At the Heart of the Universe (50 page)

“You know... I mean... it was a her?” Katie asks, her voice trembling.

“Yes.”

“I would've had a big sister?”

“That's right, honey.”

“But you do,” says Xiao Lu.

“Yeah. But if you had her, Mom, maybe you'd never 'a had me. It's all kinda
weird
. Did you ever get pregnant again?”

“No,” Pep says. “We tried, tried hard, went to doctors, everything. Never. Maybe it was just that by the time we tried to have children, we were older.”

“Why were you so old?” Xiao Lu asks.

Clio smiles. “We didn't meet until we were older—I was in my thirties, Pep even older. I left my family, wanted to have adventures, see the world.”

“And I never fell in love before,” Pep said. “It was love at first sight. We fell deeply in love—crazy about each other. But even as much as we loved each other, the pain of losing our baby was so depressing, we couldn't even
think
of adoption for a long time. When we finally did, we found out that it was almost impossible for us to do. The rules were against us, because we were older, and we hadn't been married long enough. We started to argue with each other, we fought—a lot. For a while it seemed like we would split up. The marriage almost died. Just because of the rules.”

“The rules were against me too!” Xiao Lu says, passionately. “The rules, and my in-laws. The rules almost killed us both, Chwin-Chwin.”

“But we couldn't give up,” Pep says. “Life without a child, for us, wasn't really life. We felt so depressed, walked around in a daze—like facing death every day.”

“Until we heard that we could adopt from China,” Clio says. “The moment we heard, we knew it was right.”

“Why was it right?” Xiao Lu asks.

“I was always drawn to China. My best friend, Katie's godmother, Carter, spent years in Asia, some in China. As soon as I heard ‘China,' I said, ‘Yes!'”

“And my family,” Pep says, “is from an island called Nantucket, and they were whalers, and sailed to China to trade in silk and tea and rice and opium, hundreds of years ago. For me, too, it was
so
right—a big ‘Yes!'”

“Can I tell Xiao Lu about the ‘Chun'?” Katie asks, excitedly. They nod. “Well, I wasn't there when it happened but—” She stops. “I mean I
was
there, but not
there
there, I mean I was born already
here
and in the orphanage, but I wasn't there with them when it happened like I'm going to say?”

Rhett, with a contorted brow, tries to communicate this, and fails.

Breathlessly Katie goes on, “So then like they were supposed to go to China to get me, but they didn't get their documents like their police record ready in time, so their friends went to China to get
their
baby first. And it was Christmas and they wanted to give their friends a Christmas card to welcome them home, and they found one. It had a Chinese character on the front and on the back it said that the character meant ‘New Beginnings,' it was like from the third chapter of a real old Chinese book called the
I Ching
and—” Rhett slows her down, to catch up.

“What is
I Ching
book?” Xiao Lu asks Rhett.

He stops and thinks. “Not sure.” He turns to Pep. “What is the
I Ching
? We never heard of it.”

Clio and Pep are amazed. Sure that they aren't pronouncing it correctly, they try to explain what it is—
The Book of Changes
, thousands of years old, one of the oldest books in the world, a classic in Chinese, a book of prophecies, of fortune telling?

No, neither of them knows it.

“Astonishing,” Clio says to Pep.

“Thank you, Chairman Mao,” he says. “I guess that by their generation, it had been totally wiped out.”

“
Whatever
,” Katie says with irritation, wanting the stage back. “So then this character for ‘New Beginnings' is all about a plant born in the dark from a little seed and
chaos looms
!” She smiles
.
“But then it rises up from the earth into the nice beautiful light. And the card seemed so cool to them they didn't give it to their friends but
they kept it for themselves
! They even like made a
banner
of it, and
hung it up in their bedroom
! Because they were going to have a ‘New Beginning' in their life. And then, and then...” She looks at Clio and Pep and rubs her hands together with excitement, letting out little giggling squeaks. “And then
two weeks later
they got a call from the adoption lady, with news from the orphanage in China. And the lady said there were only
two things
they knew about their baby: her
birthday
, and her
name
. And her name was...
the same name as the character on the card
;
it was Chun
!”

Xiao Lu's eyes get big. She flushes and takes Clio's hand.

“My dad started crying and my mom fell down on the floor!” Katie screeches with delight, goes to the table, and gets her calligraphy to show them. “And of all the like
millions
of Chinese characters, it was
mine
,
me
! And this is the ‘Chun.' See?”

It is the character Katie drew a few days ago. Xiao Lu understood, then, that it was a bridge between the ancient pictograph and the modern character, a bridge unknown to her. To have it come to her this way, this lost character from her lost daughter, with the
karma
of connection between her life and the lives of these kind people, is astonishing. She sits there speechless, nodding. Then she gets up and shows them, in two “Chun scrolls,” the other two characters, and explains how this is a bridge. And how it all means “New Beginning,” or “Spring.”

