The Astonishing Color of After(5)

Would Axel believe me? I wanted to think yes. But honestly, I had no idea.

After I didn’t answer my cell, he called the house phone, just once. Nobody answered. He didn’t leave a message.

We’d rarely ever gone so long without seeing each other. Not when I had the stomach bug, immediately followed by the regular flu, immediately followed by an upper respiratory infection—he came over anyway, braving the toxic air from my lungs to sit on the sofa beside me and paint. Not even when Dad made me go to Mardenn, that god-awful hellhole of a summer camp. I was so miserable that Axel rode the bus all the way up to help me sneak out and get back home.

He would never cut me off. This I knew. This was all on me.

To think about it was to twist the arrow between my ribs. So I let myself be swallowed by thoughts of the bird, my questions spiraling, like where is the bird now? What does she want?

I tried to draw her in my sketchbook, but I couldn’t get the wings right.





6





The mother-shaped hole became a cutout of the blackest black. Something I could only see around. If I tried to look directly at it, I saw emptiness.

I had to fight that emptiness, that absence of color. I looked in the other direction, toward white, which is made up of all the other colors of the visible spectrum. White was a solution, or at least the smallest of Band-Aids. In the empty hours the morning after the funeral, I drove to the hardware store, winging through an obscure route to avoid being seen by anyone in the neighborhood who would recognize first the car and then my face. The need for white paint burned so hard I didn’t think twice about driving unlicensed.

I did one coat on the walls of my bedroom—the paint was thin; the bright tangerine my mother and I rolled on years ago turned a sickly shade of Creamsicle—and was making my way toward the bathroom when Dad came out of his office.

He looked at the paint bucket by my legs, smears of white already staining my jeans, and said, “Leigh, come on.”

He didn’t understand about fighting the gaping black hole, the emptiness. Not that this surprised me. There was so much he didn’t understand, would never understand.

“You’re not bringing that in there,” he said, pointing his thumb toward the master bedroom. Fine with me. No way was I going in there anyhow. He took the paint bucket, and I escaped downstairs and into a sketch pad and let my knuckles work against the paper.

I made dark, pooling shapes. I pressed my stick of charcoal down as hard as I could until my knuckles were stained and aching and a waxy puddle of black shined up at me. Maybe if I could draw the emptiness, I could control it.

But it was never dark enough. It was never the blackest black.

It’d been a long time since I colored anything in. Charcoal and pencil were all I was using, and I mostly stuck to outlines. I was saving the colors for later.





7





I knew what I’d seen. It was real. Wasn’t it?

Each of those nights after that first appearance of the bird, when all noise upstairs had subsided, I went to stand on the porch and squint into the sky. The clouds blew in front of the stars. The moon shrank, giving up a sliver of itself with every passing day. I emptied and refilled the bucket so there was always fresh water, just in case. And when I went back inside, I left the door propped open by a worn sneaker. A breeze crept in through that gap to take its turn through the living room, and I fell asleep dreaming of the giant’s breath on my face.

A week after the funeral, moonbeams reached through the living room window and the temperature suddenly plummeted. It was the type of summer night that should’ve been unbearably hot, but my every exhale sent a cloud of white billowing out in front of my face. I didn’t hear a sound or anything, but I decided to check the front yard anyway.

As soon as I stepped outside, I saw a package slightly smaller than a shoe box waiting on the doormat. Dirty twine wrapped around the sides, crisscrossing in the middle, knotted to secure the lid. The corners were a little smashed, and the only thing on the box was my name in the bold black marker of an unfamiliar hand. There was nothing else. No stamps, no labels, not even an address.

I raised my head and the bird was standing in the yard with one leg tucked up just like the cranes I’d seen in paintings. The moonlight made her wing tips silvery and sharp, made the shadows in her body almost indigo.

“The box is from your grandparents,” said my mother, the bird.

My first thought was My grandparents are dead. Dad’s parents had been on the older side when they had him; both of them had been gone for a few years.

Unless… the bird meant my mother’s parents? The ones I’d never met?

“Bring it with you,” she said as I bent to pick up the box.

“Bring it with me where?” I said.

“When you come,” she replied.

When I straightened again, the bird was already leaping up and away, this time leaving no feather.

There was nothing left to do but go back to the living room. For a moment, everything around me seemed to be melting, the colors darkening like something cooking over high heat. The windows and curtains losing their shape, furniture sagging and shrinking into the floor, even the light fixture up above turning to a murky liquid.

A couple blinks and it all looked normal again.

I sat down on the sofa, suddenly so exhausted I fell asleep halfway through trying to get the twine off the box. When I woke again, this time with a full sun buttering the windows, the box was still there.