A burst of light, and the colors tilt.
Brian and Dory pushing through the doors of the courthouse and running out to greet their friends. Brian smiling so wide, carrying a huge black umbrella overhead. Dory’s veil catching on a breeze, her jade cicada bouncing against her sternum. Her gaze slides downward for half a second, and in that moment there’s the slightest hint of grief. A tug between the eyebrows. When she looks up again, her features have fixed themselves, and she’s glowing with happiness once more.
One friend blows fat bubbles through a pink plastic wand. Another tosses rose petals. Brian and Dory laugh and grin, holding hands everywhere they go, like their new marriage is a lifeline to be tightly gripped. It’s drizzling, but sun squints through the droplets. Someone shouts to look for the rainbow that’s sure to come.
Darkness, and a spark.
My mother hums in the kitchen, wrapping dumplings. Chopsticks snatch up raw filling. Nimble fingers pinch the skins.
“Oof.” She pauses to rub her large belly, smiling at the roundness that separates her from the table.
“Too bad you’ll never meet your aunt Jingling,” she says to the mound beneath her hand. “These dumplings were her favorite.”
A burst of light.
My mother and my father, pausing in the middle of a hike. Trees around them tall and spotty. It’s early morning—dew catches on their sneakers, stray blades of grass cling to their ankles. My mother cradles her belly, imagines her child floating in the hollow of a conch shell, bathing in gradients of sunrise.
“But think of our kid,” says my father. “Think of her growing up missing a whole set of grandparents. Two people who are still alive. Imagine her in ten years, twenty years, resenting you for keeping her cut off. She’ll be curious—anyone would be.”
“Brian,” my mother says sharply, “it is not for discussion. It is my decision. You do not understand.”
He runs a hand through his hair and turns in a circle of frustration. “You’re right. I don’t.”
“She will have everything else,” says my mother, almost begging. “But I cannot do what you’re asking.”
The pain in her voice stabs at me, shards of something turquoise and broken lodging under my skin, jamming in my throat.
“Ever?” says my father.
My mother considers this. “One day, perhaps. I go to see them again. One day you and Leigh go to meet them. But I need time.”
My father presses out a long, sighing breath. “Okay. Fine. One day.”
New colors.
A baby bouncing over a knee above a familiar leather sofa. Across the room, deft hands mapping out black and white keys. A living room bursting with magenta warmth and dandelion cheer and all the hues of love, invisible but undeniably there.
I know that baby’s face only because of the photographs hanging in my father’s office. That’s me. Little Leigh, daughter of Dory and Brian, back when all three of us were still in love with one another, before things had gone horribly wrong.
Or had things been wrong to begin with?
Flicker.
My mother stands in the kitchen with an apron wrapped around her. Her hair shoulder-length, the few white strands tinted red with her favorite henna dye. She pauses halfway through chopping a block of bean curd. The knife falls from her hand, tumbling heavily into the sink. Nobody’s there to ask what’s wrong. There is only my mother in the kitchen, hands shaking, brine edging out of her eyes. Eyes that see nothing but the knife.
Flash.
My mother, waving me out the door as I run to catch the yellow bus, and turning back to collapse on the sofa. The expression on her face like that of someone haunted.
Flash.
My mother in the basement, holding a bottle of OxyContin and a jug of bleach. She heard once that it takes ten seconds for something swallowed to reach the stomach. But how long to digest? How long if it’s liquid?
Flash.
My mother, rising from her bed in the middle of the night. She walks quietly, slowly, avoiding the creaks in the floor. Down in the garage, she slides into the sedan and sits in the driver’s seat, car keys biting into her palm. She’s thinking. Debating. If she turns on the car. If she doesn’t open the garage door. If no one in the house wakes, and she falls asleep at the wheel. The vehicle doesn’t even have to move. She could sleep forever.
Flash.
My mother, on the floor of the bathroom, curled like a child, face pressed into the tiles, fingers stroking the carved wings of her jade pendant.
Flash.
My father, dragging his suitcase out the front door to leave for his first conference. His first week away from us. He kisses my mother and she smiles, but it’s not real. Not a full smile. It doesn’t shine in her face.
Dad doesn’t notice. He’s too excited. How does he not see?
He rolls his suitcase out to the waiting car and beams his grin at us while the driver loads the trunk. One last wave and he’s pulling away.
Flash.
My mother, opening the back door and standing barefoot in the freshly fallen snow.
Her thoughts fluttering by like the pages of a book caught in a rough wind. Thoughts of the snow. Of how the cold is not so bad. The shivers will distract her from other things.
And after a while, she’ll just fall asleep. Peaceful. Numb to the world. Dreaming one last dream in the hollow of a snow angel.
Flash.
The colors disappear. The light vanishes.
I hear a sob, and realize it’s me. But when I touch my face, my cheeks are dry. I’m not actually crying. I’ve never felt more dried up in my life.
Long before I lost my mother, my mother lost her sister. My mother lost her parents—or at least, that’s what she believed.
Believing is a type of magic. It can make something true.
Long before doctors put a label on her condition and offered slips of paper bearing the multisyllabic names of pharmaceuticals. Long before my father started leaving on his work trips.
Long before everything: She was already hurting.
84
I blink the memories away, and the world returns in colors made harsh by sleep deprivation.
Why is the smoke showing me all this? Why summon such grief, when I’ve already lost so much? So many of these things seem better off forgotten.
The ache of it all is stuck in my lungs.
I look down for the gray silt, but there is none. No dust, no ash.
Instead, there’s the jade, sitting in my palm, looking the same as always. It wasn’t burned up. The relief slams into my chest, and I suck in a deep breath.
It’s still here. I get to keep it.
The only evidence of the incense and the memory is that the silver chain looks scorched. Sections of it dark and oxidized. But the links still hold strong. I clasp it around my neck once again, glad for the pendant’s comforting weight, glad that after everything, I still at least have this.
85
WINTER, SOPHOMORE YEAR
Winter break started with the chain of Mom’s cicada necklace somehow falling apart. She was bent in half, reaching for something in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and the jade went clattering to the floor, no rhyme or reason. She immediately went out and bought a new chain until she could get the original fixed, but it wasn’t the same. The silver tone was a bit too shiny, the length of it a little too short, and the links themselves boxy in a way that just didn’t look right.
It felt like an omen.
I would think back on that later and realize it should’ve flagged my attention that I was already looking for something to blame.
Omen or not, it was a weird break. Axel went to visit family in San Juan for the first time in years, and Caro was snowboarding again. Dad was actually supposed to be home for a decently long stretch, and Christmas Day started off promising.
Dad pulled up a chair as Mom was wrapping dumplings.
“I’ll help.” He took a stack of the doughy skins and began scooping filling into the centers, folding in their edges.