North of Beautiful

by Justina Chen Headley

  “Mom,” I began afresh, “what should I do about Erik?”

  “You mean, what should you do about Jacob? Or why you’re still together with Erik?” she asked, surprising me. She was striding fast now, faster than I had ever seen her walk in the last few years. I don’t think she saw any of the buildings we were passing, not the Hall of Supreme Harmony or the Hongyi Pavilion. Finally, she slowed, panting a bit, sweating a lot. “Why are you?”

  “Because . . .”

  “Because you slept with him?”

  “Mom!” And then grimacing, I looked away, mumbled, “How did you know?”

  “I just did.” She waved impatiently. “And I don’t agree with what you did. But that’s not a good enough reason to stay together with a boy.”

  I’m not sure what I expected Mom to say, but her commentary on my sex life wasn’t it. After all, she had always warned me that relationships were hard work. That divorce wasn’t an option. I had so needed to know that I had someone, it didn’t matter that that someone wasn’t right for me.

  She chewed on her lip, wanting to say something more.

  “What?” I asked. Jump the moat, Mom.

  “You didn’t get pregnant the way I did. You don’t have to be stuck.”

  I swallowed. “You don’t have to stay stuck, Mom.”

  She just shook her head as if it was too late for her. “Be careful with Jacob. That boy has been through enough.”

  “I know,” I said sharply. And then softened my voice. “I know that. I should have broken up with Erik before coming. I just wasn’t sure of Jacob.”

  “Are you now?” she asked quietly, but her eyes never left mine.

  With no hesitation, I nodded. Jacob was the kind of guy who never said anything unless he meant it. He was the kind of guy who would break up with a girl if his heart wasn’t into the relationship. He was also the kind of guy who would never date someone who already had a boyfriend.

  “I’ll break up with Erik as soon as we’re back home,” I said out loud, more for myself than for Mom.

  Mom nodded. “That sounds like a good idea.”

  Without needing a map, I knew what lay before us: the Meridian Gate, the central entrance to the Forbidden City that was once the exclusive domain of the emperor. He alone strode through this entrance. Directly outside lay Tiananman Square, the site of protests and repression. But even quashed rebellions leave us different. Because freedom may be a forbidden fruit in tyrannies, but once tasted, it is unforgettable. No matter how desperately Dad tried to contain us, we were all spinning out of his control. My brothers had orbited away from home. I took my untreatable face to the dermatologist against his wishes. The one person he had corralled with any effectiveness was Mom — and here she was, thousands of miles away from him. We had all mounted our own private rebellions successfully.

  Unexpectedly, Mom asked, “Honey, did you know that the empress was allowed to go through this gate only one day in her life?”

  “Yeah, her wedding day. How did you know?”

  “Norah told me.”

  Probably during one of their talks about marriages . . . and her ex-husband’s remarriage. I looked at Mom, knowing the same idea was already forming in her head from the way she narrowed her eyes at that gate, daring it in a game of chicken. And I said, “Well, it’s time to change history, don’t you think?”

  I took her hand in mine, not the way I used to hold hers as a child, but with our fingers woven together. And we strode through the archway of emperors and into the open — hand in hand, my mother and I.

  Chapter twenty-seven

  New World

  THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER AN early start, Mom and I sat aboard a cable car, sailing us up the lush green mountainside to the highest point on the Great Wall in Mutianyu, a remote section of the Wall off the beaten tourist track.

  “You might not want to look down,” I advised Mom. While I wasn’t scared of heights, I did wonder about the safety of the cable car, swaying as it was on the thin overhead cord of wavering steel.

  Even though her face was white and her hands gripped the edge of her seat, Mom kept her eyes open, fixed ahead. When we disembarked and started past a group practicing tai chi on the Wall, Mom actually dared to peek over the ledge. While she gasped — it was a long way to the ground — she didn’t back away. Instead, she motioned me to her side, and both of us studied the expansive vista of hunchbacked mountains and the Great Wall itself undulating in front of us, the spine of the dragon, some call it. I could see why. It was as if the mountains themselves had been peeled back, laying open the skeletal wall. Mom squeezed my arm. “It’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful.”

