I’m sick of remembering. Weary of the shadows and storms being tugged to the surface of my mind, mauve spilling into raw umber. Tired of reliving the past, the mistakes.
I’ve been weaving the net much too tightly, so I have to undo it all and start again. Looser, I remind myself, because every time I get caught up in the memories I go all absentminded and my fingers curl and tug and tighten. I need bigger waves, a looser weave, a larger net. I have to get this right so I can catch the bird. A sigh of frustration, and fingers relinquish their grip. It’s back to a pile of thin fabric strands, now beginning to curl at the edges where the scissors severed the fine weave in the cotton.
Someone else’s memory—that’s what I need. Something to refresh myself and shake me loose.
And that’s how I find myself standing before the drawer, pulling that box of incense out again. There aren’t very many sticks left.
I don’t look closely enough to count them; I’m tired of counting. But I know with just a glance that I’ll run out soon.
The match is already lit when I remember that I need some kind of trigger. Like the tea leaves.
I shake the match till it’s dead and cast about the room for something that might be good. The leaves worked because Waipo touched them herself, because tea is important to her, an element anchored to her past.
My eyes settle on the box from the bird—I haven’t touched it since Dad walked out. Maybe now’s the time to go through it again.
Photographs. Letters. I unfold a manila envelope and tug out the contents. There’s a page covered in handwritten Chinese characters and, behind it, a piece of art. A drawing from years ago, one I have no memory of ever making. I must have been a little kid, because at the top, it says For Dad in the most atrocious handwriting I’ve ever seen, thick green strokes of oil pastel all jagged and off center.
What is this doing in the box?
I wonder what it would give me, if I burned this?
Remembering how the feather and the tea crumbled to ash makes me pause, because someone saved this drawing for a reason. I can’t just sacrifice it for a memory.
But in the next blink, my room has changed and I can see the cracks again; they’ve made it halfway down the walls. The ceiling is missing pieces here and there, little gaping holes of emptiness. Even as I watch, another piece begins to crumble away. It disintegrates, the dust falling, leaving behind only the black.
There’s a shrill screech, just like the one we heard outside the temple. The flapping of wings.
A burst of red between the cracks of the ceiling. Wings bearing a million different hues. Vermilion, crimson, the red of blood. A long tail gliding past.
One feather drops through the largest gap. It floats down like a sigh, coming to land on top of the drawing, and then vanishing.
I don’t need to be told twice. My fingers are shaking, so it takes a few tries to light the new match. Flame to incense. Ember to paper. The drawing begins to burn. Ribbons of black smoke pitch forward, turning, sweeping, coiling.
There’s the darkness.
Then come the spark and the flash.
50
—SMOKE & MEMORIES—
The sun is a fat coin embedded in the wide blue sky. I’m standing in the driveway I know all too well, with its crooked slant and the ridge that earthworms stick against on rainy days. A big yellow school bus pulls to a stop.
Behind me, my front door wheezes open, and I turn around in time to see a younger version of my father stepping onto the porch. I know from the smell and the sunny colors that it’s one of his memories. He grins and calls out, “Whatcha got there, kiddo?”
A tiny girl with a mess of pigtails comes running across the street and up the driveway, waving a piece of paper like a flag.
I don’t remember this at all.
“Look what I made!” the eight-year-old version of myself shouts.
I follow her into the house, where Dad spreads the paper out on the counter.
“Wow,” he says, sounding genuine. “I think it’s your best one yet.”
“It’s Mommy playing the piano!” little Leigh exclaims.
“I can see that,” my father replies. “You did a spectacular job.”
“It’s for you, Daddy!”
“Wow, thank you. I think this should go here for now—at least until we get the chance to frame it!”
My heart twists at the way my younger self beams cadmium bright, the way my father’s hands lovingly push everything on the fridge out of the way to make space for the drawing. Could Dad see the instinct in how I was already capturing the proportions and dimensions of the piano? Did he note the way I’d tried to blend different colored oil pastels in my shading?
“What do you think of that?” he says.
“Higher!” says my miniature self. “So Mommy sees.”
Dad nudges it up another few inches. “Don’t worry. It’ll be the first thing she looks at when she gets home.”
“Where is she?” Tiny Leigh cranes her head around to one side and then the other.
“Not home yet. Want a snack?”
“But she’s always home now.”
“She’s running a few errands, but she’ll be back soon. How about an apple with peanut butter?”
My memory-self makes a face. “I’m sick of that.”
Dad yanks open the freezer. “Okay… how about mozzarella sticks?”
Little Leigh’s eyes shine wide. “Mommy never lets me have those for an after-school snack.”
My father shrugs. “It’s your birthday. I don’t see why today can’t be an exception.”
“Yes!” Memory-me leaps into the air, pumping a fist. I can’t remember ever having so much energy in my life.
Dad is heating up the marinara sauce and the afternoon sun is streaming into the kitchen and the house is filling with that delicious deep-fried smell. The front door opens.
“Mommy!”
My mother smiles from the foyer—it’s an expression that cuts right through my center. “Happy birthday to you!”
“Where have you been?” My younger self jumps down off her stool.
My mother takes the wrapped, suitcase-sized box out from behind her and maneuvers it down the hallway. “I was picking up your birthday gift. Do you like to open now?”
“Yeah!”
Those tiny fingers tear at the paper, stripping it off with noisy gusto to reveal a beautiful leather case. Thumbs flip open the two shiny latches without hesitation—the top lifts and little shelves slide out, bearing perfectly lined up sticks of color. Cray-Pas on the left, and markers beneath those. Gel pens on the right; crayons on the lower level. And pencils. So many pencils. Sketching pencils with their different hardnesses, watercolor pencils—enough to make little Leigh’s head spin.
My memory-self gasps, and can’t stop gasping.
“Do you like it?” asks my mother.
“It’s the best thing ever!” memory-me exclaims. “There are so many colors!”
And behind us, on the periphery, my father wearing a grin I haven’t seen in a long time. A grin that presses hard into my ribs, that makes me feel simultaneously warm and sad.
A flicker, and a changing of colors, a changing of smells.
My mother wanders alone down the hallway of my high school. The whole building is set up for a student art show. Paintings and drawings line the walls of classrooms and halls. Murals cover the lockers. Glass cases have been set up to display three-dimensional things: abstract wire sculptures, papier-maché, glazed ceramic pots and vases.
Mom walks past every piece of art—even the ones that are obviously not mine—hunting for the corresponding placard and checking for my name. And every time she finds one of my pieces, she steps back to snap a photo on her point-and-shoot camera.
She swells with pride and loudly points out my drawings to anyone nearby. The last one she finds is the portrait of her. I hadn’t shown it to her yet; it was a surprise. A photo-realistic pencil sketch suspended in glass. My mother at the piano, one hand grazing the keys, the other raised up to the page of sheet music with a stubby pencil to mark down the fingering.
“It is beautiful,” she says.