The Astonishing Color of After(82)

Was she thinking about a red bird?

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

My sketchbook is open to a fresh page on the bed, but I’m too restless to draw. Too anxious. It feels like the valves of my heart are jammed with muck, working extra hard to pump the blood. My lungs losing elasticity, fighting the air I’m trying to take in. My head fogged up all Antwerp blue.

I have two days, and two sticks of incense.

As I lean toward the nightstand to grab the matches and my last photograph from the box, my mother’s cicada pendant swings to the side and thwacks me in the shoulder.

The cicada. The pendant she wore every single day of her life.

My fingers reach up to find the jade, feeling the carved ridges and the smoothness of the underside. There’s the comforting weight of it hanging from my neck, the stone warm from sitting close to my heart.

My reluctance is smothering, the necklace heavy as an anvil.

I can’t.

I should.

My fingers are trembling the slightest bit as I put the photograph back, because the pendant is so much more important—there’s got to be something crucial in this piece of jade.

I unclasp the chain from my neck, feeling strangely certain now. My fingers trace the curves and edges of the carving one last time. After this, it’ll be gone; the cicada will burn up, turn to gray silt, disintegrate.

I wish I had a longer piece of incense, but this’ll have to do.





83





—SMOKE & MEMORIES—


There’s my father, so young, stepping out of a cab. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and a blazer. His hands cupping a bold bouquet of roses. He walks slowly, carefully, up the steps of an apartment building to the third floor. He checks the address in his pocket and presses the button in the frame of the entrance, which spews out the melodic trilling of robins.

“Doorbirds instead of doorbells,” he mutters to himself, smiling a little.

My mother cracks open the door, bright-eyed and breathless. “You’re here!” she exclaims. She looks nervous, one hand clutching the pendant against her sternum.

“I told you I’d come.”

She inhales deeply. “Wait for a moment—”

From inside, behind her, I can hear the voices of my grandparents.

“Who is that?” they demand.

My mother turns away to answer. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Waigong appears behind her, and his face shifts from neutral to dismayed to disgusted. “Who is this?”

“He speaks Mandarin very well!” my mother says quickly, anxiously. “He wanted to come here to meet you and—”

“He is not coming in,” says my grandfather in a terrible voice. “He is not welcome here.”

My mother’s face contorts and flashes with rage. “But you haven’t—”

Waigong takes her by the elbow and nudges her out of the way. He doesn’t even look at my father as he shuts the door.

I can’t help the gasp that slides between my teeth, the cerise punch landing in my gut. How could my grandparents not even give Dad a chance? What was so wrong with him?

He lowers the flowers. He knocks, presses the bell again. There’s no answer, only the sound of arguing from the other side. He sits down on the steps, settling in for a wait.

A burst of light, and the colors tilt.

Brian and Dory pushing through the doors of the courthouse and running out to greet their friends. Brian smiling so wide, carrying a huge black umbrella overhead. Dory’s veil catching on a breeze, her jade cicada bouncing against her sternum. Her gaze slides downward for half a second, and in that moment there’s the slightest hint of grief. A tug between the eyebrows. When she looks up again, her features have fixed themselves, and she’s glowing with happiness once more.

One friend blows fat bubbles through a pink plastic wand. Another tosses rose petals. Brian and Dory laugh and grin, holding hands everywhere they go, like their new marriage is a lifeline to be tightly gripped. It’s drizzling, but sun squints through the droplets. Someone shouts to look for the rainbow that’s sure to come.

Darkness, and a spark.

My mother hums in the kitchen, wrapping dumplings. Chopsticks snatch up raw filling. Nimble fingers pinch the skins.

“Oof.” She pauses to rub her large belly, smiling at the roundness that separates her from the table.

“Too bad you’ll never meet your aunt Jingling,” she says to the mound beneath her hand. “These dumplings were her favorite.”

A burst of light.

My mother and my father, pausing in the middle of a hike. Trees around them tall and spotty. It’s early morning—dew catches on their sneakers, stray blades of grass cling to their ankles. My mother cradles her belly, imagines her child floating in the hollow of a conch shell, bathing in gradients of sunrise.

“But think of our kid,” says my father. “Think of her growing up missing a whole set of grandparents. Two people who are still alive. Imagine her in ten years, twenty years, resenting you for keeping her cut off. She’ll be curious—anyone would be.”

“Brian,” my mother says sharply, “it is not for discussion. It is my decision. You do not understand.”

He runs a hand through his hair and turns in a circle of frustration. “You’re right. I don’t.”