  What was beautiful, I wanted to tell Mom, was both of us on this wall, designed to keep invaders out, but failed. The nomads still sacked China. When it came down to it, there was no way every section of this 3,000-kilometer wall could be kept intact and protected, not when someone was determined to break in. Like us.

  I approached a man, asked him to take a picture of us by way of lifting up my camera, pointing at Mom and me, and then smiling. Jacob was right; smiles were disarming.

  Later, Mom and I began to walk the length of the Wall, which had so many more stairs than I thought it would. For some reason, I had pictured the Wall as one continuous flat; it was more like a gentle roller-coaster with hills and valleys.

  “Oh, I think this might be as far as I go,” Mom said, gazing uneasily at the fifth steep flight of uneven stone steps rising before us.

  “Here, Mom.” I held her arm to help her up. “Just a little ways more.” And then to distract her: “Can you believe we’re here? On the Great Wall?”

  “No.” She was breathing hard, her face flushed from exertion. I started to worry that I was pushing her too much. She might have a heart attack; she hadn’t exercised like this in years.

  “Have a seat, Mom.” I wiped off a block of rock for her and crouched next to her. “So was this worth it?”

  She threw her head back and laughed openmouthed in a way I had never seen her at home, a deep-throated chortle that started from the very depths of her soul. “I had a moment when we were touring the . . . what was it called?”

  “The Forbidden City?”

  “No, that old neighborhood.”

  “Hutong.”

  “Right.” She clapped her hands. “The hutong. And my rickshaw almost crashed into another. Then I wasn’t so sure.”

  “I didn’t see that.”

  “No?” Mom smiled secretly, proud of her own adventure. “I had no idea. . . .”

  “No idea what?”

  “That there was so much to see in the world.”

  We both looked over the Wall to the west, where I could imagine the thundering of horses’ hooves as nomadic warriors approached the Wall, intent on breaching it. To the west, the rest of the Silk Road lay with its promise of sand dunes and camels and caravans. And beyond that Europe.

  “There is so much to see,” I repeated. And then, “It’s too bad Merc didn’t come with us. You know, he hasn’t seen anything in China.” He hasn’t seen anything of us. Of me.

  Mom looked thoughtful, brushing grit that I had missed off her seat of stone. Then she said, “It’s his loss. All we can do is tell him what he missed, and hope that next time, he’ll make a better choice.”

  I snorted. As if telling him that would convince him to put down his BlackBerry.

  “You know, honey” — Mom wound a loose thread from the bottom of her sweatshirt around her finger, pulled, and tore it off — “one day he’ll realize what he’s sacrificed.”

  I guessed from her wistful expression as she blew the thread into the air, watched it fly and disappear over the Wall, that she was thinking of all the trips she hadn’t taken with her sister. I was shocked when she admitted ruminatively, “I was supposed to go with Susannah to Guatemala. I had promised her.”

  “I didn’t know that. I’m glad you didn’t go!” If she had, Mom wouldn’t be sitting here ne
xt to me. She would have been on the bus that had plunged over the cliff, killing the passengers, including Susannah. “Why didn’t you?”

  “There was that conference in Seattle for port-wine stains, do you remember?”

  I reared back so hard that I lost my balance, the truth bowling me over. I stood up now and rubbed my tailbone. I had always assumed that it was Dad who prevented Mom from going, from living her life, from traveling with her sister. “You didn’t go because of me?”

  “Susannah didn’t understand that. She was so angry with me.” Mom puffed out her cheeks and then blew, remembering what must have been a nasty conversation with Susannah. “I should have been on that trip with her —”

  “Mom, don’t say that.”

