It is the kind of day that farmers, when there were still farmers, would have dreamed of. The sky is brilliant blue, the plants are newly green, the air as fresh and clean as though it had been washed, tumbled dry, and neatly folded the night before. It is the kind of day you never forget.
“Hasn’t been a day this pretty since the day you were born,” Mary Grace Mahon says to her granddaughter.
“You didn’t know me the day I was born,” Ruby says.
“Oh, but I did,” Mary Grace says, tucking a bobby pin further into her hair, which is white and silky and braided like a pretzel.
“Not possible,” the girl says, twirling her own black, silky hair into a grandmother pretzel.
“In my heart of hearts, I knew you’d be here soon,” Mary Grace says.
“I was born in China, Grandma. The people in China didn’t even know when I was born, and when I was born, Mama didn’t even know she was going to adopt a baby.”
“I knew,” Mary Grace says. “I knew it all along. Even before your mother was born, I knew that you’d be coming our way.”
“Why do you wash the wax fruit?” Ruby changes the subject.
“It gets dusty and then sticky, and then it starts to look furry.”
“Why do you even have wax fruit?” Ruby asks.
“Appearances are important,” Mary Grace says. “I like the bowl to look full.”
“I was old when my mother left me at the orphanage,” Ruby says.
“How old?” Mary Grace asks.
“Between nine and ten,” the girl says.
“But you’re just seven now,” Mary Grace says.
Ruby shrugs, as though that’s irrelevant. “I came from China in a box. I cried the whole way home. It wasn’t very nice,” she says.
“You came from China in your mother’s lap,” Mary Grace says. “I was right there. I went along for the ride. It was you, me, and your mama, three generations of Mahon women flying to America, like life coming full circle.” What she doesn’t say is that in China the people she met looked her in the eye in a way no one had before. “Interesting,” they said. “Very,” she said, and they left it at that.
“Here is your daughter,” they said, handing the child to her daughter, Eliza.
“Why did my mama leave me in a box?” Ruby asks.
“The box was all she had. It was meant to keep you safe.” Mary Grace goes into the kitchen and brings out a small wooden crate that some oranges had come in. “If you put newspaper or blankets in here, this would be a safe place for a baby.”
Ruby takes the box from Mary Grace, lines it with napkins from the dining room table, and arranges the wax fruit in the box.
She puts the box down in the center of the dining room table.
“Does that look comfortable?” she asks.
“Are you talking to the fruit?” Mary Grace asks.
Ruby doesn’t answer.
“I have a question for you. What does it mean that today is a professional day at your school?”
“It’s teacher training,” Ruby says.
“Aren’t they already trained?”
Ruby rolls her eyes. “They do special things like make the cafeteria menu for the rest of the year, and they do bonding exercises.”
“Like gluing themselves together?” Mary Grace asks.
Ruby is looking at the pictures on the mantel in the dining room. “Why are there no pictures of your father?”
“He died before I was born,” Mary Grace says.
“That’s not true,” Ruby says.
“How do you mean?”
“You once showed me a letter he wrote,” Ruby says.
“From before I was born,” Mary Grace says.
“It said ‘Thank you for the photograph of our daughter, Mary Grace,’” Ruby says.
“You have a very good memory,” Mary Grace says, leading Ruby to the rear window. “Look at the birds,” she says, pointing to the feeder. “The birds are getting bigger and bigger, have you noticed?”
The child looks intently. “I can see them growing,” she says.
“Watch,” Mary Grace says. As the birds peck at their food, they realize they are being studied, and they stop, pivot, tilt their heads, and spread their wings—showing off. Then they turn toward the glass, beady black eyes meeting Mary Grace’s and Ruby’s, one-on-one.
“I wonder what they see when they look at us?” Mary Grace asks.
“Monsters,” Ruby says.
A man, no longer young but not exactly old, wearing a black hat with gemstones around the brim, putting him somewhere between preacher and cowboy, walks into Paul’s Gasoline Station and Mini-Mart, his shoes smelling of gasoline. “I can never decide if I love or hate the smell of gas,” the fellow says.
“You get used to it over time,” Paul says.
“It’s warming up,” the fellow says.
“Always does.”
“It’ll go cold again,” the fellow says.
“That’s the way it is,” Paul says.
“Before it gets hot.”
“Every year,” Paul says.
“It’s misleading.”
The fellow takes a look about him. “Things seem different around here. On the one hand, we count on everything to stay the same, and on the other it’s inevitable that it changes.”
“I moved things,” Paul says.
“Why’d you stop selling chips?”
“Had nothing to do with selling them. It was me, I kept eating them, couldn’t control myself; Pringles, Cheetos, Doritos, first one bag, then two. By the time I got rid of them, I was up to four or five bags a day and I was always thirsty. Now I sell the dried fruit.”
“Anyone buy it?”
“No, but at least I don’t eat it. You look familiar,” Paul says, ringing up the gas.
The man cocks his head jauntily to the side. “People say I bear a striking resemblance, both physical and philosophical, to Voltaire, which comes as no surprise—he’s a distant cousin.”
Paul shakes his head. “Not ringing a bell.”
The man puts out his hand. “Peter,” he says.
“Paul,” Paul says, shaking the man’s hand, which is large and delicate all at once.
Peter spots something on the counter. “That the Unit?”
“Not exactly.”
“Give me a clue?”
“If I knew for sure, I’d tell you,” Paul says. “I found it in my mother’s basement. All kinds of things down there. It’s like an artifact from an archaeological dig. I’m thinking it’s my dad’s ham radio.”
“You found it in her basement?”
“Yep, you have no idea what’s in that basement,” Paul says.
“I bet I do,” Peter says, smiling, like he knows a lot about basements.
“I’m thinking about getting it up and running. There are people out there, just floating, who want to talk. I thought I might set up a little radio station where the chips used to be.” Paul takes a closer look at the fellow. “Did your father used to work at the factory?”
