But I can’t read who the letter’s addressed to. I can’t even figure out who wrote it—though I have a few guesses.
“Is it from my… waipo?” The syllables for maternal grandmother get stuck in my throat. Why pwuh is kind of what they sound like. I remember Dad teaching the words to me a long time ago, but I never imagined that I might someday use them in a context relevant to myself.
It’s frustratingly ironic that I’m the one with Chinese and Taiwanese blood running through my veins, and yet my Irish American father is the one who can read, write, and speak the language.
Why was Mom so stubborn? Why did she reject Mandarin and talk to us only in English? The question has bothered me a hundred times, but never as intensely as now, looking at these strange letters. I always thought that one day she would give me an answer.
Dad clears his throat. “Your waigong wrote it, actually. But it’s from the both of them.”
I nod him on. “And?”
“It’s addressed to you,” he says with disbelief.
Excitement and fear and hope and dread churn together in my stomach. I’ve spent years waiting for the chance to know them. Is this finally it?
A photograph falls out of the stack. It’s stiff, the edges crisp, like it’s been carefully kept.
In the picture, my mother is wearing big thick-rimmed glasses, a pale dress, half a smile. She looks young enough to still be a teenager. It must have been taken before she left Taiwan to study in the US.
Was she happy back then? The question wraps around me, carrying with it a bluish slip of sadness.
There’s the sound of air being sucked in quickly. When I look up, Dad’s lips are pressed into a line. He seems to be holding his breath.
“Dad?”
“Hmm?” His eyes reluctantly break away from the picture.
“Will you read the letter to me?”
He blinks several times, clears his throat. He begins to read. Slowly at first and then settling into a pace, his professor’s voice loud and clear.
Mandarin sounds so musical, the way the tones step up and down, each word rolling to the next in little waves. I catch phrases here and there that I recognize—but strung together, I can’t quite decipher what the whole of the letter means.
Dad finishes, and seeing the expression on my face, he explains: “In a nutshell—your grandparents want you to visit. As in, go to Taipei to meet them.”
Is that what the bird wants? My mother’s voice echoes back to me: Bring it with you. When you come.
I turn toward him. “What about you?”
My father gives me a confused look. “What?”
“Don’t they want to meet you, too?”
“We’ve met.”
The words hit me in the chest. “What? You told me you’d never met them.”
“No,” he replies very quietly. “It was your mother who said that.” The look on his face is unreadable.
How is there so much that I still don’t know about my own family?
“They know about Mom?” I ask.
Dad nods.
I listen to the clock striking out each determined tick. If only I could rewind, go back in time and ask my mother every question about every tiny thing. How crucial those little fragments are now; how great their absence. I should have saved them up, gathered them like drops of water in a desert. I’d always counted on having an oasis.
But maybe that’s why the bird came. Maybe she understands that there are too many things unanswered. A shiver ripples through my body. It occurs to me that Caro, who believes in ghosts, would probably call this a haunting.
Bring it with you. When you come. The bird meant for me to go somewhere. I’m almost certain that it could only be where my grandparents are.
Maybe that’s where I’ll find my answers.
I want you to remember
“So can I go? To Taipei?”
Dad shakes his head. “Things are more complicated than you realize.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“It’s not the right time for any of this,” he says. He tilts his head down in a way that says, This conversation is over.
The bird doesn’t come back after that.
10
When I close my eyes to try to sleep, everything tilts and spins. Behind my eyelids, I see the bird landing again and again. I hear my mother’s warm voice.
I crack my eyes open, gazing at nothing in particular, letting my vision adjust to the darkness. But the longer I look, the more things seem to change. The edges of the end table going soft, rounding. The other side of the sofa deflating, though I don’t feel my body moving with it. The carpet below turning into a dark and wavering sea, reflecting back the lines of moonlight that trace the window edges. The entrance to the living room melts away, walls dripping down like a surrealist painting.
“Dad?” I call out softly.
The room resets. I wait to see whether he heard me, but there’s no sound of him moving around.
Trying to sleep is pointless. It’s not even what I need right now.
I sit up and pull my computer into my lap, let the harsh light of the screen wash the living room in a cold glow. It calms me to see everything more clearly, to note the sharp corners of the piano bench, the straightness of the curtains draping down against the window.
When I type the word suicide, my hands are slick with sweat and I am almost certain my father, upstairs in the makeshift bed in his office, can hear me tapping out each individual letter. The last thing I want is to go back to Dr. O’Brien’s office, to endure his nasally voice and answer questions about how I’m “coping”—which is exactly what will happen if my father realizes what I’m searching for on the internet.
I sink back into the old sofa and tuck my bare feet under a pile of cushions before scrolling through the search results.
Link after link, page after page. The words crowd the screen, crawling everywhere, blurring like dots of rain gathering on glass, sharpening again to prick at my eyes.
My gut makes the sickening lurch like I’m at the top of a roller coaster, just starting to drop. Only there’s no release. There is just that tension, coiling tighter and tighter, constricting my organs and seizing my breath and threatening to bring up my last meal.
What I learn is that all the odds were stacked against my mother actually dying. Someone should have caught her before she lost enough blood. Her stomach should have ejected everything she swallowed.
I can’t stop myself from wondering about the physical pain of the experience. I try to imagine suffering so hard that death would be preferable. That’s how Dr. O’Brien explained it. That Mom was suffering.
Suffering suffering suffering suffering suffering.
The word circles around in my head until the syllables lose their edges and the meaning warps. The word begins to sound like an herb, or a name, or maybe a semiprecious stone. I try to think of a color to match it, but all that comes to mind is the blackness of dried blood.
I can only hope that in becoming a bird my mother has shed her suffering.
Dad still doesn’t believe me.
Would it make a difference if he did?
Isn’t part of being a parent that you’re supposed to believe your daughter when no one else does? When she needs your belief more than she’s ever needed anything from you?
The more I think about it, the more that believing seems like the ultimate definition of family. I guess my family is kind of broken. Always has been.
Once, in the first grade, our teacher had us make family trees. I remember trimming out the shapes for Mom and Dad and Grammy and Grandpa. I remember making a trunk from an inside-out cereal box and cutting multicolored construction paper clouds to use as leaves.
I hated how it came out. My tree was imbalanced. Mom wasn’t an orphan, but that was how it looked when the teacher stapled mine up on the bulletin board. Most of the other kids had made trees that were perfectly symmetrical.
After school that day I went home and asked, “How come we never see my grandparents?”
“What do you mean?” Mom said. “Every week we see your grammy.”
“But your mom and dad,” I clarified. “How come we never spend Thanksgiving with them?”