They ask the meaning of the scrolls. Rhett translates. “Spring returns flowers no fade,” he says—the literal translation. He tries again, “When Spring comes, the hidden flowers come up and blossom.” He reads others. “‘When Spring winds stop, moon shines clear'; ‘A Spring child, when a woman is twenty-eight, is good fortune.'”



After lunch, it is time to leave. Pep produces his business card, Clio writes down all their numbers and e-mails—“in case,” Katie says, “she gets a computer.” They talk about bringing her to Columbia on a visa.

Rhett takes photos of them standing in front of the house, at the cliff edge, with the fragrant ming aurelia, in the house, and in the mouth of the cave. At the flash the bats squeak and scatter, gliding here and there, and finally seek deeper dark.

To Xiao Lu the walk back to the temple is funereal, reminding her of the journey with her mother's body in the wheelbarrow, her half-crazed father trailing along behind, up the mountain from the river to the run-down little temple where the monks would do the cremation. Was Tao there, then? She can't recall. This walk seems even worse.
She is in good hands, yes, but how will I bear it again without her?

Clio is worried. First that something will happen to keep them from getting there—but also that nothing will happen and that the wheel of loss will merely turn. She walks along, listening to Thalia's inane chatter. Finally she says, “Would you mind not talking? This path is an old pilgrimage path between the monastery and the Dusk-Enjoying Pavilion. Would you mind walking in silence?”

“But why? We've got to amuse ourselves somehow.”

“Well, then walk ahead or behind—I don't care, just don't spoil it!”

“Now you just wait a second, missy! I came all this way—”

“
Shut up
!”

Thalia looks mortified. Settling her Great White Hunter hat with a
harumph
that Clio can barely keep from laughing at because it reminds her of the precious English literary novels they were forced to read in Mr. Parkman Howe's Academy for Girls, Thalia stomps off to where Rhett is lighting another cigarette, using the smoke to try to discourage the pestilential insects. Clio feels great—lighter, freer. Her sister is stirring up her old rebelliousness, her wish to break free and do outrageous things in wild places. She wonders,
Why, then, did I ever go
“
home
”
? Why the hell did I ever go back?
She finds herself wishing now that the way back were forgotten, hidden away, and she an empty boat, floating adrift.



When True Emptiness spots Pep, he breaks into a big smile and bows a formal Buddhist greeting. For the first time in his life Pep Macy bows to someone too. The monk motions him into his office. Pep insists Xiao Lu go first. Appalled at the severity of her monkey bite, the monk sets off a string of red firecrackers, and then, gathering the spent gunpowder and paper and mixing it with what could be rancid Tibetan yak butter, makes a poultice and wraps it from shoulder to elbow in a snow-white Red Cross bandage. He gives her a packet of medicine.

He then ushers Pep and Rhett into his consultation room, a former classroom of the monastery, long abandoned. All along one wall are hundreds of two-foot-tall carved and painted wooden Buddhas, primitively done, as if by novices. The colors are faded, the paint chipped, but the hundreds of eyes are somehow insistent, although insistent about what, Pep can't tell.

Katie, Xiao Lu, and Clio are immersed in the carp in the reflecting pool outside.

Thalia is buying souvenirs in the Elephant Temple Gift Shop.

True Emptiness puts his fingers on Pep's pulse and nods proudly. He does a more careful communion with the pulse, checks out the ankle—and for some reason does an extensive sounding of Pep's armpits. He says that
almost
all problems are cured, but that more medicines are needed. He goes to an old floor-to-ceiling cabinet, rummages around, and returns with a fistful of matter that he parcels out into paper packets. He writes down the doses, timetables, and route of administration, one of which, to his own great hilarity, is up the butt. Pep asks if these will assure his continued health. The monk holds his thumb and forefinger together in front of Pep's eyes, and lets them go in the universal sign of “Poof!”—fairy dust being released, vanishing up into nowhere, not even air.

“Take this correctly,” he says, “and you'll be forever smiling and talking. Smiling like an idiot and clucking like a chicken!” They all laugh.

“How long do I take the medicine?”

“Not long,” he says. “Only for
this
lifetime.” He laughs again, bows, and starts to leave. But then he stops and asks Pep to remove his hat. He peers at the scars of Pep's chronic scraping of skin off his scalp from bashing into the low beams of China, and is not pleased. He sets off a string of
green
firecrackers, and applies the same gunpowder, yak butter, and white bandage. He bows goodbye.

Rhett and Pep go out and tell Clio, Katie, and Xiao Lu the good medical news to much delight. No one knows what to do next. The moment hangs, neglected.

Xiao Lu gets up, thinking,
I can't stand this.
She says, “It is time to say goodbye.”

“Don't you want to stay for dinner,” Clio asks, “and for the dusk meditation?”

“No. My food is better, and I do not often meditate with them.”

“But I thought you were a Buddhist?”

“No. I do not believe in religion. My mother did, with her little box of gods. I do not. I heard once that God has no religion. I believe that.”

“
Your
food,” Pep says, “
is
better. It is delicious! So fresh and healthy!”

“Yes,” Xiao Lu says, “the food here stinks. It was one reason I had to find another place to live, away from them and their religion and their food.”