Twenty-two

AS THE T ROLLED out of Forest Hills, David looked at Rachel.

She was sitting next to Grace, her hands clasped in her lap. Occasionally he would see her index finger describe a shape, a rectangular pattern, on her wrist. She looked out of the window, past his shoulder, at the districts of Franklin Park and Roxbury passing by; when the main line tracks ran parallel to the T for a while, he saw her gaze flicker. She glanced once or twice at him, and the book he was carrying.

He had brought Wilson’s biography.

As they had prepared to go out, after both he and Grace had caught just a couple of hours’ sleep, Jen had brought Rachel down to the kitchen. The book was open on the tabletop, at a picture of the An-lan Chiao suspension bridge, on the route to Tatsienlu. What had prompted him to look at the chapter, he couldn’t say. But he had woken up in the red leather chair with Tatsienlu in his head.

Rachel had stood at his shoulder in the kitchen, leaning slightly forward.

“Have you seen this bridge before?” he asked her.

He watched her eyes stray across the page.

Grace smiled at them. “Rachel,” she murmured. “This is David, remember? Say hello.”

“Hello,” Rachel said.

David wanted to touch her. He wondered at this strange, impulsive instinct. He only wanted to put his arm on her shoulder, or his hand on hers. But, after the reaction the day before, he dared not. “Hello, Rachel,” he said.

“Have your sandwich, Rachel,” Grace instructed.

“I have bridges, too,” Rachel said. She had sat down in front of the place set for her.

“This is in China,” David told her. “This is your mother’s book.”

“Three hundred and forty-three, six hundred and seventy-six, three hundred and forty-three feet, like that,” Rachel said, putting her palms flat on the table, side by side, three times. “Flatiron bed, fixed saddle, anchorages.”

She was smiling with some kind of inner delight. It was the first smile he had seen, and his heart knocked unexpectedly in his chest. The smile transformed the face, but, more than that, it was terribly unusual. It was the kind of smile you saw sometimes on the faces of much younger children, completely without guile or hesitation.

Grace was cutting bread at the table. “Clifton,” she guessed.

“No.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Grace complained, making up her own sandwich. “I’m out of practice with this one.” She shrugged. “Windsor.”

“No,” Rachel repeated. She pressed her palms again to the tabletop.

Grace glanced at David. “It’s a game,” she explained.

“Three hundred and forty-three, six hundred and seventy-six, three hundred and forty-three.”

“It’s Wales somewhere,” Jen suggested. “Or the Great Western.”

“No.”

“Got it,” Grace said. “Hungerford.”

Rachel began to eat, satisfied. She rocked from side to side a little.

Grace looked back at David. “That’s your part of the world,” she said. “Hungerford Bridge, London. Built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1845.”

“And Clifton is Bristol,” David said, understanding now. Rachel kept the precise dimensions of bridges in her head. Strange. Amazing. He joined their smiles. “Even I know that. You can’t exactly miss Clifton Gorge.”

“Ten cables, twenty-one inches,” Rachel said.

“Clifton has ten cables?” David asked, puzzled.

“Eat,” Grace told her. “No talking, Rachel. Enough.”

It wasn’t until they got up to go, as David closed the book, that he saw, toward the bottom of the page opposite the photograph of the An-lan Chiao high in the Min River mountains, Wilson’s diary notes: “…the floor of the bridge rests across ten bamboo cables each 21 inches in circumference, made of bamboo culms split and twisted together…”

And the idea came to him then.

Right then, watching his daughter pick up her things, with the book in his hand.

They went on to the State station.

“Sometime today I have to find my car,” Grace mused, as they stepped out into the street. “God alone knows where it is.”

She turned as if to walk down the long haul of Cambridge Street to the hospital, but David held her arm.

“Did James ring you yet?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Do you think we could spare a half hour?”

“What for?”

“Something I need to find,” he told her.

She took her cell phone out of her bag and rang James’s number. After a slight delay, he answered.

“How is Anna?” she asked. She paused for the reply. “Any change?” He must have replied in the negative. “We’ll be there soon,” she told him. She made to switch the phone off, then put it back to her ear. “Excuse me?” she said. David saw her face darken. “I see,” she replied. “Then we’ll make it sooner.” She flicked it off, and put it back in her bag. Then, she stood with both hands on her hips, gazing sightlessly at the buildings across the street.

“What is it?” David asked.

“That bastard,” she retorted. “He isn’t there.”

“Isn’t at the hospital?”

“No.”

“Well, where the hell is he?”

“At the gallery,” she said.

David looked at the ground for a moment. “What did he say about Anna?”

“No change,” Grace whispered.

David set his face. “Come on,” he told her. “We’ll hurry.”

They found the huge bookstore on School Street.

“What are you looking for?” Grace asked.

“A map,” David told her.

“A map?” Grace repeated. She gave him a curious look.

“Bear with me,” he told her.

