Free At the Heart of the Universe by Samuel Shem Page B

close to saying no, now they said, “Yes!”
    â€œPeppie?” she says to him now, in a whisper so as not to wake Katie.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œI’ve missed you.”
    â€œAnd I you.”
    â€œIt’s my fault.”
    â€œNope. It takes two, you know.”
    She disengages carefully from Katie, and slips in beside him. Clio knows that he won’t push her. She feels the familiar big body, and as she settles into the crook of his neck, she breathes in the comforting scent of his hair, his aftershave. They caress each other, she his chest, he her breasts.
    Soon she hears him breathing deeply, asleep. Katie mumbles something from a dream. At once, Clio is attuned to her daughter’s needs. She finds herself thinking once again that she’s made a mistake in sending Katie to Spook Rock, an almost all-white school. She’s the only Asian, one of only two kids of color, the other an African American boy named Nigel, who is driven to school every day in a limo. Year after year of school photos of white children but for those two faces. How much of Katie’s growing isolation is from being Chinese? How much from being adopted?
    Clio needs to be close to her, and slips out of Pep’s bed into Katie’s. She puts her arms around her again. Her mind is too awake for her body. She finds herself thinking of their first trip to the orphanage, ten years ago. From the moment she first saw her, when the Chinese woman in the long white coat came out of the one-story redbrick building into the slanting autumn sunlight of the concrete playground with two babies in her arms and called out, first, “Ying!” for the one who, just then, became Faith Ying Schenckberg, and then, “Chwin! Chwin-Chwin!” for Chun, Katie Chun Hale-Macy, she knew they’d done the right thing. The sight of her baby stunned her, enfolded all her senses into one sense, of awe. There she was—her black hair tinted red in the sun and sticking straight up on top of her head, her round face and plump cheeks and fair skin and lips a pink of roses. Beautiful big eyes like teardrops on their sides and pupils dark as history. Dark irises too, with a catch of blue—but maybe it was only the reflection of the dazzling late-October sky. She was swaddled tightly in a tattered purple sweater, and wrapped up and tied with plain twine. She had just awakened and looked at them sleepily but steadily, as if strangely sure . From the start her eyes were so alive! As if, Clio said to Pep, she had been so tightly swaddled for so long—three months in the orphanage—that her arms couldn’t move and her fingers couldn’t touch, and she had learned to touch everything with her eyes. Her hair grew out from two dark whorls, a “double crown,” which her caretaker said was a sign of great wisdom. The hair on the back of her head was rubbed off, showing bare scalp—Clio realized with a sense of horror she had been kept lying on her back, unmoving, for hours at a time. Her heart went out to her. She fell in love instantly. Pep was weeping. In that one moment we went from two to three. Tomorrow we go back there again .
    Her mind floats this way and that over the incredible images of the day and settles on the vision of the woman at the police station in the white silk dress and blood-red sandals and umbrella and with the face of Katie at thirty. Again she watches her walk in, stare at her and Pep, disappear into a doorway and then into Changsha and seemingly off the face of the earth, this impossible possibility come on this tenth birthday, less an actual woman than an aura or a divine presence or even a sinister one, a breakaway spirit a rising and falling on a jasmine sea sure it’s impossible but happens...
    8
    The next morning Katie decides to wear her best dress to the orphanage. It is bright red, with white flowers on sinewy vines. It fits her frame closely, making her look older, less a girl