At last the air is not so sticky and a chilled velvet black arrives.
It drapes over me, settles like a blanket. It darkens everything in the room so that I can no longer see the ceiling or the walls. There’s just me and the rhythm of my breath. My chest rising and falling. My fingers uncurling.
“Leigh.”
I’m not in my room. I’m drifting in an empty sky, cool and cloudless, free of gravity. I’m floating through the blackest black.
When the noise of gentle flapping reaches my ears, I know exactly what I’m about to see.
“Mom?”
The bird glides toward me out of the dark, majestic and graceful, her red wings gleaming.
I stretch my arms out to hug her.
She flaps once, twice.
She falters. Her feet scratching wildly, trying to find purchase. As one set of sharp claws closes over the air, it crumbles to ash. It disintegrates, burning away into dust, just like a stick of incense.
The bird gasps. “Leigh!”
My heart lurches into my throat. I blink and sit up, and she’s gone.
A dream. Just a dream. But the sound of her voice echoes in my ear until morning.
45
My heart is still pounding when the pale dawn light washes into the apartment.
The night passed both too quickly and too slowly, an agonizing turn through all the dark and muted colors.
Forty-two days now. I know exactly what the dream meant: With every day that passes, my mother diminishes. I have to find her.
Forty-two days.
Out in the living room I find Waigong by the door, kicking off slippers, pulling on outdoor shoes. He leans with one hand against the wall, the other hand tugging on his sneakers and Velcroing them tight.
My grandfather smiles at me when our eyes meet. He reaches out a hand with the palm facing down and waves it toward the floor. It takes me a moment to process the gesture: He’s inviting me to join.
Forty-two days.
Maybe we’ll see something. A hint of the bird. A clue.
Waigong is slower than Waipo, with his long cane, his off-kilter hobble. The sky is still grayish when we leave, but it opens up to the watery colors of morning as we walk. We end up in the park, winding our way through greenery, pausing to watch bugs crawling into the hollow bells of flowers.
At first the silence is strange. But once I get used to him being quiet, I start talking to him in English. It’s kind of nice, pretending he understands me.
“I had a dream,” I tell him. “An awful one.”
My grandfather gives me a long and steady look. He leads us to a bench, where we sit for a spell, watching two little kids chase each other around the small playground. On the other side, there’s a gazebo over a table. Two old men sit opposite each other, gazing down at something between them. Some sort of game. They take turns moving around flat pieces.
“What are they playing?” I ask.
Waigong says nothing, but I imagine it to be something like backgammon, or maybe checkers.
While he watches them, I study him for a little bit, search for Ping’s features in his face. Was that him? I try to imagine Waigong growing up alongside Waipo, as a brother.
The wrongness of the idea makes me squirm a little. Even if she was adopted. Still. Brother and sister, engaged, and then married. Didn’t they think it was weird?
A flat buzzing fills the air. It takes up a percussive rattle, quickening its beat, finding a steady pace. The noise halfway between a scrape and an electrical hum.
My eyes do a quick scan but find nothing to land on. “What is that?”
Waigong points with a trembling finger.
There it is, on the thin branch of the nearest tree, almost the size of my thumb, brown and unmoving.
A cicada.
I watch it for a long moment before I realize it’s far too still. This is only the shell, a husk left behind like an empty house.
We can’t see the one that’s singing, but it buzzes louder and louder. The tempo changes, quickening, slowing. It gathers up like a wave, retreats like a falling tide. We listen until the song dies.
Before we head home, my grandfather stops us near a patch of purple flowers. He touches them, tracing their silky edges, nudging each one aside until he finds the perfect blossom. His knuckles travel down the stem to the base near the grass, where he pinches tight and breaks the green.
When he holds it up to me, I tell him, “That’s lovely.”
The most perfect flower. We bring it home to Waipo.
46
The first thing I see when Waigong and I step back into the apartment is Feng, wearing another one of her floral shirts with colors so sharp they hurt my eyes—sunflowers painted in neon hues. She’s sitting at the dining table, where there are bowls of snowy rice porridge, and chatting gaily with my grandmother in quick Taiwanese. The television is blasting loudly, but she talks over it. The noise scrapes into my ears. Without breaking her sentence, Feng turns to wave to us, her grin a sharp and blinding crescent.
I swallow a sigh. Don’t Waipo and Waigong get sick of her?
Feng describes something with her hands, drawing wide circles, looking almost like a caricature.
And across from her, just outside the kitchen, Waipo is clutching her stomach, eyes squeezed shut, leaning heavily against the doorway to the kitchen, laughing like it’s all she knows how to do.
On the TV an audience is also laughing. It’s like the universe has perfectly timed some ridiculous joke to sync up everywhere, and I’m the only one not in on it.
I kick my shoes off loudly.
“Leigh,” says Feng, “lai chi.”
Come eat. Like she’s the host. Like she belongs here more than I do.
I yank my chair out from under the table as loudly as possible.
“Maybe we should put on some yinyue?” Feng says, looking pleased with herself for mixing English and Mandarin. “Yinyue means—”
“Music,” I say before she can finish. “I know.” My good mood from the walk with Waigong is completely ruined.
“Oh.” She studies my face for a moment, and I try to make my features hard as stone. “Is everything okay?”
“Sure,” I say. “Yeah.”
Feng turns back, saying something in Taiwanese. At first I wonder if she’s calling Waipo’s attention to me being horrible. But my grandmother responds by gesturing excitedly with a hand in the air. She makes her way slowly across the living room to click off the TV and turn on an ancient CD player.
Strings croon like a wave. A glockenspiel joins in above, the spare notes delicate, like bells hung from stars. A woman begins to sing, her voice buttery and warm with slow vibrato. The words are in Mandarin.
Feng sings along—she has a surprisingly good voice, and she smiles through the lyrics, her face taking on more color and radiance.
“This song was very popular back in the day,” she says during a part that’s just instrumental.
And then I realize the melody is familiar to me—somehow I recognize it. But at the same time I’m certain I’ve never heard it before, because never in my life have I listened to lyrics that weren’t in English. Could it have been something I heard as a baby? Does memory even work that way?
And then it strikes me. I haven’t heard this song sung, but I’ve heard it played on the piano. This very melody turning in the upper octaves, an accompaniment rolling beneath the left hand. When I close my eyes, I can see my mother leaning over the piano, eyes squeezing shut, hands feeling out the song. All I knew was it was improvised—it was one of the pieces she would play that never came out the same way twice.
In the chair beside me, Waigong draws little smiles back and forth in the air with a finger, moving in time to the music, like he’s the one conducting the orchestra.
“The name of the singer is Teresa Teng,” says Feng. “Deng Lijun. Have you heard of her?”
“Ni mama zui xihuan,” Waipo says. Your mother’s favorite. She brings over the CD case. The album cover shows a rosy-cheeked woman, her black hair curled and fluffed, the expression on her face soft and demure.