The Astonishing Color of After(48)

“What do you think of that?” he says.

“Higher!” says my miniature self. “So Mommy sees.”

Dad nudges it up another few inches. “Don’t worry. It’ll be the first thing she looks at when she gets home.”

“Where is she?” Tiny Leigh cranes her head around to one side and then the other.

“Not home yet. Want a snack?”

“But she’s always home now.”

“She’s running a few errands, but she’ll be back soon. How about an apple with peanut butter?”

My memory-self makes a face. “I’m sick of that.”

Dad yanks open the freezer. “Okay… how about mozzarella sticks?”

Little Leigh’s eyes shine wide. “Mommy never lets me have those for an after-school snack.”

My father shrugs. “It’s your birthday. I don’t see why today can’t be an exception.”

“Yes!” Memory-me leaps into the air, pumping a fist. I can’t remember ever having so much energy in my life.

Dad is heating up the marinara sauce and the afternoon sun is streaming into the kitchen and the house is filling with that delicious deep-fried smell. The front door opens.

“Mommy!”

My mother smiles from the foyer—it’s an expression that cuts right through my center. “Happy birthday to you!”

“Where have you been?” My younger self jumps down off her stool.

My mother takes the wrapped, suitcase-sized box out from behind her and maneuvers it down the hallway. “I was picking up your birthday gift. Do you like to open now?”

“Yeah!”

Those tiny fingers tear at the paper, stripping it off with noisy gusto to reveal a beautiful leather case. Thumbs flip open the two shiny latches without hesitation—the top lifts and little shelves slide out, bearing perfectly lined up sticks of color. Cray-Pas on the left, and markers beneath those. Gel pens on the right; crayons on the lower level. And pencils. So many pencils. Sketching pencils with their different hardnesses, watercolor pencils—enough to make little Leigh’s head spin.

My memory-self gasps, and can’t stop gasping.

“Do you like it?” asks my mother.

“It’s the best thing ever!” memory-me exclaims. “There are so many colors!”

And behind us, on the periphery, my father wearing a grin I haven’t seen in a long time. A grin that presses hard into my ribs, that makes me feel simultaneously warm and sad.

A flicker, and a changing of colors, a changing of smells.

My mother wanders alone down the hallway of my high school. The whole building is set up for a student art show. Paintings and drawings line the walls of classrooms and halls. Murals cover the lockers. Glass cases have been set up to display three-dimensional things: abstract wire sculptures, papier-maché, glazed ceramic pots and vases.

Mom walks past every piece of art—even the ones that are obviously not mine—hunting for the corresponding placard and checking for my name. And every time she finds one of my pieces, she steps back to snap a photo on her point-and-shoot camera.

She swells with pride and loudly points out my drawings to anyone nearby. The last one she finds is the portrait of her. I hadn’t shown it to her yet; it was a surprise. A photo-realistic pencil sketch suspended in glass. My mother at the piano, one hand grazing the keys, the other raised up to the page of sheet music with a stubby pencil to mark down the fingering.

“It is beautiful,” she says.

The light changes, everything inverts, the smells turning, and when the colors return, I can tell by their faded hue that it’s an older time. A memory from further in the past.

There’s my grandmother—a version of her who is perhaps in her late forties, walking along the side of a road. She pauses outside a set of rounded steps that lead up to a doorway, where there’s a pointed arch with an image of Jesus at the top. She does not enter, but leans against the railing, listening.

The colors and sounds settle and then I hear it, too: the notes of a piano, first lively and fluttering, and then slow and somber. Adept fingers dancing over the keys, adept heart drawing feeling out of the notes.

The music comes to its reluctant end, and my grandmother sighs. She shakes her head a little and then walks on, hurrying as if she does not wish to be seen.

The colors invert, and the memories swirl away.





51





The remains of the drawing line my palms with soft gray ash, silky between the pads of my fingers. I rub my hands and the dust falls away, turning to nothing.

Once upon a time we were the standard colors of a rainbow, cheery and certain of ourselves. At some point, we all began to stumble into the in-betweens, the murky colors made dark and complicated by resentment and quiet anger.

At some point, my mother slid so off track she sank into hues of gray, a world drawn only in shadows.

On the nightstand my phone begins to buzz. There’s the quiet tinkling of notes—

That’s strange. Who would be calling me?

But it’s not a call. It’s the track Axel sent me, the one of my mother playing the Teresa Teng song. How does my phone keep doing that?

The afternoon heat wraps tightly around me, and yet the music sends shivers into my center, drags other memories to the surface.