“Nope,” the man says.
“Since you mentioned the Unit, I thought maybe he did.”
“Nope,” Peter repeats. “Never seen the Unit. It’s just one of those things you grow up hearing about but never know if it’s real or not.”
“For twenty-five years, my father worked at the factory, and then he opened this gas station. He worked on the gadget. That’s what they called it then when no one wanted to call it what it was—a bomb. He was proud of it, used to talk like they were making something special, something that was going to change the world, like a giant Christmas present. I always pictured something big and round wrapped in colored foil like those holiday chocolates,” Paul says.
“Like the Easter Bunny,” the fellow says. “My dad died on Easter Sunday 1955. I never knew him on account of how priests weren’t supposed to have children.”
“They made the trigger,” Paul says. “It was all go, go, go until they dropped it, and then you didn’t hear so much. Silence,” Paul says.
“Not a word,” Peter says. They each take a long breath.
“‘Infinite Capacity,’” Paul says. “That was the factory motto. They thought they knew what it meant. My father wasn’t the same after that—at least that’s what my mother says. I was too young to remember. I don’t think they knew what they were making. They weren’t scientists, they were tinkerers.”
The two men stand in silence. Peter looks at the television set on the counter—the ball game is on. “Who’s winning?”
“The other guys,” Paul says. “Was it just the gas, or something else you wanted?”
“I’ll take a couple of the fruit leathers and a bag of popcorn—how come you still carry the popcorn?”
“I hate the sound it makes when you chew it, like Styrofoam.” Paul hands the fellow a bag. “Take it, it’s on me.”
As he’s leaving, the fellow reaches into his pocket and flips Paul a coin. “For good luck.”
“Walking Liberty,” Paul says, turning it over in his hand. “Haven’t seen one of these in a long time. We used to get ’em from the Tooth Fairy.”
The stranger smiles, flashing gold rims around his teeth. “Tooth Fairy,” he says. “Now, that’s a calling.”
“I owe you some change,” Paul calls after the fellow. “Or at least more popcorn.” He yanks several more bags off the rack.
“You owe me nothing,” Peter says. As he walks out, the gems on the brim catch the light and a rainbow explodes out of his hat.
Deep into the seventh inning, Paul spots someone at the pumps in a black midlength coat trying to fill up a two-liter soda bottle. He rushes out. “You can’t just gas up a Coke bottle. You could blow us all to kingdom come. Look at you—you’re an accident waiting to happen.”
“I walk very long time to your station to say hello, and this is your welcome?” The man is Chinese and speaks with a thick accent. “I run out of gas on hairpiece curl. My car just stop in the middle of the road. . . . I walk from there.”
“Hairpiece curl?” Paul asks.
“No mock me,” the Chinese man says. “I have accent. You have accent, too—I no mock you. I have lousy life—bad harelip, bad surgery. Everywhere I go, I deal with people like you. Your father would be ashamed. Your father was good man open to all, and you are like today’s man—mean all around.”
“You knew my father?”
“Of course I did. That’s why I come to you now. Your father fix my father’s car forty years ago, and now like bad date my car break down right in the same spot as my father’s—what are the chances of that?”
“Slim.”
“I say so, too,” the man says.
On the ground next to the man is a wide black briefcase, like a sample case or a lawyer’s attaché.
“Your briefcase is sitting in a puddle of gas,” Paul says to the man.
“That okay,” the man says. “Briefcase look like vinyl, but it is very strong bull.”
“What’s your name?” Paul asks.
“Walter,” the man says. “Everybody call me Walter.”
“Walter, I will help you with your car. I have a niece from China,” Paul says, thinking he’s doing a good job.
“You and everybody else,” Walter says, carrying his briefcase into the gas station office.
The pay phone on the wall of the mini-mart rings. Paul picks up.
“It’s your sister,” his sister, Eliza, says. Eliza owns a flower shop downtown with a sign in the window that says By Appointment Only. She doesn’t like surprises.
“Can I call you back?” Paul asks.
“Why?”
“I’ve got someone here.”
“Who?”
“A guy.”
“What kind of a guy?”
“The kind of guy who has car trouble.”
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
“I did, actually.”
He covers the phone and whispers loudly, “My sister. She’s a talker.”
“I’m in no hurry,” the man says. “I got where I am going.”
“We need to talk about your mother,” his sister says.
“Why is she ‘my mother’ when she’s your mother, too?”
“When there’s something wrong, she’s your mother, and you know that.”
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s losing her mind.”
“She’s ninety-three years old. It’s bound to happen.”
“It’s not that she’s senile, it’s that she knows too much.”
He turns off the television on the counter. “What do you mean?”
“This morning when I dropped Ruby off, she was saying things that on the one hand made no sense and on the other seemed perfectly logical, or more than logical—like she knew something. She was talking about the weather and how the weather used to let you know what time of year it was and how now, on any given day, it could be any day of the year. . . . And then she went on about the bats and white-nose syndrome and the collapse of the honeybee colonies and how everything is more interrelated than we realize and we really couldn’t get much dumber, could we—and then she just glared at me like it was all my fault.”
Paul is playing with the half-dollar Peter flipped him earlier. “I’m not sure what to say,” he says. “Sounds par for the course. And this fella needs me to help him. Can we talk later?”
“Meet me at home.”
“I can’t leave the station.”
“Fine, I’ll come to you.”
Walter is buying gum balls from an old penny machine in the corner.
“I’m not so sure I’d eat those,” Paul says. “Hard as rocks.”
“I like it,” Walter says. “It give gum ball with fortune written on it, like ‘Have a nice day.’ I remember this machine, long time ago the same machine used to sell a small hand of salty peanuts.”
“That’s right. Back in my dad’s day, the machine sold salted peanuts. He loved his peanuts. Let me just find my keys and we’ll get ourselves a can of gas and drive up to your car—where’d you say it broke down?”
