The Astonishing Color of After(74)

I pressed my mouth into a thin line so I wouldn’t blurt out anything about the irony of the pronoun we and the phrase a close eye.

I threw myself down on the sofa. It didn’t make sense for me to be the last to find out about things like this. Wasn’t I, compared to my father, the way more reliable support system? I had to work to keep the disgust off my face.

We heard the garage opening then, the motor humming as it pulled the door up. Dad straightened with excitement. He placed Meimei at the top of her playground.

Mom walked in and the cat meowed.

“Surprise!” Dad half shouted, throwing his arms out.

“Oh,” she said, “my god. Is that cat?”

I’d been under the impression that my mother hated cats. She mentioned a long time ago that she thought cats were evil and tried to suffocate humans in their sleep. But the moment Mom reached out a tentative hand, Meimei pushed her head right into my mother’s palm and began to purr. The two of them took to each other like they were meant to be.





Dad flew out again, and I wondered if he felt any guilt for having upped the head count of those he was leaving behind. As the days grew cold, Mom started sleeping more and more. I was an expert at taking care of myself by then. In the mornings, I rolled out of bed exactly seven minutes before Axel nudged his Camry into our driveway. Just enough time to throw on clothes, brush my teeth, grab an English muffin, and walk out the front door.

It was impossible for me to know how late my mother slept in after I had left for school, but it reassured me that she at least got up to feed Meimei, put out clean water, sift through the litter box.

That dark and horrible part of me envied the cat. I’d learned to be self-sufficient; it was a habit forced upon me by my mother’s condition. But here was a creature who was helpless, an animal who didn’t deserve the name of her species because she couldn’t even be called upon to kill a cockroach. She was the one to get my mother out of bed. She was the reason my mother changed into real clothes, the reason my mother rose to brew a pot of tea.

Sometimes I watched from the other room as Meimei found Mom in the kitchen and went about winding figure eights through her ankles. When Mom bent down to pet her, she flopped over, lifting her fluffy belly to the ceiling and closing her eyes for a good rub.

The cat was the one who reminded her that life was a real thing. All the rest of us might as well have been mannequins on display in the window of a museum.





“It’s funny, I never thought of you as a cat person,” said Axel, pressing chords into his keyboard. It was on the electric guitar setting, and the notes came scraping through the tinny speakers of the headphones hanging around his neck.

I was on the couch, sketchbook propped up by my knees, and shading with a nub of charcoal. “I’m really not. I don’t understand Meimei at all. Like, she’ll rub up against me to make me pet her. And then halfway through the petting, she whips her head around and swats at me to stop. See, look.” I held out my hand to show the scratches on the back. “I just don’t understand what she wants. But whatever. She’s my mother’s cat.”

“I didn’t peg your mom for a cat lady, either.”

“She’s not, really.”

“When I think ‘cat lady,’ I think of, like, Leanne’s mom, who used to be a breeder and now judges cat shows.”

“Sounds like a thrilling life,” I said sarcastically.

Axel raised his eyebrows. “So why’d your dad get Meimei in the first place?”

I shrugged, flipping to a fresh page in my sketch pad. “Who knows? Maybe he thought a dog would be too much work.”

“But why a pet at all?”

“To give Mom a reason to get out of bed and do shit.”

Axel was quiet. The chords stopped. He turned on his squeaky seat so that he faced me. “Is she okay?”

I shrugged again.

“Will you please talk to me about it?”

Something in his tone made me pause and look up. I set down the charcoal.

“There’s something you haven’t been telling me, isn’t there?” he said.

“What do you mean?” I said, and a neon-red sign flashed dangerously in my head: Bullshit bullshit bullshit.

“Come on, Leigh. I’m worried.”

Axel crossed his arms, and I waited, silently counting to thirty, hoping that maybe he’d give up. He didn’t.

“She’s been… struggling,” I told him.

“With what?”

“Everything? I’m not sure.”

He gave me a look and I threw up my hands. “I’m being serious! Really. I don’t know. She won’t talk to me about it. But it feels like every little thing is this insurmountable wall for her. And when she’s down… it’s pretty bad.”

He nodded me on.

“It’s the reason they sent me to that awful camp over the summer. So I would be out of the way while she had treatment.”

“What kind of treatment?” said Axel.

“Electro-whatever it’s called. ECT. Like, shock therapy.”

“Whoa.”

I let a breath out through my nose. “Yeah.”

“You could’ve told me, Leigh.”

My eyes drop to the floor.