Nola sang “Teach Your Children,” and when she finished, the crowd cheered and wouldn’t stop. Bono kissed her cheek and asked her to sing more, so she sang “Hot Child In The City” and danced as if she were alone at home, while her lungs pumped out the music. When she was done, her head felt light in a weird way. She stood there, looking down at all these people who loved her, and she felt grown up, not just ten, and very special, like a goddess; she had given them something that made them happy. She now understood what it meant to love “her fellow human beings,” because she loved every one of them. Mom had been right all along. Love made the world a wonderful place.

Nola stayed up late, then fell asleep in a sleeping bag on the soggy ground with a boy younger than she who kept pulling on his penis. She decided that at home she would talk her parents into sleeping one night on the beach so the three of them could sing and then gaze at the stars. Love was close to home, too, she thought. She should write it as a song.

Jenna was a year and a half old when she had another cold and couldn’t breathe. She cried, then choked, and, frightened, she cried even harder and wouldn’t stop no matter what Nola did.

“Just shut her up,” Mom sobbed. “I can’t take it anymore!”

So Nola thought of the treatment the woman who watched the old man gave him when he wheezed real bad. Nola boiled water in a large pot, put a chair next to the counter so Jenna could reach it, placed Jenna’s face right above the hot water, and covered her head with a towel to keep the steam in.

“Breathe,” she ordered Jenna, and demonstrated. “In and out.”

But stupid Jenna dropped her face into the hot water.

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5

Nola's workout over, she gulped down juice and, still dripping sweat, stood by the window with Lulu in her arms.

From the height of the fourteenth-floor penthouse suite, an unobstructed view of the city stretched out for miles below her. Cranes filled the skyline. Every other building going up was a steel-and-glass skyscraper. The scaffoldings, though, were made of bamboo intricately tied together and seemed dangerously precarious. Straw mats were stretched between the bamboo poles to catch falling debris.

“Look, Lulu, this is Beijing, your city.”

“Ta-ta-ti.”

Nola continued to chatter and point out the sights to the baby. Details presented themselves, clearer, sharper than in previous days, as if imprinting themselves on her memory for Lulu's benefit. The baby, though, was more interested in grabbing Nola's lips, nose and hair. Nola laughed at her antics and went on talking. When Lulu was ready to speak, it would be English. Maybe in time Nola would hire a Chinese tutor for both of them.