Evangeline has switched from black and white to color! She wears a gold necklace and green plaid dress with a scoop neck. Her purse sways as she sits on the edge of the chair next to mine. The nun is gone, but not her voice.
“I hoped you would come tonight,” she says.
Really? I don’t say that she is the last person I expected to see. She is the last person I expected to see ever again!
Evangeline looks at the bodhisattva, then turns to me. She reaches to my cheek, then curls her fingers back. Nun training. Most of the audience has moved into the main room now. The expert, Dr. Benton, converses with Mr. Chow in Chinese.
“My birth mother used to bring me here to look at this dragon pearl,” I say, pointing up. “It must have reminded her of home.”
Evangeline raises her eyebrows. Nods. I cannot take my eyes from the matching curves of her collarbones, the elegant upward sweep of her neck. We each sit waiting, it seems, for the other one to talk.
“She was the Chinese archaeologist’s daughter.” My voice is raspy. I clear my throat. “Did you know that?”
“Adoption records are sealed.”
“The speaker said Lien Loo never came to America. Why would he say that? It’s a lie.” A tunnel of silence stretches between us.
“Perhaps you should ask him,” Evangeline says.
I glance at the dragon pearl collecting candlelight. “I thought the pictures in that box were clues to help me find her, that she might be here and I could show them to her and, if not, I could at least show them to someone.” I take a deep breath, knit my hands. “Idiotic. After all this time, but . . .”
She glances at my purse. “Did you bring the slipper?”
“No! It’s too fragile, and I don’t know . . . I . . .” I fiddle with my purse strap, glance up at her. “I came back the next day. I needed to talk to you.”
She looks off. “There are restrictions for sisters who leave. I couldn’t . . .”
What restrictions? “Joy took me on a tour. Sister Immaculata can’t hear. Joy’s food was dried out, her water was frozen, and the new nun is allergic to cats. Joy was curled up on your bed when I left.”
Evangeline lowers her head. I wish I hadn’t said it. I wish I had Kleenex. “I’m sorry, Lily. Leaving was terribly difficult.” She stares at her lap. “I grew up there.”
“You did ?”
She straightens her back and chin. “Yes.”
“But . . .”
“I became one in the stream of souls going out the door.”
“Y . . . you left that day, after the shed, didn’t you?”
“It was time. My work was finished. The Mercy Home saved all our lives—yours, mine, my mother’s, and both of your mothers’.”
I sit back, picturing my mothers. So strange to think Evangeline actually knew both of them. The Sisters of Mercy saved Mother?
“How did it save my adoptive mother?” I ask.
Evangeline looks puzzled, as if this is something I should already know. “Maybe you should talk to her about it.”
Is she crazy? My mother is the last person I could talk to. I check my watch. Eight thirty. An hour to get home. I say the dumbest out-of-the-blue thing. “So you’re just plain Evangeline now?”
Her cheeks crinkle. “Just plain.” She stands. “I understand the art experts will be here for a few weeks. Their story is certainly a fascinating and important one.” She gives me a serious look. “Good evening, Lily.” Evangeline weaves out of the temple opening and through the reception crowd, catlike, mysterious.
I sit with my head tilted back. “I came,” I whisper to Gone Mom, “and even Sister Evangeline came. Where in the world are you?”
Beyond the rows of empty chairs the bodhisattva glows on its lotus flower throne. Its smile is calm and simple. Its scratched crystal eyes remind me of Evangeline’s somehow—with every bit of life they’ve witnessed leaving a mark.
The bodhisattva’s raised finger catches the candlelight. How has it not been broken in a thousand years? I weave through chairs, pulled to the front of the room, and stand so it is pointing right at me. I reach up and touch fingertips with the bodhisattva.
God and Girl.
Lien and Lily.
* * *
I dodge the photographers and Elliot James and exit the museum petrified that a picture of my fingertip will be on the front page of the Sunday paper. I cross the lawn and sit down by The Thinker. The full moon has washed his bronze face in milky light.
Sometimes things come together and sometimes they don’t. I came for Gone Mom and I left with a lie. And what did Evangeline mean about the orphanage saving all of us?
“Mr. Howard said you might be out here.”
I whip around, nerves unzipped.
Elliot!
“God! What’re you doing? You scared me to death!”
“Sorry.” I can’t see his face, just his flappy horse blanket of a coat.
I hear car engines in the circle. Voices. Horns. Elliot and I stare at the other member of our trio—The Thinker, the only one of us without clothes.
He sits, asks why I came tonight. Garbled words rush from my mouth—I have become interested in various aspects of Chinese culture because I don’t know very much and I . . . that my brother is doing a Boy Scout merit badge and tried some interesting mirror angles to see the Chinese artifacts that . . . bodhisattvas are good inspiration and . . .
This would be the perfect time for Elliot to rescue me, acknowledge that something is painful and weird and help out by changing the subject. But when he’s not holding a pencil or paintbrush, Elliot’s personality can shred down to nothing.
“The Thinker and the bodhisattva are opposites,” he says finally. “The Thinker’s all clenched, wanting answers to everything, and the bodhisattva’s just calm, like he knows there aren’t answers.”
