The Astonishing Color of After(86)

86





How am I supposed to find the bird? How are these fragments of the past supposed to help?

Forty-seven goddamn days since the stain. In the morning it’ll be forty-eight. I’m almost out of time.

Earlier I made Feng translate for me and ask Waipo if there’s anywhere else we might visit. If there’s a place my mother loved that we haven’t gone. Waipo shook her head, said that we’ve gone everywhere she knows.

Part of me wonders if she’s lying to me, and then I feel the need to shake myself, because why would I think that? There’s a knot of resentment somewhere in the back of my skull. Would my mother have turned into a bird if my grandparents hadn’t been so against her marriage to my father? In their faces I try to search out a hint of that old disapproval… but all I see is exhaustion. Skin gone spotted and soft. Wrinkles that trace the paths of something that might be regret.

Even when they smile, there’s something sad lingering in the corners of their mouths.

I think of my mother saying to my father, One day you and Leigh go to meet them. But I need time.

One day. As in now.

My father’s sigh hisses in my ears.

My father. Dad.

Maybe he’s the missing piece. Maybe if the bird sees that he’s here, with me, then she’ll come down. She’ll tell us.


I want you to remember



I give myself a minute to think about it, until the certainty settles over me disazo scarlet, a color as bold as her feathers. Then I draft the email.



FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected]

SUBJECT: Urgent!!!!!!



Dad, I need you to come back here ASAP. Please. It’s an emergency.





87





Right as I’m about to close out of my email, my phone chimes. At first I think with grim satisfaction that Dad’s replied already, because he has the tendency to freak out and respond within milliseconds.

But it turns out to be a new message from Axel.



FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected] SUBJECT: (no subject)



So much happened in the winter. So much I wish we would talk about. I feel like I somehow failed.

Something I’ve been wanting to ask you for forever: What the hell happened at Winter Formal?



The email spins a web of muddy colors inside me, smearing everything stil de grain brown.

Sometimes Axel could be so dense it made me want to shake him. As if I were the one who’d gone off and started dating someone else. Someone awful. Twice.

Screw Axel. And screw Leanne. I hope the two of them are happy.

The rage trickles down into my hands.

I flip through my sketchbook and tear up the drawings I’ve made for him on this trip, listening to that coarse, satisfying noise as the paper rips. Shredding each of them, smudging the pieces with the oil of my fingers.

What the hell happened? You tell me, Axel.

And then my brain is going there, dredging up those recent months again, churning them to the surface, remembering.





88





WINTER, SOPHOMORE YEAR


We turned the corner into the new year. The break ended, and it was announced that for the first time ever, our school was holding a Winter Formal at the end of February.

“I’m totally taking Cheslin,” Caro declared at lunch a week later.

“Really?” I said. “You actually want to go to that?”

“Why not?” she said.

“It’s… I mean. It’s just another school dance.”

“It’s more than any old dance,” Caro said. “It’s a formal. It’s like prom, except open to everyone.”

I shrugged. “I’m not even sure I’ll go to prom.”

Axel slid into his seat and shoved three fries into his mouth.

“What about you, Axel?” said Caro. “Are you going to Winter Formal?”

I was expecting him to make a face and roll his eyes, but he didn’t. His chewing slowed. He swallowed and made a show of popping open his Snapple and taking a few gulps. He bit into three more fries.

“Take your time,” Caro said drily.

He shrugged. But what he finally said was, “Maybe. There might be plans for that in the works.”

I had to physically hold my jaw back from falling open. Axel? At a dance?

Caro raised her eyebrows. “You move fast, dude.”

It was her reaction that made me rewind and play back his words in my head.

What did he mean, plans? Did he have a date?

But it didn’t come up again, and after that, I forgot Winter Formal was even happening. There were other things to worry about, like my portfolio. Like how each day I dreaded going home, where I knew I would find all the shades drawn, everything dark, the air stale and thick with the stench of cat litter that desperately needed sifting. Mom’s current default was insomnia and migraines, which made her either explosively angry or quiet as a slug.

Dad was still traveling, though not as frequently as he used to. During the periods that he was home, his new mission was to convince me that art school was a bad idea.

“Don’t you see how you’d be limiting yourself?” he said as I swept a charcoal stick across the page.