Feng’s eyes open wide. Her shoulders droop forward and she shrinks into a slight hunch. “I’m sorry, I was just trying to—”
“Stop it. You’re not part of this family. You don’t know anything. Why are you always here? I wish you would leave us alone.”
Feng takes a step back, stumbling over her own feet. “I just want to help you. That’s all.”
I spit the words out so meanly I surprise even myself: “Why are you so convinced I need your help?”
“Leigh,” Waipo says.
“It’s okay,” says Feng. She turns to my grandmother and tries to smile. “Meiguanxi.”
I blink, and she vanishes into the crowd.
56
After Feng left, Waipo and I made our way back home in a gauzy silence.
It’s quiet in the apartment now, everything so still that I can hear my grandparents shifting in their bed. There’s a faraway cricket making its rhythmic count somewhere out on the streets. The occasional car swishes past. My guilty inhales and exhales loud as stormy waves crashing over rocks.
If Axel were here right now, he’d ask, What color? and I’m not sure I would be able to answer. Maybe it’s a color I haven’t discovered yet.
I try to shove the thoughts about Feng out of my brain.
My hands grab at the T-shirt strands. I start again with a braid, my knuckles directing the fabric, fingers curling to hold the weave loose. I focus on the over and under, on tying quick knots, and let my mind wander.
There was one weekend when Caro and I spent our entire Saturday reading about tetrachromacy and trying to figure out if one or both of us might happen to have it. It’s this extremely rare thing that means you can see colors that other people can’t. So, like, a regular person might call a sky perfectly blue while a tetrachromat insists that it’s also red and yellow and green.
I wonder if seeing the bird is like that. If those of us who’ve seen her have something special in our eyes, in our brains, in our hearts—something that allows us to see into that other dimension of existence with sharp clarity.
Because the bird is real. She has to be.
I am as certain of this as I am of the fact that I was born. That I’m alive. That my name is Leigh Chen Sanders.
And then I remember how one article said that most birds are tetrachromatic.
That must be true for my mother, as a bird. It must be. I wonder if she can see colors I can’t. If for her the sky is full of purples and oranges as she sails across. If the moon looks like a brush loaded with a million different shades of paint, waiting to be cleaned.
It’s as if my thoughts summon some kind of magic. The colors of my room begin to deepen their hues, like flowers blossoming. Crimson in the corners. Cerulean along the southern cracks. Indigo by the window. Bioluminescent green tracing the creases of the wall closest to the bed. The things that are already black somehow take on a truer shade, pitch dark and empty.
I blink hard, and it clears for a moment.
But then it pours back in like an ink spill spreading quick.
On the shiny surface of the stain, I see hints of the past. The memories unfurl.
57
SUMMER BEFORE SOPHOMORE YEAR
I should’ve known something was up when Dad came and sat down in the kitchen and said nothing about the sketch under my hand. He was so quiet I wondered: Was he watching me work?
I set down my pencil to take a sip of tea. That was when he pounced.
“Leigh, how do you feel about going to camp?”
I paused, mug halfway to my mouth, and raised my eyebrows. “Camp?”
It was the end of June, end of freshman year. My summer had just begun, and later that day Axel and Caro were going to come over. I was ready to enjoy two months off.
I had no idea that in less than a year my life was going to flip upside down.
“Sleepaway camp,” said Dad.
There must’ve been a look of horror on my face because he said, “Come on, it’ll be fun. You’ve never done it before. It’ll be a good experience. There’s one in Upstate New York that looks perfect for you.”
“What, about this”—I gestured to my pajamas, sketchbook, and half a dozen pencils strewn out next to my breakfast—“indicates that I’d want to go somewhere totally not interesting, and make fake new friends who I’ll never speak to again, and be away from my actual friends, just to do a bunch of trust falls and get eaten alive by diseased mosquitoes—”
“It’s an art and nature camp,” said Dad.
I had to work hard to not roll my eyes. My father clearly thought that anything with the word art in it automatically won with me. At least he was making an effort?
But the wrong kind of effort.
“Can we address the elephant in the room?” I said.
His face shifted into something wary. “What’s the elephant?”
My stomach tightened with irritation. “Okay, Mom? Is in no condition to be left alone.” I hated the word condition, but it was easier than calling it what it really was. A war. Her depression was this big thing we were all battling together.
“She’s not going to be alone.”
“Oh, she’s not?” I did a pretty good job of keeping most of the sarcasm out of my voice. Most, but not all. Luckily, my father missed the tone.
“No. I canceled the summer intensive I was going to teach, and I’ve postponed my trip to Beijing. So I’ll be here.”
Great. Dad would be here. Here, quote unquote. I imagined him shut up in his office for eighteen hours, submerged under papers, everything else in the house forgotten. Here still didn’t mean he was actually present.
I unclenched my jaw. “Mom needs me.”
“Actually, that’s exactly why this came up. Your mother and I were thinking—”
“There’s no way Mom had an actual thought that was in agreement with this,” I said loudly over him. My mother hadn’t uttered a real sentence in over a week. She moved like a zombie. Over the last couple months her piano students had stopped coming—either she’d canceled the lessons or they’d all sensed something was very wrong. Now she spent her days in bed with the curtains drawn. If I coaxed her long enough, hard enough, she’d sometimes eat a tiny bit of food.
“We were thinking it would be good for you to get out of the house for a little bit. Get away from this, go somewhere positive. And it’ll give your mother a break so she can relax and have some peace and quiet—”
“Are you shitting me?”
“Language, Leigh,” said my father.
I made a noise of disgust.
“We’ve already enrolled and paid for you to go—”
I stood up, all but slamming my mug down. “You what?”
“We’ll be driving you there on Sunday. So you should probably start packing.” He stood and pushed his chair under the table.
“Dad, you can’t be serious.”
“I am absolutely serious, Leigh. This’ll be good for you.”
“That’s the biggest goddamn lie—”
He shot me the look of death. “Language, young lady. If you can’t speak to me with respect, you’re going to get yourself grounded.”
“Oh, grounded for four whole days.” I rolled my eyes. “Before I’m chauffeured straight to hell.”
“That’s it,” said my father, throwing his hands in the air. “You officially are grounded. Which is perfect. Plenty of time for packing. I’ll send you the website so you can see what they recommend.”
“This is like the opposite of a kidnapping.”
“Leigh, this is not meant to be a punishment. I did actually try to pick something you would like. I think you’re going to enjoy it.”
He was so very wrong. On all counts. It was a punishment. And no, I definitely wasn’t enjoying it.
Camp Mardenn. Six weeks of hell. We lived in wood cabins, ancient and smelly, complete with plastic buckets if it rained and leaked. Every day we went out to “be with nature and make art”—I focused on the art of screaming silently.
I missed Axel and Caro desperately.
I missed my mother even more.