Norah blanched. “I wish I had known. I would have sent photos. A present at the very least.”
It was Mom who said the words Jacob needed: “You were so loved, Jacob.”
He couldn’t have stopped those tears now if he tried. As if in agreement, Mom and I stepped back, cooed at some babies in their cribs. All these unwanted children who had been abandoned.
Years of being self-conscious trained me to notice when someone was staring at me. Like now. I looked over my shoulder and found a little girl by herself in the corner. As soon as she saw me notice her, she dropped her head, her bob sweeping down like a curtain over the curve of her cheek. Where others might have mistaken that for shyness, I knew it for what it was: shame. As if she knew when she was being stared at, too, the girl spun around to the wall, but she moved too fast. Her hair swung up and away from her face for an instant. But that was all it took to unmask the bright red birthmark splashed from the left side of her forehead down to her nose and cheek. It was as if she had swabbed her left hand with red paint and forgotten that as she held her head in deep thought. There was absolutely no doubt why her birth mother had broken the law and abandoned her — whether it was at a police station, on hospital steps, or beneath a tree. It was all because of a goddamned red mark, a permanent slap on this girl’s face.
“What’s wrong?” Mom asked, putting her hand on my arm.
Too slowly, I shifted my eyes back to her. Mom had followed my gaze like a mama bear protecting her young and she frowned at the little girl. “What’s she doing in the nursery?”
I knew why: because babies couldn’t talk, couldn’t tease. There was safety and solace in silence.
“I need a bathroom,” I told Mom, my voice tight.
Her eyebrows furrowed as if she knew I, too, was hiding something. “We passed one on the way in.”
I nodded, couldn’t choke out any more words, not even the ones that would diffuse Mom’s concern.
As quickly as I could, I left the nursery, glad to escape, glad that Jacob was too busy getting reacquainted with his first family — that was what his amah was, after all — to notice my flight from a little girl who could have been me.
Chapter twenty-nine
Cartographic Lips
RULE FOR THE WISE: WHEN you’re trying to escape yourself, don’t look in the mirror. Which, of course, is what I did in that dingy orphanage bathroom. There were no doors separating the stalls, just holes in the ground. But the need to see myself outweighed any discomfort to my nose. So I rested my pelvis against the grayish vanity, and leaned so close to the mirror, my breath fogged the lower half of my face. The safe, blemish-free half of my face. I stared back into my faded blue eyes that Karin thought I should make a jewel-like amethyst courtesy of a pair of tinted contacts. Fake, I had scoffed at her. I didn’t want to be fake.
And finally, finally, I looked at my cheek, shrouded as usual in makeup. How was this any different from fake eyes? Or a fake personality, warm in public, cutting in private?
And how the hell was I any different from that little girl, both of us ashamed of our faces? Even if she wanted to cover her mark, how was she going to find makeup or afford it? Her very clothes looked too small for her.
I leaned my forehead against the mirror, feeling the cold, sleek surface against my skin. This close to the mirror, I couldn’t make myself out. I was just one big blur. Was that what I was going to do for the rest of my life? Hide forever behind my mask of makeup? Veil myself like I was too hideous for public viewing?
I hated all those layers of makeup then, the weight of the foundation and powder and moisturizer. I was breathing harder than if I had gone snowshoeing for two, three hours. My hands gripped the sink, the edge cutting into my palm. My face was nothing but a cartographic lie, told to placate my father, who could stand nothing less than perfection. A lie to assure my mother that I had every chance for the happiness that she was denied.
Without pausing to think of any of the consequences, I turned on the faucet. Had the water run brown instead of clear, I still would have splashed it on my face. Over and over, I rubbed the frigid water over my cheeks, my forehead, my temple until my face was frozen and my hands went numb.
When I finished, both of my cheeks bloomed red from cold. I didn’t let myself linger there in the bleak bathroom. I headed back to the little girl in the nursery. She was still crouching in the corner as if that was the only place where she belonged.
