The Fortunes (35 page)

Outside the director's window night has fallen, and he can see them all reflected in the dark glass as if on a screen. On her desk John sees a paper surgical mask, still bowed to the shape of the director's face, with a smudge of lipstick in its middle.

“Where's Mei Mei?” he asks. “It's all right if she's sick. We want to see her. We'll wait until she gets better. It's all right.”

But even as he says it, he knows it isn't. The director and Napoleon have a hurried exchange. John has never yearned so much to speak Chinese.

“Baby die,” Napoleon whispers at last, looking stricken, and he nods, over and over, of course, of course. Baby die. Babies die all the time. It's the most natural thing in the world.

Beside him, Nola's eyes are closed so tight the tears seem squeezed from them.

“When?” John says.

“This morning.” While he was out walking, he thinks. Or while everyone else was celebrating? While he was sitting in Starlucks? He always thought those copycat joints made the Chinese seem like flatterers or fools unable to tell the difference. Now he wonders if they're not mockery, if the Chinese aren't in on the joke. But the deception is the least of it. Poor, poor Mei, he despairs, not so lucky after all. He never met her, yet he feels like he's in mourning, so much so that what Nola says next doesn't surprise him, though Napoleon's and the director's faces fall in shock.

“I want to see her.”

There's a hurried, tumbling conversation in Chinese.

“It won't do any good,” Napoleon begins.

“I want to see her.”

“Is the truth,” Napoleon assures them, and he believes her, even though he knows she's tried to pass off the new baby as Mei.

“That's not why,” he tells her. He looks at the director. “Please, let us see her.”

He knows they want him to take the other baby. He knows they want to keep this quiet. He knows they want his money. He knows they'll allow it.

And they do. The baby in Nola's stiff arms is passed to the director, who passes her to a nurse. They're led into the basement, down a long corridor, bare pipes overhead. They pass an open door through which they glimpse huge washing machines, a line of dryers, their windows like a row of portholes on a submarine, and, dwarfed by the equipment, a group of toddlers folding laundry. Tiny shirts and pants. John thinks of little Lily.

At the end of the hall there's a small office, a doctor's, judging from the posters tacked to the walls, and beyond it a bare examining room. Everywhere in China is chilly, he's found (they're here off-season), but the room is frigid—not refrigerated but naturally cold, like a pantry, or a root cellar, or the grave, of course. He folds his arms, tucks his hands under the cuffs of his rolled shirtsleeves for warmth.

At the threshold Nola puts a hand on Napoleon's arm, shakes her head, and the guide nods, visibly relieved, stands outside, her back to the door, as if on guard.

Mei is bundled up on a metal desk that doubles as an examination table, and John's immediate feeling is how hard the surface looks, how drab and colorless compared to all the cribs he's ever seen. And then he notices her stillness. He's been around sleeping babies before—the children of friends—but the quality of this stillness is different. And then he sees it's not the baby—or not only—but also the adults. Normally we creep around a sleeping baby, hushed, gentle, slow, breath held. Now the director moves brusquely, jaggedly, her feet scraping the floor, not fearful of waking the baby, eager if anything to make a little noise, to affirm her own life. John makes himself inhale, exhale.

A cloth is raised. They look at her face, already faded to gray, as matte as the photo they've cherished. Her mole is a dark period at her temple. He imagines the life draining from it as from a hole.

It comes to him that all this time, all this ambivalence on his part was a kind of fear of this tiny baby, that somehow she would make him less real, less authentic, and he bows his head, begs for her forgiveness.

“Okay,” Nola says with a swallow, and John puts his arm around her quickly to steady her, leads her out and up the rough concrete stairs, away from what he can't help thinking of as the death floor.

Back in the director's office, slumped in low chairs, more Chinese flits over their heads. John has the toy elephant in his hand—no idea when he took it out, how long he's been gripping it. He remembers, absently, the huge elephant statues at the Ming tombs outside Beijing, Napoleon explaining that they were carved before elephants became extinct in China, in the fifteenth century. When he looks up, Napoleon is studying them carefully.

