Page 49

48.

My mother was renting an apartment in San Francisco while her new house was being built. “I prefer the suburbs usually, it’s so dirty in the city, but it’s a nice change of pace to be up near the dot-coms right now, to see what’s actually happening at the bleeding edge of the industry,” she’d told me on the phone. “San Francisco is evolving terribly fast. There’s so much moaning about all the artists being pushed out, but you have to think about all the exciting things coming in their place. And honestly, I welcome a few more decent restaurants and a few less burritos.”

Her temporary home was an open-plan condo on the top floor of a modern glass tower in Nob Hill. When she opened the door, I found myself facing a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, beyond which I could see the illuminated towers of Grace Cathedral, glowing ghostlike against the night sky.

She leaned in and hugged me lightly, a much warmer hug than the previous day’s, if still a little tentative. Jasmine perfume wafted off her; her bones felt as small as a sparrow’s. I couldn’t help comparing her hug to my father’s of that morning, sour-smelling and almost painfully tight. “It’s so good to see you again,” she murmured.

“You smell nice,” I blurted. “I remember that, from when I was little.”

She looked startled, but happily so. “Chanel No. 5,” she said. “Yes, I’ve been wearing it my whole life. You really remember that, but you don’t remember your father kidnapping you? Selective memory, so fascinating. Anyway, come in! I just took dinner out of the oven.”

I took a few steps inside. My mother was wearing liquid satin pants and a long cashmere cardigan, both of them the color of fresh December snow. In my Kmart uniform of jeans and hoodie—a little worse for wear after two straight months of heavy rotation in my wardrobe—I felt woefully underdressed. Empty-handed, too. Should I have brought flowers or candy? Was one supposed to bring a gift for dinner with your long-lost mother? If tonight was a test, I felt like I was already failing.

She had her hand on the small of my back now, and was pressing me toward a dinner table that was set with candles and an orchid centerpiece, as if we were on some sort of date. We crossed through the living room, where everything had also been rendered in white—furniture, rugs, pillows, even the cat that slept on the couch—and I wondered if my mother turned invisible when she sat inside this monochromatic tableau. The only color in the room came from the shelves that stretched along one wall, where a collection of delicate glass vases was on display, each one illuminated by a perfect puddle of light. It was all very austere, and it struck me that my mother must be quite rich in order to own so little.

I wondered what she would have made of the cluttered cabin where I was raised, with its towering stacks of newspapers and collections of bent nails in oatmeal cartons. It was hard to imagine that this spare woman had ever been married to my father. How radically their roads had diverged the minute my father drove his convertible off a cliff.

As we passed through the apartment, she gestured to a glass coffee table, where a handful of dusty-looking albums sat incongruously next to an Andreas Gursky art book. “I stopped by the storage unit this morning and found all the old photos. I thought you might like to look at them,” she said. “I haven’t opened those albums in years. It was just too hard. I’m sure you can understand. So it will be a revelation for both of us. After dinner, I think, since the food is hot.”

The apartment was stuffy, the heat cranked luxuriously high. I could feel a staticky buzz coming off my mother as she busied herself at the dining room table, straightening silverware and adjusting the dishes. Gone was the coolly detached woman from the reading the night before. This Tess seemed nervous—rattled, even—as though she had found herself trapped in a cage with a wild animal that might not be particularly friendly.

She looked up at me suddenly, studying me hard. “You were so blond as a child,” she said. “Flaxen, like me.”

“I still am,” I said. “I dyed it.”

“Oh. If you want to dye it back, I can take you to my hairdresser.” She reached out and tentatively touched a strand of my hair, sending a shiver of pleasure up and down my spine.

“Did you braid it for me? When I was little?” I blurted.

She nodded. “It would get so knotted if we didn’t.”

“I remember that,” I said, delighted that this was an authentic memory, after all, and not just something that Marmee did forJo.

She gave me that funny lopsided smile again, sad and happy at the same time, then picked up a glass of wine that was sitting, already half empty, on the table. “I’m sorry Freddy isn’t here to meet you, unfortunately he’s wrapping up some financing in Beijing, but I told him all about you and he is very excited to meet you when he returns. He’s officially your stepfather, isn’t that strange? All this is going to take some getting used to, isn’t it? Anyway, dinner isn’t anything fancy. I should confess that I’m not a very enthusiastic cook. I find it mostly a waste of valuable time when the food I could buy is so much better. But I certainly can manage a decent roast chicken. So that’s what we’re having tonight.” She stopped suddenly. “Oh. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

I laughed. “I’ve been known to kill my own dinner, so no.”

The wineglass paused halfway to her mouth. “You hunt ?”

“I grew up in Montana. Everyone hunts.”

She winced. “Well, I suppose you at least know the meat’s organic.” She gestured at the table. “Sit, please.”

