At the Heart of the Universe (14 page)

“And what?” Pep asks, pressing harder, as if ferreting out a lie on an insurance application, trying to uncover “a disease or mental defect.”

“Oh I don't know.”

“Okay, trouble with the bad air here.” He tries to clear his throat of the jagged black needles of cigarette smoke. “So a year ago she gets off the train?”

“And visits me here, right here in this room.” She gestures around the room. Pep, Clio, and Katie look around, as if something of her is still there. “And she tells me this story, and she is sad that she will never go back to Changsha again, never find her baby, and she is very broken-down by this, crying and crying, and she leaves, and that is the last time I see her. But anyway, for my business, my dress shop, I go to Changsha maybe every other month—to see the new clothes from Hong Kong—and from Milan and America too!—I love Milan and America very much!—Donna Karan DKNY! I love Changsha City—such a lively city and the shops are so bright and full of things to buy—like the Apollo Commercial City on Shaoshan Lu—did you go there?”

“No, we missed it,” Clio says. “But what happened to her?”

“So big and clean and magic! And at night, Changsha City comes alive! Like it must be Times Square, or Broadway, or SoHo—Donna Karan lives in SoHo, no?”

“We don't know where Donna lives,” Pep says. “Rhett, help!”

“And so,” Ming Tao goes on, “after my talk with Third Sister, and her being
broken-down so badly
by abandoning Chwin, the next time when I go to Changsha on business, I take the bus to Social Welfare Center, to find out more. The big gate is closed. There is a guard. He will not talk to me. I talk to the doorman at the Grand Sun, and we talk a lot about Americans he sees there with their babies, and he tells me one thing very important—Americans go nuts with their child's birthday. Sometimes he sees Americans have a birthday party in the hotel, for their other kids? They take over the whole restaurant! Back in America they hire clowns, animals, magicians, even a circus! Spend a
lot
of money! So I think, hmm, Tao, if they come back here with Chun, maybe they come back on her birthday—
what
an opportunity
!” She laughs, stubs out her cigarette, and stands before them, an actress on a stage. “I know Chwin's birthday, so I plan my next dress shop trip for that day. Last Monday, on her birthday, I watch from a store across from Welfare Center. But I don't see anyone! Third Sister said other mothers told her to leave Chwin near a police station, because when she is found she will be taken right to the police station, then to the orphanage. She found the Nan Da Lu station, and left Chwin in the nearest market, down an alley, in the vegetable stand. Hidden in a pile of celery. They find her right away. Xiao Lu visited that market again, the time she went back.”

Celery! In a pile of celery?
Clio looks down at Katie, who seems caught up in thought. She brings her chair closer, so their legs touch, and puts her arm around her.

Katie tries to picture herself as a baby in a pile of celery. Suddenly she feels a clenching up inside, like her insides have turned into a big fist, twisting.

“So I think maybe Chwin
on her birthday will visit the police station. I leave a friend to keep watching the closed gate of the Welfare Center and I walk the one block over to the police station. I see you, but I do not see a Chinese girl with you. It is dangerous for someone like me to be there all the way from Tienja, so I go in and pretend to have business, give them my name and address, and get out fast.” With a satisfied smile, the performance done, she sits back down.

“Incredible,” Clio says. “Like magic, Katie, isn't it?”

“I
told
you, didn't I?”

“Okay. Now.” Pep is trying to bring the thing back down to earth, to the facts they need. “When we asked about her health, why'd you say ‘yes and no'—is she sick?”

“She's very good.”

“Is there something more, something wrong with her, physical or mental?”

“Pep, please—”

“It's important. Ask her, Rhett.”

When Rhett translates, a shadow flickers across her face, but she brightens again. “No, she needs clean air, that's all.
Very
shy, and lives alone on the mountain, and she is not interested in fashion, but she is good. Smart. Artistic. Our father,
he
is crazy.”

“
Crazy
?” Pep blurts out, imagining a dozen genetic risk factors.

“Broken by the Red Guards. They left him his house and a few fields, but he... After our mother died he stops. He sits and talks to himself. And sees things that aren't there and talks to them, talks to his past. He wraps up tobacco leaves in newspaper, big rolls, and smokes them.” She laughs, takes a newspaper, and, with comic drama, demonstrates, making a funny face at Katie, who smiles awkwardly. “But he is happy! His mind is focused on the time before Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward! The Years of Starvation when I and Third Sister were born. In the Great Leap Forward we had nothing to eat! We ate nuts and berries!” She laughs, earthily, as if, Pep thinks, she's enjoying her insane father's predicament and the irony of Mao's dictate that all Chinese have to leap forward by starving to death. Is her blunt laughter of derision? Horror? The mere folly of it all? Who knows.

“And your mother died of... ?” Pep asks, actuarial to his core.

“Exploding heart.”

“Heart attack—good to know. At what age?” She thinks about sixty.
Make a mental note: get Katie screened for cholesterol/lipids.

“Are you okay hearing all this, dear?” Clio asks Katie.

“He went crazy? Like
why
?”

“Because the Chinese government treated him very badly.”

“Was my birth mom tortured too?”

“No, she was only a child. No one would've hurt a child.”

Ming Tao asks, “But why didn't I
see
you go in the Welfare Center on her birthday?”

“We were supposed to go there on her birthday,” Pep says, “but there was a mistake—our meeting was cancelled. We went the next day.”
Was it only yesterday?

She laughs at this mix-up.

“But it's quite a thing for you to do,” Clio says, “go all the way, alone, to Changsha, spend a whole day or two trying to find us, and then the long ride back.”