“You must decide, John, Nola. I'm so, so sorry. But will you take the other baby? The director says she's the very best they have. Strong, healthy. And you can have her for less.” Napoleon bows her head, tucks a string of hair behind her ear. “She is desperate. If you don't take, there will be questions, trouble for her, I think.”
And for you?
John reflects.
Is this your Waterloo? If you lose your job, will you be able to afford a child?
.

He appraises these two women who are trying to sell him a baby girl. He hasn't seen a man since he entered the orphanage.

The director says something else in an undertone.

“Come,” Napoleon says gently. “Spend some time with her.”

There is something indecent in all this, but when John looks at Nola, he knows she feels it too.
We have the diapers,
he wants to say.
What else are we going to do?
So they go along.

And in her eager panic the director ushers them into the ward.

The thick smell first—the cheap scent of wipes and talc and cleaning fluid—then the sound, almost industrial, like a factory floor, until he can begin to process the uproar of crying with, beneath the wails, an uneven, juddering beat—it takes John a further moment to identify it—of children pulling on crib bars, jumping on mattresses. The cribs are made of a black tubular metal—hence the industrial clamor—and he can't help but think of cages, of cells. When he makes himself banish that thought, the place reminds him of an old maternity ward, all the babies lined up, with perhaps a cigar-smoking dad peering in at them from behind a window, trying to identify his. Only here there's no glass between.

“Here.”

The director is holding out the baby to them. John stares at it, making sure it's the same one as before. Its legs are kicking, its face contorted, and for a moment, overwhelmed by the noise, put off by the aggression with which the director pushes the baby at them, both he and Nola freeze. And then Nola takes her into her arms.

The woman calls out in Chinese, and Napoleon, after a brief consultation, whispers tightly, “If you no like this one, she says . . . you can choose. See the others. Take any you want!”

She gestures to the row after row of babies.
Another one in half an hour.
John can suddenly understand why Stan and Bev have come back for a second child. “Like Chinese takeout,” Stan had joked. It had seemed crass before, but John gets it now. What will become of all these children? How can they save only one?

The director is reading names off the cribs—Zhen, Jia—hoisting another child in her arms, squeezing her as if to plump her up, or like a vendor attesting to the ripeness of a melon. In her white coat, she looks suddenly less like a doctor or even a scientist than like a grocer.

“No,” John says quickly. “We can't choose!” He looks warningly at Nola. “We can't!” Though he knows for sure only that he can't. It's overwhelming. He looks down the ranks of cribs and feels the way he sometimes feels in big-box stores, Costco, Ikea, even as the comparison revolts him. But then it's not just the sheer multiplicity. He can't choose between even two options. He couldn't choose what to do about their own pregnancy, after all, was only too happy to defer to Nola's right to choose (that's why, he realizes with a shock, she hates him a little bit), before that couldn't, still can't, choose China or America, wants both, which may be to say neither.

And what about the child? To be singled out, to live for all these others. To be one and represent many, and inevitably imperfectly—he knows what that feels like, that burden. There, gleaming darkly, is the germ of inauthenticity.

But Nola is nodding. “We can't choose,” she agrees softly. But she's not looking at him. The child has her finger in its tiny grip.

And this is what she wants, what they both want more than anything, not to choose, after all, but to be
chosen.
He by her, she by him, both of them by this child. It's part of why he loves Nola, he thinks, because she, a white American, chose him.

Napoleon looks at them narrowly, perplexed. She has a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, John notices for the first time, and then he recognizes how pale she's gone. “Okay, okay. She says, since you Chinese, John, she have a
boy
for you, tomorrow, next day latest.”

Baby penis.
John shudders.

“I'm not
that
Chinese,” he says, and it's true. He's never felt more American. He's finally reached the limit of his Chineseness, the outermost frontier, and it feels like a revelation, like making out the jagged line of the Great Wall from space. “We're taking her.”

And Nola pulls the baby close. “She's ours.”

And she is. By fate, by fortune, by luck, good or bad or both, which after all, commingled is fate. This man, this woman, this egg, this seed, this country, this town, this room, these people, this baby. The lucky ones.

