The Astonishing Color of After(16)
My throat tightens up. It wasn’t often that we would have a Taiwanese-style breakfast—only a couple times a year, when Mom felt like making the drive out to one of the Asian grocery stores—but that rarity made it such a treat. Axel and I, and Dad, if he was around, would stuff ourselves to the point of having to skip lunch.
I wonder about the days when she’d come home with all the ingredients for a meal like this. Were those the times when she missed Taiwan? When she missed her family? She’d had me almost convinced that she’d stopped caring about them.
Waigong is already seated, his wooden cane leaning against the table by his elbow. He picks up one of the sesamedotted flatbreads, digs his finger into the side, and opens the two layers like butterfly wings. He stuffs it with a section of cruller, and dunks the whole thing in his soy milk—just the way Mom would have eaten it.
The pendant feels heavy, and my fingers trace the shape of the cicada. I try to imagine my grandparents thirty years younger, sitting at a round table just like this one, smiling at my mother instead of me.
17
In the heavy quiet of the night, I’m finally alone in my room again.
I spent the day melting under the sun, trailing behind Waipo through the open-air market where whole fish were laid out on piles of ice in bright plastic buckets, and pineapples were stacked high on metal carts, and one woman pushed her dog around in a stroller to go buy a whole black-skinned chicken. Afterward, Waipo bought us bubble tea, and we sat on a park bench people-watching as we sucked the tapioca up through fat straws.
It felt so different from the parks back home, full of thick trees draped with scraggly brown beards. Star-shaped flowers smelling like kumquats. Long leaves waving like flags, flapping their rusty undersides.
We watched children racing down a path toward a small playground. Kites sprinkled the sky like confetti—a butterfly, a phoenix, a winged monkey.
It was an Axel type of scene. He would’ve pulled out his portable watercolors and made us stay until he’d gotten at least two good pages. And once he went home, his quick strokes of color would bake from raw visual into warm, delicious audio. The kites would be rendered in arpeggios. The children would become little timpani gods roaming the earth in seven-eight time. For Axel, watercolors are just his way of taking notes—his own form of shorthand. He uses the colors to guide his compositions, to produce pieces of what he calls opera electronica.
Even as Waipo and I walked home, even as we ate dinner with Waigong, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Axel would do and say if he were here with us.
I didn’t tell him we were going to Taiwan. In my head I see him standing on our porch, ringing the doorbell, knocking hard. I see him stepping back, counting the passing beats like a piano accompanist waiting to jump in again.
I blink and it all vanishes: the memory of the park, those imagined spreads of watercolor, Axel’s unhappy face.
It’s growing late, but something keeps me awake. My grandparents have gone to bed, the last of their sounds shuffling and clicking away into silence.
I wonder where Dad is now. Is he checked into some fancy hotel, paid for with all his travel points? Does he regret leaving us? My fury is still simmering, tinting everything a dark burnt umber.
The smart thing would be to try to sleep, get my body on schedule. I need to be operating at max levels of energy if I’m going to find the bird. I’m exhausted, and the heat makes it so much worse—every one of my limbs feeling thick and weighed down.
And yet. When I close my eyes, willing my body to relax… I can’t shut off my mind. Images rewind, replay, again and again. I think of that red and feathered creature sailing across the sky. The box of things that my grandparents said they’d burned. That gray body, arranged in the casket like a doll.
And what about the box of incense? I’d never seen incense sticks so black.
I hear them again: the whispery voices, words I can’t decipher. The shushing of syllables that slide up against each other.
Cold light puddles in the wide crack between the bottom of my door and the linoleum. It seeps in from the window behind the thin curtain, washing the walls in spectral beams. At first I think it’s the moon snaking down the alley, and then I realize it’s the streetlamps. My eyes settle; the darkness lifts. There’s just enough glow to see by.
My bare feet slide out of the low bed to find the floor, carrying me to the dresser. I guess I was expecting the whispers to grow louder, but they abruptly halt the moment I touch the handle. I pull at the drawer slowly, quietly. This is a small apartment with thin walls; sound travels.
There’s the feather. There’s the incense. And this time, there’s also an old-looking book of matches. Where did these come from? A shiver traces the curve of my spine. I can’t help checking over my shoulder. The light outside the window flickers and dims, as if answering a question I didn’t know I was asking.
I’m convinced they’re from the bird—the feather is like a signature, telling me she sent these here for me to use.
Yank out a match, scrape the flame to life, touch it to the tip of a stick dark as tar.
The end catches, lights up like a firefly. The smoke that rises is inky black, drawing lines through the air.
No voices. Nothing. I don’t know what I expected.
But then the dark lines billow out fast, drawing ribbons that wrap around and around in the shape of a storm. I gasp, and smoke shoots into the back of my throat and down into my lungs. I’m coughing and spitting and trying to rub the sting from my eyes.