At the Heart of the Universe (52 page)

“Look—I tried to draw the elephant, but it didn't come out too good.”

“It's not that bad, honey—”

“Mom, stop it! It's
bad
, okay?”

“Okay. It is pretty bad.”

“Not even
pretty
bad.
Bad
. It is
ugly
!”

“Okay. Bad.”

“Agreed,” Pep says. “
Ugly
!”

“So then I thought, okay, I'll do like what Xiao Lu does, I'll draw the
character
for elephant she taught me, okay?”

“Great.”

“But it's not great, 'cause it's hard with a lot of lines and I can't remember it too good. I drew this.” Katie shows them a character that looks a lot like an elephant.

“It looks a lot like an elephant, honey.”

“Sure does,” Pep adds.

“Guys, that's the
problem
!
It looks
too much
like! It's supposed to be a... what?”

“An abstraction of—”

“Yeah, a metaphor like in Greek?” Clio nods. “But it isn't! It's just it
itself
!”

“Calm down, calm—”

“
I'm not calming down, Mom
! This is
important
. Listen to me, will you?”

“You're right,” Clio says. “Don't calm down. I'm listening.”

Katie waits to see if she is really listening. Finally she sees that she is.

“So then I decide to go back to basics, and draw what I know, you know?”

“Like?”

“Like a horse. The first thing Xiao Lu taught me. First the stick figure of a horse, then the old character, then the modern, and it was great, and I knew if I did it I would feel good about it, right?” Clio and Pep nod. “So I did it, and look!”

They do. It isn't very good. The stick figure looks like a horse, but the character doesn't, it doesn't have much
lift
up off the pictograph into the art. The modern figure has even less.

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” Pep says, “they're not too good.”

“Not that good at all,” Clio says.

Katie is startled—
they told the truth?
“No, they're not,” she says, “and you know why?”

“Why?” they both ask, at the same time.

“'Cause I don't have my real brush, the one she gave me! And I don't have my real inkstone! All I've got is this dumb ballpoint pen from the Drippy Hotel!” As soon as she says that, she finds herself thinking,
And I don't have her!

“Well, where's your brush and inkstone?” Clio asks.

“I forgot 'em! I left them at her house! Can we go back and get 'em?”

Pep and Clio glance at each other.

“Sorry, hon,” Clio says, “we can't.”

“There's no time now, and we leave tomorrow morning.”

“Shit!” Katie says. Clio stares at her. “I know, it's a swear and I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” Clio says. “You're old enough now for a swear once in a while.”

Katie is staring at her, and then at Pep, silently making a plea:
Please
,
Mom
,
please
,
Dad
,
don't make it nice anymore
,
just show me you get it and then tell me. Tell me.

“And,” Clio goes on, “you don't have
her
with you either now, to help?”

Katie stares at her, and in her mind is a memory of sitting at the table in the hut, the scents of woodsmoke, garlic, and ink all around, her head bent close to the character that is really an animal, almost alive, and the scent of her birth mom—pine, rain, turned-up earth.

“Yeah,” Katie says, “I miss her already, really
bad
.” She snuggles into Clio's arms.



All of them are bedding down for the night. Outside the tremulous arc of their candle it is deeply dark, cold, and scary as only a big mountain in a foreign wilderness can be. In the attic the damp cold is almost cutting. Pep, Katie, and Clio are on one side of the room, Thalia and Rhett on the other. The meal has been foul, the bedding is stale. It makes all the Macys miss the fresh vegetables and sweet cedar mattresses of the little hut and cave on the shy side of the mountain.

Rhett has located two bottles of beer, which he and Thalia are sipping.

“Okay, gang,” Pep sings out. “Bedtime. I'm taking orders for sleeping pills.” He holds out his palm. “Ambien reds, five millipedes, Ambien whites, ten millipedes—”

“Stop that, you cad!” says Thalia, laughing. “I'll take a white.”

“For me, of course,” Rhett says with delight, “the red.”

Hungrily, Rhett and Thalia reach for the Ambiens, pick a couple of pills each out of Pep's extended hand, and drink them down with their beers.

All say goodnight.

Rhett and Thalia are soon afloat in that rich, syrupy sleep of the drugged. They stir as the gongs chime at four in the morning but, groggy, go back to sleep until the sun clears the silent heart of the peaks and the monks start calling to the soul-mountain for their feeding at six. They look around. Katie and Clio and Pep, and all their things, are gone.

PART FOUR

The days grow long, the mountains beautiful. The south wind blows over blossoming meadows.Newly arrived swallows dart over steaming marshes.Ducks in pairs drowse on the warm sand.

—Tu Fu (713–770), “South Wind”

45

Pedaling hard uphill on the rackety bicycle, the girl thinks,
I won't give up until I reach the fork in the path.

The branches of the persimmon trees scratch her, but she puts her head down and pedals on. She remembers how the red-dirt path, all rutted and twisty, keeps going up until where the tree is, that one lonely fig tree at the fork.
This time we'll go the new way, to the right. When we got to the village down below it was easy to find out where they live. It's not far now. “See, I told you, didn't I?” I said to them. “I said trust me—we'll find 'em.”