“Hairpin curl,” Walter says slowly. And this time Paul listens more carefully.
“Hairpin turn?”
Paul drives the Chinese man to his car, all the while telling the story of how the Mahon family has been repairing cars ever since Ransom Olds and Henry Ford started making them. “In fact, my grandfather and his brothers used to sell buckets of water right up there on the hairpin turn to cars whose engines overheated. They’d carry buckets up the Mohawk Trail—a nickel a bucket. And they’d pick blueberries on the way down, fresh-picked blueberries, warm from the sun, bursting with flavor. What business did you say you’re in?”
“I am low-profile deliveryman, advance man. I come and I go.”
At the Holiday Inn downtown, two Chinese men wearing the same black midlength coats as Walter check in. They are given a room with two double beds. As soon as the door closes, they take off their coats and do gymnastics tricks, jumping from bed to bed, turning flips in the air. They are former gymnasts and strongmen—they lift their beds over their heads for exercise.
Back at the house, Mary Grace is making lunch for Ruby. “Would you like me to tell you a story?”
“What kind of a story?” Ruby asks.
“A true story,” Mary Grace says.
“Nonfiction?”
“Yes.”
“That means it’s real?”
“It’s a story that I’ve never told anyone before.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about us.”
“You never told anyone—not even my mother?”
“Not even your mother.”
“Is it a secret?”
“It was—until now.”
“My mother doesn’t believe in secrets.”
“Neither do I. Perhaps there’s a difference between a secret and something that just hasn’t been said.”
“I’m listening,” Ruby says.
Mary Grace takes a deep breath. “My father was Chinese.” Ruby looks at her suspiciously, like it’s a joke.
“He was born in China in 1860.”
“Were his parents Chinese?”
“Yes.”
“Does Mama know?” Ruby asks, suddenly a little anxious.
“No, she doesn’t.”
“How come?”
“I never told her.”
“Tell me more,” Ruby says.
“My father’s family were poor farmers in China. He came to California by boat when he was ten to live with his uncle. And when the shoe factory here went on strike, seventy-five Chinese men from San Francisco came to town and worked in the factory.”
“Your father came here?”
“Yes. And he became friendly with a local family, and soon he worked for them, and when they went south to Florida—he went with them. And your great-grandmother, who was friendly with one of the girls in that family, went to Florida, too. And she and my father become very close.”
“Were they married?”
“No, they were never married.”
“What did she like about him?”
“He was very clever, always inventing things, and he was very kind to animals. He had a horse that he spoke to as if she were a person, and my mother liked that.”
“Pop-Pop also invented things,” Ruby says, speaking of her grandfather.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I never met Pop-Pop,” Ruby says sadly.
“You would have liked him a lot,” Mary Grace says. “So after a while my mama realized that she was going to have a baby. She bought herself a train ticket and a gold wedding band and came back home big with child.”
“Why did she buy a wedding band?”
“In those days it wasn’t proper for a woman to have a baby on her own. When people asked, ‘Where is your husband?’ she’d look sad and say, ‘He was killed in the war.’”
“What war?”
“The first big war, World War One.”
“Why didn’t she marry your daddy and live happily ever after?”
“Because people weren’t so forgiving,” Mary Grace says, realizing that some things are very hard to explain. “And so she was very pregnant and tired of waiting for the baby to come, and so she went out for a walk, and she just kept walking and walking. She walked right up the mountain and around the mountain and back down the mountain, and on her way down the baby came.”
“You?” Ruby asks.
“Yes.”
“And when people saw me, they said my face looked a little odd. ‘It’s the face of grief,’ my mother would tell them. ‘Her father died before she was born.’”
Ruby looks at her grandmother. “I think your face looks pretty. Old but pretty.”
“Thank you,” Mary Grace says.
“Did you ever meet your daddy?”
“No. He died a long time ago, but he left something behind.”
“What?”
Mary Grace opens her hand.
“An orange?”
“My father was known as the ‘Citrus Wizard.’ He invented the orange we eat today.”
“How did he do that?”
“Cross-pollination. He combined the strengths of different plants, something he learned from his parents and from watching honeybees, and he created an orange that didn’t freeze on cold nights.”
She drops the orange into Ruby’s hand. “It’s a good story, isn’t it?”
Ruby nods.
“Should we eat our lunch at the dining room table or outside under the apple tree?”
“I’m afraid of the bees,” Ruby says.
Mary Grace opens the back door. “And the bees are afraid of you,” she says, handing Ruby a plate and a glass of milk.
They go out back. Mary Grace is distracted by the weather, by the fact that everything is out of order. “Hydrangea and peony are up too early this year,” she says. “Something is coming into the yard, taking over the apple tree. Look,” she says, “you can see it, something dark coming up from the bottom, spreading.
“Everything is vulnerable,” she says, shaking her head. “When we were kids, this fence wasn’t here and we used to tiptoe next door and steal Mr. McGregor’s apples. The trick was to take as many as you could before he noticed.”
“Did you live in this house when you were my age?”
“I did, and then I moved out when I got married and moved back in when Mother began to fail.”
“How many apples did you take?”
“As many as we could carry.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“No. I don’t think he minded as long as we ate them—but Mr. McGregor used to like to try to scare us.”
“How does an apple tree make apples?”
“You need two different kinds of apple trees near each other in order to make fruit. Bees to carry the pollen from one tree to the other; a tree on its own is barren.”
“So,” Ruby says, “if your father was Chinese, that means my mother and Uncle Paul are Chinese, too?”
Mary Grace nods.
“Do they know?”
“No.”
“We should tell them.”
“We should,” Mary Grace says.
“Tonight,” Ruby says. “How old are you?” she wants to know.
“What makes you ask?”
“I was just wondering how many peanut butter sandwiches you’ve eaten in your whole life.”
“It’s funny,” Mary Grace says. “I only eat peanut butter with you.”
“What time is it in China?”
