The Astonishing Color of After(53)

“He says it was a filthy bird that came down out of the sky.” Feng shakes her head. “How strange.”

“Strange,” I echo, my voice coming out ash blue.

“It’s too bad. Waipo wanted to get some of these—they were your mother’s favorite night market snack. Though the best fish balls are in Danshui. Your mom used to commute out there just to buy them.”

Your mother’s favorite.

The words turn around and around.

Your mom.

As if Feng knew her. As if she somehow, once upon a time, walked these streets alongside my mother.

Something in me snaps.

My body turns. My feet root down into the ground. Even as I’m telling myself to hold back, the words are boiling their way up, pouring out of my mouth. “Stop pretending you know about my mother.”

“Huh?” says Feng.

It tumbles out of me, wretched and wild and black with rage: “As if you know a single real thing about her. As if you’ve traveled back in time and met her—”

I’m seething so much my stomach is clenching and my insides hurt and I want to spit out every furious thought that comes to mind.

Feng’s eyes open wide. Her shoulders droop forward and she shrinks into a slight hunch. “I’m sorry, I was just trying to—”

“Stop it. You’re not part of this family. You don’t know anything. Why are you always here? I wish you would leave us alone.”

Feng takes a step back, stumbling over her own feet. “I just want to help you. That’s all.”

I spit the words out so meanly I surprise even myself: “Why are you so convinced I need your help?”

“Leigh,” Waipo says.

“It’s okay,” says Feng. She turns to my grandmother and tries to smile. “Meiguanxi.”

I blink, and she vanishes into the crowd.





56





After Feng left, Waipo and I made our way back home in a gauzy silence.

It’s quiet in the apartment now, everything so still that I can hear my grandparents shifting in their bed. There’s a faraway cricket making its rhythmic count somewhere out on the streets. The occasional car swishes past. My guilty inhales and exhales loud as stormy waves crashing over rocks.

If Axel were here right now, he’d ask, What color? and I’m not sure I would be able to answer. Maybe it’s a color I haven’t discovered yet.

I try to shove the thoughts about Feng out of my brain.

My hands grab at the T-shirt strands. I start again with a braid, my knuckles directing the fabric, fingers curling to hold the weave loose. I focus on the over and under, on tying quick knots, and let my mind wander.

There was one weekend when Caro and I spent our entire Saturday reading about tetrachromacy and trying to figure out if one or both of us might happen to have it. It’s this extremely rare thing that means you can see colors that other people can’t. So, like, a regular person might call a sky perfectly blue while a tetrachromat insists that it’s also red and yellow and green.

I wonder if seeing the bird is like that. If those of us who’ve seen her have something special in our eyes, in our brains, in our hearts—something that allows us to see into that other dimension of existence with sharp clarity.

Because the bird is real. She has to be.

I am as certain of this as I am of the fact that I was born. That I’m alive. That my name is Leigh Chen Sanders.

And then I remember how one article said that most birds are tetrachromatic.

That must be true for my mother, as a bird. It must be. I wonder if she can see colors I can’t. If for her the sky is full of purples and oranges as she sails across. If the moon looks like a brush loaded with a million different shades of paint, waiting to be cleaned.

It’s as if my thoughts summon some kind of magic. The colors of my room begin to deepen their hues, like flowers blossoming. Crimson in the corners. Cerulean along the southern cracks. Indigo by the window. Bioluminescent green tracing the creases of the wall closest to the bed. The things that are already black somehow take on a truer shade, pitch dark and empty.

I blink hard, and it clears for a moment.

But then it pours back in like an ink spill spreading quick.

On the shiny surface of the stain, I see hints of the past. The memories unfurl.





57





SUMMER BEFORE SOPHOMORE YEAR


I should’ve known something was up when Dad came and sat down in the kitchen and said nothing about the sketch under my hand. He was so quiet I wondered: Was he watching me work?

I set down my pencil to take a sip of tea. That was when he pounced.

“Leigh, how do you feel about going to camp?”

I paused, mug halfway to my mouth, and raised my eyebrows. “Camp?”

It was the end of June, end of freshman year. My summer had just begun, and later that day Axel and Caro were going to come over. I was ready to enjoy two months off.

I had no idea that in less than a year my life was going to flip upside down.

“Sleepaway camp,” said Dad.

There must’ve been a look of horror on my face because he said, “Come on, it’ll be fun. You’ve never done it before. It’ll be a good experience. There’s one in Upstate New York that looks perfect for you.”