The Astonishing Color of After(40)

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh my god. If it’s on this box—”

Right at that moment I saw the legs peeking out from the bottom edge, not far from my left hand.

“Don’t look—” I began to say, but I was too late.

Axel yelped and dropped his side, leaping away. I let go, too, the weight shifting too fast for me to hold it up all on my own.

And then I couldn’t help it: I doubled over, cackling monoazo yellow, laughing so hard spit flew from my mouth. I laughed until my stomach hurt and my throat was dry and my eyes were leaking. I laughed because of the spider, but also because I hadn’t felt so at ease and normal in months.

He cracked a sheepish grin. “It looks dead.”

“Happy now?” I was still trying to gulp down the last heaves of laughter.

“I will be once you dispose of the body.”

“Christ on a bike.” I hunted around for a tissue.

“You don’t believe in Christ.”

“I don’t believe in killing things, either, and look what I just did for you.”

We tore into the box together. It was immediately obvious: This one was different from the others. Instead of folders and paperwork, this box mostly contained envelopes.

Axel grabbed a stack and spread them out in a fan. “They’re all unopened.”

I picked one up. It was addressed to Dorothy Chen, but there were three Chinese characters next to that. The return address was written all in Chinese, except at the bottom, where it said: Taiwan (Republic of China).

We sorted the envelopes by the dates stamped on them. The latest ones were from almost a decade ago.

“Holy crap,” I said. “I can’t believe she never read these.”

“Who do you think they’re from?” said Axel.

I shook my head. I wished I could ask Dad… but there was no way he would tell me anything.

“You think it’s them?” said Axel. “Your grandparents?”

I grabbed a stack of letters and examined their corners. The return address said Taiwan again and again. And the name—or what I guessed to be the name, made up of those swooping strokes of pen—was the same on every single one.

I nodded slowly.

Axel reached into the box to pull out more, and something heavy fell from his handful. He fished it out: a bracelet. Little rounds of cloudy green jade set in yellow gold, the pieces linked together. I clasped it around my wrist; the stones were heavy and cold against my skin. Who had this belonged to?

“This is random,” said Axel. He held up a worn leather-bound book. On the front it said THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON.

It had the sour and musty smell of something old. Something once loved but then forgotten. I hoped for notes in the margins; there weren’t any. But things were underlined, boxes had been drawn around certain words, entire stanzas circled. Some of the pages were missing, others stained. The corners floppy and weak from being dog-eared. I opened to somewhere in the middle:

You left me boundaries of pain

Capacious as the sea,

Between eternity and time,

Your consciousness and me.



“That’s the only English thing in here,” said Axel, peering into the box. “Assuming all the letters are in Chinese, of course.”

And were they? It was an important question. But if I tore open an envelope, it would be crossing a line. What I was doing right now, looking through boxes—this was simply explorative. But the moment I opened someone else’s mail, it was snooping. It was trespassing. My body felt orange with preemptive guilt.

The thought hit me: What if my grandparents didn’t even know I existed? What if they had no idea there was a half-Asian, half-white descendant of theirs out here in the town of Fairbridge, dying to meet them?

That would be messed up. I could hear Caro’s anger churning away in my rib cage, and Axel’s curiosity spreading down my spine.

What did I feel, independent of everyone else?

Only the stiff mint-green cold of being unable to process what was in front of me.

I tore open one of the letters from Taiwan before I could change my mind.

Lines of pen flowed across the paper in thin and wispy strokes. It was all in Chinese. I couldn’t read a word. I thought I would at least recognize something—a you or an I or an of—but nothing looked right. This writing was not like what I’d been used to seeing, back when Dad taught me some of the basics. It seemed to be the Chinese equivalent of cursive. Elegant. Moving like water. Hard to read.

As I riffled through the last stack, a stiff little rectangle slipped out from between the envelopes. It landed facedown by my knee.

A photograph. Black-and-white—or more like brown and yellow, for all that time had faded it—and it showed two little girls side by side, peering straight into the camera, unsmiling. Both of them in pale frocks and dark Mary Janes. One girl’s hair was in a long fishtail pulled in front of a shoulder. The other had high braids that hung in loops on either side of her head. They looked like sisters.

Axel leaned over to see. “Who do you think they are?”

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe one of them is your grandmother?” he said.

I squinted like when I was trying to identify the lightest and darkest points for a sketch. My eyes searched for something in one of the faces to call familiar, but what was there to see? It was just two little girls, probably both under the age of eight. I tucked the photo into the poetry book.