Because how can the four of us sit here and watch TV together? Pretend like we’re just having a normal night as a family? This is not how this is supposed to go.
Everyone watches me expectantly. I hold up a finger, uncertain whether that’s even a universal sign, and run for the guest room. The box is in my duffel bag, carefully wrapped in a pair of jeans. I peel off the lid.
I hesitate for just a second—because is this what my mother wants me to do? But how would I know? I can’t afford to waste time. If she’s here, I have to find her.
“Leigh,” my father says in a warning tone when I return to the living room holding the box.
I ignore him and kneel on the floor between the couch and the armchairs, carefully extracting the contents. Waipo says something; the lilt of her words form a question mark in the air. Dad doesn’t answer. When my eyes meet his, I note his furrowed brows, the unhappy tug in the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t want me to do this.
Well, I don’t care. I didn’t come all this way to keep secrets.
I turn to my grandparents and point down at my array. The letters, in a carefully balanced pile. The photographs, fanned out. The cicada necklace, which I pour out from the pouch.
Waigong has stopped nodding.
My grandmother kneels down beside me and fingers the silver chain, traces the edges of the cicada. “Baineng,” she says, and a fast string of words rolls from her mouth, the syllables coming out all silk and knots, peaks and valleys.
Dad replies slowly, keeping his gaze pointed at his feet. Whatever it is he’s saying sets my grandmother shaking her head, her body trembling like a string yanked taut.
“What is it?” I cross my arms. “Tell me.”
My father finally looks up. “Where did you say you got this box again?”
The anger lights inside me like a match. Fire burns fast along my ribs. “I told you. Mom came as a bird—”
“Stop. This is going too far, Leigh.” His voice like a coil of something hot.
I stand up. “I’m not lying about this. I wouldn’t lie about Mom.”
My grandmother starts rocking back and forth.
“Tell me what she said,” I demand.
Dad sucks in a deep breath and squeezes his eyes shut. “You should never have gotten this box.”
I roll my eyes. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
The language slips out by accident. His face tightens, but clearly other things are more important because he lets it go. “They never sent this. There’s no postage on it.”
“I told you,” I say, trying to curb my tone, “it didn’t go through a mail service—”
“No,” he says. “Listen. Your grandparents put this package together, planning to send it. But they changed their minds. Instead, they burned it. The photos and the letters. The necklace, which I mailed to them. They burned all of it.”
Waipo murmurs something, shaking her head.
“They burned it so that your mother could have these with her on her next journey,” Dad translates, his voice dropping low.
“But Mom—the bird.” I feel everything tilt and bump. I’m a top teetering at the end of its spin, a squeeze of asphaltum paint sullying zinc white. “You have to tell them about the bird.”
Dad pushes himself out of the armchair. “We’re done with this conversation.”
I listen with disbelief to the sound of his feet creaking their way down the hall, the guest room door shutting behind him with a click.
Waigong closes his eyes, gripping his cane and letting out a long, lasting pitch that’s halfway between a hum and a wheeze, almost too quiet to be audible.
I turn to my grandmother. “Mama shi,” I begin—but then it takes me a long moment to remember how to say bird: “Niao.” Did I get the tone right?
My grandmother blinks at me.
I grab a pen and pad of paper from the table next to the couch, wondering how on earth to communicate this.
The silence is back louder than ever. This time nobody tries to end it.
I start with a quick sketch of my mother’s face. It’s my first time drawing her since she turned into a bird, and it comes slowly at first. But my fingers remember—my muscles know how to draw the dark eyes, the freckle on her right cheekbone, the tilt of her eyebrows. Her face materializes out of the ink.
Waipo bends forward to see and I turn the pad around. My grandmother studies the drawing. She squints and blinks, and recognition blooms in her eyes. I point to a photograph from the box and then back at the face, just for confirmation. “Mama,” I say again. My grandmother nods, and then I draw an arrow. Where its tip ends I begin to make the bird.
Waipo stares for a long time, watching my pen work. The ink doesn’t flow smoothly through the ballpoint, and I still can’t get the wings right, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the bird. I look up, triumphant.
My grandmother’s expression is apologetic. She shakes her head and murmurs something in Mandarin.
A different approach, then. On a new page, my pen works out the fat, fuzzy body of a caterpillar. A new arrow points from that to the other side, where I make a butterfly. Before I even finish, Waipo’s already nodding. She understands. Her finger traces the arrow from one to the other.
I tear out the page with my mother and the bird, and place it beside the caterpillar and butterfly.
For a moment there is only the tick of the tiny alarm clock on the shelf. And then Waipo gasps with understanding. She pats Waigong’s arm, and he opens his eyes, gazes down at the pages.
“My mother has turned into a bird,” I say in English.
Waipo nods.
15
Raised voices startle me awake. I sit up slowly, feeling disoriented. Eyes achingly dry, muscles sore and prickly. It’s my first time getting sleep again since the bird brought the box to our house. Trying to swim my way up out of the exhaustion feels awful.
My hand is in a fist, and when I unclench it, there’s the cicada necklace warm in my palm. Dents are left in my skin from where the edges dug in. I don’t remember picking it up when I went to sleep. The chain sticks to me; I shake it off on my pillow.
A tug of the curtain reveals the world outside to be still and dark. Not yet dawn.
Decibel by decibel the voices climb. Waipo, sounding rough and defensive. Dad, weirdly nasal, pitched higher than usual. Her voice burnt sienna, his kings blue. Their words crashing into each other so fast and hard I can’t pick out a single recognizable phrase.
There’s only one guest room, and when I turned in last night, my father had already taken the floor—likely feigning sleep on top of those blankets—and left me the bed. I didn’t expect to actually fall asleep, not after the shock over the box that should have been destroyed.
How long has Dad been up? What time is it? Purple confusion clouds my mind.
When I get to the end of the hall, Dad’s back is to me, but I can tell from the way his shoulders hunch and how he has one fist pressed to his head: He’s crying. It’s the first time I’ve seen him cry since the funeral.
My grandfather, Waigong, is standing on the other side of the room—which might as well be across the Pacific Ocean—one hand gripping the back of the couch. There’s a terrible look on his face. Waipo’s in the doorway separating the kitchen from the living room, shaking her head at the floor.
Nobody sees me for a long, quiet moment. Then they all notice at the same time, my presence announced via some frequency I can’t detect. Waipo’s eyes snap up. Dad pivots around.
“I’m sorry, Leigh,” he blurts at the same time Waipo utters a string of syllables. My father heads back toward the guest room, sweeping past me so quickly the air churns into wind.
Waipo ducks into the kitchen and reappears half a second later with plastic containers stacked between her hands. She calls out words that sound like music and like nothing.
“Sorry for what?” I turn to send my voice down the hallway after my father.
“She’s asking what you want to eat,” Dad translates over his shoulder.