North of Beautiful (33 page)

I guessed from her wistful expression as she blew the thread into the air, watched it fly and disappear over the Wall, that she was thinking of all the trips she hadn’t taken with her sister. I was shocked when she admitted ruminatively, “I was supposed to go with Susannah to Guatemala. I had promised her.”

“I didn’t know that. I’m glad you didn’t go!” If she had, Mom wouldn’t be sitting here next to me. She would have been on the bus that had plunged over the cliff, killing the passengers, including Susannah. “Why didn’t you?”

“There was that conference in Seattle for port-wine stains, do you remember?”

I reared back so hard that I lost my balance, the truth bowling me over. I stood up now and rubbed my tailbone. I had always assumed that it was Dad who prevented Mom from going, from living her life, from traveling with her sister. “You didn’t go because of me?”

“Susannah didn’t understand that. She was so angry with me.” Mom puffed out her cheeks and then blew, remembering what must have been a nasty conversation with Susannah. “I should have been on that trip with her —”

“Mom, don’t say that.”

“— and there were so many others that I should have gone on with her.” Mom nodded emphatically, fell silent, and I knew that was all she was going to say. Her breathing, I was glad, had evened out. And then suddenly, Mom grabbed my hand. “Merc and Claudius are your only brothers.”

“I know, Mom.”

“No,” she said fiercely. “They’re the only ones you’ll ever have.”

I heard what she was telling me: don’t do or say anything that will push them away forever. But did they realize that I was their only sister?

I stretched up on the balls of my feet, feeling antsy. I needed to move, needed to get away from this conversation. “Shall we?” I asked.

“You know, I’m going to rest a bit and turn back. You go on, though. I’ll meet you at the bottom of the cable car.”

I looked at the Wall, undulating in front of me into the horizon. Jacob had left me with the GPS and coordinates for a geocache not far from here. And then there was a toboggan ride at the end of this section of the Great Wall that I was dying to try. I mean, tobogganing down the Great Wall! Mom would never get on one of those sleds. But this was all moot; I remembered how much she had struggled on the steps to get this far. “I’m not leaving you here by yourself.”

“Then I’ll just sit here and look out. You can come back for me, then. Really,” she said firmly, “it’s what I want.”

Without another word, Mom took out the journal I gave her on her birthday a couple weeks before the trip. I had yet to see her using it. But then again, it could have been because she never had privacy; I wanted to give her that now, space to think with no one intruding or eavesdropping or demanding something from her. So I said, “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

“Take your time, honey,” she answered without looking up from the journal. “We’re only here once.”

There still weren’t many people on the Wall, which freed me to go at my own pace. The wind had picked up, and while it didn’t feel strong enough to blow me off the Wall, I shivered and threw on the sweatshirt that I had tied around my waist just in case.

As I approached the first watchtower, I checked the coordinates on the GPS. Still too far south. So I climbed the steep steps but didn’t linger at the top of the tower, not wanting to be away from Mom for long. I jogged down the stairs and the next section of the Wall. A couple looked at me strangely as I ran past them, but I didn’t care. I had missed my morning runs, missed the way my legs stretched in front of me until I felt like a gazelle, missed the fresh air after Beijing’s smog. The uneven stones reminded me of running on the trails behind my home, and I slowed enough to watch my footing.

Another watchtower lay directly ahead. The coordinates on the GPS started matching up with the waypoints Jacob had left with me. This was it, I thought excitedly. This was where the cache was hidden. Thirty feet, twenty feet. Knowing how crafty geocachers could be at hiding their treasures, I started poking around the Wall, looking for the cache as soon as I scaled the steps to the watchtower.

Not being a purist, I had peeked at the clues Jacob included for the microcache. I knew it was in a tiny film canister, and then there was this: “where those without wings could fly.”

Whatever that meant.

I kept probing the small crevices along the wall, found graffiti written and carved on the stone, counted a couple of pieces of chewed bubble gum. No cache.

I must have tramped the full circuit around that watchtower twelve times, first on tiptoe, then crouched low. I seriously considered crawling until I remembered how much spitting I had seen in Beijing. No crawling.