“Right now?”
Ruby nods.
“In China today is tomorrow.”
In the afternoon the wind shifts, becoming hot, urgent, swirling, picking up whatever it can lift, twirling what it carries, around the houses, the trees, the town, up to the mountain, in a kind of rhythmic, purposeful, twisting, turning dance, as if trying to shake something off, trying to get relief.
Eliza blows into the office of the mini-mart, carrying a vase of flowers.
“For me?” Paul asks.
“For Parker, but I didn’t want to leave them in the hot car.”
“Parker, the guy at the cemetery? The guy with the tattoo of Jesus on his back?”
“That’s him. Just before Mr. Houghton died, he gave Parker enough money to buy flowers for Mrs. Houghton’s grave every week in perpetuity.”
“So what is it about your mother that’s plaguing you?” Paul asks.
“I don’t know exactly. She’s got something up her sleeve, that smug, ‘knowing’ look she gets—pursed lips like she’s lived so long that God himself has hired her as his personal adviser.”
Paul says nothing.
“And she’s been very organized like she’s . . .”
“Planning a trip?” Paul asks.
“Something like that,” Eliza says.
“What’s she going to do, run away? It’s your anxiety talking. Anytime Mom or Dad tried to leave town, even just to go to Pittsfield, you practically had a breakdown. For forty-five years, no one in this family has been able to go more than a couple of miles from home base.”
“We all have our limits,” she says.
“I don’t know how you made it all the way to China and back,” he says.
“Valium,” she says. “I took Valium and I took Mom. What is that thing?” She points to the old metal box on the counter.
“That’s the question of the day. Whatever it is, still works.” Paul turns it on; the red light warms, then glows like a maraschino cherry deep in a glass of ginger ale. “It’s something Dad made. I found this one in the basement.”
“It’s not the Unit, is it?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says. “You never really knew what the Unit was—did you?”
“Not really,” she says. “Whenever he said anything about it, Mom would shush him. I always thought it was something related to private parts.”
“He called it the Unit or sometimes the peacekeeper,” Paul says.
“Whatever it was, it’s probably still in the basement,” Eliza says, sweeping her hair, which is black going gray, back into a ponytail.
“This thing is a receiver of some sort, like a ham radio. I’d like to get it up and running, see who I can find ‘online’ the old-fashioned way.” He turns it off and then on again—the red light glows a little brighter.
“Is it wise to turn on things when you don’t really know what they do?”
“Like what? You think by turning this on I’m dimming the lights in China?”
“You never know.”
“Maybe someone will call me, a voice from the past,” Paul says.
“Perhaps you’re sending a signal,” Eliza says.
“And perhaps someone will signal me back.” Paul turns the machine off and on again and again. “Remember how Dad and I were always making stuff with our soldering guns?”
“Who could forget the smell of burning plastic and molten whatever, toxic fumes coming upstairs? I think that’s what started my headaches. What happened to the chips?” she says, looking around.
“I ate them,” Paul says.
“All of them?”
“Pretty much.”
“I was hoping you’d have chips,” she says. “I was looking forward to it.”
“Fruit leather?” he says, offering her some.
“No thanks.”
Paul flips his half-dollar into the air. Eliza catches it, takes a look. “Tooth Fairy paid you a visit?”
“Perhaps,” Paul says.
She puts her hands over her eyes. “Everything is too bright, too clear, like the day itself has gone past full daylight and into something like Kodacolor explosion.”
“You see rainbows?” Paul asks, thinking of the man with the hat from earlier.
“I’m getting one of my headaches. Can I use your phone?” Eliza goes to the old pay phone and dials Mary Grace.
“Where are you?” Mary Grace shouts. “I can hardly hear you!”
“On the pay phone at the gas station. It’s the same damn phone that’s been here for thirty years. I’m surprised it still works. I wanted to see if you’re okay to keep Ruby for the afternoon. I’m getting one of my headaches.”
“We’re fine!” Mary Grace shouts. “Go home and lie down. Drive careful, I think there’s a storm coming.”
Mary Grace hangs up and turns to Ruby. “Your mom has been getting headaches ever since she was a child. I think it’s things she knows but doesn’t want to know trying to get out. Your mother is very smart.”
“Like me,” Ruby says.
“Just like you.”
On her way home, Eliza stops at the cemetery. In the distance two men are digging a grave. Nearby, Parker, shirtless, is down on his hands and knees with a small clipper, trimming the grass around a headstone, like he’s giving it a haircut or a shave. The glossy sweat on his back coats a large Byzantine tattoo of Jesus, catching the afternoon light in such a way that Eliza feels the face of Christ looking at her, demanding something.
“Who died?” she asks, nodding toward the gravediggers.
“Don’t know yet,” Parker says.
“I got your flowers.” She holds out the vase.
“Appreciate it,” Parker says, turning around, reaching into his pocket for the money. His chest and his arms are covered in tattoos, stories waiting to be told.
“Strange weather,” she says, making conversation.
“Yep,” he says, “there’s something in the air, almost like little invisible flakes, shards of light—just landing on things.”
As the wind picks up, a hum comes over the hills, low-grade and musical, more like a chant. It starts off faint, rises up, and then stops as though to catch a breath and begins again—a hum like the wind, like a Buddhist song.
The widow from across the street comes knocking on Mary Grace’s door. “We’re in for it now,” the widow says.
“Late for snow and too early for blight,” Mary Grace says, putting on the kettle to boil. Ruby, playing on the kitchen floor, listens to every word.
“When plagues are upon us,” the widow says, “deliverance soon follows.”
Mary Grace says nothing. What is there to say? The widow continues, “What time of year is it—harvest?”
“Spring,” Mary Grace says.
“Is that right?” The widow looks at the calendar on Mary Grace’s wall. “Did I miss Christmas?” She shakes her head. “When you live long enough, you see it all—the great blizzard, the unending rain, the big fire, the quake before dawn, the rising lake, the disappearing trees, the white noise. There were always those who knew and those who didn’t want to know.” She clucks.
