify the terms?

“She is Third Sister. Her name is Xiao Lu.”

Clio feels a chill. Her name. Finally. Once again she feels like she's about to break down. As she tries to get herself under control Pep barges in.

“Is she alive?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“When is the last time you saw her?”

“I saw her, let's see, about one year ago.”

“And, Tao Ayi,” Clio says quietly, shyly, bringing a smile to Ming Tao's lips, “your sister, um... Xiao Lu, she is quite well?”

Ming Tao hesitates.

Clio and Pep glance at each other.

“Yes.” She smiles. “And no.”

More smiles, but when she goes on she seems more tentative, or even irritated, or perhaps contemptuous—all of which Clio finds strange. But perhaps she simply is misreading the woman, for Ming Tao is smiling all the while. “Two years ago, on the eighth anniversary of the day she left baby Chwin in Changsha, my sister took the train back there, back to Changsha.” She pauses, takes out another cigarette. Rhett lights it for her, flicking his Tang-warrior lighter with a certain flair.

Clio reacts strongly to this, the first time she's heard Ming Tao call Katie by her Chinese name. She has heard it from Hongyen Ayi at the orphanage, but still is struck to hear it here, as if it is confirmation that Katie truly is someone else, that everything Clio has only partly admitted she is now forced to face, to admit with a terrifying certainty. To her she is Katie, not Chun, and certainly not this “Chun” that sounds like “Chwin.” But the stiff way that even Rhett pronounces “Katie” and the easy lilting pronunciation of “Chwin” drive the point home with the sudden pain of a splinter.

“Xiao Lu waited all day outside Social Welfare Center Number One. She hoped to find out something, anything, about what happened to her baby—if she was still there, if she was still in Changsha, or in some other part of China. She saw nothing, spoke to no one. Third Sister is very shy. Not like me!” She laughs hard at this. “But on that day she saw a group of Western people with Chinese babies going into the Grand Sun Hotel. She went up to the Chinese doorman outside the hotel and asked who they were. He said they were Norwegian people, who had just taken eight babies from the orphanage the day before. She asked more about this. The guard told her that all the babies are adopted by Western people, some from Europe, most from America. This upsets my sister very much. She thinks—America! That is so far away! My baby is
gone
!” Ming Tao strikes a dramatic pose of exaggerated grief, and waits for Rhett to translate. “So then she takes the train back—she is so upset she doesn't even stop and see me here in Tienja—and she goes back home, to her home on the mountain. But then the next year—one year ago now—on the same day, the anniversary of when she left her baby, she gets on the train here again, to go there. But she can't do it. She gets on the train and
she can't breathe
! She feels she will die if she doesn't get off the train! She is used to breathing
clean
air—she lives in mountains for the last
three years
! The mountain air is very good, and the air here is terrible, and...” She takes a deep drag, blows out two dragon plumes of significant smoke, and laughs hard at the terribleness of this air.