  “— and there were so many others that I should have gone on with her.” Mom nodded emphatically, fell silent, and I knew that was all she was going to say. Her breathing, I was glad, had evened out. And then suddenly, Mom grabbed my hand. “Merc and Claudius are your only brothers.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “No,” she said fiercely. “They’re the only ones you’ll ever have.”

  I heard what she was telling me: don’t do or say anything that will push them away forever. But did they realize that I was their only sister?

  I stretched up on the balls of my feet, feeling antsy. I needed to move, needed to get away from this conversation. “Shall we?” I asked.

  “You know, I’m going to rest a bit and turn back. You go on, though. I’ll meet you at the bottom of the cable car.”

  I looked at the Wall, undulating in front of me into the horizon. Jacob had left me with the GPS and coordinates for a geocache not far from here. And then there was a toboggan ride at the end of this section of the Great Wall that I was dying to try. I mean, tobogganing down the Great Wall! Mom would never get on one of those sleds. But this was all moot; I remembered how much she had struggled on the steps to get this far. “I’m not leaving you here by yourself.”

  “Then I’ll just sit here and look out. You can come back for me, then. Really,” she said firmly, “it’s what I want.”

  Without another word, Mom took out the journal I gave her on her birthday a couple weeks before the trip. I had yet to see her using it. But then again, it could have been because she never had privacy; I wanted to give her that now, space to think with no one intruding or eavesdropping or demanding something from her. So I said, “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

  “Take your time, honey,” she answered without looking up from the journal. “We’re only here once.”

  There still weren’t many people on the Wall, which freed me to go at my own pace. The wind had picked up, and while it didn’t feel strong enough to blow me off the Wall, I shivered and threw on the sweatshirt that I had tied around my waist just in case.

  As I approached the first watchtower, I checked the coordinates on the GPS. Still too far south. So I climbed the steep steps but didn’t linger at the top of the tower, not wanting to be away from Mom for long. I jogged down the stairs and the next section of the Wall. A couple looked at me strangely as I ran past them, but I didn’t care. I had missed my morning runs, missed the way my legs stretched in front of me until I felt like a gazelle, missed the fresh air after Beijing’s smog. The uneven stones reminded me of running on the trails behind my home, and I slowed enough to watch my footing.

  Another watchtower lay directly ahead. The coordinates on the GPS started matching up with the waypoints Jacob had left with me. This was it, I thought excitedly. This was where the cache was hidden. Thirty feet, twenty feet. Knowing how crafty geocachers could be at hiding their treasures, I started poking around the Wall, looking for the cache as soon as I scaled the steps to the watchtower.

  Not being a purist, I had peeked at the clues Jacob included for the microcache. I knew it was in a tiny film canister, and then there was this: “where those without wings could fly.”

  Whatever that meant.

  I kept probing the small crevices along the wall, found graffiti written and carved on the stone, counted a couple of pieces of chewed bubble gum. No cache.

  I must have tramped the full circuit around that watchtower twelve times, first on tiptoe, then crouched low. I seriously considered crawling until I remembered how much spitting I had seen in Beijing. No crawling.

  My back hurt from bending over. So I stood and looked at the view, really looked at it. I wished Mom were here with me, because who knew? Who knew that the world itself was one giant cache, stashed with hidden places of infinite beauty like this for people to find? I was about to give up and finally thought to check the time. A full hour? Mom must have thought that I had peeled off the wall, my body broken on the rocks below.

  As if wishes could come true, I saw a familiar pink sweatsuit: my mother picking her way to the watchtower. She was so focused on the uneven path, she didn’t see me watching her slow progress.

  And sure enough, here in the places where those who can’t fly do, I raced down the stairs as quickly as it was safe, and rushed to Mom. She was panting, her face flushed. But her eyes? They sparkled with pride.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “I was just about to come back to you.”

  “I know. But I decided I didn’t want to miss out on anything.”

  “We can head back now.”

  Her brow furrowed. “It can’t be much longer to the other cable car from here.”

  “It’s not. Maybe another twenty minutes.”