From the day they showed up again at her little hut in the woods, Xiao Lu was determined. As soon as she was healthy, she would go back. And they would go back with her, no question. This morning down in the village, Xiao Lu wouldn't take no for an answer—she was tough.
I've been right almost every time in China except when I ran away—and if that hadn't happened then, this wouldn't be happening now. But is this gonna be right too?

Katie clenches her teeth, pushes hard, harder, and when the bike slows after a hard push she takes a quick glance back and doesn't see anybody. It's a steamy morning in late July. She wants to wipe the sweat off her face because it's mixing with the sunscreen to make some weird goo that's stinging her eyes but she knows that if she takes her hand off the handlebars to wipe it she won't be able to make the next turn of the wheel and keep moving up. It's like if she can make just one more turn of the pedal this whole adventure will turn out well, but if she gives up it will tilt like a bicycle defeated and wobble and throw her off, down into the red dirt. Eyes stinging, she does one more hard push. The bike moves at first barely but then when the pedal goes all the way down it moves faster and everything else but pedaling gets blotted out, and she puts her head down and does one more and when she looks up she sees it just up ahead, the fig tree at the fork in the path.
I'll stop up there and wait for them to catch up. I'll go, “La-dee-da what took you so long?”

Catching her breath, she looks around. To the left, the path goes up to the house of the scary grandparents. To the right the path dips into a valley of rice fields. A lot of paddies climb the hills like steps on either side. Some fields are green, others are flooded with no sign of planting and reflect the sun in wedges. Far down in the valley she sees somebody working in the field, a white shirt with a golden straw hat, bobbing up and down like a bird.
I think they told Xiao Lu to go down there, way down there
,
maybe three farms or five
,
and that's where they'll be.

“Katie? Wait!”

Katie watches them walk their bikes up toward her. First Clio, in her straw hat, then Xiao Lu, hatless, smiling up at her—she's always smiling at her now—and then Pep, huffing and puffing and bent down almost double over the small bike like a clown in a circus act. Katie laughs at the sight of him, his big knobb-ley knees going here and there, his face sunburnt red, his nose like a half tomato, skin peeling.

They come up to her and stop to rest.

“Thank God we don't have to go up there again,” Clio says, nodding to the left fork.

“Up to the beautiful nice grandparents?” Pep says. “Hey—how 'bout we drop in for a cup of tea and a torrent of abuse? Shall we take a vote?”

“I vote no!” Katie says.

“No,” Clio says.

“Xiao Lu?” Katie communicates, in gesture and a few Chinese words, what the choice is. Xiao Lu's eyes get big, her mouth falls open, and she shakes her head no.

“Good,” Pep says, “I vote no too.”

Xiao Lu gestures to the other fork of the path, the one leading down alongside the rice field with the bobbing figure.

Her eyes are different,
Katie thinks,
as if she could start crying really easy. It's a big thing for her to bring us to them, for her to see them again after so many years.
She's scared of what she might find there—real scared. I'm scared too. They might be mean like the others!

Clio nods to Xiao Lu. Xiao Lu gets up on her bike and sets off, Clio following.

“Excited, Kate-zer?” Pep asks as he walks his bike alongside Katie.

“Yeah.”

“Gonna be great to meet your beautiful nice sister, eh?”

“Yeah, Dad, like as great as your meeting my beautiful nice birth dad too!” He looks like he's swallowed a toad, the slimy thing caught halfway down his throat. She laughs and gets up on her bike.

“You little foozle! Ha! Haha!” He grabs the seat of her bike and pushes her a few steps along. She screeches—“Heeeee!”—and with a hard push he lets go and she keeps on going, fast and faster down the slope.

Feeling his push, the bike floating along, she remembers the moment when she learned to ride. He had been teaching her, running alongside and holding the bike while she pedaled, catching her when she was about to fall. It seemed she would never get it. But then one warm evening as he ran along beside her and she wobbled and wobbled as if once again she would fall, he ran faster and she pedaled faster and suddenly he seemed a little behind her and he had already let go of her and it worked!—as if he was still there pushing her but he wasn't, he'd let her go on alone and she was floating, flying, screeching with delight, and he was still with her and not.

She glances back. He's pedaling hard to catch up. She hurries after the two women, thinking,
My mom and birth mom side by side, how cool is that?

But he's given her too hard a push for the sudden downhill. She flies way too fast down the long slope and is suddenly scared that she's just gonna crash into them on the narrow path or have to steer off into a paddy and she cries out, “Hey, watch out,
here I come
!” and they turn and seem to be laughing because as if by magic the red-dirt path swells out like a big belly into a road wide enough for everybody and they make a place for her to slip on in between them and grab her and slow her down and hold her, Clio by her shirt and Xiao Lu by her handlebars until she moves with them and they move with her along into their pace, all of them suddenly a living character of three people riding in the sun.

“Look! No hands!” They look back. Pep is barreling down toward them, hands high in the air. He brakes hard and swerves dramatically, tires spitting red dirt, and, laughing, joins them. He rides on the outside of Xiao Lu.

The three women and the man ride along together seeking a girl named Xia, whose name means “Summer.” And if you could ask each of them what they are feeling at just that moment, each might say in their own way that they are feeling part of something else, part of something at the heart of the universe, a universal law of love.