The two women have each lived a long time and speak in a kind of code. Mary Grace takes out a tin of tea.
“And those who liked it the way it was before,” the widow says.
“And always some who didn’t want to know, who ignored the warning,” Mary Grace says.
“Was that the end of it?” the widow asks. “Wasn’t there more? Didn’t they know that one day it would come back?”
“You and I have lived a long time. We’ve been through it all,” Mary Grace says. “It comes and it goes.”
“What are you talking about?” Ruby demands.
“We are talking about life on this good earth,” the widow says.
“Will you stay for tea?” Mary Grace asks.
“I’m going under,” the widow says, turning to leave.
“Be sure to take a flashlight,” Mary Grace reminds her.
“You’re welcome to join me,” she says, filled with hope—no one wants to be alone in the dark.
“We’ll stay,” Mary Grace says.
“If anything interesting happens, come get me,” the widow says, leaving.
“Where is she going?” Ruby asks.
“Years ago some folks built shelters underground in case of bad weather or war and stocked them with food and water. Your grandfather and I never went for that kind of thing. We’re more optimistic than some of the others. Do you know what I used to like to do when a storm was coming?”
“What?”
“I liked to ride my bike up Mount Greylock.”
“That sounds dangerous,” Ruby says. She is by nature cautious.
“Yes, I suppose, but it was very exciting. I saw all kinds of things. If you get up high enough, sometimes it felt like you were Zeus on top of Olympus above the storm, or you could watch it move from one side of the mountain to the other—you could almost get right up inside it. Would you like to do that with me sometime?”
Ruby shakes her head no. “I’m more of an indoor person,” she says, and goes back to her game.
“Look at the birds,” Mary Grace says, noticing the birds just outside, making sudden, quick preparations, as though they have some kind of backup plan, some emergency-effectiveness training that they are putting to the test. The winds are picking up, though the sky remains clear but for some high, white clouds.
“Tell me more,” Ruby says, to distract herself. “Is that the ring your mother wore?” She points to a ring on Mary Grace’s finger.
“Yes, it is.”
“The golden ring?”
Mary Grace nods.
And the storm is upon them. Fat raindrops splash against the windows, thunder slams, the windowpanes shudder. The winds spin, turning in ever tighter circles, at one point seeming to focus entirely on the apple tree, whirling around it, leaving the tree trunk and branches coated with ancient black sand—crushed onyx, obsidian, druzy. As quickly as the storm was upon them, it is over.
Paul arrives soon after. “Quite the storm,” he says. “The streets are covered with branches, lines are down.”
“Quite,” says Mary Grace, distracted. She is once again looking at the birds for clues. They appear to be flying around the house, circling.
“Just wanted to make sure you two were all right. We lost power, so I closed for the night. How is it that your lights are on?” Paul asks.
“I don’t know,” Mary Grace says, going back into the kitchen, busying herself with dinner.
“I met the funniest fella today. A Chinese man came to town, said he’d been here before and that he knew Pop.”
“Hmmm,” Mary Grace says, winking at Ruby.
And then she remembers the widow across the street. “Can you two knock on her shelter door, let her know the weather is over for now and see if she’d like to join us for dinner?”
Ruby and Paul dutifully go across the street and knock on the shelter.
The widow won’t come out. “They say more is coming soon,” she says. “Things don’t happen just once.”
“Would you like us to bring you a plate of supper?” Paul asks.
“Oh,” she says, “thank you, that would be nice.”
At the Holiday Inn downtown, the two Chinese men ask about dinner. “We have been looking forward to something special. We are craving the McDonald’s. Is there one near here? Do they have a Happy Meal? It comes with a prize inside like a fortune cookie? Have you ever had one?”
Ruby calls her mother from the phone in Mary Grace’s kitchen.
“Hi, Mom,” she says.
“Hi, Ruby,” her mom says.
“Grandma wants me to invite you for dinner.”
“That sounds nice, but I still have a headache. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Ruby says. “Grandma told me something interesting.”
“What did she tell you?”
“We’re Chinese.”
“You’re Chinese,” her mother says.
“So are you,” Ruby says.
“Please, Ruby, don’t start.”
“What, Mama? I’m just telling you what Grandma told me.”
“Can you put her on the phone?”
Ruby looks at Mary Grace, who is standing right there listening. Mary Grace shakes her head.
“She can’t come to the phone right now,” Ruby says. “She’s very busy.”
Ten minutes later Ruby’s mom arrives wearing her cranial ice helmet, looking like an angry linebacker. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m not liking it,” she says to her mother. “You are confusing Ruby.”
“Ruby is not confused,” her mother says.
“Well, then I must be.”
“Perhaps, but it’s not your fault,” her mother says, going into the kitchen for the supper plates. “Can you and Ruby set the table?”
“I’m not hungry,” Eliza says, “I’m nauseated. Why is this orange box on the table?”
“That’s the box I came in,” Ruby says.
“No, it’s not,” Eliza says.
There is an old baby doll, like the baby Jesus, in the clementine crate on the dining room table.
“Well, it’s like the box I came in,” Ruby says. “We were playing Trip from China.”
“Why is it I can’t even just have a headache and lie down for two hours without the whole world slipping out of control?” Eliza asks.
“Maybe you want more control than is possible?” Paul says.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Mary Grace says when they’re all in their places.
“Are you thinking the end is coming soon?” Eliza asks, worried.
“It’s inevitable,” Paul says.
“Ruby, go in the other room and watch television,” her mother says.
Ruby doesn’t budge.
“I have some information,” Mary Grace says.
“What kind of information? Like top-secret information? Like someone from the government is going to come knocking on the door?” Paul asks.
“I was born out of wedlock,” she says. “My father was Chinese.”
“Your father was killed in the war,” Eliza says, correcting her.
