I shove my sketchbook under the sofa and pad into the kitchen to dig a piece of string cheese out from the drawer in the fridge. My mother’s cat winds back and forth between my legs, mewing.
The newspaper crinkles between Dad’s hands. “Ignore Meimei, I just fed her.”
I lean down to graze her soft back with my fingers. She mews some more. Maybe what she’s hungry for isn’t food. Maybe what she wants is my mother.
If Axel were here, he’d say, Hey there, Miss Cat. He’d lean down and have her purring in a matter of seconds.
Axel. The thought of him sends a shard of phthalo blue into my center.
“What about you?” Dad is saying. “Would you like a real breakfast?” He sips his coffee. “I’ll make oatmeal?”
I scrunch up my face, but my back is to him so he can’t see. Doesn’t he know I eat oatmeal only when I’m sick?
No. Of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t know shit.
Mom would have offered to make waffles with berries and cream. And if we were really going to keep up our Sunday morning tradition, Axel would be letting himself in through the back door any minute now. But he isn’t going to come. He knows me better than anyone, knows when I’m trying to serve him counterfeit cheer, knows when I’m on the verge of shattering. Even if he can’t see the self-hate chewing through my insides, he has to know that it’s irreversible, this thing that’s happened between us.
“No thanks.” I busy myself with pouring orange juice into Mom’s favorite mug—the black-and-white one covered in music notes—to avoid looking at him. “So when are you going back to work?”
“Well, given what happened…”
My brain immediately begins to tune him out. Given what happened. I want to burn those words out of existence.
“…so, I’ll be here.”
“Wait. What do you mean?” I turn around. One of my charcoal sticks is dangerously close to his mug, and I make myself resist the urge to walk over and rescue it. Dad is known for being a klutz; plus he doesn’t particularly care for my “habit” of drawing. (Like it’s something detrimental to my health that I need to quit. Like it’s crack cocaine.) “Don’t you have another conference or workshop coming up?”
“I’m not going.”
“But you have to. Don’t you?”
He shook his head. “I’ll be working from home for a while.”
“You what?”
“Leigh,” Dad says. He swallows audibly. “You sound like you want me to go.”
Well, I’d assumed he would throw himself back into work. I’ve been waiting for him to call a car to take him to the airport. Waiting to have space to breathe again, put things in my sketchbook without being policed, figure out what exactly it means to grieve for a mother.
“Do you want me to go?” he says, and the fissure in his voice threatens to put a matching crack in my chest.
I steel myself, feeling ruthless. “It’s just that… you used to leave for work things all the time. We got used to it. Why aren’t you traveling anymore?”
“You had your mom to take care of you,” he says, trying to mask the hurt in his voice.
“I’m about to turn sixteen. I’ve been staying home by myself for years.”
“It’s not about how mature or independent you are, Leigh. It’s about… us needing some quality time together. Especially given what’s happened. I want us to… talk more.” His eyes take on the shine of guilt.
I gulp down a deep breath. “Okay. Then I have something I want to talk about.”
Dad’s eyebrows rise a couple millimeters, but he also looks relieved. “All right,” he says warily. “Shoot.”
9
It takes me just a second to retrieve the package from its hiding place under the sofa. “I know you don’t believe what I said about Mom,” I begin, setting the box on the kitchen counter and dragging a stool over to sit.
Dad closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. “Dreams sometimes just feel incredibly real. No matter how badly you want them to be true, they aren’t—”
“But can you just look?” I tell him. “The bird came again, and she brought this box.”
He looks at me with a pained expression. “Leigh.”
“I’m being serious!”
“There’s no postage on the package,” he says slowly.
“Just listen for a sec.” I try to pull back the anger. “I get that this sounds ridiculous.”
Dad shakes his head.
The cat meows by the sliding door in the back, and Dad steps over to the glass to let her out. Meimei slinks through the gap in perfect silence, as if she can’t bear to witness any more of this conversation.
The door slides shut hard. “How about we schedule another appointment with Dr. O’Brien—”
I clench and unclench my jaw. “Just look in the box, Dad. Please.”
He makes a noise of frustration and tears off the cardboard lid. His hands slow as he sees the contents. Yellowed letters, neat in a bundle. A stack of worn photographs, most of them black-and-white. He loosens the drawstrings of a velvet pouch; a silver chain pours out, followed by a shiny piece of jade. It’s a solid and weighty thing, only a bit smaller than Dad’s thumb. An intricately carved cicada at rest.
My father draws a sharp gasp. He recognizes it, as I did.
That is the necklace my mother wore every single day of her life.
“How is this here?” he murmurs, tracing a wing. “I mailed this off.”
“She said the box is from my grandparents.”
Dad furrows his brow and blinks at me. He looks old and tired. Not just in his body, but in his face. In his eyes.
I hold up one of the black-and-white photos. There are two little girls perched on ornate wooden chairs with tall backs that stick up beyond their heads. I’d seen these two before, in a different photograph, one that Axel had helped me unearth in my basement. In this picture they’re a little older. One of the girls has grown taller than the other.
“Who are they?” I ask, pointing at the girls.
He looks at it for a long time. “I’m not sure.”
“Okay. Then what does the note say?” I prod.
“What note—?” he begins, but then it’s in his hands and he’s reading it and his eye is twitching.
I stared at the page for so long I can remember the inky look of the contents, characters with strokes that swooped down and hooked upward. I know the look of Chinese writing when I see it. It’s all over my father’s study.
When I was little, I would crawl around on the shaggy rug of his office while he drew on giant pieces of paper torn off an easel pad and taped to the wall. My fingers would trace the air as he taught me the order of the strokes. He’d break down the components of the characters, teach me to identify the radicals—This one looks like an ear, right? and See how this is just like the character for person, but like if you were seeing the person from a different angle?
Mandarin was like a secret language between us—the best was in grocery stores, or in restaurants, how we could talk about people around us and they wouldn’t understand. That boy has a funny hat, I would tell Dad with a giggle.
It was something that Mom never wanted a part of, even though I couldn’t help thinking of it as her secret language to begin with. It belonged to her in a way that it would never belong to me and Dad.
And like so many other things, our secret language faded away. I haven’t spoken a word of Mandarin in years.
I still have a bit of it, of course. Like I remember ni hao, which means hello, and xiexie, which is thanks. There were times when I asked Mom whether she thought I should go to Chinese school on the weekends, like a couple kids I knew. She always stepped around the question.
Maybe next year, she’d tell me. Or, You can take the class you want in university.
I still remember the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes when she answered.
If only I could read the language. Like, really read it. I still know some of the basic characters, like the ones for wo and ni—me and you.
And mama. Mother.