North of Beautiful (24 page)

“Yeah, and God knows what kind of accident is waiting for you if we left you, Trouble Magnet.”

“Gee, thanks.” I was too tired to formulate a witty comeback and would have forgotten it anyway when Jacob nestled me close to his side, tucking me into the warmth of his body. It felt so good to be held by him, I decided it wouldn’t be disastrous to wait all night for Merc. But I heard my name being called. At the curb, Merc hopped out of a minivan from the passenger side, and waved at me. He said something in Mandarin to his driver, who got out, too, and opened the trunk. I was reminded of Elisa. She had stopped e-mailing me about a month ago after we had exchanged a couple of messages; I chalked it up to her being busy, figuring out her life though I suspected it had to do with more than that. And now I wondered whether I’d see her at all.

Merc approached us, his expression assessing, making me aware of how close Jacob and I stood next to each other, how easily his arm rested around my shoulders. I quickly pulled away from Jacob as though we had been doing something wrong.

No welcoming hug from Merc, just: “Hey, you made it.”

You did, too. “Yeah, miraculously.” I wondered what Jacob made of us, our stilted welcome. “I can’t believe you have a driver.”

“My company requires it,” he said defensively. “Liability. Don’t want the expats getting into accidents and getting sued.”

After I introduced Merc to Jacob, I said, “Mom’s inside.”

Instead of apologizing for keeping us waiting, Merc now barraged Mom with a million questions about the trip, how she was feeling. That’s what living with Dad had made us good at: deflecting. Rerouting. Diverting. We were the air traffic controllers of conversations. Merc threw himself into becoming our one-man porter, carrying our heavy luggage over my protests.

It was strange how commanding and self-assured Merc was here amidst unfamiliar words and people, makes of cars I’d never seen before. While Merc and his driver wrangled the luggage into the minivan, I felt my world expand far beyond Dad’s gridlines, far beyond Colville. The weariness of travel sloughed off me. Only then did I allow myself to admit that I had made it. Me, the girl who had dreamed of traveling but hadn’t left Washington State except for once. I was standing in China.

I was in China.

I breathed in, chain-smoking the acrid fumes of the passing cars. In those fumes, I smelled my freedom.

It was completely dark by the time we reached the Jinmao Tower. I only woke when the minivan stopped abruptly. How could I have fallen asleep and missed the Shanghai skyline, famous for its futuristic, fantastical buildings?

“Don’t worry.” Jacob had guessed the reason behind my sigh when I followed everyone out of the minivan only to have the tower’s overhang block the view. “You’ve got plenty of time to see everything.”

Still, I wanted to rush around the city now, a giant geocache, find everything I had read about in the books I had borrowed from our tiny library. I wanted to taste the food, listen to the people. Energized, I set for the tower’s gleaming gold doors, needing to get to wherever we were going fast.

“Someone’s awake now,” said Norah, yawning. Her shawl was askew and her makeup worn off. As well-traveled as she was, the trip had taken its toll on her, too.

Before dropping Jacob and his mom off at the hotel reception desk on the fifty-third floor, we all stopped at Merc’s law firm on the forty-second. The most personal object in his office was an antique map, handsomely framed, a high school graduation present from Mom and Dad. Other than that, there was nothing personal in this corner office designed to impress with its sleek desk and aerodynamic chair.

“The view’s better up on the observation deck,” Merc said. “Eighty-eighth floor.”

“This is high enough,” said Mom nervously. She stood, hand on his door, as far from the windows as possible.

Not me. Nose to glass, I relished Shanghai’s whimsical skyline. It was as if the city’s architects had thrown away everything people assumed about what buildings were supposed to look like, and tried new forms: orbs! Triangles! Even Jinmao was a reimagined pagoda, hard- angled as it strained upward to reach a steel-and-concrete heaven. If Karin’s dad saw this nighttime spectacle of rainbow-hued lights, he would have felt shamed, his 60,000-watt homage to Halloween a faint shadow of this citywide lightscape.

“Mom, look,” I said, beckoning to her. “It’s beautiful.”

She shook her head slightly, too scared of heights to move from her comfortable corner. So I walked over to her, took her hand in mine, and guided her to within a foot of the window, holding on tightly.

