The Astonishing Color of After(104)

I draw in a deep breath. “Can I ask you something?”

Axel shifts in his seat. “Of course.”

“Those emails.” I pause, because I’m not really sure how to frame my question.

“Emails?”

“Yeah. Um. What was up with those?”

He gives me a funny look. “What?”

“I mean.” My face is growing hot and I’m already regretting bringing them up. “They were pretty weird. Some of them… there was just no context. Not that everything needs context, but just, like. They were kind of random?”

“Leigh,” he says. “I have literally no idea what you’re talking about right now.”

I can’t decide if he’s being cowardly or actually dense. “The emails.”

“Right, I got that part. What emails?”

“All of them?” I’m starting to get impatient. “Everything you sent me while I was in Taiwan.”

His forehead scrunches down. “Ah. I see. I don’t know what you’re talking about… because I sent you zero emails while you were in Taiwan.”

I squint at him. “What?”

He looks back at me. Is he joking?

I pull out my phone and open my in-box, jabbing my finger at the screen, growing more furious by the second. My hand pauses as the app works to load— What if those emails weren’t at all real? What if I actually imagined them?

But no. The messages are there, thank god. The anger rushes back, hotter and louder than before. How much more cowardly can he possibly get? “These emails.” I shove the phone in his face. “Do you remember now?”

Axel takes the phone from me. He clicks through them one by one. I watch as his eyes read the words, trace the watercolor brushstrokes. When he gives the phone back, his face is strangely pale.

“Leigh, I need you to believe what I’m going to say, all right?”

Suddenly, I feel oddly calm. If this is the game he’s going to play, there’s nothing to do about it. “You’re about to tell me you didn’t send me those emails.”

“I didn’t send those emails.”

“Even though I have proof of them right here.”

“Let me finish,” he says. He scratches at his bottom lip with one thumb. “I wrote those emails. But I never sent them.”

“How does that make any kind of sense?”

“They were in my drafts. I—I do this thing.” He swallows. “I write drafts. Emails that I sort of—fantasize about sending. But I never actually send them. I just draft them and let them sit there.”

I watch his face closely, waiting to catch the slightest bit of bullshit.

“I swear to god, Leigh. I’m—I just. Right now I’m absolutely mortified you saw these.” He huffs out a shaky laugh.

“You said goodbye—” I pause because I’m not sure how to ask my question.

“What?”

“Your first email. It said ‘goodbye’ and it linked to the last track you wrote for the Lockhart Orchard set. What did you mean? Why were you saying goodbye?”

“That… I meant.” His voice grows very quiet. “I was saying goodbye to your mom. But I realized later that it didn’t really fit in with that set, even though I used the same structure and instruments. What did you think it meant?”

I don’t know what to say to that.

“So,” Axel says finally, “you believe me? About how I didn’t send the emails?”

“Show me your drafts,” I tell him.

“What?”

“Take out your phone. Pull up your drafts folder. I don’t have to read them. I just want to see that they exist.”

“God.” He makes a hissing noise of disbelief. But even so, he pulls the phone out of his pocket.

I watch as he navigates to his email. Try to memorize the features in his face. Is this the last time we’ll talk to each other like this? Is this the end of everything? He can’t try to take back what he’s sent. Things changed irreversibly that day on his couch.

“Um.” His eyes bulge. “What the hell.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“All my drafts are gone! Everything I wrote. And instead—there’s just. There’s this.” He hands the phone to me.

It’s a photograph of a bird’s shadow over my lawn. The very lawn outside the house we are standing in.

“I’ve never seen that before,” says Axel. “I have no idea how that got on my phone! This is the weirdest thing.”

The bird. The incense. Feng. Nothing feels so weird to me anymore. Not after all that.

“Okay,” I say.

He looks dazed. “Okay what?”

“I’m allowing it. I accept your answer.” But now I need to go and sit alone in a corner and reread all his emails with this new knowledge. My chest aches at the thought of it. “I should really go to bed.”

Axel stands up. “Wait. I want to show you something.”

“Right now?”

“Just upstairs,” he says.

And for a moment I have the terrifying thought that he’s going to make me go into the master bedroom and walk over the stain. I know it’s not technically there anymore; the carpet has been stripped, though no one uses that room now. Still.