The Astonishing Color of After(17)

The smoke fills the room, until there’s only black.





18





—SMOKE & MEMORIES—


The smoke clears, darkness melting away, and I find myself standing in a completely different room. A room I know all too well, in the house where I’ve lived my whole life.

Pear-green walls. An arched entryway.

My living room.

Mom’s at the piano; a Beethoven sonata flies from her fingers, the notes turning and falling impossibly fast.

I’m looking at my mother. My mother my mother my mother. My ribs are on the verge of fracturing.

“Mom.” The piano drowns me out.

Her hands roll over the keys, shaping wide arpeggios, her torso rocking to match the dark waves of the music. I remember this piece: “The Tempest.”

There’s a vaguely sweet scent hanging in the air—my mother’s coconut shampoo, the only shampoo I’ve ever known her to use, the closest to a perfume that I’d ever smelled on her.

The colors in the room are muted, and there’s a meditative quality to the music, to its spinning rhythm. I’m nowhere near the piano but I can practically feel the smooth keys under my fingers.

“Stop,” someone whispers behind me, giggling. I whirl around, and there on our sofa sits a dark-haired girl that is unmistakably me—but younger—grinning widely and elbowing a shorter, gangly version of Axel. The faces are a bit blurry, but it’s definitely us. I’m standing directly in front of them, but they don’t see me. This is so weird.

“What?” he says, his face a canvas of blank innocence.

My younger self rolls her eyes dramatically, shining all the while. Had I realized how I felt about him yet?

This is a section of the past, somehow preserved. I don’t remember it at all; and then I realize by some instinct that this memory belongs to my mother. That’s why it smells like her.

The stripe in my hair is purple, so this memory-Leigh is probably about twelve years old, still carefree. She and Axel hug sketch pads over their knees, kick at each other’s ankles.

There’s a thunderous noise above—footsteps coming fast down the stairs, and then my father appears, his face lit up. I’d forgotten that sound—the joyous stomping of feet. When did we become quietly padding people?

“What smells amazing?” says the memory version of my father.

A timer in the kitchen goes off and the colors shift as if awakening. My mother whirls halfway around the bench and leaps to her feet. She plants a kiss on Dad’s nose and waltzes right past him into the kitchen. He turns to watch her, enchanted.

Once upon a time we’d been an almost perfect family. I wish we could rewind, go back to live in those years forever.

Everything turns even blurrier, and the smell of the coconut shampoo fades slightly now that my mother isn’t here. I walk into the kitchen and the edges sharpen, the colors brightening once more. Her face is glowing, and there’s the hint of a smile as she slides the pan out of the oven.

“Enough with the suspense!” Axel calls from the other room. “Tell us what they are, already!”

“Danhuang su,” says my father.

I follow Mom back into the living room, her arm stretched out ahead of her so that the plate leads the way. She’s stacked it high with a dozen perfectly round pastries, gold and laminated, ornamented with sesame seeds.

This is the mother I want to remember. This joy. The way her glow filled a room. Her playfulness, her love of good food, her bright and bouncing laughter.

I step forward, desperate to touch her, but my hand disappears against her shoulder like I’m the one who’s the ghost.

My parents share a pastry between the two of them, pulling the flaky layers apart with their fingers, catching the bean paste on their tongues. Mom lets Dad have all of the salted egg yolk at the center—his favorite part.

I stand there with my feet rooted into the carpet of that memory, watching until my ribs crunch together and pulverize my heart and send the heat of my missing everywhere. The grief spills out of me sepia dark.

All the colors invert. The light sucks away.

Flicker. Flash.

There’s Leigh from the past, even younger this time, no color in her hair yet, crouched at the edge of a dark lake. My father comes up beside her, pinching a bouquet of green grass blades. The colors have changed their tint, like someone turned a dial to make them warmer. The scent completely different, like dryer sheets—the way my father always smells.

It’s Dad’s memory.

“So here’s the trick. Take one of these—” He lays the blades out on a flat spot and selects a prime piece for my memory-self. “Now sandwich it flat between your thumbs. Press them together.”

Little Leigh holds her hands out to show him. I don’t remember any of this, either.

“Yeah, like that. Press harder. Then you go like this—”

Dad brings his thumbs up to his face. He puffs up his cheeks and puckers his lips, blowing hard just under the knuckles to produce a reedy squeal that sings out across the water.

I watch as the memory version of me imitates him, blowing into her thumbs. Her blade of grass flaps and squeaks.

“I cannot do it also,” says my mother, who stands a few paces away, balancing on top of a rock, watching, holding her own blade of grass.