“Can you believe you’re in China, Mom?” I asked.

“No.” Mom shook her head as she peered tentatively down at the cars, the people, the bustle on the streets far, far below us, swallowing at the vaguely dangerous sight. This city didn’t just dwarf Colville; it eclipsed Seattle.

Mom made a choking sound. I squeezed her hand comfortingly, glanced over at Norah, who hadn’t said a word since we came in here. She was staring bleakly out the window, looking at absolutely nothing. I bet I knew where she was — half a world away in Seattle, with Trevor. And with her ex who was days away from remarrying and starting a new life without her.

Then Merc, too, noticed Norah, and ambled over to her, pointing something out in the horizon. Both of them looked hungrily into the yawning night, these two titans of the business world who had everything at their disposal. It was as if they were searching for something. Or someone. I’d never seen two more lost people.

“We could check out the observation deck tomorrow,” Jacob said, now at my side.

Tomorrow. I grinned at him.

“You kids can do that. Lois and I have plans,” said Norah with a conspiratorial wink at Mom.

“We do?” Mom asked, too taken aback to notice that though I was still standing close to her, I had let go. She turned to Norah, hesitating like she had no idea what she wanted. And then, she said, “Well, sure. But what are we doing?”

“It’s a surprise.”

It was Mom’s face that betrayed surprise when she realized she wasn’t holding her usual safety net, me. Before she could panic, I grasped her arm and led her out of Merc’s office. “See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

From behind me, I felt Jacob, his breath kissing the back of my neck, making me shiver as though his lips had been pressed in that same exact spot.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Chapter twenty-one

Keys

YOU WOULD THINK I’D FALL asleep as soon as I collapsed into bed. Mom had. Through the walls, I could hear her light snoring next door in Merc’s bedroom, sighs mixed with breathy rumbles, sounding sad even in her dreams. I was buzzing. The gleaming highway lights from Jinmao to Merc’s neighborhood in the Jing An district could have been running in my veins, powering the replay of the last twenty-four hours in my head: my marathon conversation with Jacob on the plane, Norah and Merc staring out at Shanghai like the two loneliest people on the planet, Mom and me here at last in China.

My thoughts turned to tomorrow. Despite my best intentions to remain Zen about traveling, I fretted about us veering off our itinerary. Days ago, I had memorized the activity-by-activity matrix I had mapped out of all the things we would do and see while we were here. Along with the route we’d take to get from one place to another, I had created a list of things to pack according to day and activity — notebook and coloring pencils for sketching at Yu Gardens, the photocopied map I had found of every building on the Bund, my laminated synopsis of Shanghainese history. But now that we were stopping at Jacob’s hotel in the morning for Norah’s “surprise,” my schedule was obsolete before we’d even started. God only knew what that surprise would be.

After twelve hours on the airplane, my mouth felt sucked dry, so I went in search of water. For some acoustical reason I didn’t understand, I could barely make out Mom’s snoring in the hall. I peeked into the living room, saw no one, continued to the tiny kitchen. It was almost two in the morning. Merc must have slipped out while I was showering off the traces of travel, but where?

My hand was on the faucet before I thought better of drinking water from the tap — yup, you got it: Dad had told us about a guy who picked up some stomach-eating bacteria from tap water. So I used the purified water from the cooler in the corner. As I automatically wiped up the few drops of water that had leaked from the cooler onto the floor, I noticed how antiseptically clean the kitchen was, devoid of any scent. I doubted Merc ever cooked in it. Even the vents behind the cooktop gleamed shiny new.

Sipping my glass of water, I paused in the living room, surprised at how adult it looked. Merc’s apartment was bigger than I thought it would be, furnished more tastefully than he could have pulled together by himself. Elisa was stamped all over the décor, from the tailored sofa accessorized just so with orange and green throw pillows to the elaborately carved curio cabinet. As if my brother knew what curios were, much less bothered to collect and display them. But there they were, knickknacks: a carved chop in his Chinese zodiac sign, the horse. An oxblood red vase. Some kind of bronze combination lock with Chinese characters etched on its five wheels. Proof that Elisa was important to him.

A key jiggled in the front door, and Merc shuffled in, his necktie loosened, his briefcase slung over his shoulder. He was so haggard he was gray.