Mom gasped quietly. I could have been eleven again, wearing the evidence of stain remover that worked only on manmade materials, not man himself. “Terra! Your face!”
At that, Jacob spun around to make sure I was okay.
“Terra,” Mom called again.
Without breaking my stride, I kept walking to the girl who was watching me suspiciously. I knew the exact moment when she saw my port-wine stain. Her eyes widened, her gaze shifted to my cheek, and she stared the way everyone had stared at her for her whole, short life. I didn’t flinch. How could I? It was the first time I wanted someone to see my birthmark.
The little girl skittered back against the wall when I knelt beside her. I tucked my hair behind my ear and turned my cheek, not away from her, but to her. And then I had to trust in the universal language of a smile. Jacob had told me to smile at all the starers, that ultimate act of disarming. As he said, it was the reason why so many doctors gave their time to perform cleft palate and cleft lip surgeries. Smiles biologically bonded mothers to their babies, kicked in their mothering instinct. Fix the smile, save the child. So I bet on it now. I smiled.
Then, gently, I brushed her hair off her face — her perfect, perfect face. For a long moment, I cupped that round, befuddled face in my hands as if it were the most precious treasure of all — a sacred geocache I hadn’t even known I was searching for until now. All those well-meaning comments from strangers — the ones who told me they knew people with port-wine stains — all of those I understood now. In their own haphazard, clumsy ways, they were trying to tell me that I was fine the way I was. That I wasn’t alone.
I didn’t have the language to communicate that to this little girl — or to communicate that beauty — real everlasting beauty — lives not on our faces, but in our attitude and our actions. It lives in what we do for ourselves and for others.
So I did the best thing I could.
For a long moment, I waited for her gaze to lift away from my birthmark and back to my faded blue eyes. When she did, I realized I knew all the Mandarin I needed to express myself to this girl.
In my faltering Chinese, I used the same words Jacob’s caretaker had when she saw him. I told her in words that I struggled to say to myself whenever I looked in a mirror.
“Hao kan,” I said gently, quietly, firmly as if it was a pact between the two of us.
She blinked. I wasn’t sure if she understood. Or if she believed that she was beautiful. So I pointed to her and then to me. And I repeated with utter conviction, “Hao kan.”
Those words, my pronouncement, won me the girl’s slow nod. I nodded back. And when she smiled, wide and open, I tell you, there was nothing more beautiful than that.
Part Three
Terra Firma
Chapter thirty
Large-Scale Maps
I USED TO THINK THE tourist couples who sat companionably at Snagtooth Coffee without talking, the ones who read the paper in silence while they were on vacation, were worse than boring. They were in relationship purgatory, just drifting along, waiting. Waiting for what? They had lost what little zing they must have had once. But sitting beside Jacob halfway through the flight back to Seattle, neither of us talking? There was real comfort in being quiet.
After I had changed spots with Norah, he had smiled at me, saying all of two words: “Big trip.”
“Huge,” I had agreed.
And then he closed his eyes, not because I was boring. But because we didn’t need to talk. We didn’t need to impress each other. We could just be.
I let myself close my eyes instead of keeping watch. A few moments later, Jacob reached over and took my hand in his. I needn’t have worried. The zing was still there. He rested our hands on his chest, his hand over mine, my hand over his heart.
To dream, you need to starve doubt, feed hope. I intended to do that. So as I dozed off, I imagined myself with Jacob. As a couple, despite our differences, despite the distance. I dreamed of us being one of the success stories, a couple that worked out.
Too soon, we were disembarking from the plane and walking through the gate where our travels had first started.
“It’s almost as if we hadn’t even left,” said Norah.
“We could turn around and go again,” Jacob said, his shoulder brushing mine as we walked side-by-side. Norah was wrong. We definitely had left. And we definitely had returned. In a very un-Mom way, she had her cell phone out, now calling Dad, as we walked through customs.
