At the Heart of the Universe (30 page)

“You were right.”

“Now she's not a figment anymore.”

“What's that?”

“Of my imagination. She's real.”

“Very, Kate-zer, very,” Pep says, and then, “Love you.”

Katie yawns, and settles. “Love you two too.”

“Call me if I need you,” Clio whispers.

In the silence, the sounds from the mountain, looming unseen, close by on the other side of the wall and leaning in, intensify.

Pep hears a hoot, optimally a low-risk owl. And then a snuffling thing, at worst a bear, at best a panda. Rustling noises, and claws skittering over the black-tile roof—a squirrel, a rat? Rummaging through all the risks, he gives in to the fact that he'll never get to sleep in this distressing place, and falls asleep.

Clio lies awake, thinking of Xiao Lu.
What is she feeling right now, finding her daughter again? Is it what I myself felt when I was handed the same daughter three months after she abandoned her? No. I was handed a baby to keep; she is seeing her baby as someone else's child, to be abandoned by her all over again.
All at once Clio feels what it must be like, that ache in that heart. Her own heart speeds up. She tries to breathe herself down.

Why haven't I tried harder to engage her fully? Is it that she seems annoyed that I exist? How could she not? She wants to be alone with Katie. Still, why haven't I gone wholeheartedly into trying to make contact with her—why didn't I join her, bowing to the Buddha? It's hard not to see her as a stranger, foreign, other, but there was something else too. What was it?

The answer comes, and she shivers.

She does want her back.



Her feet hardly need the torch to find the path home. For the first time she walks her path in something like happiness. Her lost daughter has come back. More beautiful than she ever could have imagined, almost like Second Sister.
Thank you for finding them, giving them my message.
Chun has grown tall; her face is the same face, her hair has the same tint of russet, the same double crown that means wisdom, the same eyes and lips. Very beautiful. Healthy and strong, more so for being given to them. My
flesh and blood.
Their
child?

Now she is pacing around the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion, built facing west on a level clearing at a site called Ox Heart Rock—named for the shape of a boulder perched on the edge of a waterfall, splitting the stream to fall in two cascades into a pool. Here the water sprays up into a mist. In her darkest times, the endless power of this torrent crashing against the endless strength of this rock—and the rainbows that sometimes gather in the rising mist—has given her hope
.
This place was here long before she was born, and will be here long after she dies. This, her life, is a single flicker of the spray, only endless in a single moment, as now, here, facing this stream.
The one pure and clean thing.

Even when she was in the depth of despair at abandoning both her children, this place offered hope—that someday she would find the one she abandoned into the wide world, and bring her back to the one still there, Chun's own First Sister, little Xia.

Strange to see her as American. More strange to see that they are so old.

I wish that I could sleep with her on my breast tonight, and every night. I wish she could be mine again.

She feels such yearning that she stops pacing, leans on one of the decaying walls of the small Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion. The happiness of a moment ago has vanished and she is dizzy above the split waterfall. For the first time since she thought of killing herself on the mountain, she thinks of it again.

Usually, the deeper into the mountain she climbs, the farther from people and the nearer to her little hut and cave and animals, the lighter her heart feels. This night, the deeper she goes, the heavier her heart. It is as if she is leaving her baby all over again, hearing again the terrible cries—“Whose baby whose baby?”—and once again not being able to shout out, “
Mine
!”

27

Xiao Lu comes at six, just as the first light of dawn unrolls itself up over the edge of the mountain and spreads out like a comforter over the stones of the courtyard. Soon, fed by the summer sun, the light feels warm. Clio and Pep are perched, thawing out and yawning, on the edge of the carp pond, watching Katie and a nun perform incense rituals at one of the three-legged cast-iron vessels. It has been a rough night. None of them can remember ever being as cold. In the morning they ran bent double to and from the latrine, trying to clench up against the shivering to get warm—which only made the shivering worse, and made their legs shake and their teeth chatter. Late June, and they could see their breath in the air.

“I'm never sleeping there again!” Katie cried. “It's scary and gross and cold and there are smells that even Cinnamon would be a'scared of. I want a hotel!”

“There are no hotels on the mountain, dear.”

“
What
?
None?”

Luckily breakfast, a gruelish rice soup called
congee
, was—unlike the stringy pickles in clotted-blood-colored sauce and what might have been pork or that squirrel on the roof but had to be vegetables—
hot
.

Xiao Lu is dressed as before but without her orange vest, and carries a shoulder sack and a black umbrella. With a quick nod and smile to Pep and Clio, she goes straight to Katie and is soon grasping her own joss stick in two hands and waving it around, laughing like a girl.

“I keep feeling,” Clio says to Pep, “that as of this morning our lives have changed, but nothing about it is clear.”

“Agreed,” Pep says. “Adding another mother ain't easy.” She smiles, appreciating his lightness. “But look at her—she's so playful, seems so young—it's more like we're adding another kid.”

“I
want
to embrace her, but...” Clio trails off. In her mind are all of the things Tao told them about Xiao Lu, things that cloud a fresh view of who she actually is now.

“Understood,” Pep says. “Me too. Let's just try to stay open.”

“Openhearted?”

“That too.”

They set out, Xiao Lu leading, to the Joking Monkeys. She sets a fast pace, pointing out plants and birds to Katie, who is soon following close behind. Clio and Pep bring up the rear.