“You should have told me maps, and not books,” Grace said. “There’s a better place on State Street. It’s a travel store.”

“Is it far?”

“Not too far…”

They found themselves almost running.

Inside Rand McNally, Rachel began pulling Grace’s arm. “We used to come here all the time,” Grace explained. “Atlases.”

They found the section for China. David took down one of the books that boasted a foldout map in the back pocket. He sat down on the floor, and spread it out. Zhongguo, said the back title, Carte Chine, Mapa touystyczna Chiny…

He flattened it out. It occupied fifty inches by thirty-five.

“China,” Rachel said. “India, Kazakhstan, Taiwan.”

He looked up at her, smiling. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s right.”

They stared down at the piece of the world revealed at their feet. In the bottom right-hand corner, Shanghai occupied the easternmost part of the continent, the Yellow Sea stretching out toward the fragmented coastlines of Japan and Korea. Rounding the coast came Kowloon, Hong Kong, and the Gulf of Tonkin. From their vantage point directly above it, the enormity of the mountains dwarfed even the vastness of China’s interior: the Altun, Qilian, Kunlun, Gangdisé, Nyaingêntanglha, and Himalaya Shan all swept down in one extraordinary arc. Two colors alone dominated the map: the green of the huge river plains, and the stony gray of the interminable mountain ranges. Almost through the center, dividing mountain from tundra and China from Mongolia and Russia, ran the Great Wall.

David got up. “Stay here,” he said.

Rachel got down on her knees, and ran her finger along the eastern coast, and then inland, following the blue line of the river from Shanghai.

David was back in a minute or so, with a highlighter pen in his hand.

He kneeled next to Rachel. He began to underline the place-names. They showed in vivid pink.

“Yichang,” Rachel read out, “Chongqing…”

He found the others that he could remember. All traveling west, higher and higher: Chengdu, the last great city before Sichuan really began to climb; Chongqing, Emei Shan, Hanyuan, the Zhedou Pass, Danba, Batang.

“Do you see this?” he asked Rachel. He pointed to the site of the Zhedou-Shankou Pass, at eighteen thousand feet, far away from the green, far into the gray.

“Where are the bridges?” Rachel asked.

“This is Zhedou,” he told her. “I think there’s probably a bridge there by now. There certainly used to be a village. It’s a thousand feet below the pass. A man called Ernest Wilson walked through here a hundred years ago. He was from England, and had come to live in Boston, right here in this city. Near where you live now, Rachel.”

She said nothing. He persevered. She was looking off to the side now, along the tall racks.

“When he walked up to Zhedou, it was a horrible journey,” he continued. “It was so cold that the rain froze on their clothes. They passed the skeletons of animals that had died on the road—horses and mules, animals that were supposed to be able to endure places like that. The Chinese men who walked with him said that they were afraid of the pass, because the wind made a noise, a howling and grinding, a wailing noise as if someone was crying. They thought that something was mourning the dead. They thought ghosts lived there.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Rachel said. Her head was still turned in the opposite direction.

He smiled. “Maybe not,” he said. “But the men who were with him thought so. In China, there were spirits who controlled the human world, and there were the shen that belonged to trees, and rivers, and rain. Then there were the gui. They were the ghosts. They were people who had done something terrible in life, and had been reborn as demons, always hungry, always crying.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Rachel repeated.

David glanced at Grace. She had pursed her lips at Rachel’s pragmatism, and now simply rolled her eyes at David in good humor.

“Well,” David said, “then there was a snowstorm, and two men got lost. They found one the next morning. He’d been hiding under some rocks all night, and he was too frightened to go on.”

“Where was the other man?” Grace asked.

“They didn’t find him until two days later,” he said. “He was alive, but frozen to the core. They had to leave him behind in the huts they’d used for shelter.”

“Why?” Rachel said.

“Because he was too slow to walk with them.”

“Why?”

“She means why were they walking in the snow,” Grace murmured.

David sat back on his heels. “Because, in all this snow, where nothing else was growing, where nobody lived, and where not even animals could live, there were plants. Orchids. Poppies. Things that no one in the West—in England, in America, in Europe—had ever seen before.”

“Orchids are flowers,” Grace explained. “Your mom drew them.”

She looked at David over Rachel’s head, and gave a little smile.

She knew, he realized; she knew that her daughter had remembered him.

“Where are the bridges?” Rachel repeated.

David turned back. Now, his daughter was looking straight at him.

“You know what?” he said to her. “This is why I bought the map. We need it. We need it for when we go and see your mother.” He stood up, picked up the map carefully, and began to fold it.

Grace put her hand briefly on his arm.

“We’re going to build a bridge,” he said quietly. “She’ll come back. Just like the orchids. Just like the lilies.”

“David,” Grace warned, in little more than a breath.

“We’ll build a bridge,” he said. “We’ll build a way through the mountains.”