“Hey,” said Merc softly, surprised I was still up. He dropped his keys on the hallway table carved with dragons before lowering his briefcase quietly to the floor. “Can’t sleep?”

“I’m too wired,” I admitted. “Where were you?”

“I had some stuff I had to finish at work.”

“At two?”

He shrugged, shook out of his jacket. Hanging above the dragon table was the collage I had made for him a year ago, the same piece Elisa had mentioned at Christmas. That’s when it occurred to me; I hadn’t seen a single photograph of Elisa. Or anyone else, for that matter.

“So when do we get to see Elisa?”

My abrupt question startled Merc so much that he forgot he was hanging up his jacket. He mumbled something or another while closing the closet door, jacket still on his arm. And then he grabbed an inch-thick document from his briefcase and flung himself into a chair in his living room. The motion was so practiced, this had to be his regular routine: work at work, then work at home.

“What’d you say?” I asked.

“We’re not together anymore.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated.” He opened his document, and immediately deflected, “Is Mom asleep?”

“Yeah. She was worn out.”

“It was a huge trip for her.”

I nodded.

“She wouldn’t have come without you,” he said, and I knew that was as close to him ever saying “thank you for bringing her” as I was ever going to get.

Even if he couldn’t say the words, I would: “Hey, thanks for sending us the tickets.”

He nodded brusquely, almost embarrassed.

I should have apologized to Merc for my abrasive e-mail — what better chance would I get? — but sitting across from him with his jaw so set, his hand poised to continue working, I let the opportunity die. Our lack of intimacy had never bothered me much. I’d always been a lot closer to Claudius, which Mom attributed to our being just three years apart, but the distance between me and Merc had to do with a lot more than the twelve years spanning us. He was a floe of ice unto himself, remote. That’s why I liked Elisa, really liked her. I had hoped that she would have been my guide to the real Merc, the one she had thawed.

I stifled a yawn and sat on the couch across from his chair, despite knowing that Merc wanted privacy to finish correcting his legal brief. The careless pile of pillows, sheets, and comforter that he would use later crowded me to one end of the couch. So I shoved them to the middle, and settled against the colorful throw pillows.

“What?” he asked, his question sounding like: what are you still doing here?

If I were Mom, I would have left the room — complete with a profuse apology, accepting that her very presence was a nuisance. In-stead, I asked conversationally, “So what are you working on?”

With his red pen poised for future corrections, Merc answered me, as professorial as Dad ever was: “A Chinese company is about to go public on the NASDAQ. So I’ve got to review all the initial public offering documentation.” He said something else, but I lost him at NASDAQ, his legalese a foreign language to me.

“Uh-huh.” I suppose a truly interested person would have probed more deeply and a good conversationalist would have asked more scintillating questions, but my traveled-out brain couldn’t even form the simple words: what are you talking about? Right then and there, I lost Merc to his work again; he was back to poring through his document.

My outreach to Merc stalled, I was about to give up, call it a night, when I noticed the two six-foot-long maps hanging above the mantelpiece, mounted and framed without glass. The topmost map was of China, the bottom, a map of the world; both were covered with pushpins. Now, I could ask him about the fragment of the China map I had brought with me. Now, I could ask him how it had gotten onto our property, whether he had anything to do with it.

Instead, I asked, “You’ve been to all those places?”

“What?” Merc blinked, waking from the mind-numbing effects of dense legalese.

I pointed to the maps. Merc glanced at them like he’d never seen them before. “Oh. Just the orange pins. The green ones were the places on our — my — tick list before I leave.”

I asked, “When’s that, exactly?”

“I don’t know. Another two years?”

“But you said two years, max, in China.”

He shrugged. “Plans change, Terra.”

No, I wanted to say. Plans don’t change for no apparent reason, especially changes to my master plan. See, according to my plans, Merc was supposed to move back to Boston — which, compared to China, wasn’t too far from Williams. According to my plans, I’d be able to see him a hell of a lot more than we had seen each other these last two years. But then again, I wasn’t going to Williams anymore. And he wasn’t moving back to his practice in Boston. Plans did change. What was the point of being an adult if you couldn’t control your master plan?