There’s my father, helping me up to sit. Somewhere behind him, I can hear Waipo muttering in Taiwanese.
Two pills on my dry tongue. I sip at a glass of water.
My body is so, so heavy. I just need to close my eyes. Just for a second.
I’m falling again, fast and hard, spinning through the black.
The wind picks up, pressing against my skin as I drop. At some point, the darkness begins to pale. The black turns to a murky indigo. Indigo fading to dioxazine purple, shifting to cobalt blue, then cerulean, and taking on a shine like a watercolor wash. The palest bit of rose seeps in like a touch of sunrise. Swirls of white blossoming, unfurling, expanding like an inhale.
I’m drifting through a sky.
“Hey, Leigh.” It’s Dad. I turn to try to find the source of his voice, but I can’t see him anywhere. “How you feeling, kiddo?”
He hasn’t called me kiddo in years.
“I’m okay,” I answer.
As the air warms, I hear the tinkling of a piano. It grows louder, until I can pin down what the music is: Pavane pour une infante défunte by Maurice Ravel.
“Remember this piece?” Dad whispers.
“Ravel. One of Mom’s favorites.” She used to play this one when she was in a quiet but good mood. Pavane for a dead princess is how the title translates. I always wondered: Who is the dead princess?
The music ends, and the sky goes quiet. Something settles into the space between my ribs. Something that feels full and achy and sad all at the same time.
I can tell Dad’s feeling it, too, when he says in a quiet voice, “Remember how if you did something weird, she would say, ‘Oh! My god!’ like it was two separate phrases?”
I laugh a little. It feels strange but good. “Yeah. And remember how if you tried to make a joke? She would shake her head and say, ‘You are a funny man, but you are not funny.’”
Dad snorts. “Yeah.”
“Remember when you gave her that first waffle iron for Christmas and she looked so confused when she opened it—”
“You remember that, Leigh? That was ages ago. You must’ve been four.”
“She said, ‘It’s for making the cake that looks like a fence?’ And then she called it ‘fence-cake’ for the longest time.”
“I don’t think she even liked waffles at first,” he says, and I can hear him smiling around the words.
“I remember she kept trying to improve them by adding ingredients from the Asian grocery store.”
“Oh yeah,” says Dad, chuckling a little. “Like the waffles with the red bean paste, and sesame seeds on top.”
“And then the ones she made with the matcha powder. They were pretty good.”
“Those were good! And she only made them that one time.”
I feel my face stretching into a smile of my own. It warms my body. “We could try making some ourselves.”
“And then she started doing those waffle sandwiches?” says Dad.
“Wow, I’d totally forgotten about that.”
“She tried to make that BLT with cheese, but in between two waffles?”
“I think it would’ve been good if she hadn’t used the Kraft singles,” I tell him.
He starts to laugh in his belly, and it’s such a good sound. Warm and reassuring, something I haven’t heard in a long time.
The sky turns cadmium orange.
98
I blink, and there’s no sky at all. There’s a ceiling. My father, sitting backward in a chair, his arms resting on top. I’m in bed under a thin blanket, and suddenly I’m too hot. Sweating. I kick the blanket off.
“You’re looking better,” says Dad. He puts his hand on my forehead. “Your temperature’s gone down.”
“I had a fever?”
“For like three days.”
Three days.
I missed the forty-ninth day. My eyes sting.
“You crashed hard,” he says, and I can hear the concern lining the edges of his voice. “You had us all pretty worried. Your grandmother said you weren’t really sleeping—insomnia can do some pretty severe things to the mind and body, you know.”
I think of the cracks spreading across the ceiling until the world around me shattered.
“Though it sounds like you still managed to do a fair amount of exploring.” Dad smiles. “You went to a couple of my favorite temples.” He sees the question in my eyes and explains. “She’s been calling me with updates here and there.”
“You shouldn’t have left.” It’s not the thing I was planning to say, and so the words surprise me, too. “It was shitty that you just walked out of here when you couldn’t deal.”
His head droops. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“What were you guys even arguing about?”
“It was ridiculous. Your grandmother made a joke about, I don’t know. Something about how if we’d come years ago, things could be different now. I didn’t even fully process what she was saying—I think the joke might have ultimately been about food? Really, I just took it as an accusation, and I exploded, and she exploded right back. It was a mess. I’m sorry, Leigh. I really am. And I’ve apologized to your grandparents, too. Emotions were just… running high. For everybody.”
I don’t know what to say to all that, so I drop my gaze and let my eyes wander. I look over at the nightstand, suddenly remembering the photograph—the last one from the box. The one I never burned. Dad picks it up for me. It’s a little bent, the edges charred.
It’s a color photograph, but everything is so faded that at first glance it almost looks like it was taken in black-and-white. There’s my mother with long, looping braids that hang down against her shoulders. Jingling has a short bob that barely reaches her chin. The two sisters sharing secret smiles. They look like they’re not even teenagers yet. And behind them, Waipo and Waigong, gazing into the camera, mouths straight but not unhappy.
“Why didn’t you tell me I had an aunt?” I ask.
Dad’s face tightens, looking angry and guilty and sad, the color of burnt carmine. “It wasn’t for me to say. But I should’ve made your mother tell you. You deserved to know.”
“What about me? Like—” I struggle to find the words. “When did you tell Waipo and Waigong that… I… even existed?”
“I went to see them—you were just about two years old at that point. I was on a trip to Taiwan for work, so I brought them photographs of you.”
“You just showed up? Why did you wait so long?”
“I only went after I opened a letter they’d sent to your mother. Your waigong said they wanted to make amends. I thought maybe I could help fix things.” His face was full of anguish. “Everything that happened after Jingling—” Dad lets out a heavy breath. “Your mother blamed herself for it. She kept saying she should’ve realized that something was wrong. That Jingling was sick.”
I blink. “How could she have?”
“That’s what I said. But she was convinced. And after, your grandparents pressured her to stay in Taiwan. They wanted her to quit music, do something practical. Something Jingling would’ve done. They wanted her to marry someone Chinese or Taiwanese. I flew to Taipei to meet them, and they shut the door in my face. Your mother was terribly wounded by that. When I got back to the States, I called her, and she was so upset. Impulsively—and maybe foolishly—I proposed. When she said yes, it was her way of running away from home.”
I imagine my mother making the decision over the phone, no hesitation, already throwing the few things she would need into an empty suitcase.
Dad goes on. “For a while, I wondered if she only said yes to rebel—whether she would’ve said no under better circumstances. And then I felt so guilty. Maybe if I’d just given her time to forgive herself a little. Maybe if I’d had more faith in us. I was just so in love, and so afraid I was going to lose her.”
He shakes his head. “I never wanted her to divide up her family. But she felt that without Jingling, there was nothing to close the rift between her and her parents. And I—well. I couldn’t bear to make her do anything that might make her miserable.”
I swallow hard. “So you—you still—loved her? Love her?”