My mother raised her eyebrows. “Dr. Nagori said you make good work. He said this is opportunity you can get noticed. Do you want to get noticed, Leigh? Do you want to go? To Berlin?”
“There’s no way Dad’ll say yes. So it doesn’t even matter.” I sank into the sofa.
“No,” my mother said firmly. “It does matter. You want to go, you will go.”
“I haven’t even submitted a portfolio, Mom. That’s the first part. I have to be accepted first. They’re only picking, like, twelve people.”
“Ahhh,” said my mother, her voice rounding a hill. “I see. You are afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” I shot back with so much contempt even I had to concede it was a lie. My cheeks went warm.
Mom came and sat beside me, perching on the edge of the seat. “It’s okay to be afraid. But not okay if be afraid means you do nothing. You must not do nothing. That’s not life worth living.”
I tried to swallow, but my throat wouldn’t work; there was something stuck in it, dry and methyl violet.
Later I wondered: Was that how my mother felt? That she was doing nothing? That her life was not worth living?
“Have you ever been afraid to do something?” I asked.
“Of course,” said my mother. “I was afraid marrying Dad. I was afraid coming to US. But look now: how happy I am here. How happy I am, I have this wonderful daughter, so dedicated and talented.”
I rolled my eyes like I was acting out a part. Why did I do it? Some terrible requirement of being a teenager is being absolutely awful when your parents are being lovely.
I saw the way my mother tried to shake the eye roll off like it was only water, like it wouldn’t sink through her skin. She smiled, but her eyes looked far away and wistful, as if she were filling up murky brown.
“You will make portfolio. You will go to Berlin.”
Other things were changing, too. Axel was doing more music than ever, since he’d enrolled in band. The music room was right around the corner from my locker, so we started up a habit of walking to art together after he got out of eighth-period jazz. Which was great. Until Leanne started walking with us.
I should’ve realized we hadn’t seen the last of her. Apparently she played the alto sax—who knew? I guess he didn’t find her so annoying anymore. There were, like, seventeen kids in the jazz band, and between them they all had varying degrees of chumminess, depending on what instruments they played. I tried to figure out how Axel fit into this equation. He mostly stayed on electric bass, but I knew he occasionally switched over to piano. It seemed, though, that his closest friend in that class was Leanne.
One day the two of them rounded the corner to my locker, laughing obnoxiously hard. I could barely follow the story they were telling.
“—And Mr. Chiu set his mug down right next to the trombones,” said Leanne, the cadence of her voice dramatizing the whole thing. I wondered if her eyes were going to pop out.
Axel snickered. “So we do this epic run through the coda—it’s the first time this piece has gone at all smoothly—”
“We’re going to be late for art,” I interrupted loudly.
“Okay, okay, walk and talk,” said Leanne.
Axel’s grin was so wide it was about to break a window. “The trombones are all into it, and Chiu is shouting, ‘Yes! Yes!’ Like he’s just had the best sex of his life or something.”
Leanne was cackling.
“And Darrell Hudson leans right over the desk and empties his spit valve into Chiu’s mug.” Axel exploded into laughter, tears squeezing out of his eyes.
The bell rang, and we ran the rest of the way, Leanne to study hall, me and Axel bursting into the art room. Nagori rolled his eyes at us. We started the day’s assignment, and Axel was still laughing, and I was curling into my piece of paper, hoping he couldn’t see the bit of hurt that was seeping through me Prussian blue.
73
It’s Feng’s idea to go. “We should visit your mother’s university,” she said after I told her about the bird, after I explained why I was trying to go to the places that had been important to her. Feng promised to help me come up with a new plan, said she doesn’t think we need to make a net. She thinks that visiting my mother’s spots is exactly the right thing, but that we need to look harder.
“If the bird told you to come to Taiwan, then there must be something she wants you to do or see,” Feng said. “Something more than just finding her.”
I think back to the note my mother left crumpled up in the garbage can.
I want you to remember
We take a car up Yangmingshan, which Feng says was once called Grass Mountain, for the silvergrass that grows tall and flowers on its highest slopes. We snake through winding roads, through pockets of sulfurous air. Outside the window, in every direction: a million shades of green. And behind all the flora: the mountains like watercolors. Layers and layers of blues and grays and greens rolling into one another.
And when we finally get to the Chinese Culture University, to the music building with its slate eaves and pagoda-style rooftops, we climb up to the fifth floor, to all the practice rooms where my mother must’ve sat and trained for hours. We find one with HELLO scratched above the knob. It happens to be the one door that’s unlocked.
There isn’t much space, but the three of us pile inside anyway. The black piano gleams with our reflection; I lift the cover to let it smile with its shiny teeth, like my mother would prefer.
Feng pushes open the only window; the smell of sulfur sweeps in, and something compels me to get a photo of the view. I guess I want to capture what my mother must’ve seen when she looked out there after hours of practicing. When she was only a student, without the burden of a family. When she was—I hope—happy.
As my finger taps the button to get the picture, a screech pierces the sky, stabs right through me.
Waipo grabs my wrist and points with her other hand just in time for me to see a red tail gliding away.
I press into the window, lean myself out as far as I can, but she’s gone.
“Did you get a picture?” says Feng in a hushed voice.
“I don’t think so.” But I check my phone anyway. On the screen I see the eaves of the roof. The watercolor mountains in the distance. The faraway trees like broccoli.
And on a balcony floor a couple stories down, in one sunlit patch of stone: the shadow of a bird.
I’ve been shivering nonstop since our visit to the school. And as the day progresses, the hallucinations are flaring up again. Colors brightening and mixing. The edges of things sharpening then blurring. Inky cobweb lines returning.
Everything around me looks shattered.
The seconds tick their way toward midnight, which will mark the end of the forty-fifth day.
But we must be getting closer. A tiny voice in my brain screams, Closer to WHAT? The rest of me swells defensively.
Closer to seeing her again. Speaking with her. Hugging her.
I want you to remember
She has to tell me what it is. Before she runs out of time.
We’re so close. I’m so certain of it that it feels like I can justify using one of the precious remaining incense sticks. I pull open the drawer and reach for the two photographs I was able to salvage from the ashes. Both of them are a bit damaged, but whole enough.
I choose my parents’ wedding photo, slightly bent, one edge discolored by heat, one corner entirely missing. There’s my mother in her modest white dress, a delicate veil flowing down her back. My father young and handsome in his rented suit. It’s a posed portrait, but the happiness in their faces is real.
With shaky fingers, I light the shortest stick.
Touch the ember to the photograph, watch it begin to burn.
Flicker and flash.
Flicker. And flash.
74
—SMOKE & MEMORIES—