“Thanks,” I say again.
Feng grins brightly at Waipo and Waigong. They exchange more words, syllables that flit past too quickly for me to even guess whether they’re Mandarin or Taiwanese. My grandmother makes some sort of joke—or at least, seeing the way Waigong and Feng laugh, I’m guessing it’s a joke. Cold pewter envy curls around my stomach. Waipo doesn’t know me well enough to joke with me. She can’t even expect me to understand a joke.
Feng slips her shoes on and turns to wave at me, thin fingers fluttering back and forth, and as she leaves, my shoulders sink away from my ears, tension rolling off them, a weight disappearing.
Waipo heads to the kitchen and Waigong is back on the couch watching his music videos.
I sink into a chair at the dining table, where it smells overwhelmingly of oil and sugar. There’s the paper tote full of pastries, with brushstroke words printed on its front. Tracing the bold characters with my fingers doesn’t help me recognize any of them. I turn it around on the off chance that there might be English on the back of it.
But there isn’t. Instead, there’s a logo: a red circle drawn around a red bird.
21
I can’t sleep, so I pull up my email on my phone. There’s a message from Dad, which makes me roll my eyes. I’ll read it later.
Below that: the thing Axel sent. No hesitation allowed. My index finger jabs at it hard.
FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected] SUBJECT: (no subject)
4 minutes 47 seconds
You breathe out all those lines of art like your life depends on it. Well my life doesn’t depend on this but I guess it’s how I process things… my sketchbook is like a journal. Converting it to music… that’s me analyzing and processing it.
This is the final piece in the Lockhart Orchard set.
Titled “Goodbye”
Goodbye.
I read the message again, and that last word kicks my heart out of place.
What the hell kind of email is that? What’s it supposed to mean?
Goodbye. The confirmation of all that I’ve ruined slams into me in waves of fluorescent hues. I was ridiculous to hope that one kiss would turn everything he had with Leanne to ash.
I think of how mad he got at the funeral. I know he didn’t mean to, that it was the last thing he would’ve wanted on a day like that.
But it was my fault. I broke the no-bullshit rule.
I imagine Axel sitting on his tweed couch where we kissed, holding a thick pad and some watercolor pens. I imagine myself transported there by a magic carpet, swooping into the basement and crashing into the floor, my mouth already shaping an apology.
At the bottom of the email: a link.
It takes me to a private page where Axel’s uploaded the track as an MP3: GOODBYE: ADAGIO IN ORCHARD GREEN. The final piece in the set. I know exactly what he’s referring to.
The image he’s used as the “album cover” on this page is a photograph of Lockhart Orchard that twists my stomach, sends a nostalgic red ochre rippling through me. It’s a picture I watched him take with his phone, on a day I remember all too well.
I can’t help wondering: Has Leanne listened to this? Has she asked him about the significance of Lockhart Orchard?
Does she know what’s happened between him and me?
My thumb hits play. The piece begins with the bass section humming low and deep, legato lines that crescendo ominously. A piano comes in with soft chords, the cello arching after them.
Pieces of the past rise to the surface of my mind like little bubbles.
22
SUMMER BEFORE FRESHMAN YEAR
I would always remember my fourteenth birthday with perfect clarity, because it was one of the first times I realized that there might be something truly wrong with my mother. She cared that it was my birthday, but it wasn’t enough to blow aside the storm. In the shadowy master bedroom, with lights off and curtains drawn, she spiraled all the way down. Her body was silent, but her darkness was louder than anything. Our home shrank to the size of a dollhouse, and the walls pressed up against me so that I couldn’t breathe or speak or hear anything but her despair.
Axel and I went out riding bikes. We tried to get lost so that I could remember a different set of fears. At every junction where we would’ve normally turned down a familiar road, we went the opposite direction.
We wheeled through woods and past farmhouses, across fields and around parking lots. We raced toward the edge of the sky—we could see the crease where it touched our part of the earth—but we never made it. The horizon always ran ahead of us. We scraped to a stop when we found a line of trees we’d never seen. They seemed to stretch on endlessly.
“Are we lost?” I said.
Axel didn’t answer. He hopped off his bike and threw himself flat on the grass. A fat bumblebee zigzagged over him.
“Everything looks different from this angle,” he said.
I lay down next to him. The white streaks in the sky were like lines of foam across a restless sea. Birds crawled past. Something small buzzed in my ear, then took off again.
“We’re not lost,” Axel said finally. “We’re just headed somewhere different.”
We ended up in an apple orchard, and by then my mood had improved. The air was thick and sticky, faintly sweet. The trees rippled against the touch of a high breeze. I didn’t yet know how much I needed to worry about my mother, and so I let myself be distracted enough to celebrate a birthday.
“This is a good one,” I said through a full mouth, gripping a half-eaten apple, sitting in the wedge between two thick branches. Wind tugged at the bit of color in my hair—back then it was a streak of electric blue. “What’s it called again?” I asked.
“Honeycrisp, I think?” Axel called from across the orchard. I ducked to look at him between branches. He was in another tree, his violet plaid peeking through the twists of leaves and fruit.
“Sounds like a breakfast cereal,” I said.
“If you keep eating, you’re gonna make yourself sick,” he told me.
“Nope. I could eat a hundred more of these.”
He wriggled out from between two tricky branches and settled into a new spot against the trunk, sighing contentedly. His already tan skin was extra dark from the summer sun. “Why do people never climb trees anymore? This is glorious. I feel so alive up here.”
“I love this,” I told him, dangling my leg experimentally. “It is glorious. That’s the perfect word for it. Glorious in a goldenrod sort of way.”
“We should bring some back for your mom,” said Axel.
Mom. That one syllable triggered a wave of sadness and worry. All I could think of was how my mother looked that morning, slumped over the kitchen table, her frame small and compressed, as though her darkness took up so much space in the house there was barely any room left for her body.
I couldn’t help but feel a little angry that he had brought her up. Without her strange bleakness, it would’ve been an almost perfect day.
“What?” he said. “Don’t you think she’d love these?”
I rolled my eyes. “Why do you have to be such a suck-up? She’s not your mother.”
He looked taken aback. The harshness of the words surprised even myself, but already it was too late for me to pivot, to try for a joke that might save the conversation.
Axel was just considerate like that. And so what if he was sucking up? His own mother had walked out on his family when he was seven. In the course of our friendship, my mom had become something of a surrogate parent to him.
My feelings peaked and then deflated just as quickly, and then I felt ashamed. Here he was, wanting to do something nice for my mother. And here I was, moping about the fact that she was in a bad mood on my birthday.