  “Then let’s go. I didn’t come all this way to turn back,” she said, already setting up the stairs I had just descended. Slowly, we climbed, and I wondered how Mom had made it all this way by herself. Slowly, I thought. One deliberate step at a time.

  “Look, Mom,” I whispered once we reached the vantage point where the serpentine Wall disappeared into the horizon. “Forever is thataway.”

  She stood beside me, panting. Her hand rested near an arrow hole, the arrow hole where the ancient guards of China could let loose their weaponry against the Mongol invaders, let their arrows fly.

  “No way,” I muttered. I bent down and peered through the arrow hole, searching for the hidden canister. Not there. I tried another arrow hole just a few feet away.

  “What are you doing, honey?” Mom asked, bending down herself, ready to help me find whatever I had lost.

  As I patted around, I found a tiny crevice to the east. My fingers slipped in, touched smooth plastic.

  “We found it!” I announced, triumphant, pulling out the black canister carefully.

  “Found what?”

  In answer, I handed Mom the cache. She read the note taped around the canister’s outside, explaining in both Chinese and English that this was an official geocache site. Those not geocaching were respectfully asked to replace the cache where they found it.

  “A geocache,” Mom said, opening the lid and shaking out its contents into her cupped hand. Just paper, tightly rolled into a miniature scroll, and a pencil stub. “Susannah used to geocache.”

  “She did ? Wait, you know about geocaching?”

  “Sure, she was so goal-oriented, she couldn’t just hike like me.”

  And then it occurred to me where those fragments of China map came from, how the cache had gotten placed on our property. I dropped my backpack to the ground, chancing generations of dried spittle, and dug inside for the envelope where I had been stashing tickets and other ephemera as collage material. I lifted the piece of the China map, still sealed in its plastic bag, and held it out to Mom. “This was Aunt Susannah, wasn’t it?”

  Her eyes widened when she saw what it was. “Where did you find this?”

  “At home. There’s a geocache at our home. A pile of these were in it.”

  “No, but how?” Mom shook her head, and then her mouth opened to a wide O. Embarrassed, she said, “I sent Susannah those pieces one day when I was mad at your dad.”

  “Do you think she started the cache when she came to visit?” I asked
.

  Mom shook her head, bewildered, still staring at that tiny piece of the China map.

  I continued. “And maybe she scattered them in geocaches around the world. But why would she . . .”

  I had my answer when Mom propped her hands on the wall, ducked her head like she was woozy, and breathed deeply. It was Susannah’s quiet rebellion, mounted against Dad all these years. A warning to intrepid travelers not to trust in maps blindly.

  Here be dragons.

  “Sign your name,” I told Mom, handing the logbook to her. The list was short, just about thirty geocachers, including MM — Memento Mori: Jacob and his dad — dated almost exactly seven years ago. It was strange, holding this paper, knowing that Jacob had held it before me. And knowing how different his life was now from what it had been seven years ago. How different Mom’s was five years ago when Susannah was still alive. And Dad’s twelve years ago before the China map was deemed a fraud.

  “But I didn’t find the cache,” protested Mom.

  “I couldn’t have found it without you,” I pointed out.

  So reluctantly, she took the stub of a pencil, thought for a second before carefully lettering a geocaching nickname: Crafty Mama. Nothing — nothing — made me more proud than to see Mom signing that name in the log. I may have been the pathfinder. But she was an explorer, too.

  “Here,” she said, pressing the log onto me.

  As I signed my name under hers, I knew what to do with that frayed piece of map that I had carried from one continent to another. I looked at Mom; she nodded in approval. So I rolled the log around that piece of map, not a shroud so much as a cocoon, an adventure preparing to take flight.

  More than walking the Great Wall had worn Mom out. She looked wilted by the time we reached the end of the Mutianyu section, and I suspected it had to do with the potent memory of her sister. So when Mom encouraged me to ride the toboggan instead of the cable car down — “If it’s something you want to do, then do it, honey” — I took her up on it. I knew better than to ask her to join me.