The Astonishing Color of After(6)

It was real. It existed in the light of the morning. I took a deep breath and let my fingers curl around the lid.





8





I’m still trying to figure out what to do about the box. It’s been nearly a week since my mother came as the bird and delivered it. It’s agonizing to feel like I can’t talk to Axel about this.

Will Dad believe me now?

I think of the way his brows furrowed, like there was something wrong with me.

I’m sitting on the sofa, cross-legged and directly above the spot where I’ve hidden the package. The stuff inside that box—it’s different from the feather. It’s so much more. Maybe this time I can get him to listen.

I stare straight ahead into the glossy finish of the upright piano like it’s a crystal ball that will explain why my mother is a bird, or show me what I’m supposed to do next. I’ve been going through the house and drawing the things that feel important, but I haven’t made a picture of the piano yet. It has so much history, and history means colors.

Once upon a time that instrument poured sound through our home. When did I last hear my mother play? I’m not sure; I guess that should’ve been a red flag.

In hindsight everything seems obvious.

Year after year I promised that the next summer I would finally let her teach me so that a second set of hands might grace those keys. It was something she wanted. More specifically, it was something she wanted us to do together. I always imagined us learning some charming duet, my hands pounding chords in the bass, her delicate fingers tinkling in the higher octaves.

Mom used to leave the piano keys out in the open, gleaming like teeth. She said they needed to breathe. But my father put away the sheet music and pulled the cover down. The piano before me is bare, unsmiling, funeral black.

In the space where the music books used to sit, open to whatever sonata or nocturne she was working through, I find the ebony reflection of myself. Growing up, I always wished I could look more like my mother. More Taiwanese.

My mother had shoulder-length hair that she kept permed in loose curls, and big glasses that she peeled off when her headaches took over. I remember trying to see her through the eyes of strangers: the willowy, dark-haired woman with the disjointed grammar and mixed-up idioms. I only ever remember hearing her speak English. She even picked an English name for herself: Dorothy, which she ended up shortening to Dory.

I have some of the same shapes in my mother’s face, but otherwise most of my features come from my father, the Irish American guy born and raised in Pennsylvania. I have a smudgier version of his hazel eyes, a replica of his sharp nose. I look a lot like his younger self—especially in certain pictures from back before I existed, when he was a bass player in a band called Coffee Grind. It’s hard to imagine him as a musician—I’ve only ever known him as a sinologist, a scholar on all things related to China: the culture, economics, history, etc. He’s totally fluent in Mandarin and makes regular trips to places like Shanghai and Hong Kong to give talks and meet other sinologists and economists.

I tug fingers through my shoulder-length hair—the one attribute that seems to be all my own. The stripe on the side is currently dyed mermaid green, but the rest of it is my natural color, a deep brown, exactly halfway between my mother’s thick black strands and my father’s mousy waves. It’s a little thin, but it looked decent when Mom used to weave a French braid down my back; I wish I had bothered to learn how that worked.

There are a lot of things I wish I’d learned from her, while I still had the chance.

My reflection makes me sigh.

The piano tells me nothing about my mother, the bird. Nothing about the box. It only mirrors back the story of a desperate girl who’s been getting up in the deadest hours to unlock the front door.





The sound of coffee spitting and bubbling breaks apart my thoughts. It means Dad is in the kitchen. I don’t really want to face him. I’m tired of his doubting me, and I’m sick of the way he walks around emanating a murky Payne’s gray. The colors of this kind of grief should be stark and piercing, with the alarmed brightness of something toxic. Not the quiet hue of shadows.

But my stomach is gnawingly empty, and once the coffee is made he’ll sit there for ages. It’s either face him or go hungry.

I shove my sketchbook under the sofa and pad into the kitchen to dig a piece of string cheese out from the drawer in the fridge. My mother’s cat winds back and forth between my legs, mewing.

The newspaper crinkles between Dad’s hands. “Ignore Meimei, I just fed her.”

I lean down to graze her soft back with my fingers. She mews some more. Maybe what she’s hungry for isn’t food. Maybe what she wants is my mother.

If Axel were here, he’d say, Hey there, Miss Cat. He’d lean down and have her purring in a matter of seconds.

Axel. The thought of him sends a shard of phthalo blue into my center.

“What about you?” Dad is saying. “Would you like a real breakfast?” He sips his coffee. “I’ll make oatmeal?”

I scrunch up my face, but my back is to him so he can’t see. Doesn’t he know I eat oatmeal only when I’m sick?

No. Of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t know shit.

Mom would have offered to make waffles with berries and cream. And if we were really going to keep up our Sunday morning tradition, Axel would be letting himself in through the back door any minute now. But he isn’t going to come. He knows me better than anyone, knows when I’m trying to serve him counterfeit cheer, knows when I’m on the verge of shattering. Even if he can’t see the self-hate chewing through my insides, he has to know that it’s irreversible, this thing that’s happened between us.