At the Heart of the Universe (3 page)

Suddenly she feels the seriousness of this endeavor, returning to the place where her beloved girl was abandoned, and perhaps even the place with some record of it.
Is this a wise thing to do? We could have just kept on exploring China, stayed with the tour. We didn't have to come here, risk this.
Her anxiety rises, but then, feeling the searing, heavy heat of a June afternoon in south China, her fear flips over into excitement, for it reminds her of the most adventurous time in her life—the years after college when she broke from the Family Hale and wandered the Caribbean. Sailing along, one day much the same as the next except for whether the wind was blowing or not blowing, or how long the day's rain would last. Showing up here and there, sometimes in the most elegant harbors, sometimes, like now, in dusty, hot places where everyone stood around or squatted and smoked, staring at her and not moving, and where she was the only white woman, and where at first she was scared and worried and after a while found herself on the other edge of scared and worried, the edge of portent.

Thinking,
In the days before Katie, before caution. Well then, girl, seize those days again! Be brave for your daughter. View it as an adventure.

She wears an upscale version of the same kind of clothes she wore back then—a tan safari shirt with multiple pockets each latched by Velcro, matching shorts, and navy-blue New Balance tennis shoes. Tall and full-bodied, she keeps herself in shape, working out with a trainer at Schooner's Spa at the mall, jogging with her daughter, playing tennis regularly with her friends and golf rarely with her husband. She stands there with a certain solidity, planted but ready to move. At home she seems always on the go between child, husband, job, lessons, and errands, racing around in what she and her circle of mothers call “the daily scavenger hunt of Life As Supermom.” She's fifty-one, older than the other moms—she married late, at thirty-eight. Deep down she still feels twenty-seven. Under the conical straw peasant's hat she bought a week ago in the Terra Cotta Warrior Gift Shop in Xi'an, her sun-bleached blond hair is in a ponytail. Above her straight nose, her light-blue eyes scan the shapes and colors around her—now suddenly an architect's eyes, an art dealer's eyes—searching for pieces she might buy for her gallery.

Nothing. This is post-Mao modern, or post-modern Mao: concrete, and spiritless. Artless. She tilts the straw hat back on her head and feels the flat sudden burn of the sun on her cheeks and chin and—a focus of her allure—on her plump lips, and thinks,
Sunscreen.
Sunscreen for fair-skinned Pep, peeling away, and, just to be on the safe side, for Katie. Katie's amber skin never seems to burn, just to burnish, but still. With melanoma on the rise, with studies showing that it takes just one or two real bad sunburns in childhood to start it brewing, you can't be too cautious. From her backpack she takes out her tube of Coppertone 45, maximum strength.

Watching Katie step down from the bus and bounce out into the light—her yellow hat with a chicken logo pulled down over her sunglasses so that she seems older, even glamorous—Clio feels a lump rise in her throat, a sudden sorrow that brings tears to her eyes.
She's so innocent, so expectant and vulnerable. She still sees the best in everything. Totally unable to tell a lie. A fierce, sure spirit. Still a pure soul. What will she make of all this? God help her.
You
help her.



Katie Chun Hale-Macy, tall for ten, and slender, steps down slowly out of the air-conditioning onto the dusty ground, pulling down the beak of her yellow baseball cap with the chicken logo and “CHINA CULTURE CAMP 2001.” She feels the wet heat slap her like a big, sweaty hand. She tries to see, but everything's blurry. “My sunglasses are like all fogged up?”

Clio smiles. Lately Katie's every sentence ends in an upward inflection, making it sound like a question. It bothers Pep, but Clio has assured him that all of Katie's fourth-grade girlfriends talk that way.