“Yes,” Ming Tao says, “it is
very
hard for me to do.”

“And why did you go on this... this mission for her?”

“I feel bad for her, her life is not good. Both my sisters' lives are not good, both First Sister and Third Sister. I feel bad I did not take care of Third Sister. I was Second Sister,
her
big sister, we swam in our river together, swam and swam!—and then I didn't take care of her. Now I have a debt. So I pay her—whenever I go to Changsha, I look for her baby—and now I pay her by finding Chwin
and bringing her to her.”

“Yeah, well,” Pep says, with a look to Clio, “we'll have to think about that.”

“But you, Ming Tao, you did this because you felt guilty?”

Rhett translates this. Ming Tao does not understand. They go back and forth, with little luck. Finally Rhett says, “Guilt is not what she is saying. She feels ‘bad' and ‘owes her sister a debt,' which she has now partly paid, but there's more to pay, by bringing you together with her and by being a good
ayi to Katie. She said again how she has discovered pleasure in her life but her sister has not. That's the best I can do.”

Clio is startled to realize that she has forgotten Katie's birth mom's name. “God, Pep, these Chinese names—what was she called, Katie's birth mom?”

“I'm drawing a blank.”

“Shi-ow Lu, Mom,” Katie says, and then emphasizes it. “
Shi-ow
Lu
.”

“Shi-ow Lu. Thanks. Oh—and Tao—you mentioned First Sister? Where is she?”

Rhett translates, but Tao does not answer. Her face turns somber.

Katie notices, feels how the flow of talk has been cut like with scissors, wonders about this First Sister.

Finally, with a sigh, and a thin smile, Ming Tao asks, “Will you have more tea?”

“No, no,” Pep says, abruptly. “Bottom line: Where is Xiao Lu right now?”

“She lives alone on a mountain, far away. No phone.”

“Can you give us her address?” Pep asks.

She hesitates. “I am the only one who knows how to find her. You cannot find her without me. I can take you but... I am so busy here, with my shop, my family...”

From Rhett's tone, and his look, Pep gets it. This is a woman on the make. She sees, in them, a way out of this filthy hot room. He is on guard.

“Yes, yes,” Clio says, wanting to shift the tone away from Pep's rude interrogation. “Yes, Tao Ayi, we were at your dress shop—a lovely, elegant shop, and you must get a
great
deal of pleasure from it, shay shay.” After she says these last words she realizes they mean “thank you” and wonders why she used them.

“How far is it to visit Third Sister?” Pep asks.

“A nine-hour journey, first by train, then by bus. And then you take a brand-new cable car up the mountain—but you still have to climb two hundred more steps to the Elephant Temple, and then hike up through the woods to her little house. I have never been there, but I think it will take, to go and come back, three days.”

“Can't do it,” Pep says, relief in his voice, “We have to leave Tienja tonight, on an eight o'clock train back to Changsha, and then back to America.” He turns to Clio, praying that she will not think it's a good idea to go.

Clio looks at Katie, who shrugs and says nothing. To Clio, this sudden possibility of meeting the birth mom is fraught. She feels she
should
do it, but now that it's real, it feels too sudden, too risky. Maybe someday, when they've thought it all out, prepared themselves—someday when Katie's more mature, and really
prepared
for it, okay. But to go nine hours up into the mountains, into the unknown, after what she's heard about her here? “No,” she says, “there's really no time, is there?”

“Right,” Pep says. “We'll spend the day, find out all about Katie's birth mom, and write her a message that someone can get to her, and then plan, next time, to visit with her.”

Clio looks at him, and again at Katie. “Honey, do you want to stay here three more days to go visit your birth mom?”

“Oh God, Clio, come on—”

“Katie?”

14

She glances up at her mother. All of them are staring at her. The room feels tight and hot, hard to breathe in. She feels confused, and flustered. So far this meeting with her birth aunt isn't fun.
It's meeting the wrong one. Don't they know that?

“Yeah, I do,” she says, answering her mother.

“You sure?”

“I
told
you I wanted to, remember? I still do.”

Clio and Pep exchange looks. “Let's just talk a little more about it, dear, before we decide for good?” Pep groans and shakes his head. “Rhett?” Clio goes on. “Could you ask her to tell us more about Xiao Lu—how old she is, if she has other children, what happened to her husband?”

“I have only seen her twice in twelve years,” Ming Tao says. “Once, a few years ago at our mother's funeral, and once last year. At our mother's funeral I said to her, ‘I have discovered the pleasures in life!'” She laughs so hard at this, tears come to her eyes. “She married a farmer near a town called Chindu. She lived there with him and his parents, and had a daughter named Xia. But she left them all, went to a mountain, three years ago. She takes a big risk, to leave them.
Big
risk!”

“Katie,” Pep says, “You have a sister! Her name is Xia.”

“Awesome! How old?”

Rhett asks. Tao says, “Xia is a few years older than Chwin.”

“And do I have a brother too?” Katie asks. After Rhett translates, Tao shakes her head no.

“But why?” Clio asks sharply. “Why would she
ever
leave her
first
child?” She sees Katie staring at her, her eyes showing her surprise.

“Mom, she musta
had
to. She wouldn't of done it except she had to. Like she had to put me in the celery, but she made sure I was safe, right?”

“Right.” As always, Clio thinks, Katie sees the glass as half-full, finds the good. No depressed Hale genes for her. “She knew you'd be found right away—it was the
best
place to put you, really.”

“I don't know why she left Xia,” Ming Tao says. “She left, and never went back.”

“So,” Pep says, “Katie's sister and birth father still live on the farm?”