Early the next morning while my parents still slept, I sat in the kitchen drinking mug after mug of peppermint hot chocolate, watching the cat stare out the window. The quiet was getting to me. It felt like it was taking Axel nine hours to respond to every text. I tried not to be offended; he had a big family, and apparently they had a ton of holiday traditions.
I thought about how different things had been last Christmas. How Dad had been gone, but somehow that had been better. How Axel spent winter break helping me sort through those boxes.
And with that thought, my feet carried me downstairs. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I was restless and I was remembering the bracelet, the Emily Dickinson book. I’d taken those up to my bedroom, along with that black-and-white photograph of the two little girls. The other stuff was still where I’d found it.
In the basement, the boxes were exactly how we’d left them, open and askew. There were even letters on the floor from when Axel and I had separated them into piles. A part of me wondered at my carelessness in leaving these out. Anyone who’d come down would’ve seen immediately that I’d been digging, snooping.
Maybe that’s what I’d been hoping for. Maybe I’d thought that if my mom or dad saw what I’d been looking at, they’d confront me, open up a dialogue. Finally talk to me about my grandparents.
But nobody had been down here. Not in an entire year.
That night I let myself out onto the porch and stood on the steps, face angled up toward the cloudless sky. The moon was a fat, glowing coin. It had a face. Kind, and almost smiling. I wondered if my grandparents in Taiwan were gazing up at the same plate of light, trying to make eye contact with that pale and beaming man.
86
How am I supposed to find the bird? How are these fragments of the past supposed to help?
Forty-seven goddamn days since the stain. In the morning it’ll be forty-eight. I’m almost out of time.
Earlier I made Feng translate for me and ask Waipo if there’s anywhere else we might visit. If there’s a place my mother loved that we haven’t gone. Waipo shook her head, said that we’ve gone everywhere she knows.
Part of me wonders if she’s lying to me, and then I feel the need to shake myself, because why would I think that? There’s a knot of resentment somewhere in the back of my skull. Would my mother have turned into a bird if my grandparents hadn’t been so against her marriage to my father? In their faces I try to search out a hint of that old disapproval… but all I see is exhaustion. Skin gone spotted and soft. Wrinkles that trace the paths of something that might be regret.
Even when they smile, there’s something sad lingering in the corners of their mouths.
I think of my mother saying to my father, One day you and Leigh go to meet them. But I need time.
One day. As in now.
My father’s sigh hisses in my ears.
My father. Dad.
Maybe he’s the missing piece. Maybe if the bird sees that he’s here, with me, then she’ll come down. She’ll tell us.
I want you to remember
I give myself a minute to think about it, until the certainty settles over me disazo scarlet, a color as bold as her feathers. Then I draft the email.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Urgent!!!!!!
Dad, I need you to come back here ASAP. Please. It’s an emergency.
87
Right as I’m about to close out of my email, my phone chimes. At first I think with grim satisfaction that Dad’s replied already, because he has the tendency to freak out and respond within milliseconds.
But it turns out to be a new message from Axel.
FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected] SUBJECT: (no subject)
So much happened in the winter. So much I wish we would talk about. I feel like I somehow failed.
Something I’ve been wanting to ask you for forever: What the hell happened at Winter Formal?
The email spins a web of muddy colors inside me, smearing everything stil de grain brown.
Sometimes Axel could be so dense it made me want to shake him. As if I were the one who’d gone off and started dating someone else. Someone awful. Twice.
Screw Axel. And screw Leanne. I hope the two of them are happy.
The rage trickles down into my hands.
I flip through my sketchbook and tear up the drawings I’ve made for him on this trip, listening to that coarse, satisfying noise as the paper rips. Shredding each of them, smudging the pieces with the oil of my fingers.
What the hell happened? You tell me, Axel.
And then my brain is going there, dredging up those recent months again, churning them to the surface, remembering.
88
WINTER, SOPHOMORE YEAR
We turned the corner into the new year. The break ended, and it was announced that for the first time ever, our school was holding a Winter Formal at the end of February.
“I’m totally taking Cheslin,” Caro declared at lunch a week later.
“Really?” I said. “You actually want to go to that?”
“Why not?” she said.
“It’s… I mean. It’s just another school dance.”
“It’s more than any old dance,” Caro said. “It’s a formal. It’s like prom, except open to everyone.”
I shrugged. “I’m not even sure I’ll go to prom.”
Axel slid into his seat and shoved three fries into his mouth.
“What about you, Axel?” said Caro. “Are you going to Winter Formal?”
I was expecting him to make a face and roll his eyes, but he didn’t. His chewing slowed. He swallowed and made a show of popping open his Snapple and taking a few gulps. He bit into three more fries.
“Take your time,” Caro said drily.
He shrugged. But what he finally said was, “Maybe. There might be plans for that in the works.”
I had to physically hold my jaw back from falling open. Axel? At a dance?
Caro raised her eyebrows. “You move fast, dude.”
It was her reaction that made me rewind and play back his words in my head.
What did he mean, plans? Did he have a date?
But it didn’t come up again, and after that, I forgot Winter Formal was even happening. There were other things to worry about, like my portfolio. Like how each day I dreaded going home, where I knew I would find all the shades drawn, everything dark, the air stale and thick with the stench of cat litter that desperately needed sifting. Mom’s current default was insomnia and migraines, which made her either explosively angry or quiet as a slug.
Dad was still traveling, though not as frequently as he used to. During the periods that he was home, his new mission was to convince me that art school was a bad idea.
“Don’t you see how you’d be limiting yourself?” he said as I swept a charcoal stick across the page.
“I could go to a regular school that has a good art program and other things, too,” I said.
But it seemed that if I compromised the slightest bit, he pushed harder.
“What if you went into the sciences? You’re always spouting off random science facts, like remember when you were telling me all about pigments?”
The frustration was heating up my face. “Because I’m interested in scientific things that have to do with art. Do you even remember what my science grades look like?”
“Well, you could even study, like, accounting or economics—and just take an art class for fun. You don’t want to box yourself into an impractical profession—”
“Tina majored in philosophy and now she has her marketing job, which she says has nothing to do with her college degree.”
“There are always exceptions. But imagine how difficult it must’ve been for Tina to get that position.”
“And what about you, Dad? Are you going to tell me that your East Asian Studies major was the most practical thing?”