He'd save them all if he could. But in the end one will have to stand for them all (though he leaves the envelope of money). It's not right, of course. It's fucked up. Many into one won't go. And yet the alternative is worse: to save none, to walk away empty-handed. The only thing worse than choosing is not choosing. And yes, it'll be a burden on the child, an intolerable one perhaps, but perhaps that's also what luck is, what it should be: a burden, a duty, an obligation.

Napoleon smiles with relief, as if she'd been offering them her own child.

On the way back in the bus, he holds the child and she falls asleep on his chest and he curls around her and sleeps himself all the way back to the hotel. But she wakes with him too when they pull up, begins to wail—wet or hungry?—and they hurry inside, John jiggling the plush toy desperately in her face—“See the elephant!”—until Nola takes her. His past self, the self who came in and out of these doors earlier today even, suddenly seems impossibly distant, another person. The baby's cries pin him to the present.

Napoleon bids them goodnight, reminds them of the morning's itinerary. She'll see them to the station, the train to Hong Kong, where they'll complete the immigration paperwork at the U.S. consulate before flying home in a couple of days. John tries to thank her, show there're no hard feelings, that they can trust each other to keep their secret. “We couldn't have done it without you, any of us. You do incredible work.” She smiles tiredly. Dark filaments of hair float about her face like the pencil lines of a sketch. “You're my last group,” she confides, not quite able to disguise her relief. “I'm quitting for when baby comes.” Her relief, John thinks, and perhaps too her distaste. He wonders if she's always felt that way or only now that she carries her own child. Tomorrow they'll tip her generously, proffer small gifts with both hands (cosmetics from Nola, American candy from John). Poor impersonal offerings. He had wanted to give her a copy of his book, but he knows it's bad luck;
book
in Mandarin also means “loss.”

It's late, and across the empty lobby John spies Pearl stepping out of an elevator. She walks toward them, tall in her heels, and he sees her taking them in, him, Nola, the bundle in Nola's arms. Her face is unreadable—inscrutable, he thinks, despite himself—but when she meets them she pauses as if waiting for the last echo of her heels on the marble and gestures to the baby. Napoleon makes as if to shoo her away, but John says, “It's all right.” He looks at Nola, and she steps forward. Pearl stares at the child for a long time, not baby-talking, not smiling, not waving. Waiting for the baby to see her, and still.

“Okay,” she says at last. She fixes John with a look and he nods once, the slightest bow. “Take her,” Pearl says. “Take her home.”

“Who was that?” Nola will ask him in the elevator, and he'll shrug, avoid her eye. But later that night, when they need a name that isn't a dead girl's—not Mei, not Anna, it'd be bad luck—he'll whisper it:
Pearl.
In the dark, sitting beside her, both of them awake now, watching the baby sleep, he'll hear Nola thinking about it, and he'll press his lips to her hair in a kiss—
mother of Pearl
—and feel her ease against him.

“I wonder what she'll be,” Nola murmurs a little later. “Listen to me. Typical mom.” But he holds her tightly. It's good to be typical for once, to ask a question they haven't allowed themselves for years.

“I'll settle for happy and healthy,” he says, because he already aches for her to be successful. Nola stifles a yawn. “Happy and healthy . . . and rich and famous.”

“I always wanted to be a rock star,” she says, giggling. “Olivia Newton-John.”

“What a coincidence. I always wanted you to be Olivia Newton-John too.”

She head-butts him softly.

“I always wanted to be an astronaut,” he recalls. Specifically, the first Chinese American in space, as he'd announced at the front of some grade-school class (he's startled to think there was a time when he'd innocently embraced his identity, seen it as an advantage).

“Never say never.”

“I'm pretty sure there already has been—a couple, at least.” Saying it, he dimly recalls one or both of them being asked if they could see the Great Wall from space and that in fact the answer was no (and, even more surprisingly, that the idea itself predated the space program, dating back to turn-of-the-century speculation about canals on Mars). Even if it had been true, he's read recently that huge swaths of China are increasingly invisible from space beneath a blanket of smog.