“Of course. I never stopped, Leigh. Never.”
I turn my face away because it’s too hard to look at him. “It’s just. You were gone so much. You… changed. You turned into this career guy, and then Mom and I were just that family tucked away in the back of the closet.”
Dad inhales sharply.
“Sometimes it seemed like you were just pretending everything was fine, like the problem might fix itself. But things like that don’t go away on their own.”
He makes a sound like he’s quietly choking.
My voice cracks. “We needed you, Dad.” There’s both a pain and release in saying it out loud. I spent so much time trying to convince myself that it was better when he wasn’t around. That we didn’t need him. That Mom and I were a complete unit on our own.
Now that I’ve said the words, I don’t even feel angry anymore. Only sad.
I listen to his thick inhalations.
When he speaks again, his words are shaky. “I never meant to let my work take over. But you’re right. And when I finally realized something was broken… I didn’t know how to make it better. Every time I came home, there was this unbearable weight. It was easier to be gone, you know? To be a family via the phone. Like we were in our twenties again, keeping it up long-distance, separated by the Pacific.”
His voice gains speed, as if he’s rushing to pour out the thoughts before he can take them back.
“Sometimes it really felt to me like you two were better off when I was gone. I didn’t know how to change that. I just—” He squeezes his eyes shut. “These aren’t excuses. I know it’s my fault. And I can’t take any of it back. If I had been a stronger, better person, your mother would still be here.”
“No,” I tell him. “You can’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault. Just like it wasn’t Mom’s fault that Jingling died.” As the words come out, I realize they’re true. I actually believe them.
He’s still shaking his head. There’s a helpless misery in his face.
“Anything could have happened, even if you’d been there for all of it. Mom was sick.”
“I just wish—” He stops and presses his lips together, swallowing the words.
I get it. There’s no point in wishing. We can’t change anything about the past. We can only remember. We can only move forward.
It hurts so much I feel barely stitched together. I have to work hard to push down the knot in my throat. “Tell me about when you guys met.”
Dad goes quiet, but his face changes.
“Tell me,” I urge again. “It was at a students’ mingle event, right?”
When he finally speaks, his voice is soft and slow. “She was the only one in the room I wanted to talk to. She lit up the place. She was like this torch. I could’ve talked to her forever.”
Dad smiles then, but it’s a painful one. “When she mixed up her idioms, she made me laugh so hard. She never cared about being wrong—she would just laugh along with me. And when she played piano—god, this is going to sound so corny—it was like her body just melted into the sound. It was like music was where she was born, and when she played the piano, she was home again.”
I think of my mother swaying on the black bench, her body rolling with the wave of the melody, fingers precise and certain on the counterpoint. There’s that twinge, that soreness. The regret that I never let her give me a lesson.
Dad reaches behind him, pulls a folded square of paper from his back pocket.
“What’s that?”
He unfolds it wordlessly and holds it up so I can see.
It’s the pencil drawing of our family on the seesaw in Village Park, looking as old and worn as a treasure map. It must’ve been folded and refolded a million times.
“Wow. I kind of thought you were going to stick that in a folder and forget about it.”
He takes his time replying, like the words are difficult to come by. “I’ve kept it with me since you gave it to me for Christmas. First I packed it in my suitcase so I could look at it while I was away. And then it just became habit to carry it in my pocket. It made me feel better.”
“Wow,” I say again.
“I’d be on a plane, and I’d unfold this and just marvel at what an amazing job you did—the emotion that you captured in our faces. Every time I looked at it I felt like I remembered that day even better. It’s remarkable.”
My eyes sting. “Thanks, Dad. That means a lot.”
“You have a gift. I’m sorry if it ever seemed like… I thought otherwise. Your mother was so incredibly proud of you, and she had good reason to be.”
We fall silent, and I wonder if he’s realizing the same thing I am: that we just had our longest conversation—without fighting—in a long time.
The ache for my mother is still there. It’s never going to leave. But it’s tucked deep inside layers and layers of remembering. Some of it good, some of it bad. All of it important.
The door creaks and my grandmother steps into the room, bringing me a glass of juice. Her eyes light up when she sees that I’m awake.
“Leigh,” she says, followed by a string of something fast and melodic.
I turn toward my father expectantly. “What did she say?”
He smiles a little. “She said your name is powerful. It’s just like the Mandarin word for strength. Li.”
My grandmother smiles, too. “Li.”
99
Hold your finger to the sky with so much force it lengthens like a spine. Look up to the point of it and beyond. There. That tiny patch of the world, no bigger than the tip of your finger. At first glance, it might just look like one flat color. Blue, or gray, or maybe even orange.
But it’s much more complex than that. Squint. See the daubs of lilac. The streak of sage no wider than a hyphen. That butterscotch smear and the faint wash of carnelian. All of them coming together to swirl at the point just above your finger.
Breathe them in. Let them settle in your lungs. Those are the colors of right now.
100
Dinner is a little too quiet, and that’s when it suddenly occurs to me: “Where’s Feng?” I turn to Waipo. “Feng zai nali?”
She gives me a confused look. She says something I don’t understand.
Dad looks just as puzzled. “What’s Feng?”
“Feng,” I say. “Our friend Feng!”
My grandmother shakes her head. “Shei?”
“That’s an interesting name,” says Dad. “What tone is it? The word for phoenix?”
“That’s just… I don’t know.”
“What does she look like?” he says.
The question catches me off guard. What does she look like? As I open my mouth to describe her, I realize I don’t know anymore. All I remember is her paleness, and her bright floral prints.
Dad shrugs. “Waipo says she doesn’t know anybody named Feng.”
I bolt into my room and tear through everything, searching for a sign of her. She existed. I’m sure of it. My phone still works—it’s still on that Taiwanese network. The SIM card she gave me was real. I look for the selfie we tried to take at the top of Taipei 101, but all I find on my phone is a blurry picture with half of Waipo’s shoulder. But the pastry bag—the one with the red bird logo—it’s still there in my drawer.
Is that all? No other traces? She was so deeply embedded in our lives for two weeks. I return to the dining table, scanning the apartment for any other signs of her.
“Dad, can you ask Waipo about the box of stuff that was sent to us—it had, like, tea and pastries in it. It had my SIM card in it. Feng brought us that box. Ask Waipo if she remembers.”
I watch the two of them conversing, the way my grandmother points to him, the way he shakes his head as he responds.
“Leigh,” he begins slowly, “she says that the box was delivered by mail, and that it had no sender listed. She’d thought that I was the one who sent it.”
“But you didn’t. You weren’t. Right?”
“Right,” he says, looking concerned. “I never mailed you anything.”
Back in my room, I carefully fold up the gift bag that held the pastries and tuck it into the back of my sketchbook.
Feng was real. I’m certain of it.
But somehow, nobody remembers her. Nobody but me.