At first the path is gradual, stone steps carved into rock. As the forest thickens, stone gives way to mossy earth, winding ways among high pines, cedars, and old rhododendrons, their waxy, thick leaves looking to Clio like Elizabethan collars around pink blossoms as big as a baby's head. Camellias abound. The air is cool and thick with rising dew, carrying the heady scent of pine, earth, high-mountain air, and flutters of jasmine. Birds sing—even, once, the harsh calls of a nightingale. There is a sense of solidity—Clio thinks of a mantra of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn:
I am solid, like a mountain; I am fresh, I am free
—a sense that underneath them is a big core rock, and nothing bad can happen as long as they put the soles of their feet firmly upon it, one after the other. Yet as she watches Xiao Lu and Katie playing as much as walking on the path ahead, so lithe and spry compared to her and Pep, part of her feels the opposite—apprehensive, worn, and slight, and on the shadow side of middle-aged. Thank God for Pep.
Big and solid. Towering over all of us, especially Xiao Lu. Immoveable. The family mountain.

The path borders a stream that thunders down around rocks and fallen tree trunks. A footstep often sinks into moss, sounding something damp and satisfying. Mists are everywhere, floating the morning, rising to eye level so the trail can be seen below but nothing above, until, in the next instant, the mist clears and they are in a tall grove of ancient sequoia. Up through the straight trunks Clio can see a congealing of mist to clouds, all puffy and moving fast toward the east, riding the big expectant sky.

Pep, out in the open air and away from the low-ceilinged rooms and vans, feels good, free. He starts to sing, “She'll be coming round the mountain when she—”

“Daddy, don't!” Katie cries out. “I told you not to. Not in front of
her
!”

Xiao Lu laughs and wags her finger at Katie—a “No, don't be disrespectful” wag. Katie laughs at this. Xiao Lu wags once more, and points her umbrella up, signaling “Move it out!” Clio and Pep look at each other.

“Super blunt,” Pep says, “even if culturally determined.”

Soon Xiao Lu stops. Smiling broadly, she points to a pile of poop that, in mime, she avers is that of a bear. Katie shows her delight. Xiao Lu bends close to the poop and picks through it assiduously with a stick to show what the bear ate. Seeds, small bones, and a few shreds of aluminum foil. Katie is loving this.

“Like in biology at school, Katie, isn't it?” Clio says. “Picking through the owl's nest?” Katie is too absorbed to answer. Clio shakes her head in frustration. She takes Pep aside, and whispers, “Honey, I... I have to tell you something?” He nods. “Last night I had a crazy thought—really scary. Out of all proportion?” He nods. “I thought, ‘She
does
want her back'?”

He smiles, nods. “Not crazy at all, Clee, just not possible. Given everything,
of course
she'd want her back. How could she not? For her, we hardly exist—she wishes we didn't. What else
would
she wish? But that's all it is, and can be. End of story.”

“Right. Of course. I'm overreacting. I just feel we have to be alert. Careful.”

“Absolutely, and very.” He smiles at her, takes her hands in his. “But put yourself in her shoes. To her this is a gift from the gods!”

They come to two logs set side by side across a hard-rushing stream. The logs are dry and level, the stream just below their feet. Xiao Lu skips across, Katie imitates her skipping, and Clio and Pep walk across. The path turns sharply up. The stream cleaves the rock more deeply. The next log bridge is higher up over a more threatening gorge. Despite the height, Xiao Lu skips easily across each time. Katie and Clio, enjoying the game now, follow her lead. Pep starts to feel uneasy.

Coming out at the third bridge, watching Xiao Lu playfully hop on one leg across, watching Katie mimic her and seeing Clio look down once and then not hop but place each foot carefully, Pep feels shaky inside. Easing up to the edge, he looks down. Big mistake. The stream is now a torrent, rushing over rocks fifty feet down—to Pep it seems suddenly a hundred. Spray blasts up from the collision of the water and the rock. The rough spray has wet the logs spanning the chasm. The three others are waiting for him on the other side. He freezes. He reasons with himself:
The logs are wide, wide as a sidewalk, and steady. They all did it, you can do it.
He steps out, and finds himself paralyzed with fear. For a second he can't make himself go on. He tries to make his foot move and can't.
Shit. A new phobia? Terrific.

They are shouting to him from the other side. Xiao Lu skips back to him on light feet, her umbrella tapping playfully along. Laughing, she holds out her hand. He takes it—it feels like iron. This helps. Iron is what he needs. But it is awkward, she holding his hand and walking backward—it makes him even more frantic. He yells over the roar of the water for her to stop and gestures for her to give him both her hands. She tucks her umbrella under an arm and does so. He has to bend down to her level, which decreases the height over the logs, and makes him feel a little better. He can sense, through her hands, the strength of her arms, her legs, her whole wiry body, the
sureness
of it all, and tries to visualize her hands as two iron railings on either side.

Step by step, he makes it. Katie looks at him strangely, as if thinking,
What a wimp!
Clio cheers. Xiao Lu bends double with laughter, unsympathetic to his plight. It irritates him. Through gesture he asks, how many more of these before the monkeys? She raises a single finger—just one more.

The last bridge is even higher, and to him the logs seem like saplings. They slope up at a hefty angle. He thinks of the Nike slogan, “Just Do It,” and starts walking across. But his body decides “Just Don't!”
and balks, like a deer caught in headlights. Even taking Xiao Lu's hands seems dangerous. He feels too high up to balance, and drops to his hands and knees. He sees the embarrassment on Katie's face, but has no choice. The pounding of the stream on the boulders seems to engulf him, drowning out everything else. The logs are slippery from the spray, mirroring a slippage in his confidence. Finally, with Xiao Lu walking slowly in front and Clio walking slowly behind and Katie counting his crawling steps, he's across. He sits there, drenched in sweat, trembling.
Where the hell did this fear come from?

“Why are you so scared of heights now, Dad?”

“Honey, I wish I knew. I never was before—well, except looking down from super tall buildings. But I think she said that's the last of 'em.”

“Till we have to go back over them when we go—”