He didn’t understand about fighting the gaping black hole, the emptiness. Not that this surprised me. There was so much he didn’t understand, would never understand.
“You’re not bringing that in there,” he said, pointing his thumb toward the master bedroom. Fine with me. No way was I going in there anyhow. He took the paint bucket, and I escaped downstairs and into a sketch pad and let my knuckles work against the paper.
I made dark, pooling shapes. I pressed my stick of charcoal down as hard as I could until my knuckles were stained and aching and a waxy puddle of black shined up at me. Maybe if I could draw the emptiness, I could control it.
But it was never dark enough. It was never the blackest black.
It’d been a long time since I colored anything in. Charcoal and pencil were all I was using, and I mostly stuck to outlines. I was saving the colors for later.
7
I knew what I’d seen. It was real. Wasn’t it?
Each of those nights after that first appearance of the bird, when all noise upstairs had subsided, I went to stand on the porch and squint into the sky. The clouds blew in front of the stars. The moon shrank, giving up a sliver of itself with every passing day. I emptied and refilled the bucket so there was always fresh water, just in case. And when I went back inside, I left the door propped open by a worn sneaker. A breeze crept in through that gap to take its turn through the living room, and I fell asleep dreaming of the giant’s breath on my face.
A week after the funeral, moonbeams reached through the living room window and the temperature suddenly plummeted. It was the type of summer night that should’ve been unbearably hot, but my every exhale sent a cloud of white billowing out in front of my face. I didn’t hear a sound or anything, but I decided to check the front yard anyway.
As soon as I stepped outside, I saw a package slightly smaller than a shoe box waiting on the doormat. Dirty twine wrapped around the sides, crisscrossing in the middle, knotted to secure the lid. The corners were a little smashed, and the only thing on the box was my name in the bold black marker of an unfamiliar hand. There was nothing else. No stamps, no labels, not even an address.
I raised my head and the bird was standing in the yard with one leg tucked up just like the cranes I’d seen in paintings. The moonlight made her wing tips silvery and sharp, made the shadows in her body almost indigo.
“The box is from your grandparents,” said my mother, the bird.
My first thought was My grandparents are dead. Dad’s parents had been on the older side when they had him; both of them had been gone for a few years.
Unless… the bird meant my mother’s parents? The ones I’d never met?
“Bring it with you,” she said as I bent to pick up the box.
“Bring it with me where?” I said.
“When you come,” she replied.
When I straightened again, the bird was already leaping up and away, this time leaving no feather.
There was nothing left to do but go back to the living room. For a moment, everything around me seemed to be melting, the colors darkening like something cooking over high heat. The windows and curtains losing their shape, furniture sagging and shrinking into the floor, even the light fixture up above turning to a murky liquid.
A couple blinks and it all looked normal again.
I sat down on the sofa, suddenly so exhausted I fell asleep halfway through trying to get the twine off the box. When I woke again, this time with a full sun buttering the windows, the box was still there.
It was real. It existed in the light of the morning. I took a deep breath and let my fingers curl around the lid.
8
I’m still trying to figure out what to do about the box. It’s been nearly a week since my mother came as the bird and delivered it. It’s agonizing to feel like I can’t talk to Axel about this.
Will Dad believe me now?
I think of the way his brows furrowed, like there was something wrong with me.
I’m sitting on the sofa, cross-legged and directly above the spot where I’ve hidden the package. The stuff inside that box—it’s different from the feather. It’s so much more. Maybe this time I can get him to listen.
I stare straight ahead into the glossy finish of the upright piano like it’s a crystal ball that will explain why my mother is a bird, or show me what I’m supposed to do next. I’ve been going through the house and drawing the things that feel important, but I haven’t made a picture of the piano yet. It has so much history, and history means colors.
Once upon a time that instrument poured sound through our home. When did I last hear my mother play? I’m not sure; I guess that should’ve been a red flag.
In hindsight everything seems obvious.
Year after year I promised that the next summer I would finally let her teach me so that a second set of hands might grace those keys. It was something she wanted. More specifically, it was something she wanted us to do together. I always imagined us learning some charming duet, my hands pounding chords in the bass, her delicate fingers tinkling in the higher octaves.
Mom used to leave the piano keys out in the open, gleaming like teeth. She said they needed to breathe. But my father put away the sheet music and pulled the cover down. The piano before me is bare, unsmiling, funeral black.
In the space where the music books used to sit, open to whatever sonata or nocturne she was working through, I find the ebony reflection of myself. Growing up, I always wished I could look more like my mother. More Taiwanese.
My mother had shoulder-length hair that she kept permed in loose curls, and big glasses that she peeled off when her headaches took over. I remember trying to see her through the eyes of strangers: the willowy, dark-haired woman with the disjointed grammar and mixed-up idioms. I only ever remember hearing her speak English. She even picked an English name for herself: Dorothy, which she ended up shortening to Dory.
I have some of the same shapes in my mother’s face, but otherwise most of my features come from my father, the Irish American guy born and raised in Pennsylvania. I have a smudgier version of his hazel eyes, a replica of his sharp nose. I look a lot like his younger self—especially in certain pictures from back before I existed, when he was a bass player in a band called Coffee Grind. It’s hard to imagine him as a musician—I’ve only ever known him as a sinologist, a scholar on all things related to China: the culture, economics, history, etc. He’s totally fluent in Mandarin and makes regular trips to places like Shanghai and Hong Kong to give talks and meet other sinologists and economists.
I tug fingers through my shoulder-length hair—the one attribute that seems to be all my own. The stripe on the side is currently dyed mermaid green, but the rest of it is my natural color, a deep brown, exactly halfway between my mother’s thick black strands and my father’s mousy waves. It’s a little thin, but it looked decent when Mom used to weave a French braid down my back; I wish I had bothered to learn how that worked.
There are a lot of things I wish I’d learned from her, while I still had the chance.
My reflection makes me sigh.
The piano tells me nothing about my mother, the bird. Nothing about the box. It only mirrors back the story of a desperate girl who’s been getting up in the deadest hours to unlock the front door.
The sound of coffee spitting and bubbling breaks apart my thoughts. It means Dad is in the kitchen. I don’t really want to face him. I’m tired of his doubting me, and I’m sick of the way he walks around emanating a murky Payne’s gray. The colors of this kind of grief should be stark and piercing, with the alarmed brightness of something toxic. Not the quiet hue of shadows.
But my stomach is gnawingly empty, and once the coffee is made he’ll sit there for ages. It’s either face him or go hungry.