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44.

That night, I took the train down to Menlo Park alone.

As I sat in the plastic seat, watching the landscape fly past—sterile office parks that crouched alongside the salt flats and brackish marshes of the Bay; rows of commuter homes in various shades of beige; a horse racing track floating in a sea of empty parking spaces—I was suffused with a sense of pride that I had learned so much so fast. Just two months earlier, I had been too intimidated to attempt the train at all; and now here I was, looking like any other Bay Area local with a bodega sandwich in a bag and a novel on my lap, casually gazing out the window.

I wasn’t feeling casual at all, of course. The sandwich was like cardboard in my mouth, and so I’d left it uneaten; and my mind couldn’t fix on a single sentence of the William Gibson novel I’d nicked from the office. As each stop brought me closer to Menlo Park my pulse accelerated, a staccato drumbeat of a single word. Mother mother mother.

Unclear, until it was too late, that there were two kinds of trains—“local” and “express”—I arrived at my mother’s reading twenty minutes after it started. I slid into a seat in the back row, next to a sweaty man in a misbuttoned shirt who was scribbling frantically in a Moleskine notebook. He smelled like egg salad.

My mother, on the other hand, was glorious. I had never seen a woman so imposing, so self-possessed. She stood at the front of the room in a beautifully fitted suit the color of an eggplant, hands braced on either side of the lectern as she spoke. Her hair, a trim golden cap, was tucked behind ears that were the size and shape of nautilidae. A luminous pearl gleamed from each earlobe, matching the strand that rested on the neckline of her pale silk blouse. She was smaller than I’d imagined—without the stiletto heels she was wearing, she was at least a half foot shorter than me—and yet somehow she came across as much taller. Maybe this was because of her posture, square and upright, as if she had shoved a wire hanger inside the back of her suit jacket.

She read aloud from her book in a voice that was brisk but slightly affectless, and it was clear that these words were so familiar to her that she didn’t even have to think about them anymore.

“We are all cyborgs now, thanks to computers and cellphones and digital cameras,” she intoned. “Technology has already given us the capacity to grow exponentially beyond our mundane human capabilities, and it’s only going to get more astonishing from here. We can externalize our functioning, outsource our memories and archives, let the computers mediate and collate information so that we don’t have to do that busywork ourselves. Once computers become small enough to be handheld”—there was a guffaw from a man sitting in front of me, and she fixed him with a look of disdain—“Oh, it will happen, in a decade, probably less. Computers the size of a deck of cards. And when it does, humans will essentially become walking libraries, constantly connected to the internet brain, tributaries of its knowledge, nothing ever forgotten. From there we will figure out how to wire our brains directly to the internet and at that point we will become part of the computer consciousness, and it will become part of us. And we will never, ever die.”

I was hypnotized, only half listening to her, waiting instead for her eyes to snag on me, like a burr in a sweater. Would she recognize me, sitting there in the audience? Would her voice falter and die, as she suddenly realized that her long-dead daughter was staring back at her from the very last row? A ghost somehow made corporal?

But it wasn’t until she finished her reading and began taking questions from the audience that her gaze came anywhere near me. Next to me, egg-salad man’s hand shot straight up into the air. She pointed at him—a little reluctantly, I thought—and as she did, I could have sworn I saw her eyes slide to my face, catch there for a moment, and then dance away again.

“Can it be dangerous to have access to all this information?” The man’s tone was accusatory. “Like, do we really want to have access to every single memory we’ve ever had? Won’t that be exhausting? Aren’t we supposed to screw up and forget things, especially the traumatic things we’d rather not remember? Isn’t that what makes us human, and interesting—our fallibility?”

She frowned. “Fallibility isn’t a particularly efficient mode of existence, is it? The human race is ripe for improvement; I think we can all agree about that. And having a personal knowledge archive at our fingertips allows us to constantly work on perfecting ourselves. Computer-assisted existence will allow us to make decisions based not on emotion —which is reactive and illogical—but on rationality and reason and shared experience. Artificial intelligence will help us calculate the most efficient response to any scenario. We will optimize our way in the world, eliminating the mistakes that only cause us distress. How is that a bad thing?”

Even as she rebuked my neighbor, I noticed that her gaze had again skipped sideways toward me. There was a tight wrinkle between her brows, as if she’d seen something that she couldn’t quite identify. I smiled encouragingly at her, which was apparently the wrong move, because she looked quite startled and immediately flung her eyes away, calling on another person three rowsup.

For the next twenty minutes, she didn’t look at me once. I listened to the audience questions without hearing a thing—buzzwords like external brains and transcending mortality, concepts that I couldn’t yet wrap my head around (and yet, I somehow knew, would enrage my father)—until finally she stepped back from the lectern, indicating that she was done. The bookstore manager—a stout gray-haired woman in a purple turtleneck and quilted vest—stepped in to take the microphone.