My back hurt from bending over. So I stood and looked at the view, really looked at it. I wished Mom were here with me, because who knew? Who knew that the world itself was one giant cache, stashed with hidden places of infinite beauty like this for people to find? I was about to give up and finally thought to check the time. A full hour? Mom must have thought that I had peeled off the wall, my body broken on the rocks below.

As if wishes could come true, I saw a familiar pink sweatsuit: my mother picking her way to the watchtower. She was so focused on the uneven path, she didn’t see me watching her slow progress.

And sure enough, here in the places where those who can’t fly do, I raced down the stairs as quickly as it was safe, and rushed to Mom. She was panting, her face flushed. But her eyes? They sparkled with pride.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “I was just about to come back to you.”

“I know. But I decided I didn’t want to miss out on anything.”

“We can head back now.”

Her brow furrowed. “It can’t be much longer to the other cable car from here.”

“It’s not. Maybe another twenty minutes.”

“Then let’s go. I didn’t come all this way to turn back,” she said, already setting up the stairs I had just descended. Slowly, we climbed, and I wondered how Mom had made it all this way by herself. Slowly, I thought. One deliberate step at a time.

“Look, Mom,” I whispered once we reached the vantage point where the serpentine Wall disappeared into the horizon. “Forever is thataway.”

She stood beside me, panting. Her hand rested near an arrow hole, the arrow hole where the ancient guards of China could let loose their weaponry against the Mongol invaders, let their arrows fly.

“No way,” I muttered. I bent down and peered through the arrow hole, searching for the hidden canister. Not there. I tried another arrow hole just a few feet away.

“What are you doing, honey?” Mom asked, bending down herself, ready to help me find whatever I had lost.

As I patted around, I found a tiny crevice to the east. My fingers slipped in, touched smooth plastic.

“We found it!” I announced, triumphant, pulling out the black canister carefully.

“Found what?”

In answer, I handed Mom the cache. She read the note taped around the canister’s outside, explaining in both Chinese and English that this was an official geocache site. Those not geocaching were respectfully asked to replace the cache where they found it.

“A geocache,” Mom said, opening the lid and shaking out its contents into her cupped hand. Just paper, tightly rolled into a miniature scroll, and a pencil stub. “Susannah used to geocache.”

“She did ? Wait, you know about geocaching?”

“Sure, she was so goal-oriented, she couldn’t just hike like me.”

And then it occurred to me where those fragments of China map came from, how the cache had gotten placed on our property. I dropped my backpack to the ground, chancing generations of dried spittle, and dug inside for the envelope where I had been stashing tickets and other ephemera as collage material. I lifted the piece of the China map, still sealed in its plastic bag, and held it out to Mom. “This was Aunt Susannah, wasn’t it?”

Her eyes widened when she saw what it was. “Where did you find this?”

“At home. There’s a geocache at our home. A pile of these were in it.”

“No, but how?” Mom shook her head, and then her mouth opened to a wide O. Embarrassed, she said, “I sent Susannah those pieces one day when I was mad at your dad.”

“Do you think she started the cache when she came to visit?” I asked.

Mom shook her head, bewildered, still staring at that tiny piece of the China map.

I continued. “And maybe she scattered them in geocaches around the world. But why would she . . .”

I had my answer when Mom propped her hands on the wall, ducked her head like she was woozy, and breathed deeply. It was Susannah’s quiet rebellion, mounted against Dad all these years. A warning to intrepid travelers not to trust in maps blindly.

Here be dragons.

“Sign your name,” I told Mom, handing the logbook to her. The list was short, just about thirty geocachers, including MM — Memento Mori: Jacob and his dad — dated almost exactly seven years ago. It was strange, holding this paper, knowing that Jacob had held it before me. And knowing how different his life was now from what it had been seven years ago. How different Mom’s was five years ago when Susannah was still alive. And Dad’s twelve years ago before the China map was deemed a fraud.

“But I didn’t find the cache,” protested Mom.

“I couldn’t have found it without you,” I pointed out.

So reluctantly, she took the stub of a pencil, thought for a second before carefully lettering a geocaching nickname: Crafty Mama. Nothing — nothing — made me more proud than to see Mom signing that name in the log. I may have been the pathfinder. But she was an explorer, too.