“It was a lie,” Mary Grace says.
“Why didn’t you tell us before?” Paul asks.
“I’m telling you now,” she says.
“If you’d told us earlier, we could have known you better,” Eliza says.
“You knew me well enough.”
“Did Dad know?” Paul asks.
“I can’t remember,” Mary Grace says honestly. “He knew something, I’m just not sure what. I was going to tell him more, but after the gadget he was afraid of things, and it seemed best not to say too much.”
“Am I right in remembering that sometimes the doorbell would ring and strangers would be standing on the doorstep bringing boxes and crates?” Paul asks.
“Yes.”
“They’d just arrive with no warning?”
“That’s correct.”
“And you’d take the things they brought?”
“Yes, it started in the late 1940s, when this was still my mother’s house. And then, after she passed, we continued to accept what came—that’s simply the way it was.”
“They just arrived?”
“Yes.”
“Men would come and no one asked why?”
“It wasn’t about the men, it was about what they carried—big boxes, small boxes, suitcases.”
“Did you ever look inside the boxes?” Paul asks.
“No,” she says unequivocally. “My mother used to say, ‘Someday someone will claim them,’ and I assumed that she knew what she was talking about. The boxes were ours to hold, not to open.”
“We still have the boxes,” Paul says.
“That’s right,” Mary Grace says.
“And what about the Unit? How does all this fit with the Unit?”
“You’re conflating the Unit with the news from China,” Eliza says.
“Am I? They worked on the trigger at the factory. They built the trigger of the first atomic bomb—the gadget.”
“The Unit and the gadget are entirely different,” Mary Grace clarifies. “The Unit came after the gadget. It was a civilian effort, no military interference. As far as the government is concerned, they probably don’t know those things ever got built—to them it’s folklore, like visitors from outer space.” She pauses for a moment. “When the men would come with the boxes, they would talk with your father. Sometimes your father would take them downstairs and show them what he was working on. They talked about the bonds between countries, things they had in common—not everyone wanted to blow us all to kingdom come.”
“The bomb was dropped on Japan not China,” Eliza says. “China wasn’t part of it.”
“China and Japan are next-door neighbors,” Paul says, as though that clarifies things.
“I believe the Unit is still in the basement,” Mary Grace says. “All around the world, men and women built them. It’s meant to work like a magnet, gathering things.”
Ruby asks, “When did your mama die?
Mary Grace turns to the little girl. “August of 1974. She had a stroke the day after President Nixon resigned. She lost her faith.”
“And am I right in remembering we also used to get boxes of fruit every month? Oranges, grapefruit, citrus?” Paul asks.
“That’s right,” Mary Grace says. “Our regular mailman would bring those, every month a box of fruit.”
“Who sent them?” Eliza asks.
“Someone in Florida. December 1974, that was the last box we got,” Mary Grace says, suddenly tired.
Paul takes more lamb onto his plate. “I want to be sure I’ve got this right. You’re saying that you’re part Chinese?”
“Yes, and you are, too,” Mary Grace says. She is suddenly a little agitated, flighty, unable to eat. It’s much more difficult to explain than she anticipated.
“Buy firecrackers, eat lychee nuts?” Paul says.
“It means only what you want it to mean,” Mary Grace says.
“I think we should open the boxes,” Paul says.
The doorbell rings.
“I’m scared,” Ruby says.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” Mary Grace says, grateful for the interruption. She opens the front door, and there is a Chinese man holding a large basket of fruit.
“I am returning the kidneys,” he says.
Paul comes up behind his mother. “The kindness,” he says, translating for Walter. “Come in, come in. It’s Walter, the man who had car trouble earlier.”
Walter makes a little bow, and Mary Grace takes the fruit basket from him.
“In China I am Yao Walter, but here I am Walter Granger, all at once like the name Campbell’s Soup. My grandfather was digger at the bone cave with Walter Granger of Middletown Springs, Vermont. He had no children of his own, and so they name me after him. No one in my village has ever been named Walter. I hope I am not too late,” Walter says.
“Not at all,” Mary Grace says. “We’re just having dinner.” Eliza gets another plate.
Ruby pats the empty seat next to her. “Sit here,” she says. And he does.
Paul passes the lamb.
“I am vegetarian,” he says, passing it to Eliza.
“So am I,” Ruby says, not knowing what vegetarian means but knowing she and Walter have something in common. “We have homemade mint jelly,” Ruby says, passing it to him.
Walter puts some jelly on his plate. “Have you got any peanut butter?”
Excited, Ruby runs back into the kitchen and returns with the peanut butter and bread.
During dinner Walter tells stories of his adventures as a deliveryman, carrying things back and forth from China, crisscross applesauce all around the world.
After dinner Walter asks for a tour of the house. He tells them how excited he is to be there and that he wants to see “under everything.”
While Paul shows him around, Ruby and Eliza bring a plate of supper to the widow, who is still refusing to come out of the shelter. “Let’s wait and see what tomorrow brings,” she says as she pulls the hatch shut and locks it from the inside.
“Good night!” Ruby and Eliza call from her backyard. “Sleep tight!”
In the basement Paul shows Walter all the things that his father built. “My father always had a soldering iron in his hand. We built radios, fixed toasters, lamps, always working at something. But these here, these were something he said had a lot of potential. They were something he hoped would be perfected.”
“That all he say?” Walter asks. “He leave any instructions?”
Paul shakes his head. “To be perfectly honest with you, Walter, my father talked about a lot of things, and I was never really sure what he was getting at. He took the bomb pretty hard. He quit the factory and started saying things about how it’s no longer a government for the people by the people but that it’s one guy with his finger on the trigger and so on.”
Walter nods like this is all very familiar stuff. “We have similar at my home,” Walter says. “My father built a machine for us. He calls it a wishing machine.”
“You mean washing machine?”
“Wishing machine,” Walter says slowly, carefully enunciating.
