The Astonishing Color of After(2)

He didn’t follow. The front door slammed as I left; even his house was pissed at me. The sound rang out puke green. I thought of the hard cover of a book smacking shut on a story that wasn’t finished.





2





I never saw the body up close. The police arrived and I raced ahead of them. Up the stairs two at a time. Burst into the master bedroom with a force that nearly cracked the door. All I could see were my mother’s legs on the floor, horizontal and sticking out from the other side of the bed.

And then Dad was behind me, pulling me out of the way while my ears rang with the shrieking. It was so loud I was certain it was a noise brought by the police. Only when I stopped to catch my breath did I realize the shrieking was coming from me. My own mouth. My own lungs.

I saw the stain after they removed my mother, after someone had made a first attempt at cleaning it out of the carpet. Even then it was still dark and wide, oblong and hideous. Barely the shape of a mother.

It’s easier to pretend the stain is acrylic paint. Pigment, emulsion. Water soluble until it dries.

The one part that’s hard to pretend about: Spilled paint is only ever an accident.

Spilled paint doesn’t involve a knife and a bottle of sleeping pills.

The day after it happened, we spent hours searching for a note. That was the surreal part. Dad and I floated around the house, moving sloth-like as we pulled at drawers, flipped open cabinets, traced our fingers along shelves.

It’s not real unless we find a note. That was the thought that kept running through my brain. Of course she would leave a note.

I refused to go into the master bedroom. It was impossible to forget. Mom’s feet sticking out from behind the bed. My blood pounding, she’s dead she’s dead she’s dead.

I leaned against the wall out in the hallway and listened to Dad riffling through papers, searching, moving from one side of the room to the other, sounding as desperate as I felt. I heard him open her jewelry box and shut it again. Heard him shifting things around on the bed—he must’ve been looking under the pillows, under the mattress.

Where the hell did people usually leave their notes?

If Axel were there with me, he probably would’ve squeezed my shoulder and asked, What color?

And I would’ve had to explain that I was colorless, translucent. I was a jellyfish caught up in a tide, forced to go wherever the ocean willed. I was as unreal as my mother’s nonexistent note.

If there was no note, what did that mean?

My father must’ve found something because everything on the other side of the door had gone intensely quiet.

“Dad?” I called out.

There was no response. But I knew he was there. I knew he was conscious, standing on the other side, hearing me.

“Dad,” I said again.

I heard a long, thick intake of breath. My father shuffled to the door and opened it.

“You found it?” I said.

He paused, not meeting my eyes, hesitating. Finally his hand swept out a crumpled piece of paper.

“It was in the garbage,” he said, his voice tight. “Along with these.” His other fingers uncurled to show a pile of capsules that I recognized immediately. Mom’s antidepressants. He crunched them up in his fist and went back downstairs.

A cyan chill seeped into my body. When had she stopped taking her medicine?

I smoothed the paper out and stared at its whiteness. Not a speck of blood to be found on that surface. My hands brought it to my nose and I inhaled, trying to get at the last of my mother’s scent.

And finally, I made myself look at it.


To Leigh and Brian,

I love you so much

I’m so sorry

The medicine didn’t



Below all that, there was something scribbled over with so many pen strokes it was entirely unreadable. And then one final line at the very bottom:


I want you to remember



What had my mother been trying to say to us?

What did she want us to remember?





3





I started spending the nights downstairs on the sofa, the farthest I could get from the master bedroom. I was having a lot of trouble sleeping, but the old leather sofa swallowed me and I imagined myself cradled in the thick arms of a giantess. She had my mother’s face, my mother’s voice. Sometimes if I managed to drift into an uneasy slumber, the determined tick of the clock above the television became the beat of the giant’s heart.

In between the heartbeats, my dreams pulled up slivers of old recollections. My parents laughing. A birthday celebration, chocolate cake smeared over all of our faces. Mom trying to play the piano with her toes, at my request. Dad with the singsong rhymes he liked to make up: “Little Leigh, full of glee!” “Oh my, what a sigh!”

It was the night before the funeral: I woke around three in the morning to a sharp rap on the front door. It wasn’t a dream; I knew because I’d just been dreaming that the giantess was humming over a piano. Nobody else stirred. Not my father, not my mother’s cat. The wooden floor stung with cold and I stepped into the foyer shivering, baffled by the drop in temperature. I dragged the heavy door open and the porch light came on.

The suburban street was purple and dark, silent but for the lone cricket keeping time in the grass. A noise in the distance made me look up, and against the murky predawn sky, I could make out a streak of crimson. It flapped once, twice. A tail followed the body, sailing like a flag. The creature swept over the half-moon, past the shadow of a cloud.