The Astonishing Color of After(20)

Feng nods at my grandmother and turns back to me with a smile. “There’s a SIM card in that box, too. Do you have a smartphone? The card I brought gives you internet access. I thought that might be helpful.”

She shows me how to use a bent paper clip to pull out my American SIM card and pop the new one in.

“All set,” she says.

“Thanks.” I think of that email from Axel that I still haven’t read.

She beams. “If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see, just tell me. I know you’ll need lots of help, and I want to do as much as I can for you.”

I try to smile, but my face feels awkward and stiff.

“It’s so rare to get the chance to see family, to reunite like this.” She interlaces her fingers and pulls them apart again. “I want to make sure you have the best time.”

“Thanks,” I say again.

Feng grins brightly at Waipo and Waigong. They exchange more words, syllables that flit past too quickly for me to even guess whether they’re Mandarin or Taiwanese. My grandmother makes some sort of joke—or at least, seeing the way Waigong and Feng laugh, I’m guessing it’s a joke. Cold pewter envy curls around my stomach. Waipo doesn’t know me well enough to joke with me. She can’t even expect me to understand a joke.

Feng slips her shoes on and turns to wave at me, thin fingers fluttering back and forth, and as she leaves, my shoulders sink away from my ears, tension rolling off them, a weight disappearing.

Waipo heads to the kitchen and Waigong is back on the couch watching his music videos.

I sink into a chair at the dining table, where it smells overwhelmingly of oil and sugar. There’s the paper tote full of pastries, with brushstroke words printed on its front. Tracing the bold characters with my fingers doesn’t help me recognize any of them. I turn it around on the off chance that there might be English on the back of it.

But there isn’t. Instead, there’s a logo: a red circle drawn around a red bird.





21





I can’t sleep, so I pull up my email on my phone. There’s a message from Dad, which makes me roll my eyes. I’ll read it later.

Below that: the thing Axel sent. No hesitation allowed. My index finger jabs at it hard.



FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected] SUBJECT: (no subject)



4 minutes 47 seconds

You breathe out all those lines of art like your life depends on it. Well my life doesn’t depend on this but I guess it’s how I process things… my sketchbook is like a journal. Converting it to music… that’s me analyzing and processing it.

This is the final piece in the Lockhart Orchard set.

Titled “Goodbye”



Goodbye.

I read the message again, and that last word kicks my heart out of place.

What the hell kind of email is that? What’s it supposed to mean?

Goodbye. The confirmation of all that I’ve ruined slams into me in waves of fluorescent hues. I was ridiculous to hope that one kiss would turn everything he had with Leanne to ash.

I think of how mad he got at the funeral. I know he didn’t mean to, that it was the last thing he would’ve wanted on a day like that.

But it was my fault. I broke the no-bullshit rule.

I imagine Axel sitting on his tweed couch where we kissed, holding a thick pad and some watercolor pens. I imagine myself transported there by a magic carpet, swooping into the basement and crashing into the floor, my mouth already shaping an apology.

At the bottom of the email: a link.

It takes me to a private page where Axel’s uploaded the track as an MP3: GOODBYE: ADAGIO IN ORCHARD GREEN. The final piece in the set. I know exactly what he’s referring to.

The image he’s used as the “album cover” on this page is a photograph of Lockhart Orchard that twists my stomach, sends a nostalgic red ochre rippling through me. It’s a picture I watched him take with his phone, on a day I remember all too well.

I can’t help wondering: Has Leanne listened to this? Has she asked him about the significance of Lockhart Orchard?

Does she know what’s happened between him and me?

My thumb hits play. The piece begins with the bass section humming low and deep, legato lines that crescendo ominously. A piano comes in with soft chords, the cello arching after them.

Pieces of the past rise to the surface of my mind like little bubbles.





22





SUMMER BEFORE FRESHMAN YEAR


I would always remember my fourteenth birthday with perfect clarity, because it was one of the first times I realized that there might be something truly wrong with my mother. She cared that it was my birthday, but it wasn’t enough to blow aside the storm. In the shadowy master bedroom, with lights off and curtains drawn, she spiraled all the way down. Her body was silent, but her darkness was louder than anything. Our home shrank to the size of a dollhouse, and the walls pressed up against me so that I couldn’t breathe or speak or hear anything but her despair.

Axel and I went out riding bikes. We tried to get lost so that I could remember a different set of fears. At every junction where we would’ve normally turned down a familiar road, we went the opposite direction.

We wheeled through woods and past farmhouses, across fields and around parking lots. We raced toward the edge of the sky—we could see the crease where it touched our part of the earth—but we never made it. The horizon always ran ahead of us. We scraped to a stop when we found a line of trees we’d never seen. They seemed to stretch on endlessly.