“My father called it the Unit,” Paul says. “Do you know what it’s supposed to do?”
“It’s a magnet,” Walter says. “When they are all turned on, it pulls us closer together.”
Paul and Walter turn the units on—each has a red light, like the flame of a match, like a beacon glowing. Nothing happens.
“Maybe they no good anymore,” Walter says. “Maybe like magic genie lantern, the wishing wear off?”
“I don’t know,” Paul says. “Maybe it takes a while, maybe it takes a lot of units working together to make something happen. I’ll bring them upstairs, and we’ll try again tomorrow.”
“Ah,” Walter says, slapping himself on the forehead for effect. “I always forget, here today is yesterday in China.”
Mary Grace invites Walter to stay the night, and given the oddity of the day, Paul decides he’ll stay, too, and then Ruby, not wanting to miss a sleepover, insists that she and Eliza stay as well.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve had a full house,” Mary Grace says happily.
After everyone has gone to bed, Mary Grace goes into the kitchen. Walter finds her there, making tea. “I can’t sleep,” she says.
“Me three,” Walter says. “It is a very exciting time.” He takes something from inside his coat. “I wanted to wait until there was privacy. I have mail for you—really for your mother, but at a certain point in time, when the mother is no more, you become your mother. I am sorry to be so late—it was lost in transit.” He hands her a letter written in Chinese.
“Read it to me,” Mary Grace says, pouring two cups of tea.
“It is complicated,” Walter says. “My reading in Chinese is not so good. Do people in English have learning disabilities? In China trouble reading is very big problem, too many characters. Anyway, your father writes to say that in America he is like a forgotten ghost—no more Chinese. He went home to China, but when he got there, he was no more Chinese in China either. His mother wants him to stay, she finds him a wife, but the night before the wedding he runs away. He runs, he walks, he swims back to America. He arrives as traveling salesman—selling knickerknackers floor to floor. He can never go home again. He met your mother in Florida. He loves her very much. He wishes he could marry her. In the letter he mentions the kindness—that is why I come today, to return the kindness and to deliver the mail.”
Walter excuses himself from the table and opens the front door. A loud, hot wind blows through the house, lifting the letter out of Mary Grace’s hand. She grabs it in midair, folds it, and tucks it into her apron pocket. Walter returns carrying a box wrapped in very old paper, tied with string so worn that it is crumbling.
“This is a box he want to send to your mother.”
“I am ready for something new,” Mary Grace says, opening the box. Inside is a wedding dress, almost a hundred years old, long red silk in perfect condition. “It is time for a fresh skin,” Mary Grace says, holding the dress to her heart.
“Time for bed,” Walter says, raising his teacup. “Tomorrow more will come.”
The next morning Peter, the half-dollar cowboy from the day before, pulls up at nine with a giant box of doughnut holes—“fortifications.”
Walter is on the front lawn doing his tai chi. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I have to shake your hand,” Peter says to Walter. “You have loomed large in my consciousness. I’m not here just by accident. I am the beautiful boy, the bastard son of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, descendant of Voltaire. My mother knew Mr. Roger Giroux; she knew Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Hyman of Bennington, Vermont. She knew everybody who was anybody. In fact, I have some of Shirley Jackson’s ashes in the back of the car—a gift from Chuck Palahniuk, who was given them by a Jackson/Hyman daughter. I grew up on Park Avenue and in Poughkeepsie and have been waiting for this moment my whole life. I feel as though I have known all of you forever. This is it!” he shouts. “This is the Omega Point!” He kisses Walter square on the lips. “Everything that rises must converge!” he exclaims.
Ruby looks out the front window and announces, “I just saw two men kissing.”
“I’ll put a pot of coffee on,” Mary Grace says.
Paul opens the front door, ushering Peter and Walter into the house. “We have to be careful,” he says. “Don’t want people getting the wrong idea.”
“Would you like a doughnut hole?” Peter asks.
“What flavor?” Paul asks.
“Assorted,” Peter says, opening the box.
Paul plucks out a chocolate glazed for himself.
Walter goes for jelly and seems surprised when he bites into it. “Fun,” he says. “The boys outside will like this.” He opens the front door and calls out to Yin and Yang, the gymnasts who appeared at dawn and have been warming up on the front lawn, doing backflips and cartwheels.
“Fun food, catch,” Walter says, tossing doughnut holes to Yin and Yang, who catch them in their mouths. “Yin and Yang are Siamese twins separated just after birth,” Walter says proudly. “They do good now, read each other’s mind.”
“Do you know them from before?” Mary Grace asks. She spotted them earlier when she opened the front door in her robe to get the morning newspaper.
“Mother, may I?” they asked.
“Yes, you may,” she said.
And they began to perform a ritual dance on the lawn while singing a Chinese version of “Singin’ in the Rain.”
“Of course I know them,” Walter says. “They are part of the job, they are the heavies.”
“Well, then invite them in,” Mary Grace says.
Walter opens the door again, and as Yin and Yang cartwheel through the front door, Yin, Yang, and Walter all take off their black coats and turn them inside out, revealing the white undersides, like lab coats. From their pockets they take out old pieces of paper that look like parts of a puzzle or a map and put them on the kitchen table, where Walter works with a roll of Scotch Magic Tape, putting it all together. The map turns out to be a list of boxes with the contents annotated in Chinese code—which takes Walter a while to decipher. He keeps getting frustrated and ripping up his work, throwing it on the floor and stomping on it. Ruby sits next to him and very calmly asks, “Can I work with you?” And together they solve the problem.
“Walter, buddy,” Paul says, “I don’t mean to interrupt you while you’re working, but what is this all adding up to—the units, the wishing machines, the boxes?”
Walter holds up his palm, asking Paul to wait. As soon as the code is cracked, the puzzle pieces all fit together and Walter gives the results to Yin and Yang, the Chinese strongmen who quickly move through the house gathering all the boxes, suitcases, trunks that arrived over the years, preparing to unpack.