I unclench my jaw, drop my shoulders, breathe, breathe again, and for a tiny moment unhook from the world. It feels heavenly.
“Two statues,” Elliot says. “Same size. Same museum. Opposite message.”
“Yeah.”
“So do you need a ride?”
“Did you drive your car?” Stupid. Stupid.
“No. A camel.”
I turn, debate his offer, and while I debate his offer, Elliot leans over and kisses me. No warning. Just boom! Lips on . . . lips off.
Instant heart attack. Inability to speak. Wobbly world.
He stands and stretches. Since my brain is blank, I stand also, wobble wobble, and follow him like a tethered camel to his turpentine car parallel parked by the curb. The rusty door squeals open—squeeeeek! Leeleeeian got keeessed!
During the drive my purse comes alive on my lap. It has responded to the call. It has provided a focus, an activity to get through the next few immensely awkward minutes. The flap flips up, and the purse flips over and spills itself into the murky never-never land on the floor of his car. I hear my lipstick roll under the seat.
We stop under a streetlight in front of my house. By instinct I glance at my parents’ bedroom window. Not home yet, but Ralph’s light is on.
Elliot leans toward me. I lean toward the car door. The top of his head is a tangle of curly brown hair. He swipes his hand over the floor mat, fishing for my stuff. I move my feet. I don’t dare bend down.
He has hooked a few Chiclets and a photograph—the one of the camels and grooms. He looks from the picture to me. “What’s this?”
I blink. Twice. Three times, scrounging for an explanation. Instead I give him a look. A steely none of your business type of look, which I mastered from my mother, and pluck the picture from his hand.
Elliot holds the steering wheel. He stares through the windshield. I cannot look at his face. “That was undimensional,” he remarks, the way you’d judge a flat, old, dull work of art.
“What was undimensional?” And before I can suck the words back in, I know what he’s referring to—the kiss.
I yank the handle and leap out of the car, my purse tucked up in my armpit. I don’t even say thanks. Thanks for what—the ride or the insult?
* * *
I go straight to Ralph’s room. He’s sitting on the floor in his winter coat. “It’s gonna take nine lives to figure out my life!” I say.
Ralph looks over, his face screwed up. “Is this a cat riddle?”
“God!” I cringe at the reflection of my pathetic lips in his dresser mirror and swipe my mouth. I march over and bounce on his bed. “She wasn’t there.”
“Yeah.”
“Gone Mom was the big Chinese archaeologist’s daughter! Part of the team. She was supposed to come to America as a student, but the guy said she bailed out and stayed in China. That’s a lie.”
“Yeah.”
“She was in the slides, though. You shoulda seen them.”
“I did.”
“No, I mean tonight, on the screen. She was there with the bodhisattva’s hand against her cheek. You shoulda been there.”
“I was!” Ralph shakes his hands, palms up.
“What?”
“I helped the Chows carry some stuff in and I sorta stayed. I just got home. On my bike! Stealth. Last requirement on my stalker merit badge—check!” He gives me a grin.
My mind leaps off wondering if he witnessed my undimensional disaster. “So the game of Gone Mom Clue is over without a winner,” I say.
“Who was that tall lady?” Ralph asks.
“Sister Evangeline, from the orphanage. She helped me get adopted.”
“She’s a nun?”
“She’s an un-nun. She gave me that bootie and then she left.”
“Wow! Nuns rarely get fired.”
“She didn’t get fired. She quit!”
“So maybe she couldn’t quit until she gave you that shoe.”
“No way.”
“Well, why was she there?” Ralph says.
“I, uh, didn’t ask her. I was so surprised and . . .”
Ralph gives me a look. “Well, you still can.”
“Can’t. All I know is her name—Evangeline Wilkerson. I have no idea where she lives.”
“I do,” he says. “I followed her home, which took about a second because she went into an apartment house on Warwick Boulevard a half block away from the museum.” He raises his pointer finger. “And I saw her in the window when she flicked on a light on the second floor, left-hand corner on the front.”
“God. Did she see you?”
“Nope.” Ralph claws a pudgy hand through his hair. “Piece of cake.” He sighs. “I’m gonna be an archaeologist someday.”
“When’d you decide?”
“Just now,” Ralph says. “You know, all the tools, the sextants, and detective work, and art deals and ancient camel dung.”
“Well, you already know how to lose tools,” I say, “like Mom’s compact. That’s a start.” I feel rotten about her stupid compact. She’s been frantic. We have both lied, saying we haven’t seen it, which Ralph pointed out technically wasn’t lying because we truly haven’t seen it lately.
Ralph pours out a million details about shipping problems in China and the trials of reassembling the bodhisattva—dowel rods and special glues and matching paint samples and how it took years to find the pieces of the carved wooden throne in flea markets and pawn shops.
“How did you know all that?” I ask.
“The guy, Dr. Benton, explained it. Weren’t you there?”
“Hmm . . . I was distracted, Ralph.” I get the pictures out of my purse. I want to review them and match them up with the statue. But when I lay them out, my blood freezes. The bodhisattva’s head is missing. I know exactly where it is. I got into Elliot’s car with six pictures and out of his car with five.