“Let’s give a big round of applause for Dr. Trevante and that fascinating glimpse into our future. Dr. Trevante will be signing now, so let’s be sure to support her by buying a copy of her book.”

A line of fans began to form at a table near the door, where my mother had ensconced herself with a Sharpie and a stack of books. I wandered to the front counter and bought a copy of the book, then went to linger near the children’s section. I watched the dwindling line with impatience, waiting for the last of my mother’s fans to get out of my way. Seated behind the signing table, Tess looked like a queen greeting her court; each supplicant tried vainly to forge some moment of connection with a question or an extempore comment, but she briskly signed each book with only a polite reply and sent them on their way.

When the line was almost gone, I slipped in to take my place at the end. I had no plan. What was I supposed to say when I was in front of her? Hi, Tess, I’m your dead daughter? Hi, Mom, I’ve been looking for you. Hi, Dr. Trevante, this is going to sound strange but— Before I could organize my thoughts into a coherent course of action, I was suddenly standing in front of her. Up close, I could see that she looked far frailer than she’d seemed at the lectern: Her blue eyes were ringed with a delicate circuitry of wrinkles and soft pouches of sagging skin. Her pupils were the size of sesame seeds, suggesting that she’d hardly slept in weeks. (An eighteen-stop book tour—it was quite possible she hadn’t.)

Words failed me. Panicked, I simply slid the book on the table in front of her, open to the title page.

“Who should I sign this to?” Her voice was crisp, her pen poised dutifully over the page.

“Esme Nowak?” I didn’t mean to put the question mark at the end of the name, but that’s how it came out, as though I wasn’t even sure of my own identity.

She looked up sharply. Her pinprick pupils bored holes into mine. “That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t joking. It’s my name.”

At this, she swiveled in her seat and gesticulated for the bookstore owner. “Can I have some help over here? I think this girl is a stalker.” She stood and began to matter-of-factly gather her things. “I don’t know where you dug up that name, but I find it very cruel.”

My eyes stung. This was not the reception I’d anticipated. “I’m not a stalker,” I insisted.

“I don’t have time for this.” She tried to fumble the Sharpie into her purse but dropped it. Her hands, I noticed, were trembling.

“Honestly. I’m sure that I’m your daughter.” I reached into the pocket of my backpack and tugged out the I Hate Mondays photo, placing it on the table before her. “See? That’s you, right? And me.”

She glanced cursorily down at the photo; and then she froze. “Where did you get this?”

“My father. He had it hidden in a drawer. I just found it a few months ago.”

She gingerly touched a tip of a finger to the photo, shaking her head as she did. No no no . By now the bookstore owner had materialized by my side to grip my biceps. She was starting to tug me away and it felt like the whole thing was going to be over just like that, when Tess finally spoke.

“I’m sorry. I made a mistake. You can let her go.” It sounded like there were rocks in her throat.

The bookstore owner released my arm but stood there, hovering. Tess was still shaking her head. “I’m fine. Thank you.” She studied me for a long minute; then tucked her bag to her side. “Come with me, please.”

“Where are we going?”

But she was already walking toward the door of the bookstore, ignoring the last stragglers waiting to steal a moment with her. The bookstore owner called after us—“Are you sure we can’t get you to sign some stock before you go?”—but Tess simply held up the back of her hand, blocking the words midair. She wobbled as she walked, taking small steps; it looked like she had lost a critical sense of balance.

I followed a few feet behind her, still confused by my reception. What was happening?

Next door to the bookstore was an outdoor café, where clusters of well-groomed women sat with plates of salad and sweating goblets of white wine. My mother walked to an empty table and gingerly settled herself in a green plastic chair, pointing me to the seat across from her.

Once we were seated, she closed her eyes, steeling herself, then opened them again and gazed fixedly at me. I flushed, hoping that she’d find what she was looking for in my face. After a moment she sat back in her chair and looked away again, and I wondered if something had been decided. Her face had loosened, and yet I still sensed a wariness to her, similar to the deer in our meadow, as they approached the pond where the wolf liked to sleep.

“You’ll have to forgive me if I’m having a hard time believing you,” she said. “Logically speaking, this makes no sense, you understand. Esme did not survive; it was not possible. At the time of the accident, I had a friend who was a statistician and we calculated the odds together; that she’d been washed out to sea, for example, but had managed to survive. It was implausible. Just as I’m calculating the odds, right now, that you might be an imposter of some sort, out to get something from me. Which is also implausible—I don’t know what you think you would gain—but then again, human behavior is very strange.”

She was holding the photo in one hand, though, and her grip on it was so tight that the tips of her fingers had gone white. I noticed that her nails were short, chewed to the quick.