“Yeah,” Pep says now, squinting into the harsh glare from under his floppy hat. “It's like breathing wet fire. Must be a hundred, and a hundred percent humidity. Hot as hell.” He stretches up to his full six-four height, his arms high, his fingers waving in the turgid air, his khaki, multi-pocketed safari shirt riding up over his belly. His height, for him, has always been defining. Reassuring. He uses it, keeps his body tuned up. He jogs and bicycles with Clio and Katie and golfs with his buddies and considers himself fairly fit and trim. His size 12 Nikes feel solid on the packed dirt. He lowers his arms again and takes a long breath out, thinking,
This could be hard, really hard. God knows what we'll find out.
Looking around more carefully, his bright-green eyes narrow. He feels the risk, the possibility that all that he and Clio have created to make this family, to make it theirs, this American family that's doing pretty damn well in the world, all of this could be changed forever by this encounter with the police, or tomorrow at the orphanage. This ain't gonna be easy. A lot is at stake. He purses his thin lips. All at once he feels apprehensive, if not scared.
Don't let them see. Be careful. Take care of them.

He shifts his weight to a more solid stance, feet apart, crosses his arms on his chest, and tilts his head, flashing a Paul Newman cocky smile. “Where's the lush green?” he says, feigning a great yearning and puzzlement. “Where's the green? I want the lush green—”

“Here he goes again, Mom—”

“—And all I get is dusty brown, all I get is dusty brown!”

“Pep!”

“Daddy, don't—”

“Okay, okay.” Squinting, he looks around. “It is beautiful, in its own way, yeah. I love this light, this dusty haze—where's my camera?” He rubs the sweat up off his brow and back over his lank light-red hair and, to his chagrin, dislodges a piece of the scab that has finally—finally!—started to form on the bald top of his head. Three days before, at lunch at a scummy restaurant in Chengdu, he bashed it against the low ceiling of what he considered the filthiest pit toilet in all of China.

“Shit,” he says, staring at the blood on his hand, “I'm bleeding again.”

He is too tall for China, and something of a claustrophobe—which has made the trip difficult. Three things you don't want to be in China, he's realized, are tall, claustrophobic, and invested in keeping clean—phobic to dirt.
At fifty-six, you're too old for China too.
He worries that the scrape on his head from the pit toilet ceiling is brewing up rare, exotic germs that might sicken him, and he feels his sudden sweat as a fever. Thinking,
Band-Aid
, as well as
Camera
, he unzips the Citibank fanny pack that contains credit cards, passports, and airplane tickets, as well as sterile wipes and mini-packs of Kleenexes and a Swiss Army knife and a blue laser flashlight. And various pills including antibiotics and Pepto-Bismol for diarrhea and the sleeping pill Ambien to fight the week of wretched jet-lagged nights and the hot, noisy rooms and the overnight train ride from Beijing to Pingyao, wherever the hell
that
unheard-of city of six million
was! And the pack of sterile needles and syringes in case any of them are in a car crash and need blood. All the things that Rosemary Ahern, the organizer of the trip, told them to bring.

The latest in a long line of Macys in Whale City Insurance, his business is risk. The first Macys were Nantucket whalers who settled Columbia, New York, a Hudson River town, in 1775—they are mentioned in
Moby Dick
. That's what he tells new accounts, “We go back to
Moby Dick
”—thinking,
Big shit.
His work is out on that dire leading edge with morticians, oncologists, hospice workers—making a living out of disease, disaster, and death. Lately his job has been a burden—more so for his inability to think of anything without thinking of the risk to Katie and Clio.
As if I'm constantly underwriting our lives.
He finds a sterile wipe in his fanny pack and blots his bleeding scalp.

“Good,” Clio says. “Are we ready?” Katie has moved close to Pep, and is leaning up against him, one hand in his. “Are you all right, Katie?”

3

When Clio told Pep that China Culture Camp 2001 was a guided tour with twelve adopted Chinese girls of Katie's age and their twenty-two American parents, a three-week tour focused on making the trip fun for the kids by visiting zoos and schools and playgrounds and Burger Kings and Pizza Huts, Pep thought it over and said, “I don't
think
so, honey. You know I don't do groups all that well. Doesn't sound like much fun, no.”

