“Dad?” I called out.
There was no response. But I knew he was there. I knew he was conscious, standing on the other side, hearing me.
“Dad,” I said again.
I heard a long, thick intake of breath. My father shuffled to the door and opened it.
“You found it?” I said.
He paused, not meeting my eyes, hesitating. Finally his hand swept out a crumpled piece of paper.
“It was in the garbage,” he said, his voice tight. “Along with these.” His other fingers uncurled to show a pile of capsules that I recognized immediately. Mom’s antidepressants. He crunched them up in his fist and went back downstairs.
A cyan chill seeped into my body. When had she stopped taking her medicine?
I smoothed the paper out and stared at its whiteness. Not a speck of blood to be found on that surface. My hands brought it to my nose and I inhaled, trying to get at the last of my mother’s scent.
And finally, I made myself look at it.
To Leigh and Brian,
I love you so much
I’m so sorry
The medicine didn’t
Below all that, there was something scribbled over with so many pen strokes it was entirely unreadable. And then one final line at the very bottom:
I want you to remember
What had my mother been trying to say to us?
What did she want us to remember?
3
I started spending the nights downstairs on the sofa, the farthest I could get from the master bedroom. I was having a lot of trouble sleeping, but the old leather sofa swallowed me and I imagined myself cradled in the thick arms of a giantess. She had my mother’s face, my mother’s voice. Sometimes if I managed to drift into an uneasy slumber, the determined tick of the clock above the television became the beat of the giant’s heart.
In between the heartbeats, my dreams pulled up slivers of old recollections. My parents laughing. A birthday celebration, chocolate cake smeared over all of our faces. Mom trying to play the piano with her toes, at my request. Dad with the singsong rhymes he liked to make up: “Little Leigh, full of glee!” “Oh my, what a sigh!”
It was the night before the funeral: I woke around three in the morning to a sharp rap on the front door. It wasn’t a dream; I knew because I’d just been dreaming that the giantess was humming over a piano. Nobody else stirred. Not my father, not my mother’s cat. The wooden floor stung with cold and I stepped into the foyer shivering, baffled by the drop in temperature. I dragged the heavy door open and the porch light came on.
The suburban street was purple and dark, silent but for the lone cricket keeping time in the grass. A noise in the distance made me look up, and against the murky predawn sky, I could make out a streak of crimson. It flapped once, twice. A tail followed the body, sailing like a flag. The creature swept over the half-moon, past the shadow of a cloud.
I wasn’t frightened, even when the bird glided straight across the lawn to land on the porch, those claws tapping short trills into the wood. Standing at full height, the creature was nearly as tall as me.
“Leigh,” said the bird.
I would have known that voice anywhere. That was the voice that used to ask if I wanted a glass of water after a good cry, or suggest a break from homework with freshly baked cookies, or volunteer to drive to the art store. It was a yellow voice, knit from bright and melodic syllables, and it was coming from the beak of this red creature.
My eyes took in her size: nothing like the petite frame my mother had while human. She reminded me of a red-crowned crane, but with a long, feathery tail. Up close I could see that every feather was a different shade of red, sharp and gleaming.
When I stretched out a hand, the air changed as though I’d disturbed the surface of a still pool. The bird launched into the sky, flapping until she disappeared. A single scarlet feather stayed behind on the porch, curving like a scythe and stretching to nearly the length of my forearm. I rushed at it, accidentally kicking up a tiny gust. The feather took to the air lazily, scooping a little, bumping to a stop. I crouched low to catch it under my palm and angled my head to search the sky. She was gone.
Would she come back? Just in case, I set out a bucket of water and left the front door wedged open. I brought the feather inside, and back on the sofa, I fell immediately into true sleep for the first time since the day of the stain. I dreamed of the bird and woke up certain that she wasn’t real. But then I found the feather in my fist, gripped so hard my nails had bitten marks into my palm. Even in sleep I had been afraid to let go.
4
The funeral was open casket, and when I walked up to that wooden box, I almost expected to see a mound of ash. But no, there was a head. There was a face. I spotted the familiar brown birthmark in the hollow above her collarbone. That was my mother’s blouse, the one she’d bought for a recital and then decided she hated.
Before me lay a body grayer than a sketch. Someone had applied makeup and colors to try to make it look alive.
I didn’t cry. That was not my mother.
My mother is free in the sky. She doesn’t have the burden of a human body, is not made up of a single dot of gray. My mother is a bird.
The body in the casket didn’t even have the jade cicada pendant I’d seen my mother wear every single day of my life. That neck was bare—further proof.
“What color?” Axel whispered as he came up next to me.
It was our first time speaking since the day Mom died, since a week ago. He must’ve found out from his aunt Tina, after Dad called her. I know I shouldn’t have shut him out, but I couldn’t bear the thought of us having a conversation. What would I say? Every time I tried to imagine the words, everything in my head went cold and blank.
Standing there at the funeral, he looked terribly out of place. His usual clothes—plaid over a screen-printed shirt, worn pair of jeans—had been replaced by an overlarge button-down, cinched with a shiny tie and worn above a pair of dark slacks. I saw how he glanced nervously at the casket, how his attention carefully shifted back to my face.
If he looked in my eyes straight on, he would know how he’d pierced me with an arrow, how its shaft was still sticking out of my chest, twitching each time my heart contracted.
And maybe he’d see how my mother had sliced up everything else. How even if he could wrench that arrow free, the rest of me was so punctured and torn that nothing would ever be able to suture me back together.
“Leigh?”
“White,” I whispered back, and I could feel his surprise. He’d probably been expecting a glacial blue, or maybe the dying vermilion of dusk.
I saw him reach for my elbow and then hesitate. He dropped his hand.
“Will you come over later?” he asked. “Or—I could go to your house?”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” I could sense the pink rising up through him.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” I said, not because it was true but because I couldn’t bear for him to finish that sentence. What didn’t he mean? For us to break through that sizzling wall and connect one mouth to another in the same moment that my mother was dying?
“I just want to talk to you, Leigh.”
That was almost worse.
“We’re talking right now,” I said, my insides curling even as the words came out.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit. It echoed in my mind, and I tried to shove the word somewhere I couldn’t hear it.
It was only as Axel turned away that I noticed how his shoulders shook. He reached a hand up to yank his tie loose and walked toward the other end of the room. In a flash like a vision of the future, I saw the distance stretching between us, unfurling like a measuring tape, until we were separated by miles and miles. Until we were standing as far apart as two people can get without leaving the surface of the earth.
What did Axel think talking could accomplish, after all that had happened to my mother?
What could we fix?
5