I reached into my backpack and pulled out the rest of the things I’d brought with me: the birth certificate and Social Security card, the remaining photos. My father as a child, me in her arms, the men on the steps. I spread these out in front of her.

A strangled sound erupted from her as she looked at them. “My God. My God. My God.” She put a finger in her mouth and tore at the side of her nail. “If this is a prank it’s a very convincing one.” She gingerly pushed through the other photos with the tip of the other pinkie, seemingly afraid to touch them. “I never knew where these went.”

“My father had them,” I said.

She looked up from the photos and stared hard at me. “You do look like Adam, the nose in particular, the set of your jaw; your coloring was always me, though…” Her words drifted off as she stared at me. “You’ll understand if I still ask for a DNA test? But for now I’m inclined to take you at your word, as unlikely as this all seems—” Her voice was clipped and tight, as if a rubber ball was lodged in her cheek. She smiled faintly, then, and though I expected her to be delighted—her long-lost daughter returned from the dead!—the expression on her face was one of pure torture. “I don’t understand how this could happen. It defies logic. You’re dead. You’ve been dead for fourteen years. Where have you been? How could I not have known ?”

“Dad and I were living off the grid, in the woods, in Montana,” I said. “He told me you were dead, but the truth was that we were the ones who were dead. And it wasn’t until I found that photo and saw the names on the back and realized that my name wasn’t actually Jane, that I began to suspect he’d lied to me about other things, too. He told me he used to work in Silicon Valley and so I ran away and came here. And that’s how I found you.”

This synopsis, while woefully abbreviated, seemed to appease her. She nodded slowly, then seized on a detail: “Adam.” She said his name as an exhale. “Where is he? Does he know you’re here?”

“I don’t know where he is,” I said. “And no, I don’t know how he would.”

“Did he tell you anything ? About what he did and how he did it? The car…I thought…suicide.” Her body was tilting slightly in her seat, like she’d been knocked askew. I shook my head. “ Really. And you don’t remember what happened?”

“No. Nothing. I was too young.” I hesitated. “Do you know why he would have kidnapped me?”

“No.” And then she shook her head, rebuking herself. “Yes. He wanted to leave Silicon Valley, go live in the woods somewhere, a rejection of everything we’d been working toward. I said no, of course. He had become irrational. We were arguing. But I never imagined…” Her voice trailed off. “Jesus, I should call the police immediately. Sue him to oblivion.”

“No!” It burst out ofme.

She gave me a funny look. “Well, he shouldn’t get away with this.”

I looked across the table at her, at this imposing woman in her expensive suit, her forehead tugged into a downward arrow as she tried to rewrite the story of her last fourteen years. She seemed so very far away from the mother I’d spent so long imagining, vanilla-scented and soft, a variation on Lina and her woolly warmth. “Do you grow roses?” I asked. “Or play the guitar? Were you ever a kindergarten teacher?”

I suppose I still held out hope that some aspects of my father’s story were true, but she shook her head. “I learned the clarinet in high school, but I haven’t touched one since.”

“Can I…hug you?” I blurted.

She looked startled by this. She gave a little shake of her head, dispelling herself of whatever impulse she’d just felt. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Yes. That would be nice.” She stood, teetering just a little in her heels, and then held her arms out as if she was about to catch a beach ball. I stepped into her embrace, and we wrapped our arms around each other. The smell of her summoned up an old familiar memory— jasmine —that made my eyes sting. It was electric, to feel her body touching mine, but it also wasn’t terribly cozy, nothing like sinking into a down comforter or cuddling with a kitten. Instead, it felt like a simulacrum of a hug, prickly and tentative, similar to embracing a cactus.

I couldn’t blame her, though: She was hugging a corpse. There was no normal for that.

Finally, she disentangled herself and sat down again. “I’m sorry, I should have done that sooner, but you caught me off guard,” she said. “I imagine this is not the grand reunion you have been imagining.”

“Not really. I thought you’d be happier to find me.”

She dabbed at the torn cuticle, which had started to bleed. “Happy isn’t a word I use much, it’s too abstract to be meaningful. And you have to understand—to me, you are dead. I spent many years adapting to this truth, learning to let it live outside me. I did not like how I initially reacted to your death—yours and your father’s. I fell apart. I had to go away for a long time. And when I came back, I worked very hard to put you both in a locked box, so to speak, so that I could get back into a nondestructive pattern that allowed me to go on with my life.” She looked down at her hands. “And that’s how I’ve existed for well over a decade, so forgive me if I don’t immediately shift back to the other mode of being.”

“Mode of being?”

