At the Heart of the Universe (18 page)

“
Never
?”

“No. We tried. Father was going crazy. Mother was crying all the time, lying in her bed. I had to take over the family. I was the mother of the family, I did all the work, I took care of Third Sister, of everything. I made sure that the family was okay. All the time I was writing to the son of the police chief who I met when I went to Tienja to find First Sister. He came to our village. He wanted to marry me. I did not want to go, leave our family, but I knew I could get money and send it home. Maybe because his father was assistant police chief, I can clear my father's name—and find First Sister. I was clever. If anyone knew where First Sister disappeared to, it would be the police. I had a secret motive for my life. I tried and tried for years, but did not succeed. I am the hero of the family. Like in a movie.” She lights up, and goes on excitedly, “Like the woman in
The Road Home
,
do you know it?” They did not. “She is very steady in her love for the schoolteacher who comes to her village, and waits for him to return, and spends her life happy, and then when he dies, far away from the village in the winter, she insists that the men of the village follow the old custom and carry him on their shoulders, home. In a snowstorm! A real woman! Like me. I stayed and tried to help. I helped you find Xiao Lu, didn't I? And now
I
am the one who needs help.”

“Do you think First Sister is alive?” Pep asks.

She looks down into her lap. “No, I don't think so. But I never stop thinking of her. I am always searching. Whenever I go to Changsha City, I look at every face to see if it is
her
.” She pauses. Rhett and Clio wait. “I am the one of our family who is left. Father is insane; Mother dead; First Sister gone, Third Sister some kind of fresh-air-needing hermit on a mountain? She is crazy too I think.”

“
Crazy
?” Pep says. The word comes out like a shot.

“Wait, wait,” Rhett says. “I don't think that's what she means. Chill.” He goes back and forth with her, trying to clarify. Clio and Pep feel a clutch of real fear—what if Katie's biological mother is mentally ill? Often when Clio or Pep asks Katie a question she just spaces out and doesn't answer—and both of them have been worried that their daughter's addiction to anything on a video screen is a willful withdrawal from human contact. Especially now, when she's started to talk about feeling “outsidered” socially at Spook Rock. As if dealing with people is just too hard, or even just being with people is. Animals, Katie said once to them, are easier. She often seems to prefer solitude, with her animals or her drawings.

“Okay,” Rhett says, finally. “Not ‘crazy'-insane—the
father
is crazy-insane.”

“Wonderful,” Pep says, sarcastically. “Great, just great.”

“She means ‘selfish.' Giving up her family, going off by herself.
Selfish
. In China, being selfish is
worse
than crazy. You stick out from the group at your peril.”

“Ah yes,” Clio says, relieved. “In America it's the opposite.”

Ming Tao is talking rapidly, and seems indignant. Rhett tries to catch up, though she keeps on talking as if they now can understand. “She's saying
she
didn't put herself first and run away, she
stayed
—‘I stayed and took care of everybody, and what do I get? I and my family,
we
need help now.' She feels she's gotten a bad deal in life.”

Clio begins to catch on to what Pep said before, that her idealized family reunion is descending to the level of a mercenary exchange. Rhett confirms that this is the direction things are headed.

“Bottom line, guys, is what do you want to know, and what'll you pay?”

“I want to know,” Clio says, with distaste, “
specifically
how to get in touch with Xiao Lu. How to get a message to her, in Chinese, for certain. Specifically and for certain I want her address.” Clio again opens her little notebook—a Shreve, Crump & Lowe silver case with lined light purple pages—and her Whale City Insurance pen. “She can write the address in Chinese here. You can write out the English.”

“Cool.” He hands Ming Tao the notepad, conveys Clio's message in slow, firm tones. She hefts the notebook admiringly, opens and closes the cover, looks at her reflection in the high-polished silver. She takes a finger and smooths out a trailing edge of eyeliner, turns her head this way and that, pleased—and writes nothing.

“She's not writing,” Pep says.

“I noticed.” Rhett asks her something. She smiles and nods and, looking Clio in the eye, talks a long time to Rhett.

“She says that even if she writes it down, she's not sure you can ever find it yourself, without her. She lives where there are no streets—she lives like a hermit in the woods—and you don't know what she looks like. She will go with you.”

“But we're not
going
there this trip,” Clio says, “and we can't come back for, well, I figured not until spring, at best. We can write a note—we'll do it on the ride back, after we clarify what's what in the birth father's family here—maybe there will even be a message we can send to her from her husband and daughter and in-laws—but
we need the information
!”

Rhett tells her this, echoing Clio's passion. Ming smiles broadly, and replies.

“Okay,” Rhett says. “Make her an offer.”

“We'll discuss it,” Pep says.

Ming Tao nods her head. She reaches out to shake hands, as if now that money is to be exchanged they can be great friends. To Clio her hand feels rough, coarser than you'd think, her grasp stronger, like a workingman's. For all her silky dresses and makeup she seems to have no empathy for Clio as a woman and a mother wanting to connect, nor to know what this one day might mean to her and Pep and Katie.



With a final desperate lurch the van heaves itself up into a small square in the center of the town of Chindu, shudders, and wheezes to a stop. The driver and Rhett hop out to ask for directions. Clio awakens Katie. Rhett and the driver get back on, and Rhett says that they can't go much farther in the van. They'll drive a few blocks to the other edge of town, to the road to the village.

“The family farm is not far from the village.”

“The farm!” Katie says, with excitement. “Dad, this really
is
an ‘amazing'!”

A few minutes later the van reaches the limit of its ambition—it is too wide for the narrow lane ahead. “Ohh-kay!” Rhett says. “All ashore that's goin' ashore!” He makes a special show of escorting Katie out.

