What if I wasn’t meant to unlock all those memories? What if those things were supposed to stay tucked away, hidden and eventually forgotten?
Is this what my mother—before she turned into a red and winged beast, back when she still wove magical worlds over the piano keys, and delighted in the look of a perfectly done waffle, and called my name in her warm bismuth-yellow way—is this what she would’ve wanted? For me to chase after ghosts? For me to uncover whatever answers I could, and try to stitch together the broken pieces of my family history?
I think of Emily Dickinson, asking her sister to burn all her words.
I think of my mother’s note.
I want you to remember
Maybe Mom crossed that out because she changed her mind.
Maybe I wasn’t supposed to do all this, and the cracks are her way of striking out all that’s left.
It begins to rain. All the colors swirl together like a dirty paintbrush plunging into a cup of water.
91
I sit in a shattered park, beside shattered trees, under a shattered sky. I even feel the bench crunching when I shift. Rainwater snakes its way through the crevices of the broken ground. The only thing that hasn’t cracked is my own body. My limbs are whole, unscathed. I’m the last person out here who isn’t about to crumble.
In my left hand, a bouquet of the feathers that fell from the sky. I bury my face in them. They’re soft and buttery, just like my mother’s hair used to be. Warm, springy, with a hint of coconut. They don’t have the wet and rotting musk of the red-filled tub. They smell like Mom. The way she smelled in life.
“Those are some beautiful feathers.”
Feng’s standing next to my bench. I didn’t expect to see her here. She’s not broken, either—a huge relief. I’m not alone.
“Mind if I sit?” she says.
“Go ahead,” I tell her.
“I’ve only got a few minutes, actually. Then I have to go run an errand.”
“Okay.”
Feng takes a deep breath and lets it back out in a slow sigh. “I like to come here, too. It’s so peaceful. The mosquitoes don’t even bother me anymore.”
“It’s been forty-eight days,” I tell her.
Even though I’ve never told her I was counting, I can tell by the expression on her face that she knows exactly what I’m talking about.
“I came all the way to Taiwan to find the bird. But what if I don’t? I’m almost out of time.”
“Are you sure she wants to be found?” Feng says gently.
“Not anymore.”
“What are you planning to do if you find her?”
The question annoys me. “How am I supposed to know? It’s not exactly like I intended for all this to happen. She’s the one who sent me a box of clues. She basically told me to come.”
“Maybe that’s all she wanted,” says Feng. “Maybe it’s enough that you’re here.”
I shake my head. “I have to find her.”
“I have faith that you will,” says Feng. She stands. “I’m really sorry to cut this short.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“You’ll find her. I know you will. But when you do, promise me you’ll let her go.”
“What?” I look up.
“Let her go. Let her be. That’s the greatest gift you can offer a ghost.”
The words echo in my head, titanium white, turning and turning. Let her go. Let her be.
Feng hesitates for a long moment. This time, when her voice comes out, it sounds just as cracked as everything around us. “I saw the bird, Leigh.”
“What?”
“She spoke to me. She told me to go home.”
“Go home?” I repeat. “Why did she talk to you? And what—are you going to listen to her? Are you going to leave? Where is ‘home’?”
“I don’t know. I kind of like it here.” She smiles at me. “But anyway. Don’t worry about it for now.”
I have no idea what to say to this. I’d kind of thought that her home was here. That she’d… settled.
“I have to go run my errand. Goodbye, Leigh.”
I look up at her. Her head and limbs and body solid and bright against a shattered, cracked world.
She smiles. “See you later.”
As she walks away, I note how quietly she moves, so small and so light that the broken ground doesn’t make a single noise beneath her footsteps.
I turn on my phone. No new email from my father. My thumb pulls down on the screen to refresh.
Nothing.
Refresh again.
The chime of a new message. I straighten up; the wood creaks treacherously. But when the new email loads, it’s not from Dad.
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: (no subject)
I almost don’t click into it, because I’m still not sure how to feel about his last email. But curiosity gets the best of me. It turns out to be another one of those messages that has no words. Only a picture. A watercolor he made—I immediately recognize his style. But I can’t figure out when he would have painted me like this.
Because in the picture, I’m sitting curled up on his dusty tweed couch, wearing his favorite hoodie, hugging a giant bowl of popcorn, my face open and luminous and full of laughter. The stripe in my hair is blue, but I’ve done blue so many times that that tells me nothing.
Something about the way he painted me is so incredibly intimate. The colors soft and sensual. The careful strokes highlighting the curves of my thighs and the angles of my face.
Heat rises to my cheeks, thinking of him staring at me so closely. As if his brushes were hands that had traced every part of me.
I miss him. I miss the way things used to be. I miss sitting close enough to feel the heat of his body, smell his shampoo. Being able to tease him. Knowing his every thought just by the slightest twitch of his lips or the gleam in the corner of his eye. I miss the ease and the warmth. And the history. Everything between us that made us, us.
92
SPRING, SOPHOMORE YEAR
A part of me had hoped that with the seasons changing and the days growing longer, other things would melt away with the snow. Like my mother’s increased moodiness, which seemed to be dictated as much by the taste of the air as it was by her migraines. And the weirdness between me and Axel, still lingering from Winter Formal.
But it only got worse. I started to feel like I could no longer just walk into the Moreno house. I still saw Axel during art, but that was basically it. And Leanne had started eating at our table, which pretty much ruined lunch for me.
I let my portfolio take over—no art project had ever so consumed my life. I worked late into the nights and often fell asleep atop loose pieces of charcoal, waking up with my skin and clothes totally smudged and stained. I swam deep into the drawings until it seemed that all I breathed was the dust trailing my careful fingers, and everything in my vision became smears of black and gray.
I found my knuckles tracing things I never thought could be captured on paper. The delicate lines of my mother’s depression. Shadowy resentment toward my father. The negative space of our family’s gaps and divides. The bold, heavy wanting I had for Axel.
I made multiple drafts of everything, finessing my strokes, changing the light and dark, altering the focus. All I needed for the application were three strong pieces, just a sampling from a hypothetical series. Three pieces. It felt like a new mantra. Just three good pieces.
I emerged out of my sea of charcoal and paper just as the spring air was starting to boil. I traded my smock for a tank top and shorts and found myself down in Caro’s basement for the first time in ages.
“Have you talked to Axel lately?” I asked.
“Sort of,” Caro said. She sat on a stool in her basement, fiddling with the dials on an old camera. “You guys have been weird with each other.”
“I know.”
“Maybe you should talk to him about it,” she said.
“I’m not sure he wants that. He’s not the most confrontational.” I’d been doing a quick pencil study of Caro and her long torso curving over the stool, but she moved and now the light was different. I turned to a fresh page.
“You should still try.”