"Well, Alice, he began, and then paused, looking for words. "I guess I’m coming to the end too. You know that, right?"
"Yes." She tried to keep tears out of her voice, for his sake. "I know that."
"I’ve been thinking." She heard his breathing, a heavy, labored sound. "I feel bad about-I was wrong about that boyfriend of yours. What was his name?"
She closed her eyes. "Jian."
"Right. Jian. I thought you’d find somebody else easily-"
"Horace, please. You don’t have to-"
"No, I want to say this. I never meant for you to be alone."
"I know that. I know you didn’t." Everything she had thought about, all the fury and forgiveness, swirled to a hurricane inside her. With an effort she mastered herself, made her voice gentle. "Anyway," she told her father, "it was a long time ago."
He was silent for a moment. Only the sound of his breathing.
"Horace?"
"So you’ll come as soon as you can, Alice?"
"Yes. Of course. I told you-I’m on my way." She twisted the phone cord around and around her finger, feeling she was about to break. She wanted so badly to get there in time, to be near him, at least, for the end. Then she would deal with the rest.
"Alice?"
"Horace," she said softly, "hang on."
When she got back to her room Lin was there. His face was scraped, his hair matted, his clothes streaked with dirt. "Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you!" His voice was urgent. "I know why you are leaving-your father. Kong told me. Ah, Mo Ai-li, it’s a sadness."
"Yes," she managed. Why had he come back? Out of sympathy? He’d already made it clear he didn’t want her anymore.
"I hope your father will be all right," Lin said quietly, trying to pin her with his eyes.
"He won’t." She looked away. "He’s going to die."
His face softened. "I’m so sorry. You are going back right away?"
"As soon as we get to Yinchuan."
"Xiao Mo," he said, his voice gentle but insistent. "Datingyixia. I’m sorry for the things I said when you told me you were leaving. If I had known…"
"Of course," she said, looking into his face, tearing apart inside. "I know that. But there were other things you said, Dr. Lin. Remember?" Her chin trembled slightly as she reverted to the old, distant form of address they’d used at first.
"Yes, I remember. Please. Don’t call me that."
"But you did say those things, Lin. Come on. You had a right to say them. Though on some of them you were wrong." Her voice grew hard. "So there is a point I’d like to make. Just one. If I may."
"Ai-li."
"No, please. Let me. About following convenience. Yes, I led a free life. But the past is the past. And I meant what I said about the future. If you and I had taken our road together I would have been true to you. I’d never have been unfaithful. I don’t know if you heard me when I told you, or if you even care anymore, but I meant it, it’s true, with all my heart I tell you it’s true, I loved you."
His mouth fell slack at those words, which carried so much weight in Chinese. Love. He felt it, too, he knew he did. It hadn’t happened to him in so long. "Why do you use the past tense?" he whispered. "Why do you say ’loved’? Is it finished for you? You don’t feel it anymore?"
She hesitated. "It’s not that. It’s that I have to go back. I have to say good-bye to my father. And there are so many things I have to sort out. Then maybe I can really know love."
He studied her hard. "Maybe?"
"Oh, Shiyang, I-I wish it, of course, the same way I’ve always wished it. But I see now that it’s not something I can simply reach out and take." She looked up at him and held his gaze. "It’s true for you, too, Shiyang. You know it is. Otherwise you wouldn’t still be searching for traces of your wife."
"But I’ve found her now," he said heavily. "She’s gone."
"Ah. I have something for you." Alice opened her suitcase, packed and ready for the drive back to Yinchuan, and removed a small square of padded green silk. "Guo Wenxiang gave it to me. He claimed he had forgotten about it before. Of course he was probably just planning to keep it, and sell it. But at the last moment he changed his mind." With the greatest respect, using both hands, she extended it.
In silence he took it. And unwrapped it.
The look on his face, the gasp that trembled through him when he saw the tooth, told her he knew it very well. He stared at it, eyes glistening.
"It was hers, yes?" She zipped the suitcase shut.
He nodded, unable to speak.
"Shiyang," she whispered. "You’re a man of great commitment. I admire that. Perhaps I was wrong to think I could take you away from your memories."
He stared at her, everything battling inside him, then looked down at the million-year-old tooth in his brown, hollow palm. He raised his eyes back to hers. These things she kept saying, these equivocations-"Are you letting me go?" he asked her bluntly. "Are you telling me you want the rest of your life without me?"
Hurt flared. Isn’t that what you told me? she thought. Yet at the same moment she saw him standing in front of her, a man, shimmering with feeling. Half of her wanted only to step into his arms. "It’s not that I want my life without you," she said in a rough whisper. "It’s just that I can’t see anything, right now, except what I have to do. I have to go back. Beyond that"-she looked up at him, blinked back pain-"I just don’t know."
After he left she took the Teilhard books off her desk, leafed through them, then closed them firmly and buried them in her suitcase. She still had a little time remaining.
So she walked out of Eren Obo into the sudden, all-powerful desert, and climbed high enough to gain a good, unfettered view of the alluvial plain and the town. Its grid of loess buildings glinted in the sun. This was a place my life changed, she thought.
She found a good spot marked by a little jumble of boulders, just off the path. Everything behind her, all of her past, seemed dead. Lucile was dead. Meng Shaowen. Teilhard de Chardin. And soon her father would die, too, Horace Mannegan. She’d be alone again. Always alone.
It was time to leave the ling-pai behind.
And the stomach-protector too.
She knelt and, using a stone from beside the path just as a Paleolithic woman would once have done, she dug a hole several inches deep.
In it she placed the ling-pai.
She dug the antique red silk stomach-protector out of her pocket and threw it into the hole on top of the ling-pai. She never wanted to see it again.
Staring at the two mismatched objects in the hole, she felt a weird kind of clarity. She should say a prayer. What had the Chinese words been, when she had said the jiao-hun, the calling of the soul that night on the street corner in Yinchuan?
She sighed. She couldn’t remember. "Ashes to ashes," she said in English into the empty desert air, "dust to dust." She swept the loose dirt back into the hole and patted it down. Good-bye, Mother Meng. I loved you. Good-bye, Lucile.
She slowly raised herself and walked back down the path.
The first thing she did when they arrived in Yinchuan was call her father again. "Horace? I was just calling to-"
"You’re still coming home, aren’t you?" His voice sounded weak.
"Yes! I have a flight to Beijing tonight. From there it’ll take about twenty-four hours."
"Thank you, sweetheart. Thank you." He sounded so tired, so far away.
"Get some rest," she said, not knowing what else to say. "I’ll be there soon." She hung up.
In Yinchuan, in his room, Lin sat on his bed holding the tooth. In the next building Mo Ai-li was preparing to leave. She would leave and she might never come back.
Pain sliced through him at the thought.
He pushed the tooth in his pocket and walked quickly out of the room, down the hall, picking up speed, footsteps clattering, down the stairs, out of Building Two and across the courtyard.