“Hope.” The word came out so sharply that it sounded like an epithet. “I lived without it for fourteen years. This… reunion …is not something I ever imagined. So when a stranger comes to me and says she is my daughter—and I’m sorry, but you are a stranger, at least for the moment—I need a minute to wrap my head around it. Understand that you bear little physical resemblance to the toddler I knew.”

“And loved?”

She seemed taken aback by the pleading note in my voice. “Yes,” she said softly. “Of course I loved you. You were my child.”

“ Am your child.”

At this, her eyes went damp and far away. “Right,” she said. “And I am very glad to be reunited with you. More than I might be showing. This is just…overwhelming. But I’m going to give you my private phone number and you can call me to arrange a time to come over for dinner, in a day or two. And we can figure out a path forward for us.” She pulled a business card out of her purse and scribbled on the back of it, before pushing it across the table atme.

She smiled at me, then, a lopsided toothy smile that lit up her face like sunshine breaking through the clouds, loosening her features and taking the tension out of her body. “We will not lose any more time, I promise,” she said. “The things I have to teach you, Esme. The things we will do together.”

There she is, I thought. There is my mother, the one in the photo. And in that moment, it did seem like everything might be OK after all. That I might have finally found my home, my real self.

I tucked the card in my pocket, swallowing back the lump in my throat. My mother was still rummaging around in her purse, and when she pulled her hand out again she had keys clutched in her fist, preparing to leave; and I realized then that I hadn’t even gotten to the most important part yet. “Unfortunately, there’s a lot more I need to tell you,” I began. “Things that are going to be hard to hear.”

“Harder than this ?” She barked out a laugh. I noticed a tremble begin in her hands and move through her torso, until her whole body was quivering tightly, like a wind-up toy whose key had been twisted and was desperate to be released.

“I’m sorry, I know, but I could really use your—”

My words died in my mouth as she held up a palm, cutting me off: Stop . “No,” she said firmly. “No more. I’m already at my capacity for the day. I need to process all this before you throw anything else at me.”

“No?” I faltered in my convictions, surprised.

She was standing up now, clutching the purse to her chest like a shield. “Not no forever. But no for now. Just—call me. We’ll talk about whatever it is later.” She hesitated. “It was nice to meet you, Esme.”

And with that, she fled.

—

We are undone by the specificity of our dreams. Reality can never live up to the shining edifices we forge inside our fantasies: Life, in all its confusing complexity, is destined to be a disappointment in comparison. The lottery winner discovers that the riches don’t equal happiness; the longed-for baby is colicky and sour; losing fifty pounds still doesn’t bring you love; winning the election doesn’t trigger societal change.

Life is a constant emotional calibration, then: the tiny adjustments we make every day as we come up against our discontents. We ride this seesaw, between hope and disenchantment, seeking some sort of equilibrium.

Was Tess the mother I’d spent so many years dreaming about? Not at all. But motherhood comes in so many forms; the quintessential mom with her apple pies and apron strings and fathomless virtue is just a construct that no real woman could possibly live up to. I was aware of this, at least. And so I pushed away that prickly hug and the awkward conversation, and the fact that she’d walked away when it started to get hard, and focused instead on the bigger picture: That I had a mother, finally. We were going to figure out a path forward and do things together. And no, I hadn’t yet told her the whole truth or asked for her help with stopping my father, but I would do it next time we spoke. Which would be soon, so so soon, now that I had her phone number in my pocket.

And so I floated through the next twelve hours on a cloud of euphoria, through the train ride home and the long, damp walk across the city to my sublet; through a night of restless sleep, drifting in and out of maternal scenarios that were half waking, half dream, impossible to disentangle from each other; and on through my morning commute on the crowded bus, windows dripping with condensation, air smelling of damp wool. In my state of limerence, nothing quite registered as real: not the persistent drizzle that soaked my sneakers as I scurried down Third Street, not the faint scent of urine from the pavement outside the shuttered bars, not the horns blaring their grievances from the congested Bay Bridge on-ramp.

Nor was I quite conscious of the man who was standing in the mouth of the alley where Signal parked its dumpsters—a motionless figure set back from the bustling sidewalk traffic of South Park—until he spoke my name.

“Jane.”

Even then, I was still in my dream state, too distracted to sound the alarm bells that should have been going off at this use of my old name. I turned, surprised, toward the figure that was now approaching me from the gloom of the alley. My fists curled, ready to defend myself if necessary; the muscles in my calves coiled, instinctively ready to run. The man wore a too-big peacoat over a hoodie that he’d pulled forward to protect his face from the rain, and yet there was something immediately familiar about the way he moved toward me. I knew that loping gait. I knew that voice.

Still, it wasn’t until he tugged his hood back that I was forced to finally acknowledge who was standing there, just steps away fromme.

“Hi, Dad,” I said.