“I don’t think he’d want that if he knew how hard it is for me to be what Priscilla wants, what you all want,” I say in a quiet voice. “I’ve tried to be different, to change for you, but it doesn’t work. It just hurts me. I—I—” I consider telling her about my diagnosis and the hell I’ve been going through, but I remember how Priscilla reacted and I know it’s hopeless.

“You’re autistic,” my mom says.

Surprise makes me freeze in place. I can’t speak. I can’t even blink.

“Faith told me. It’s probably from your father’s side. Like Uncle Tony,” she grumbles, and for whatever reason that makes a laugh crack out of me. “I’ve been reading about it. I think I see it now.”

She rests her hands on top of mine, but then hesitates, like she’s not sure if she can touch me now. I turn my hands around and hold hers tightly, telling her without words that this is okay.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she confesses. “I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do either,” I say. “But maybe we can start over.”

She squeezes my hands and nods. “You were difficult when you were little, very difficult, and I’m sorry I didn’t know how to—what to—I thought I was doing the right thing for you.”

“It’s okay, Ma,” I hear myself say. Part of me doubts this conversation is actually happening, but her hands feel very real in mine.

She gives me a searching look before saying, “Long before I came here to marry your dad, during the Cultural Revolution in China, I was sent to reeducation camps, where I worked and starved in the fields. Did you know this?” When I shake my head numbly, she continues. “Our family wasn’t safe because Gung gung was a wealthy landowner. I wasn’t safe. That’s what I learned from them—it’s not safe to be different.” Speaking through her tears, clinging to me like I’m a lifeline, she says, “I pushed you to change because I wanted you to be safe. Do you understand?”

My throat swells, but I manage to say, “I think I understand.” An old knot of resentment loosens in my heart. I needed to hear this. “How come you never told me?”

She releases a long, weary sigh. “I told Priscilla. I didn’t want to burden you with ugliness from the past. I worry about you so much, Anna.”

“I want to know things like this.”

“I’ll tell you more about it sometime. For now, I—” She sighs again. “I have to talk to your sister. She had to block off time on her calendar for it, do you believe it? She’s that busy with her new job. A hundred hours a week until the merger goes through or something. I’m going to tell her to try therapy. I’ve been going once a week.”

My jaw drops.

She laughs before she pats my hand and gets up. “I need to go. Maybe I’ll have a cappuccino and a pastry in the park while I talk to her. It’s the small things in life.”

I walk with her to the door, and before she leaves, she hugs me firmly. She’s wearing her regular perfume, but the scent is very light. She doesn’t touch my hair. These are small changes, but I suspect she made them for me. I think she read about these things. I can’t explain how much that means to me.

“I love you, Anna,” she whispers fiercely. “No matter what happens, I hope you know that. Fight with your sister if you must, but I stay in your life. Talk to me, tell me when things are wrong, and I’ll do my best. I can’t lose you.”

I’m too overwhelmed to say anything, so I nod and hug her tighter, soaking her scarf with tears.

When she finally leaves, I watch her until she disappears down the stairwell, and then I go to my balcony and watch as she gets in my dad’s old Mercedes convertible and drives away. I imagine she’s listening to the cassette that’s stuck in the tape deck.

The bittersweet irony of the situation strikes me. I lost my dad and my sister, but somehow that gave me my mom.

FORTY-TWO

Anna

BECAUSE I REJECT THE NOTION THAT ALL THE BEST VIOLINS have already been made, that nothing from the present or future can compete with the past, I opt to buy a violin handcrafted by a modern luthier based in Chicago. It doesn’t cost as much as a house thankfully, but it’s not cheap either. I spend most of my savings on it. It’s worth every penny, however. Its voice is sweet and bright and achingly beautiful, and I fall in love with it the instant I test it out, playing my first clumsy scales in nearly a year.

Once I bring it home, I’m determined to conquer the Richter piece. I’ve had so much time away. I should be returning to music well rested and full of fresh perspective. I vow that I’m going to master the piece within a month. Back before my Internet fame, it took me less time than that to gain fluidity with a piece of music. I should be able to do it, especially with this new violin.

It doesn’t work that way. I immediately fall into the same mental trap as before, only it’s worse now. I play in horrid, never-ending loops all day, and when I stop to rest, my mind is battered and drained in a way I’ve never experienced. Still, I’m determined to forge through. I tell myself that I will finish this, even if it’s the last thing I ever do.

I end up pushing myself so hard that I burn out even worse than I did previously. I lose days and weeks. I lose functionality. This time, in addition to grief and rage, there’s anxiety, desperation. The Richter piece is trapping me, ruining my life. I want to be free. Why can’t I get free?

If I can’t play my way free, there’s one other way …

From there, I plummet into pure darkness.

But there’s a light that keeps me from falling too far. That light is Quan. When I get up in the middle of the night, nauseated and silently sobbing and tempted, so tempted, to set myself free in the only way I believe I can, he senses something is off. He wakes up. He holds me. He asks me what’s wrong.

I know he’ll believe me. I know he won’t look down on me and tell me to pull up my big-girl pants and tough it out. So I tell him the ugly truth of my thoughts and fantasies, and he cries as he rocks me from side to side.

FORTY-THREE

Anna

WITH QUAN’S URGING, I START SEEING JENNIFER AGAIN. SHE refers me to a psychiatrist. I go on medication that saves my life.

I start to feel … optimistic. There are days when I even feel good. Drugs don’t clear my creative block, though. When I pick up my violin, I still play in circles, so I set it down. I understand now that I’m not healed enough to play. I have to give my mind time.

I have trouble focusing enough to read anything of significant length, so I find my way to poetry. A poem can be as short as two lines, sometimes even one, but there’s an entire idea contained there, an entire story. That’s perfect for someone like me. I quickly fall in love with rupi kaur’s work, reading a page here, a page there, as I move about my day, sometimes as I fall in and out of sleep while watching documentaries, specifically the “Cape” episode of David Attenborough’s Africa documentary. I watch it for the two-minute scene where butterflies mate above the treeless peak of Mount Mabu in Mozambique. I’m fascinated by the vivid colors and patterns of their iridescent wings and the dizzying number of butterflies fluttering in the blue sky. It looks like a world apart from the one where I live, one that I can only dream of going to.