The Astonishing Color of After(47)

He sighed and nodded. “Ten o’clock. The car’s coming at seven.”

“Right. Need any help?”

He looked surprised at the offer. I hadn’t helped him pack for anything since I was a kid. It used to feel like a scavenger hunt, digging through the closet to locate his fancy shoes, running down to the kitchen for the travel-sized toothpaste. I remembered swelling with fluorescent importance as he asked me to help him pick out ties.

“Thanks, Leigh, but I’ve got it.”

I listened to the sound of him going up the stairs. Thud. Thud. Thud. Like the feet of a heavy giant falling hard on a ground so far away his eyes could no longer see it.





49





I’m going mad here, between the roar of my memories and the counting, and weaving, counting again, just seven days left, seven days to find the bird.

I’m sick of remembering. Weary of the shadows and storms being tugged to the surface of my mind, mauve spilling into raw umber. Tired of reliving the past, the mistakes.

I’ve been weaving the net much too tightly, so I have to undo it all and start again. Looser, I remind myself, because every time I get caught up in the memories I go all absentminded and my fingers curl and tug and tighten. I need bigger waves, a looser weave, a larger net. I have to get this right so I can catch the bird. A sigh of frustration, and fingers relinquish their grip. It’s back to a pile of thin fabric strands, now beginning to curl at the edges where the scissors severed the fine weave in the cotton.

Someone else’s memory—that’s what I need. Something to refresh myself and shake me loose.

And that’s how I find myself standing before the drawer, pulling that box of incense out again. There aren’t very many sticks left.

I don’t look closely enough to count them; I’m tired of counting. But I know with just a glance that I’ll run out soon.

The match is already lit when I remember that I need some kind of trigger. Like the tea leaves.

I shake the match till it’s dead and cast about the room for something that might be good. The leaves worked because Waipo touched them herself, because tea is important to her, an element anchored to her past.

My eyes settle on the box from the bird—I haven’t touched it since Dad walked out. Maybe now’s the time to go through it again.

Photographs. Letters. I unfold a manila envelope and tug out the contents. There’s a page covered in handwritten Chinese characters and, behind it, a piece of art. A drawing from years ago, one I have no memory of ever making. I must have been a little kid, because at the top, it says For Dad in the most atrocious handwriting I’ve ever seen, thick green strokes of oil pastel all jagged and off center.

What is this doing in the box?

I wonder what it would give me, if I burned this?

Remembering how the feather and the tea crumbled to ash makes me pause, because someone saved this drawing for a reason. I can’t just sacrifice it for a memory.

But in the next blink, my room has changed and I can see the cracks again; they’ve made it halfway down the walls. The ceiling is missing pieces here and there, little gaping holes of emptiness. Even as I watch, another piece begins to crumble away. It disintegrates, the dust falling, leaving behind only the black.

There’s a shrill screech, just like the one we heard outside the temple. The flapping of wings.

A burst of red between the cracks of the ceiling. Wings bearing a million different hues. Vermilion, crimson, the red of blood. A long tail gliding past.

One feather drops through the largest gap. It floats down like a sigh, coming to land on top of the drawing, and then vanishing.

I don’t need to be told twice. My fingers are shaking, so it takes a few tries to light the new match. Flame to incense. Ember to paper. The drawing begins to burn. Ribbons of black smoke pitch forward, turning, sweeping, coiling.

There’s the darkness.

Then come the spark and the flash.





50





—SMOKE & MEMORIES—


The sun is a fat coin embedded in the wide blue sky. I’m standing in the driveway I know all too well, with its crooked slant and the ridge that earthworms stick against on rainy days. A big yellow school bus pulls to a stop.

Behind me, my front door wheezes open, and I turn around in time to see a younger version of my father stepping onto the porch. I know from the smell and the sunny colors that it’s one of his memories. He grins and calls out, “Whatcha got there, kiddo?”

A tiny girl with a mess of pigtails comes running across the street and up the driveway, waving a piece of paper like a flag.

I don’t remember this at all.

“Look what I made!” the eight-year-old version of myself shouts.

I follow her into the house, where Dad spreads the paper out on the counter.

“Wow,” he says, sounding genuine. “I think it’s your best one yet.”

“It’s Mommy playing the piano!” little Leigh exclaims.

“I can see that,” my father replies. “You did a spectacular job.”

“It’s for you, Daddy!”

“Wow, thank you. I think this should go here for now—at least until we get the chance to frame it!”

My heart twists at the way my younger self beams cadmium bright, the way my father’s hands lovingly push everything on the fridge out of the way to make space for the drawing. Could Dad see the instinct in how I was already capturing the proportions and dimensions of the piano? Did he note the way I’d tried to blend different colored oil pastels in my shading?