At the Heart of the Universe (42 page)



“Pep? Pep, wake up, but shhh, quiet—don't wake Katie.” He carefully gets up and limps on the uneven stones to the fire, where Clio is sitting on the chair. He takes the lone bench.

They are alone. Xiao Lu and the monk are sleeping in the cave. It's only ten o'clock—Clio waited until she was sure that Katie was sound asleep.

They sit face-to-face, reading each other in the warm, close glow. Pep sees the worry in Clio's face, and something else he can't identify. He's surprised at the acuity of his eyesight—no, not just that, his inner sight as well—he feels he's never really
looked
into her eyes this unflinchingly, searchingly, before. He sees her concern, her terrible fear that things are going very wrong here—and shivers. Suddenly he wants to tell her all the things he's come to understand during the monk's treatment, and share his terror that his screwed-up heart could throw a clot into his brain that would paralyze or kill him—wants to tell her
every true thing
!—but can't.

Tell her! Can't
.

And in that “can't” something wells up that he's felt once or twice in his life—as a boy at that moment when he sensed the dry depth of his father's disinterest in him, and as a man when he stared with his wife into a childless future. He wants to tell her but he sees in her eyes her fright and sadness and all at once he's weeping.

“Oh shit, I'm sorry—” He tries to stop but can't.

“What's wrong?”

Again he takes a deep breath and tries to say something but keeps on sobbing, his body shaking. And then he feels her arms go around him and he understands that his tears are for her, for their baby, for all of them. He holds on to her, hard.

Holding him, feeling his shudders, her heart opens and breaks a little. She hasn't seen him like this in years. Not since they said yes to China and were handed Katie and their hearts flew up like birds and they were in love with her and each other and life itself and began living human-sized lives. As she cradles him, this poor man whose tightness restrains his anger like her tightness restrains her sorrow, she feels his terror, senses how much they have lost, how lonely and walled-off each of them has become, how the connection they made with each other and their baby has become a connection only
through
her, so that for years when they have “taken time for themselves”—a weekly movie date or dinner up in Albany or a trip to New York—all they talked about was their child. Katie has been their connection—which makes Katie's distance, now, terrifying.

Seeing him so vulnerable, for a moment she feels confused. Her instinct is to say to him, “Pull yourself together, be strong like always,” but then she hears her mother's voice when her father didn't get tenure in locust entomology and crashed into depression—“Pull yourself together, Forbes!”—and she damn well will not follow that shit now.
Move! Accept him. Be with him where he is, right here
,
right now.
She squeezes him as tightly as she can, feeling their embrace as a life preserver in this harsh, isolating world.

They hug each other for dear life and for a long time. The strength that has seemed lost in either of them alone now seems to come back to both, in the shared flow of care, raveling them up, together. This little catch of fire, in their despair, warms them. Again they look into each other's eyes for a long moment before pulling away.

“Pep... I... thank you so much...”

“And you.” He wipes his eyes, sighs.

“Yes.” She collects herself. “But listen—we've got to get out of here. I've got a really bad sense about Xiao Lu, and it's getting worse. Why didn't she bring anyone to carry you out? We could be back in Changsha by now. Katie's moving toward her, starting to love being here, love being with
her
.
She's hardly
talking
to me anymore—and Xiao Lu knows it. Katie's learning words, sentences. A couple of times I even saw her cover her mouth with her hand when she laughed, just like her. We're losing her—
emotionally
. Whatever I try just makes it worse! I have this feeling there's a real possibility that Xiao Lu is going to try to take her.”

“Clee,
please
—”

“We
have
to take it seriously. The only thing that's kept her going all these years is the hope of seeing her daughter again. Look at the walls—over and over she writes her
name
?”

“What more can we do?”

“One of us has to be with them at all times. At night, one of us will stay awake—I'll put the chair against the door, to sleep. When the monk goes back to the monastery, if you still can't get across, we'll make
sure
he sends back the porters. And one other thing: Pep, we've
got
to stick together in this. In the cave thing, she tried to play you off of me, and she saw you waver—”

“I didn't—”

“Listen—if she sees the slightest crack between us, she'll use it. Right now, with Katie, you're the good guy. She'll still listen to you. So you've got to be really
there
with her, okay?”

“Sure. But she still looks to you first and foremost.”

“When the
hell
, Pep,
are you going to see how important you are to her, how powerful?
When
?”

He's startled at her vehemence. “Yeah, when indeed.” He sighs. “Sorry for my outburst. Guess I'm getting emotional too.”

“Sorry? Pep, it's a
treasure
.”

Choked up again, he takes her hands. “Thanks.”



Sitting there in the chair in the centuries-old stone hermitage, the embers casting a smoky glow and all kinds of clutter hanging from beams or tacked to walls or lying on sagging shelves, Clio feels her own heart racing. Despite feeling Pep so much with her, she feels like she's lost her bearings on place and time, as if she's in a fairy tale with a wicked witch, or in Hogwarts, or with Odysseus in the cave of the Cyclops—how Katie loved that story—Odysseus trying to figure out how to get his men out safely, all the while wondering which of them would be eaten next.
In a way it's so simple, with the Greeks.

The chair blocks the door, and soon she feels safe enough to sleep. But in that phantasmal hypnogogic moment just as she's falling asleep she's jolted awake by a voice—
She loves her more truly than she loves you
.
She stares around. Nothing.

She takes a sip of black tea, intent on staying awake. Vigilant.