No answer.
I hadn’t expected one. Silence in Dad’s hands was never companionable, but always a weapon. Troubled, Mom tucked the phone in her purse.
It was strange how in the company of strangers in China, I hadn’t minded spending the rest of the trip bare-faced. The only person I knew had been Merc, and he was too busy working, head down, to notice a little thing like missing makeup. But now, in the company of these strangers, I felt so conscious of my face, despite my lipstick and eye shadow. I had to resist the urge to pull out my mirror, double-check my cheek.
While our mothers rode the escalators up to baggage claim, Jacob and I took the stairs, racing each other.
“No fair,” I said, as we started. “You’ve got longer legs.”
Jacob glanced over his shoulder at me, grabbed Mom’s spillover purchases that I had stuffed into one of his extra carry-ons. “Take your excuses somewhere else, Trouble Magnet.”
I looked past him, trying to measure how much farther I had to sprint with my heavy messenger bag banging against the side of my body. What lay ahead arrested me on that staircase.
I had been so busy blocking out the inevitable homecoming with Dad that I didn’t think about the other guy I had so carefully forgotten. So carefully pretended didn’t exist. Now, I crashed headlong into my Denial.
Erik was waiting at the top of the steps, holding an armful of red roses.
Chapter thirty-one
The Great Trigonometrical Survey
WHEN I WAS IN SECOND grade, I did my should-be-famous person report on one Nain Singh, who surveyed over 2,000 kilometers from Nepal to China. That alone might not sound entirely worthy of a report, but consider he accomplished this in 1865 and on threat of death. Tibet wasn’t so tolerant of foreigners back then, famous for beheading uninvited visitors. So Nain set out, disguised as a lama on a pilgrimage to Lhasa, to conduct the Great Trigonometrical Survey and triangulated his way across the Himalayas, using two known points for every unknown to measure the length of his country. He survived.
I wasn’t so sure I’d be that lucky as I mounted the last few steps that led to my two known points: Jacob, who was standing next to Erik. They couldn’t have been more different, those two. And I was the unknown in this triangulation problem.
While Jacob may not have noticed Erik, Erik was certainly making note of him. He lowered the roses to his side, their blooms hanging head down. And his face, the one I had always trusted to be placid, now wore a foreboding frown.
“What’s wrong?” Jacob asked, already jogging down the steps, his hand stretched out to lighten my load if I needed it. “Hey, you okay?”
No. I was a liar. And a cheater. And a coward. No different from his barista of a stepmother and his philanderer of a father.
The hundreds of excuses I’d told myself so that I didn’t have to admit to Jacob that I had a boyfriend — technically, still had one — were as untrustworthy as the antique maps Dad collected and hoarded. As beautiful as they were, painstakingly hand-painted, they were wrong.
I wanted to sprint down the stairs, but instead, I forced myself to walk with Jacob to that top floor where Erik awaited, stony-faced. How could I tell Jacob that I was going to break up with Erik as soon as I was home and that I couldn’t do it over e-mail when Erik himself was standing here? He deserved better, too.
“Jacob,” I said quietly but clearly so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself, “this is my boyfriend, Erik.”
I cringed when Jacob glanced from Erik back to me, his look of confusion fast giving way to calculation as canny as Nain Singh’s, that great surveyor. Jacob narrowed his eyes at me, seeing me clearly without my two-faced mask, both sides made up — one with cosmetics, the other with lies.
“You hate roses,” he said, flat and hard.
“What?”
“I bet you hate roses,” Jacob continued relentlessly. “Don’t you?”
“Jacob . . .”
“Don’t you?”
I nodded. He was right about me again. I did. I hated roses. I hated them for being so trite, so clichéd, a default, all-purpose flower that said I love you, I’m sorry, and get well soon. Give me peonies and tulips, orchids or gardenia. Those were flowers with character.
