The Astonishing Color of After(9)

I want you to remember



“So can I go? To Taipei?”

Dad shakes his head. “Things are more complicated than you realize.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“It’s not the right time for any of this,” he says. He tilts his head down in a way that says, This conversation is over.

The bird doesn’t come back after that.





10





When I close my eyes to try to sleep, everything tilts and spins. Behind my eyelids, I see the bird landing again and again. I hear my mother’s warm voice.

I crack my eyes open, gazing at nothing in particular, letting my vision adjust to the darkness. But the longer I look, the more things seem to change. The edges of the end table going soft, rounding. The other side of the sofa deflating, though I don’t feel my body moving with it. The carpet below turning into a dark and wavering sea, reflecting back the lines of moonlight that trace the window edges. The entrance to the living room melts away, walls dripping down like a surrealist painting.

“Dad?” I call out softly.

The room resets. I wait to see whether he heard me, but there’s no sound of him moving around.

Trying to sleep is pointless. It’s not even what I need right now.

I sit up and pull my computer into my lap, let the harsh light of the screen wash the living room in a cold glow. It calms me to see everything more clearly, to note the sharp corners of the piano bench, the straightness of the curtains draping down against the window.

When I type the word suicide, my hands are slick with sweat and I am almost certain my father, upstairs in the makeshift bed in his office, can hear me tapping out each individual letter. The last thing I want is to go back to Dr. O’Brien’s office, to endure his nasally voice and answer questions about how I’m “coping”—which is exactly what will happen if my father realizes what I’m searching for on the internet.

I sink back into the old sofa and tuck my bare feet under a pile of cushions before scrolling through the search results.

Link after link, page after page. The words crowd the screen, crawling everywhere, blurring like dots of rain gathering on glass, sharpening again to prick at my eyes.

My gut makes the sickening lurch like I’m at the top of a roller coaster, just starting to drop. Only there’s no release. There is just that tension, coiling tighter and tighter, constricting my organs and seizing my breath and threatening to bring up my last meal.

What I learn is that all the odds were stacked against my mother actually dying. Someone should have caught her before she lost enough blood. Her stomach should have ejected everything she swallowed.

I can’t stop myself from wondering about the physical pain of the experience. I try to imagine suffering so hard that death would be preferable. That’s how Dr. O’Brien explained it. That Mom was suffering.

Suffering suffering suffering suffering suffering.

The word circles around in my head until the syllables lose their edges and the meaning warps. The word begins to sound like an herb, or a name, or maybe a semiprecious stone. I try to think of a color to match it, but all that comes to mind is the blackness of dried blood.

I can only hope that in becoming a bird my mother has shed her suffering.

Dad still doesn’t believe me.

Would it make a difference if he did?

Isn’t part of being a parent that you’re supposed to believe your daughter when no one else does? When she needs your belief more than she’s ever needed anything from you?

The more I think about it, the more that believing seems like the ultimate definition of family. I guess my family is kind of broken. Always has been.

Once, in the first grade, our teacher had us make family trees. I remember trimming out the shapes for Mom and Dad and Grammy and Grandpa. I remember making a trunk from an inside-out cereal box and cutting multicolored construction paper clouds to use as leaves.

I hated how it came out. My tree was imbalanced. Mom wasn’t an orphan, but that was how it looked when the teacher stapled mine up on the bulletin board. Most of the other kids had made trees that were perfectly symmetrical.

After school that day I went home and asked, “How come we never see my grandparents?”

“What do you mean?” Mom said. “Every week we see your grammy.”

“But your mom and dad,” I clarified. “How come we never spend Thanksgiving with them?”

“They live too far away,” she replied curtly.

I didn’t understand what I could possibly have done wrong, but I knew then that I wasn’t supposed to ask about Grandma and Grandpa on Mom’s side.

I tried again in middle school, when my social studies teacher did a unit on East Asian cultures.

“Mr. Steinberg asked me if anyone in our family has ever experienced foot binding.”

“Why does he ask you that?” my mother said almost defensively, and I remembered her looking up from the knife and cutting board with a strange blue expression.

“I told him you grew up in Taiwan,” I explained.

She paused and looked up into the corners of her eyes. “I think my grandmother in China—your great-grandmother—she did do foot binding.”

“But not your mom?”

“No.”

I waited a beat. “Why don’t you ever call your parents on the phone? Or write letters?”