Meanwhile, Ruby delivers a box of Cheerios across the street to the widow’s secret hideout. “Ollie, ollie, oxen free,” she says, knocking on the door. “Come out, come out, wherever you are. If there ever was a time, this is the time. The moment is now.”
“Okay, I come clean,” Walter says, gesturing that Paul, Eliza, and Mary Grace should take their places at the kitchen table. “I offer you a belief history lesson.”
“I think you mean brief,” Paul says.
Walter goes on. “In 1920 and 1930s, the bones of Sinanthropus pekinensis, Homo erectus pekinensis, were discovered on Dragon Bone Hill by a group of anthropologists,” he says, struggling to pronounce the words. “Among the scientists were Mr. Walter Granger of Vermont and Mr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, geopaleontologist and Jesuit priest from France. Do you follow?”
“I hear you,” Paul says. “But I’m not sure I follow.”
“The bones of primitive man were discovered in China a long time ago,” Mary Grace says, translating for her children.
Ruby has returned and is sitting on her mother’s lap. “Did you discover them, Grandma?” she asks.
“No,” Mary Grace says, “I didn’t go to China until you were born.”
Walter corrects, “Good guess. Your grandfather’s family was involved, and in China family is very important.”
Everyone nods.
“In 1937 Japan invaded China,” Walter continues.
“I told you there was a link,” Paul says to Eliza.
“People worried what might happen to the bones, and so the bones were packed and were about to be shipped to America when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. In the upset the bones vanished. Some say they sank on a ship, some say they were taken by train, no one person knew what had happened, and no one has seen them since. But little by little, like undercover operation, the bones were making their way to America—to North Adams, Massachusetts, the safest place in the world.”
“Why our house?” Paul wants to know.
“It is not about your house, it is because you are Chinese, descendant of the Citrus Wizard Lue Gim Gong,” Walter says, as though it is obvious. “You were Chinese, but nobody knew, and therefore nobody could suspect. Nobody would think to look here. The boxes came over very long time to be discreet, but now it is time for them to be revealed. These are bones of Peking Man. We, the people of China, thank you for holding our history.”
“And what about him?” Paul asks, pointing to Peter, who has finished writing his speech and is now frantically working both Mary Grace’s landline and his own cell phone.
“He is our PR macher, the bastard son of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the anthropologist priest. ‘Omega Point’ was his father’s term to describe maximum complexity and consciousness toward which we are hurling.”
And with that, Peter slams down the telephone and announces, “I’ve got NBC, CNN, CBS, the local affiliates, and more coming soon.”
“This is it,” Walter says. “Our moment is now.”
Yin and Yang cover the dining room table with beautiful red cloths they magically extract from inside their pant legs, and Walter begins to lay out the exhibit—keeping the basket of fruit he’d brought yesterday in the center. The bones are not that of a single skeleton but bits and pieces, fragments of men and women who lived three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand years ago. There are skullcaps, braincases, teeth, jawbones, and stone tools. With each piece is a note written long ago in Chinese, containing information on where and when it was found.
Peter peeks out the front window. “News spreads fast,” he says as satellite trucks start pulling up. The widow comes out of the storm shelter and walks across the street, wondering what the fuss is about—she thinks it is all about her.
“Isn’t anyone entitled to a private life anymore?” she asks Ruby.
Peter works the front door like a bouncer, a carnival barker, a docent at the homemade Museum of Early Man. “Come one, come all, step right up and see what’s inside. This is history in the making, the missing returned, the secret revealed, the story of man’s evolution made whole.”
At noon, when factory whistles and volunteer-fire-department sirens and giant city clocks around the world sound their bells marking the middle of the day, all the units, the wishing machines, the peacemakers, the whatchamacallits are turned on. Giant rainbows begin to crisscross the sky in a show of light, sound, and magnetism. In this house and that house, in every village and town, appliances, cars, computers, iPhones, and BlackBerrys feel the tug. They slip off the wall and edge slightly forward, coming together, leaning in, ready for more.
Mary Grace is upstairs dressing. She slips into her mother’s wedding dress and is transformed from New England matriarch, Norman Rockwell grandmother, to a sagacious Chinese beauty. She takes the bright red lipstick that was among her mother’s effects and paints a Cupid’s bow onto her mouth. Twirling a long red ribbon, Ruby dances, leading her grandmother down the stairs and out the back door, a most modern maid of honor. Mary Grace silently descends and goes to her apple tree. She slips off her golden ring and hands it to Ruby, who puts it on a dandelion chain around her neck. Mary Grace stands under the tree, arms open, extended, waiting until she catches the light. She rises.
Sensing that something is happening, Paul and Eliza ask, “Where is she?” and are ushered out the back door as Mary Grace is being lifted.
“How did she get there?” the widow from across the street asks, seeing her friend floating feet off the ground.
“I can assure you she didn’t climb,” Eliza says. “She can’t even get up a stepladder.”
“It’s something about the weather,” the widow says, “force of nature, carried by the wind.”
“She was lifted,” someone says.
“Odd,” someone else says.
“Not really,” the widow says. “It was a long time coming.”
“Mama, are you all right?” Eliza calls out.
“I’m fine,” Mary Grace says. She is, after all, a woman of great faith. The feeling for her is one of elongation, stretching. If she pulls back, it is uncomfortable, and she wonders why she is resisting, why she is trying to stay on the ground.
“Mama, no!” Eliza calls out.
“Don’t worry,” Ruby says, comforting her mother. “You’re not alone. You have me.”
As Mary Grace rises up, it begins to snow. Heavy, thick flakes, more like shavings or the debris of something that exploded far away, begin to fall to the ground. The flakes melt onto whatever they touch, coating it with something like wax, fixing it in time and space.
Without a word Mary Grace rises further still, surrendering, ascending until she is out of sight—gone.