The colors in the room are muted, and there’s a meditative quality to the music, to its spinning rhythm. I’m nowhere near the piano but I can practically feel the smooth keys under my fingers.
“Stop,” someone whispers behind me, giggling. I whirl around, and there on our sofa sits a dark-haired girl that is unmistakably me—but younger—grinning widely and elbowing a shorter, gangly version of Axel. The faces are a bit blurry, but it’s definitely us. I’m standing directly in front of them, but they don’t see me. This is so weird.
“What?” he says, his face a canvas of blank innocence.
My younger self rolls her eyes dramatically, shining all the while. Had I realized how I felt about him yet?
This is a section of the past, somehow preserved. I don’t remember it at all; and then I realize by some instinct that this memory belongs to my mother. That’s why it smells like her.
The stripe in my hair is purple, so this memory-Leigh is probably about twelve years old, still carefree. She and Axel hug sketch pads over their knees, kick at each other’s ankles.
There’s a thunderous noise above—footsteps coming fast down the stairs, and then my father appears, his face lit up. I’d forgotten that sound—the joyous stomping of feet. When did we become quietly padding people?
“What smells amazing?” says the memory version of my father.
A timer in the kitchen goes off and the colors shift as if awakening. My mother whirls halfway around the bench and leaps to her feet. She plants a kiss on Dad’s nose and waltzes right past him into the kitchen. He turns to watch her, enchanted.
Once upon a time we’d been an almost perfect family. I wish we could rewind, go back to live in those years forever.
Everything turns even blurrier, and the smell of the coconut shampoo fades slightly now that my mother isn’t here. I walk into the kitchen and the edges sharpen, the colors brightening once more. Her face is glowing, and there’s the hint of a smile as she slides the pan out of the oven.
“Enough with the suspense!” Axel calls from the other room. “Tell us what they are, already!”
“Danhuang su,” says my father.
I follow Mom back into the living room, her arm stretched out ahead of her so that the plate leads the way. She’s stacked it high with a dozen perfectly round pastries, gold and laminated, ornamented with sesame seeds.
This is the mother I want to remember. This joy. The way her glow filled a room. Her playfulness, her love of good food, her bright and bouncing laughter.
I step forward, desperate to touch her, but my hand disappears against her shoulder like I’m the one who’s the ghost.
My parents share a pastry between the two of them, pulling the flaky layers apart with their fingers, catching the bean paste on their tongues. Mom lets Dad have all of the salted egg yolk at the center—his favorite part.
I stand there with my feet rooted into the carpet of that memory, watching until my ribs crunch together and pulverize my heart and send the heat of my missing everywhere. The grief spills out of me sepia dark.
All the colors invert. The light sucks away.
Flicker. Flash.
There’s Leigh from the past, even younger this time, no color in her hair yet, crouched at the edge of a dark lake. My father comes up beside her, pinching a bouquet of green grass blades. The colors have changed their tint, like someone turned a dial to make them warmer. The scent completely different, like dryer sheets—the way my father always smells.
It’s Dad’s memory.
“So here’s the trick. Take one of these—” He lays the blades out on a flat spot and selects a prime piece for my memory-self. “Now sandwich it flat between your thumbs. Press them together.”
Little Leigh holds her hands out to show him. I don’t remember any of this, either.
“Yeah, like that. Press harder. Then you go like this—”
Dad brings his thumbs up to his face. He puffs up his cheeks and puckers his lips, blowing hard just under the knuckles to produce a reedy squeal that sings out across the water.
I watch as the memory version of me imitates him, blowing into her thumbs. Her blade of grass flaps and squeaks.
“I cannot do it also,” says my mother, who stands a few paces away, balancing on top of a rock, watching, holding her own blade of grass.
“Leigh’s almost got it. Keep trying, kiddo.” My father steps his way back from the edge of the lake to help my mother.
Memory-me blows and blows. She straightens the piece of grass. She tries a new blade, pressing her thumbs together even harder. At last, that thin pitch squeezes out loud and true, halfway between a kazoo and a duck.
She glances over her shoulder.
There’s my mother, a silhouette against the fading sky. Her arms circling my father’s waist, cheek against his shoulder. The two of them sway together in time to music only they can hear.
There’s the flash. The colors invert.
When the room returns, I’m sitting on my bed in my grandparents’ apartment in Taiwan. The memories are over.
My thumb and index finger are pinching together so hard it hurts. I look down: The stick of incense is gone. I click on the lamp to make sure: No trace of it anywhere. No ashes. It simply vanished.
Open my palms wide, look at my trembling hands.
I sit there like that, shaking, until dawn.
19
Whose fault was it? That’s the question on everyone’s mind, isn’t it? Nobody will ever say it out loud. It’s a question people would call inappropriate. The kind of thing where everyone tells you, “It’s nobody’s fault.” But is that even true? It’s only human nature to look for a place to lay the blame. Our fingers are more than ready to do the pointing, but it’s like we’re all blindfolded and spinning.
What makes a person want to die?
She had me. She had Dad. She had her best friend, Tina. She taught piano lessons to a third of the kids in our neighborhood.
Anyone who knew her would have said she seemed like the happiest. The most alive. When she laughed, her face bloomed and you felt warm at the center.
Those last few months her laughs came rare. I noticed it, I really did. But I chalked it up to moodiness; she’d always been in the habit of swinging from one extreme to the other. I excused it too quickly, too easily.
Was it my fault? If I had only—
Or if Dad had only—
If Mom had only—
What?
20
Even in the bright morning the air is heavy and presses too close, sticking to our skin, drawing out the sweat.
I turn to my grandmother. “Niao.” Bird. I’m not sure what else to say. How do I tell her we have to find my mother?
Waipo nods, but I’m not sure she actually understands.
We walk out of the maze of alleys to a breakfast shop, where there’s a woman making something I’ve never seen before. It’s called dan bing. Her deft hand spreads a batter into a perfect flat circle, mashing an egg over the top, sprinkling it with scallions. I’m not particularly hungry, probably in part because I didn’t sleep and my body feels sluggish—but even so, my mouth waters at the smell.
The shop sells fantuan, too, and those I do recognize: rice patties wrapped around sweet dried pork song, reddish brown, fluffed like cotton. There was one day, in elementary school, when I brought a fantuan for lunch. When the kids saw the rousong center, they made fun of me for eating yarn, and asked if I was going to cough up hair balls like a cat.
The woman wipes her fingers on her apron, wraps up our breakfast order. Her eyes flicker over me, linger for a moment on my face, as purposeful as a touch.
“Hunxie,” she says to my grandmother, who is pushing coins around on her softly wrinkled palm, counting out payment. Waipo launches into a chain of words so quick I can’t catch any of them. The woman smiles at me, says something about being an American, something about being pretty. The few people eating at the nearby tables turn to point their stares at me. My skin prickles beneath the gazes.