Clio was surprised. But the refusal reverberated with other no's that had crept into the marriage over the years—it had started with the shock, humiliation, and profound sorrow that they'd gone through when they'd failed to produce a baby of their own—what they now refer to as “a bio,” a “biological” as opposed to an adopted baby. The creep of no's had only gotten worse as they tried to move on to adoption. At their advanced age there had been another series of hurdles—what he christened “The Adoption Olympics.” When Katie arrived, the sorrow lifted—it was no match for their joy—but as the years went on they realized that the sorrow was not gone entirely.

When Clio brought up the idea of the trip a second time, he said, “I need a
vacation
,
a cheap vacation—how 'bout the reliable Adirondacks?”

“It has to be China.”

“Why? Maybe if Katie were interested in China, okay. But she doesn't seem to be in the slightest.” It was true. Over the years Katie had mostly resisted Clio's repeated efforts to keep her Chinese heritage alive in the backwater town of Columbia. Despite her talent and passion for drawing and painting, Katie rarely drew or painted anything that seemed inspired by the Chinese art that Clio had shown her. Despite their finding a tutor from the Chinese restaurant, Katie hadn't shown much interest in learning Chinese—“I want to learn Spanish, like everybody else in my class.”

“But the trip isn't only for Katie's sake,” Clio went on, “it's for all of ours. The books I've read, the people I've talked to—they all say it's a terrific thing, to go back as a family. Age ten is about right. The timing's perfect. We'll leave the tour early and go back to her orphanage in Changsha—we can be there on her birthday. Returning ten years later, imagine? And we can visit the police station too.”

“What
police station too?”

“Where she was abandoned. We can visit both. To see if they have any more information. We've got to try, Pep. To find out anything we can about her birth mother. Agreed?”

He hesitated, trying to assess the risk. “Mostly, yes.”

“We probably won't find out anything. No one ever has. But we have to try. We need to be able to say to her—maybe now, maybe when she's older—that we did everything we could. We followed up. Completely.
For
her
sake, Pep. Okay?”

“Not if she doesn't want to.” More and more lately, he felt that Clio was being too lenient with Katie, making him be the firm one, which put him in the position of the bad guy.

“You think I'd make her do it if she didn't want to?” Clio said, surprised.

“There's a first time for everything, Clee.”

Clio stared at him, hurt by the accusation. “Thanks a lot,” she said. “Y'know I can take your compliments, Pep, but when you turn on the charm, I go all weak in the knees.”



For a while, Clio gave up the idea. But then one night a few months later when they went in to put Katie to bed they were surprised to find that she had arranged her treasures from China in a kind of altar. Her banner with the character for “Chun” hung over her bed. Upon her big bright-red Chinese box, under a bamboo umbrella, and in front of a fan filled with the magical mountains of Guilin, several of her Beanie Babies were gathered with a small red Chinese flag, a framed embroidery of a panda, and a propped-up Katie drawing of the Disney video
Mulan
—and in her writing “
China's Bravest Girl
.”Also, Pep's green-bronze replica of a Tang Dynasty horse frozen at full gallop with flowing mane, Clio's statue of Kwan Yin, and “Shirty”—Katie's most prized possession, the soft purple-and-white-striped cotton shirt that was her security blanket. Clio took Pep's hand, squeezed it, smiled, and led him to Katie's canopied bed. She was just closing her book—
Your Dog's Mind—
and curling up to sleep. They sat together on the edge of the bed. Each kissed her goodnight, said, “I love you,” one after the other, and she murmured, “Love you too” to each in turn, and suddenly was asleep.

The next morning, when they asked Katie if she'd like to go on a trip to China, she was thrilled, and more thrilled when they told her they'd be in China on her tenth birthday. “Cool! I'll turn ten in China!”

“Not just China, love,” Clio said, delighted at her enthusiasm. “Changsha. Where you're from.”

“
Way
cool! Thanks, Mom, thanks, Dad. It'll be like the best birthday present
ever
. When do we leave?”