Without another word, Jacob stepped around me, stopping only to thrust Mom’s packages at Erik, a perverted changing of the guards. And then he strode away at a fast, angry clip.
“Excuse me,” said a man, irritated, behind me. “Do you mind?”
Numbly, I moved out of his way, noticing my somber mother, Jacob’s disappointed one, as they filed off the escalator. Ashamed, I studied the carousels, wishing I could jump on one, swirl away. I wouldn’t have thought that Mom would stand by me, but she did, striding toward us. She had to stop momentarily to jockey up her sagging pants, but she was at my side soon enough.
“Erik,” said Mom, “we weren’t expecting you here.”
“Mr. Cooper asked if I could pick you guys up.” He shrugged, as if driving hours for me had been no big deal. It was more than what Dad was willing to do for Mom and me.
As if she felt the sting of Dad’s neglect, too, Mom’s smile wobbled, a leaf blown about in a squall. “That was very nice of you.”
Erik shrugged again.
“Well,” Mom said, shooting me a meaningful look, “I’ll meet you over in baggage claim.”
I watched Mom go, watched as a petal from those unwanted roses drifted to the ground.
“So,” said Erik, not looking at me, but off at the reader board, listing all the arrivals at the airport. There was an awkwardness, an uncertainty on his face that I had never seen before; he was usually so sure.
“So,” I repeated, not knowing what to say any more than he did. I couldn’t have missed my usual shield of makeup more.
But Erik didn’t ask about my face, almost as if he hadn’t noticed or didn’t care that I was barefaced. Instead, he wanted to know: “So who’s the Chinese guy?”
“He’s American,” I shot back automatically.
He waved impatiently in the air, having forgotten that he was holding the roses. A faint trace of fragrance trailed in the air when Erik lowered the bouquet hastily, embarrassed. His real questions hovered unspoken: are you into him? What is he to you?
Deflect, that’s what my instincts were telling me. Deflect. Reroute. Send him on a different it’s-fine-everything-is-fine path, but that was an uneven, graveled route. Easy to trip yourself up on. I couldn’t go back in time, couldn’t change what I had done, couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t loved the idea of being with a popular jock. But Erik deserved to be more than my vanity plates. He deserved to be so much more than proof that someone could find me attractive.
I took a deep breath. “I’m so sorry, Erik. I should have been up-front with you.”
“You should have.” Then, a memory clicked. “He was the guy you were hanging out with over Christmas.”
I nodded miserably.
“While you were ‘sick.’”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you hook up with him then?”
“No. God, no.”
“In China?”
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me,” he said. Where was this dogged persistence coming from? Something had unlocked the key to Erik.
“We kissed; that’s it.” What did I mean, that’s it? That was more than enough. I whispered, “I’m so sorry, Erik.” And then, finally, I let him go. “You and me . . . we shouldn’t see each other anymore.”
He didn’t answer, his hand tightening around the roses. Suddenly, he winced, loosened his grip. A thorn must have punctured him; blood welled in the curved archipelago below his thumb. I withdrew a napkin from my pocket, doubled it over, pressed it against his hand. Across the baggage terminal, Jacob had just lifted his mom’s luggage off the carousel and as he set it down, he caught sight of me at the same time I did him. And now, he stared at me in disbelief, my hands still wrapped around Erik’s. I ripped my hands away, took a step away. It was too late. The swarming crowds blocked Jacob from view. I knew he had wrenched around anyway.
Erik nodded over to the carousels that were spitting out baggage blithely, everybody’s downsized lives fitting into neat packages. “Let’s get your stuff.”
“You don’t have to drive us home.”
His eyebrows furrowed, offended. “What kind of guy do you think I am?”
Apparently, more of a guy than I had given him credit for when we first hooked up. Erik walked toward the baggage carousel. I lagged behind, awkward now that we were heading to Jacob, who was flanked by Norah and my mom as if they were protecting him. From me.
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