At four the next morning the monk rings his bell and starts his chanting and wakes up everybody but Katie. Xiao Lu comes in and smiles and starts to boil water and cook congee.
First Pep, then Clio, goes to the latrine, the other guarding the sleeping Katie.

The monk finishes his devotions and walks into the hut and puts a finger boldly on Pep's neck pulse. He nods rhythmically, as if in time with it—which Pep and Clio take for a change for the better. But then, cursing softly through clenched teeth, he shows his frustration. His examination of the ankle is more satisfying. Given the soaking in cold water and the poultice of an ointment made from mixing some black mud downstream from the latrine with the same bear-bile stuff that Pep has been drinking, the purple color has changed to blotched lavender, and the swelling is gone. He asks Pep to walk on it. Pep nods and smiles—it's much less painful.

After an enormous breakfast prepared by Xiao Lu and Katie, the monk disappears into the cave, indicating that they all should follow. He takes a large, leather-bound volume out of his bag, opens it, and invites them to look. Clearly it is a textbook of Chinese medicine, with page after page of finely wrought drawings of human bodies crisscrossed with lines of meridians and latitudes and longitudes that make them seem more like maps than people. There are also drawings of moxibustion cups and internal organs and whole chapters on acupuncture needles and their placements. It's impressive, and they nod in appreciation of the monk's obvious expertise. He indicates that they should leave him to study. At the cave mouth they look back. He is bent low to the text, a finger tracing the pathways, with the intensity of a man wrestling his gods, or his demons.

Outside, Pep says, “Katie, I want to talk with you a sec, alone?” Clio goes off. When Katie and he are settled on a bench, he tells her how it's not good that she and Clio are getting into fights all the time, and that it's got to stop.

“Yeah, but she's like so nervous! Anything I do she doesn't like!”

“I know, I know, but put yourself in her shoes. She—and I—have a job to do, which is to keep you safe, and get you back home safely.”

“But like I told you before—nothing's
not
safe here! I'm just starting to have fun and she goes wild!” She pauses. “Not like you.”

“Mom and me are totally together on this, understand?”

“Not really.”

“Not really understand?”

“No,
you're
not really.”

“Trust me—we
are
, okay?”

Katie looks down at her running shoes and doesn't say okay.

“There's one big thing you can't do while we're here: you can't go outside the boundaries of this yard, from the moon gate to the cliff edge, from the cave to the woods over there,
unless one of us is with you
. Period. It's a rule.
Agreed
?”

Katie rolls her eyes. “What choice do I have?”

“On that, zero.”

“Okay, okay!”

“Say it.”

As if to say the word would destroy her very being, she grimaces and it slips out through her clenched teeth. “Agreed.” She gets up. “Now can I go? I've got a lot of work to do today.”

“Have fun.”

“I will!”

36

Xiao Lu and Katie again spend the day in ordinary ways but for Clio's—and now Pep's—heightened vigilance. They do the usual housekeeping tasks, and also go into the woods to gather mushrooms and herbs, Xiao Lu leading them to a damp, sunlit patch of obvious fertility—there are vegetables of all sorts, carrots and Chinese radishes, garlic and onions, bok choy and sweet potato. Katie and Xiao Lu prepare another dynamite lunch—which the monk eats by himself in the cave.

Clio is exhausted from being up all night. Pep tries to persuade her to take a nap and hand over the care of Katie to him, but she can't. To stay alert, she keeps up her intake of strong tea until her fingers tremble and her lips twitch. Despite several overtures, Katie doesn't respond. Clearly she is still angry. Clio can hardly stand it.

After lunch Katie sticks close to Xiao Lu, with Clio always nearby. Katie helps Xiao Lu cut up rags for the monk's quilt, sew them together, haul water and chop wood, cook and clean. Katie makes a point of getting down in the dirt. She digs with her bare hands for mushrooms or roots or vegetables, lying on her stomach to reach into rotting holes in fallen logs or stumps and coming up smeared with mud, black half-moons of dirt under her nails, and her T-shirt and shorts the wet-brown color of the forest floor. Filthy, she smiles at Clio as if to spite her.

In late afternoon, Pep and Clio sit on the bench at the corner of the house to get away from the intense tropical sun. Katie and Xiao Lu are on the edge of the clearing in the shade of a tall old pine, playing some kind of Chinese game that involves sticks and smooth river stones and a meticulous drawing of things in the dirt, upon which Katie is sprawled on her stomach, her face sideways on one hand, carefully tracing a figure on the ground. Xiao Lu is also on her stomach, drawing—or, it seems, extending Katie's part of the drawing—with Katie's head close beside hers.

Pep asks Clio to check his pulse. She puts her finger on his wrist and looks at her watch. The sunlight makes it hard to see the second hand, and they turn and face away toward the cave, creating more shadow. She has to concentrate to find the pulse, and then try to count it. She can't—it's still too high and irregular. To Pep it feels horrific, like it's tumbling over a waterfall and crashing on the rocks below. He shakes his head in dismay. Clio turns back to Katie and Xiao Lu. They're not there.

“Oh shit! Pep?”

She starts running this way and that all over the yard, calling, “Katie! Katie!” Racing around the clearing and a ways up each of the faint paths leading into the bamboo and the woods. “Katie? Katie!” Except for the echo, dead quiet.

Back in the yard, Pep joins her. They stand, catching their breath, staring around the grove in the stony mountain pass. Clio feels exhaustion come down on her, wanting nothing more than to go to sleep and for all this to be a bad dream, yet she feels adrenaline pumping and caffeine jittering—she's on a razor's edge. She tries to think, cradling her chin in her hands, fingers to her temples, pressing hard.