North of Beautiful (36 page)

Jacob stood up. It didn’t matter that we were told to stay in that office. It wouldn’t have mattered if we had been threatened with expulsion for not obeying that one simple command. He sprinted down the hall, heading for that closing door.

“Jacob?” called Norah, following him now. We all were.

Jacob didn’t listen. His hand was on the knob. He pushed the door open. I saw the director’s look of surprise darken into annoyance, then disapproval. But her reaction didn’t matter. The extra three feet and hundred pounds that Jacob had gained since leaving the orphanage as a toddler didn’t matter either. All that mattered was the nursery worker who Jacob was staring at. Her own eyes widened in disbelief. She would have recognized him even in his Goth incognito outfit. With her tiny hand at her mouth, the woman ran flatfooted to Jacob, calling him by his first name: “Yi-Guan, Yi-Guan.”

He towered over her, but she patted him on the back as though he were still a baby who needed soothing. I could picture Jacob’s adoption story so vividly now, the one Norah had told us on the harrowing ride to the orphanage. How this woman, his amah, only reluctantly handed Jacob over to her those fourteen years ago, how she had cried like a piece of her was dying when Norah had left with Jacob. How she visited their hotel the next morning with a bag full of his favorite sweets. That was her week’s salary, Norah had said.

My eyes misted now, and I had to look away.

“Hao kan, hao kan,” his amah kept saying.

Like me and Mom, Norah hung back, unwilling to intrude. But Jacob’s initial impulsive excitement had faded to awkwardness, unsure now. I don’t think he was prepared for this onslaught of affection. Or for the reality that he could no longer communicate with the woman who had cared for him as if he were her own. And it was to his mother where he looked for help.

“Mom?”

Norah didn’t smile, but her eyes glimmered. She was needed. At last, she stood next to him, murmuring now in translation. “Good-looking,” Norah explained softly, knowing this moment was so fragile, so tenuous, a loud noise could destroy it. “She’s calling you handsome.”

Word by word, his face softened and he was reeling back in time, remembering, too. As though he were dehydrated and hadn’t known it, I could see fine lines filling in, his cracks and crevices healing. The amah gestured to Jacob now, trying to make sense of his height, shaking her head in amazement. No translation was necessary: Where had time gone? She could have been my own mother, mourning the end of every developmental stage.

Then Norah looked surprised at something his amah was saying.

“What?” Jacob asked.

“She said that the woman who found you still comes by every year to see if there’s been any news.” Jacob blinked hard at that, and I could see the tears glistening in his eyes.

Norah blanched. “I wish I had known. I would have sent photos. A present at the very least.”

It was Mom who said the words Jacob needed: “You were so loved, Jacob.”

He couldn’t have stopped those tears now if he tried. As if in agreement, Mom and I stepped back, cooed at some babies in their cribs. All these unwanted children who had been abandoned.

Years of being self-conscious trained me to notice when someone was staring at me. Like now. I looked over my shoulder and found a little girl by herself in the corner. As soon as she saw me notice her, she dropped her head, her bob sweeping down like a curtain over the curve of her cheek. Where others might have mistaken that for shyness, I knew it for what it was: shame. As if she knew when she was being stared at, too, the girl spun around to the wall, but she moved too fast. Her hair swung up and away from her face for an instant. But that was all it took to unmask the bright red birthmark splashed from the left side of her forehead down to her nose and cheek. It was as if she had swabbed her left hand with red paint and forgotten that as she held her head in deep thought. There was absolutely no doubt why her birth mother had broken the law and abandoned her — whether it was at a police station, on hospital steps, or beneath a tree. It was all because of a goddamned red mark, a permanent slap on this girl’s face.

“What’s wrong?” Mom asked, putting her hand on my arm.

Too slowly, I shifted my eyes back to her. Mom had followed my gaze like a mama bear protecting her young and she frowned at the little girl. “What’s she doing in the nursery?”

I knew why: because babies couldn’t talk, couldn’t tease. There was safety and solace in silence.

“I need a bathroom,” I told Mom, my voice tight.

Her eyebrows furrowed as if she knew I, too, was hiding something. “We passed one on the way in.”

I nodded, couldn’t choke out any more words, not even the ones that would diffuse Mom’s concern.

As quickly as I could, I left the nursery, glad to escape, glad that Jacob was too busy getting reacquainted with his first family — that was what his amah was, after all — to notice my flight from a little girl who could have been me.

Chapter twenty-nine

Cartographic Lips

RULE FOR THE WISE: WHEN you’re trying to escape yourself, don’t look in the mirror. Which, of course, is what I did in that dingy orphanage bathroom. There were no doors separating the stalls, just holes in the ground. But the need to see myself outweighed any discomfort to my nose. So I rested my pelvis against the grayish vanity, and leaned so close to the mirror, my breath fogged the lower half of my face. The safe, blemish-free half of my face. I stared back into my faded blue eyes that Karin thought I should make a jewel-like amethyst courtesy of a pair of tinted contacts. Fake, I had scoffed at her. I didn’t want to be fake.

And finally, finally, I looked at my cheek, shrouded as usual in makeup. How was this any different from fake eyes? Or a fake personality, warm in public, cutting in private?

And how the hell was I any different from that little girl, both of us ashamed of our faces? Even if she wanted to cover her mark, how was she going to find makeup or afford it? Her very clothes looked too small for her.

I leaned my forehead against the mirror, feeling the cold, sleek surface against my skin. This close to the mirror, I couldn’t make myself out. I was just one big blur. Was that what I was going to do for the rest of my life? Hide forever behind my mask of makeup? Veil myself like I was too hideous for public viewing?

