“Lai kan.” I have an idea for how to distract her, how to make her feel better.
“Kan shenme?” she asks. See what?
But I don’t know how to answer with words. I pull her by the elbow toward the guest room. We slide past inky cracks that stretch along the walls wider and higher than I am tall. We walk past a huge, gaping hole in one corner of the apartment. An abyss so black and empty it makes me shiver. The ceiling above almost completely cracked. Thin black lines fissure outward.
Of course, my grandmother doesn’t see any of this.
It’s my insomniac sight—I think of it as a superpower. The thought almost makes me smile.
When we get to my room, Waipo slumps down to sit on the bed.
“Deng yixia,” I tell her. Wait.
When I open the box, the first thing I spot is that photograph again—the duplicate of the one on Waipo’s altar, propped against the edge of her fruit bowl.
Two girls sitting, the ornate wooden chair backs rising high up behind them, their legs dangling. One of them a little taller, a little older.
My fingers trace the edges. This one’s crisp, as if it’s been carefully preserved all these years. Not like the worn copy Waipo must pick up every day, with its softened edges, its greasy fingerprints.
“Tamen shi shei?” I ask, holding the photograph out to my grandmother. Who are they?
She squints at it and answers with a fast roll of words I don’t know. Well. At least there’s another way I might be able to understand.
I shove my handmade net aside, because it’s taking up the whole top of the set of drawers, and pull out the box of incense, feeling suddenly self-conscious, anxious. For a second, I wonder if the bird didn’t bring these sticks, if the incense belonged to my grandmother all along. I show her the box, point to the characters printed on its lid. She shakes her head. She doesn’t seem to recognize it.
Waipo watches me fiddle with a match. Stick to flame. I take the embering incense tip to the corner of the photo and watch it burn.
Black smoke spurts out. Not the gentle wisps from before. Not the wavy ribbons. This is a violent spewing, and I realize: The smoke doesn’t like this. It doesn’t like that I’ve brought another person.
The photograph is plucked from my fingers by an invisible wind, swept high into the air, where it explodes in a crackle of lightning and rains down ash.
When I turn to look at my grandmother, her eyes are wide.
There is no flicker.
There is no flash.
The colors do not invert.
Beneath our feet, everything shudders, and I wonder if there’s an earthquake. It shakes so hard the already-cracked walls fall down; the ceiling crumbles. Waipo yelps as the bed drops out from under her.
The floor’s gone. Gravity has disappeared. We are drifting through that black abyss, turning in somersaults. All I hear is the sound of our breathing.
“Leigh,” says Waipo.
Her voice is like a light switch.
The black vanishes. We slam down into the ground, the impact tremoring up our legs.
65
—SMOKE & MEMORIES—
A green field. A sky of sherbet. That’s where we are.
What the hell is this place?
Waipo points at the grass up ahead, and it’s like her finger summons a wind. A huge gale sweeps past us, blowing hair all around my face and making my grandmother’s tunic billow violently.
It’s when a photograph skims past my ankles, flipping and bouncing on a breeze, that I realize there are things strewn all over the field. Pictures. Letters. Envelopes addressed in Chinese.
Then I spot the box, turned on its side, my name scrawled across the top in bold black marker.
The things the bird brought me. The box my grandparents said they burned. And all around it, broken sticks of the blackest incense. What have I done?
Waipo reaches for a crumpled piece of paper on the ground near me. The moment her hand touches it, there’s the telltale flash.
Colors out. Colors in.
The ground gone from under us, replaced by the old beige carpet of my father’s office. The room is dimly lit and smells like fresh laundry, and we’re standing right beside his desk, where he’s scribbling on a loose piece of paper with a fountain pen. What flows from the tip isn’t English. Strokes and swoops shape themselves into Chinese characters. He writes with beautiful, practiced ease.
The fountain pen makes a harsh, scattering noise—black ink soaks into the paper in the rough shape of a dog bone.
Beside me, my grandmother gasps. She gestures emphatically, pointing at the spilled ink. It takes me a moment to understand: She recognizes that piece of paper.
Could he be—? The thought drops like a weight into my stomach. Is he writing to her? To Waipo?
Dad shakes his head at the wide spot of ink but continues writing around it. He finishes the letter off, signs his name in English, fanning the page to dry the ink quicker.
He gathers together things from his drawers: various photographs of me (I must have been in the seventh or eighth grade), of my mother, and a few of our entire family together. And the final addition: a collection of my artwork—most of which I don’t remember. A self-portrait. Baby squirrels done in oil pastel. My mother’s hands roving over the piano. A charcoal sketch of Sunday waffles.
My father carefully folds these things into a protective folio, paper-clips his letter to the outside, and slides it all into a large yellow envelope. There’s already an address on the front of it, written in Chinese, with Taiwan (Republic of China) printed neatly at the bottom.
“Brian?” The voice of my mother out in the hall.
Dad hurries to push the thin package into the shadowed area behind his computer monitor.
The knock comes then—soft knuckles rapping twice—and the door slips open.
“Dinnertime,” says my mother, poking her head through.
Waipo sucks in a tight breath of air.
My father turns toward the door with a smile, his fingers hovering above his keyboard as if in midthought. “I’ll be right down.”
A stream of lights and colors, wavering, buzzing a few beats longer than usual.
Then the darkness. Then the flash, and the colors return muted. I think we’ve jumped back in time.
And suddenly I’m hyperaware of everything I’m seeing and hearing and feeling. Thinking, too—I can sense people’s thoughts.
Inside an old kitchen made of plaster walls, a young woman sings, stirring a dented pot with a wooden spoon. With a happy sigh, she settles into a woven bamboo chair. Her free hand cradles her belly, swollen with child.
It’s Yuanyang. No longer the little girl, but also not yet the Waipo I know. She’s somewhere in between.
Her husband swings into the kitchen with a grin. He wears a dark uniform, hair trimmed close to the scalp. Waigong, so young I barely recognize him.
“I can’t wait,” he says. “Why can’t the baby come already?” It’s so strange to hear him speak, to remember he once had a voice, too.
“He won’t be a toy to play with, you know,” says Yuanyang. “He’ll be a living thing.”
“She,” says Waigong.
“How are you so sure it’s a girl?” says Yuanyang.
“How are you so sure it’s a boy?” says her husband.
Yuanyang shrugs. “Just my guess.” She has never borne a child; how is she to know?
“It’s not a guess for me,” Waigong tells her. “I dreamed it.”
Heavy darkness. A flash of light. New colors:
A scene much like one the incense has shown me before: a woman on a bed with a blanket over the hump of her stomach. Yuanyang again, though she’s a few years older than in the last memory. Her eyes tired but shining. The same husband at her bedside, cradling their newborn child. It’s another girl, already full of music, cooing and grunting and blinking up at them.
He goes to rewrap the ragged blanket around the infant, and I glimpse a little brown patch in the soft rolls under the baby’s chin. The same birthmark I grew up seeing in the hollow of a pale neck. That’s my mother.