Stiff-limbed and sore all over, they step into the sunlight. The heat is the usual hellish wet fuzz. They are at what looks like a dead end but for a narrow cart path shimmering a bright red-dirt aura up into the metallic glare as it rides along the bank of a narrow river and then curves away through what look like high stalks of sugarcane, out of sight.

Katie looks up the road with such excitement and hope that it's as if she could travel the distance to the farm in an instant.

“How many people here are excited?” Pep asks, with a big smile. “Raise hands?”

Katie's hand shoots up, as does Clio's, and then Rhett's. Pep's stays down.

“Daddy, aren't you excited too?”

He starts to jump this way and that, crazily. “Excited?” he says. “Look at me, I'm jumping out of my skin!”

“Daddy, don't!” Katie says, embarrassed, as a small crowd gathers around them.

Rhett starts to talk to them, and one man shouts back. They go back and forth like jazz musicians on a riff of dueling drums and muscular trombones. “This is as far as the van can go. We can rent motorbikes, or bicycles. By motorbike it's about fifteen minutes, and by bike it may be half an hour.”

“Motorbikes!” Katie cries out.

“Is it a difficult ride?” Clio asks.

Rhett asks someone in the crowd. “No. It's level, along the river. Then it's a little uphill for ten minutes. We have to go to a village called Ja Ja—and there we have to ask for direc—”

“Listen,” Clio says, “everything is taking longer than we planned. It's already eleven thirty—to make the train back we've got to leave here again by...” She checks her Movado. “To be on the safe side, by about five thirty. With travel to and from the farm, we'll have at best a couple of hours there. Bicycles will do.”

“Deal.” Rhett turns back to the man who can arrange this.

“And don't forget the helmets,” Clio calls out. Rhett stares at her. “Helmets. Plastic helmets. We don't ride without helmets. Katie can't ride without a helmet.”

“Mom!” Katie whispers to her harshly, embarrassed. “Stop!”

Rhett asks about helmets. The man bursts out laughing, repeats the Chinese word for “helmets,” and everybody else gathered around laughs too, presenting risk-ridden mouths that Pep sees as a “Before” in a commercial for reconstructive dentistry.

“He says he has no helmets.”

“Shit!” Clio says. “Why is everything in this country so difficult?”

“Welcome to China!” Rhett gestures to the three of them and says, “Where everything is difficult, and...”

Pep and Katie join in. “—And nothing is impossible!”

“Okay, okay—no helmets—but
total
caution. Let's go!”



“Look, Peppy,” Clio shouts back over her shoulder, “finally you've got your ‘lush green, lush green'!”

Pep smiles. For the first time in China they're all having fun—as if the landscape is living up to their high hopes. The bicycle ride along the river
is
lush green lush green, mostly past rice paddies and fava bean fields and wheat, with some sorghum and soy. Water buffalo abound. The greenish-brown noodle of water curls this way and that with hardly a ripple but for the rare fish flipping. Rhett points out ancient lychee trees bending down over the slow-flowing water like courtesans bowing before a stream of passing empresses. Great stands of rare ming aurelias and the more common mimosas—trees that look like they came to life out of classic Chinese scroll paintings—and all kinds of flowers in bloom, from red and purple wildflowers and fragrant jasmine, through great gatherings in backwaters of lotus pads sprouting sturdy tubes of stems that explode in big creamy flowers with streaks of pink like in Renoir's lily gardens, to wild clematis of deep purple and banks of bougainvillea, a rush of red and pink flowers piling on top of one another like kids playing capture the flag.

And then around a curve suddenly they see before them a small mountain. Lush green, yes, with sinewy plates of rice paddies glistening all over it like the scales of a snake or, as Rhett points out, like the scales of a dragon, for they are called in Chinese “dragon-backed mountains.” At the bottom of it they can make out the reflections of tin roofs—the tiny village of Ja Ja—“Nothing Village.” The village seems to float, suspended, in the lap of the little mountain, cradled in a hazy cloud of light green dotted finely with bright orange. Clio asks what the orange dots are.

“Persimmons,” he says. “Hunan persimmons are dynamite!”

“What's a persimmon?” Katie asks.

“The world's greatest fruit. You'll see.”

Pedaling easily up a slight incline, they are among the persimmon trees. They ride down a shaded lane, the ripe orange fruit hanging down all around them. Rhett stops, picks a few, and hands them around. Pep and Katie look at their fruits casually. Clio stares at hers carefully, a signature of the closest village to her daughter's birthplace. The fruit is as big as a man's fist, shaped like a tomato. Four perfectly interwoven leaves spiral out from the stem to lie flat over the dome of the fruit. The color is deceptive. Orange, but a subtle orange, as if underlaid with earthy brown, tanned like Chinese skin.

“We can't eat 'em,” Pep says. “Nothing unpeeled or raw. Not with the skins.”

“
Pep—my
man
! You
can't
eat the skins—they're bitter. You skin 'em!” He takes out a jackknife, opens the blade.

Ming Tao asks him what they said. He tells her. “When I was a girl,” she says, “in the Years of Starvation, we ate the skins of
everything
, to survive. We even ate acorns, and sorghum—which made all of us very constipated.”

“Rhett!” Pep cries, having suffered through booming diarrhea for days. “Can she get me some of those?”

Laughing, Rhett peels one of the fruits, sections it, hands it around, licks the juice, and starts on another. Ming Tao is slurping hers, in heaven. Clio takes a taste. Her eyes widen. “My God!” Katie licks a tiny wedge, shrugs, and hands it back. Pep now inspects his piece assiduously for any trace of skin, and bites. “Golly that's good. Gimmee another!”