I hated all those layers of makeup then, the weight of the foundation and powder and moisturizer. I was breathing harder than if I had gone snowshoeing for two, three hours. My hands gripped the sink, the edge cutting into my palm. My face was nothing but a cartographic lie, told to placate my father, who could stand nothing less than perfection. A lie to assure my mother that I had every chance for the happiness that she was denied.

Without pausing to think of any of the consequences, I turned on the faucet. Had the water run brown instead of clear, I still would have splashed it on my face. Over and over, I rubbed the frigid water over my cheeks, my forehead, my temple until my face was frozen and my hands went numb.

When I finished, both of my cheeks bloomed red from cold. I didn’t let myself linger there in the bleak bathroom. I headed back to the little girl in the nursery. She was still crouching in the corner as if that was the only place where she belonged.

Mom gasped quietly. I could have been eleven again, wearing the evidence of stain remover that worked only on manmade materials, not man himself. “Terra! Your face!”

At that, Jacob spun around to make sure I was okay.

“Terra,” Mom called again.

Without breaking my stride, I kept walking to the girl who was watching me suspiciously. I knew the exact moment when she saw my port-wine stain. Her eyes widened, her gaze shifted to my cheek, and she stared the way everyone had stared at her for her whole, short life. I didn’t flinch. How could I? It was the first time I wanted someone to see my birthmark.

The little girl skittered back against the wall when I knelt beside her. I tucked my hair behind my ear and turned my cheek, not away from her, but to her. And then I had to trust in the universal language of a smile. Jacob had told me to smile at all the starers, that ultimate act of disarming. As he said, it was the reason why so many doctors gave their time to perform cleft palate and cleft lip surgeries. Smiles biologically bonded mothers to their babies, kicked in their mothering instinct. Fix the smile, save the child. So I bet on it now. I smiled.

Then, gently, I brushed her hair off her face — her perfect, perfect face. For a long moment, I cupped that round, befuddled face in my hands as if it were the most precious treasure of all — a sacred geocache I hadn’t even known I was searching for until now. All those well-meaning comments from strangers — the ones who told me they knew people with port-wine stains — all of those I understood now. In their own haphazard, clumsy ways, they were trying to tell me that I was fine the way I was. That I wasn’t alone.

I didn’t have the language to communicate that to this little girl — or to communicate that beauty — real everlasting beauty — lives not on our faces, but in our attitude and our actions. It lives in what we do for ourselves and for others.

So I did the best thing I could.

For a long moment, I waited for her gaze to lift away from my birthmark and back to my faded blue eyes. When she did, I realized I knew all the Mandarin I needed to express myself to this girl.

In my faltering Chinese, I used the same words Jacob’s caretaker had when she saw him. I told her in words that I struggled to say to myself whenever I looked in a mirror.

“Hao kan,” I said gently, quietly, firmly as if it was a pact between the two of us.

She blinked. I wasn’t sure if she understood. Or if she believed that she was beautiful. So I pointed to her and then to me. And I repeated with utter conviction, “Hao kan.”

Those words, my pronouncement, won me the girl’s slow nod. I nodded back. And when she smiled, wide and open, I tell you, there was nothing more beautiful than that.

Part Three

Terra
Firma

Chapter thirty

Large-Scale Maps

I USED TO THINK THE tourist couples who sat companionably at Snagtooth Coffee without talking, the ones who read the paper in silence while they were on vacation, were worse than boring. They were in relationship purgatory, just drifting along, waiting. Waiting for what? They had lost what little zing they must have had once. But sitting beside Jacob halfway through the flight back to Seattle, neither of us talking? There was real comfort in being quiet.

After I had changed spots with Norah, he had smiled at me, saying all of two words: “Big trip.”

“Huge,” I had agreed.

And then he closed his eyes, not because I was boring. But because we didn’t need to talk. We didn’t need to impress each other. We could just be.

With my head resting on the seatback, I reclined, not worrying about the thousands of people who had shared this very seat and left behind grease and germs. Comfort also came in knowing that countless travelers sat in this very spot before me, each going her separate way. Hundreds of different routes, thousands of different adventures started right here from this very seat.

I let myself close my eyes instead of keeping watch. A few moments later, Jacob reached over and took my hand in his. I needn’t have worried. The zing was still there. He rested our hands on his chest, his hand over mine, my hand over his heart.

To dream, you need to starve doubt, feed hope. I intended to do that. So as I dozed off, I imagined myself with Jacob. As a couple, despite our differences, despite the distance. I dreamed of us being one of the success stories, a couple that worked out.

Too soon, we were disembarking from the plane and walking through the gate where our travels had first started.

“It’s almost as if we hadn’t even left,” said Norah.

“We could turn around and go again,” Jacob said, his shoulder brushing mine as we walked side-by-side. Norah was wrong. We definitely had left. And we definitely had returned. In a very un-Mom way, she had her cell phone out, now calling Dad, as we walked through customs.

No answer.

I hadn’t expected one. Silence in Dad’s hands was never companionable, but always a weapon. Troubled, Mom tucked the phone in her purse.

It was strange how in the company of strangers in China, I hadn’t minded spending the rest of the trip bare-faced. The only person I knew had been Merc, and he was too busy working, head down, to notice a little thing like missing makeup. But now, in the company of these strangers, I felt so conscious of my face, despite my lipstick and eye shadow. I had to resist the urge to pull out my mirror, double-check my cheek.

While our mothers rode the escalators up to baggage claim, Jacob and I took the stairs, racing each other.

“No fair,” I said, as we started. “You’ve got longer legs.”

Jacob glanced over his shoulder at me, grabbed Mom’s spillover purchases that I had stuffed into one of his extra carry-ons. “Take your excuses somewhere else, Trouble Magnet.”

I looked past him, trying to measure how much farther I had to sprint with my heavy messenger bag banging against the side of my body. What lay ahead arrested me on that staircase.