“Here,” she said, pressing the log onto me.

As I signed my name under hers, I knew what to do with that frayed piece of map that I had carried from one continent to another. I looked at Mom; she nodded in approval. So I rolled the log around that piece of map, not a shroud so much as a cocoon, an adventure preparing to take flight.

More than walking the Great Wall had worn Mom out. She looked wilted by the time we reached the end of the Mutianyu section, and I suspected it had to do with the potent memory of her sister. So when Mom encouraged me to ride the toboggan instead of the cable car down — “If it’s something you want to do, then do it, honey” — I took her up on it. I knew better than to ask her to join me.

Apparently, the toboggan wasn’t as popular as I thought it would be. There was only one couple in line with me, and they were from Germany, backpacking across China. We all laughed at the enormous warning sign, listing every potential hazard of the ride and illustrating them with a stick figure. Seated in my cart, waiting for my turn, I wasn’t laughing anymore, certainly not when the woman blasted down the upturned steel track ahead of me, screaming. It wasn’t a happy euphoric scream either. Her husband followed at a more cautious pace.

The ride operator nodded at me. As nervous as I was, I knew that if I bailed now, I’d regret it. So I breathed deeply, released my brake, and started coasting down the metal chute. There was no roof over the track. Pick up too much speed and I’d be the stick figure flying clear off the rail. But — oh, God — tobogganing was so much better than running on the Great Wall. I rounded a bend, speeding along so that my hair whipped behind me, a victorious knight’s banner. A young man leaped out of the trees on the hill, waving a sign at me:
SLOW DOWN!
I braked. Really, I did, but I must have still been racing too fast, because another man jumped out, yelling at me this time.

Their glares and warnings didn’t faze me, not one bit. What were they but mere stings compared to Dad’s menacing glowers. I careened to a stop at the bottom, laughing out loud, where Mom was waiting for me, just the way I knew she would be.

No sooner did we return to our hotel room than Mom flopped onto the bed, not even removing the coverlet, which was probably crawling with all kinds of germs I didn’t even want to think about. (I had seen an undercover news report on the sanitation levels at hotels around the world, and it’s almost enough to pack your own sleeping bag.)

“I’m done for the day, honey,” she said, and flung her arm over her eyes to block out the light.

Funnily, I was still exuberant from my toboggan ride three hours earlier. “Do you mind if I run out?” I asked Mom, standing over her single bed. “I’ll bring back dinner.”

Her voice was muffled. “Sounds good.”

By the time I had collected my things, Mom’s breathing had evened out and she was asleep.

“Sweet dreams, Mom.” I turned off the light, and very gently, I closed the door.

Supposedly, the 798 Art District was to Beijing what SoHo was to New York. I couldn’t say for sure how accurate that analogy was since I’d never been to Manhattan, and my entire frame of reference for artist communities was Nest & Egg. My saving grace for actually finding the boutique Elisa shared with two other designers was that the art district was fairly small, spanning a few blocks of studios, stores, and restaurants. That, and I had the receptionist at my hotel write down the name of Elisa’s store in Chinese characters for me to give to the taxi driver.

I stood outside her boutique uncertainly. Now that I was here, I wondered why I had come. Through the window, the tiny shop could have been an aviary, but instead of exotic birds, unapologetically bright dresses hung off branches, stripped of leaves and arranged around the jewelry box–sized store. Only the self-assured could pull these dresses off, women who enjoyed attracting attention. Like the three women Elisa was waiting on when I finally forced myself to enter the boutique. The oldest must have been Mom’s age, slender and chic, her hair twisted into an elaborate updo. She frowned at herself critically in the mirror, shook her head, no.

“Terra!” Elisa called when the door set off tingly chimes announcing my entry. She sounded surprised, but pleasantly so. To my astonishment, she excused herself from her customers to stride over to me, her dress swinging loosely around her body. She threw her arms around me, pulling me in for a tight hug. She had lost weight since Christmas, her once plump body now bony, almost frail. The break-up had marked her, too. “You found me.” She squeezed my hands. “So is China everything you expected it to be?”