I sat. There was an elegantly folded linen napkin on my plate and I picked this up and placed it carefully in my lap without unfolding it, as it was far too pretty to disassemble. My mother pushed the platter of chicken and potatoes toward me and watched closely as I served myself a breast and a heaping pile of potatoes. She served herself a portion that was a fraction of the size of mine, and then refilled her wineglass. She leaned over her plate without touching her food.

“I am so sorry about yesterday. You must have thought I was a terrible human being. So distant. To my own daughter.”

“Not at all,” I demurred.

“I was. And I feel terrible about it. I talked to my therapist about it this morning and he said that I was exhibiting classic signs of PTSD. Which makes sense, you know.”

The chicken was so salty that I was finding it hard to eat. I decided to focus on the potatoes instead. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what PTSD is.”

“ Really. ” This seemed to fascinate her. “Post-traumatic stress disorder, from when you and Adam died. It can linger for a lifetime. And emotional numbing is a common symptom. If you think about it, it was inevitable that I would be so shell-shocked at meeting you again. Disbelieving and cool—” I started to object and she held up a hand, silencing me. “I was. And maybe it was understandable, but it certainly wasn’t very welcoming to you . I hope you don’t think I’m awful.”

“I don’t,” I insisted.

“Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if your father tried to poison you against me. We weren’t in a good place when he left. He was very…judgmental of me.” The wine wobbled in her glass as she spun the stem of her goblet between her thumb and forefinger. I noticed that the torn cuticles had been patched over with Band-Aids.

“He told me almost nothing about you.” I decided not to mention the damning memoir pages that I’d worked through the previous evening. I didn’t think I should believe them anyway: The woman sitting with me was hardly the villain he’d described. I smiled at her, ready to jettison my father entirely. If I had her, I didn’t need him.

Relief flooded her face. “Nothing? Well, I’m glad for that, I suppose. It gives us a clean slate, to start fresh.”

“To be honest it’s hard for me to imagine the two of you together. You’re very…different.”

“We weren’t always.” Wine splashed over the rim of her glass, and she dabbed at it with a napkin. “In the beginning we liked each other because we both thought of ourselves as outsiders. I liked that he looked at the world in a different way from everyone else, so passionate about the things he cared about; and he was certainly one of the only men I’d known who seemed interested in what was going on in my mind.” She went silent. “Well. Things change; you start out thinking you know everything about someone and eventually you realize you know nothing at all.” She picked up the wine and drank it, then leaned in. “Anyway, I’d much rather talk about you.”

“What do you want to know?” I needed to wipe the grease from my lips, but I was afraid to soil the napkin, which was quite possibly the most beautiful thing I’d ever held in my hands. I dabbed at the corner of my mouth with the very edge of one fold.

“Oh, everything. ” I could see about a hundred shiny white teeth when she smiled, each one as perfect as the vases on the display shelves.

I thought, guiltily, about the most pressing everything —my father, what he’d done (what we’d done), how to stop him, I needed to ask her for help. But the truth was that I was enjoying this delicate moment too much to break it; I wanted just a few more minutes of being her unsullied daughter before she knew who I really was.

“I’ve been living in a cabin with Dad,” I began. “Studying, a lot. Drawing, I like to draw for fun. And a lot of chores, you know, chopping firewood and taking care of the chickens.”

“Chickens?” Her eyes dropped to the carcass sitting on the table betweenus.

“I had to kill those, too.”

She shook her head. “No wonder you ran away to find me. And you’ve been in San Francisco how long?”

“About two months. I have a job at Signal.”

Her face lit up. “At Signal ? My God, are you a programmer? I always thought you’d be a programmer! You had such a logic-oriented mind even as a toddler. The things you made with Legos. I was teaching you times tables when you die—” She course-corrected halfway through this last word. “Disappeared.”

“No,” I said, a little embarrassed. “I’m not a programmer. Just a production assistant. A glorified intern, really. I proof a lot of HTML.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, still, Signal, that’s something. But…no college?”

She seemed to still not understand how we’d been living. And maybe this was my fault, that I hadn’t explained our circumstances clearly. “Dad homeschooled me,” I said slowly. “Technically I haven’t even graduated high school yet. But Dad always said he was teaching me as well as he’d been taught at Harvard, and at a fraction of the price.”

Her mouth twisted itself into a tight pretzel. “He always did have a high regard for himself,” she muttered. “Listen to me, Esme, you’re my daughter now and you must get a college degree. Ideally a master’s, too, though in my opinion a Ph.D. is just too time-consuming these days, there are too many opportunities you’d be missing out on in the current marketplace. I’ll pull some strings and find you a spot for the fall. There’s MIT, of course, but maybe you’d prefer something a little closer to home? Stanford’s going to be a challenge, but the chancellor of UC Berkeley is a good friend of mine.”

Closer to home . Closer to her . My heart popped. “That would be amazing. Thank you.”

“Yes, the Berkeley engineering department is certainly adequate.” She shot a look of sudden concern at me. “Please tell me you’re not a liberal arts type? If I know your father, he was probably filling your head with all those philosophers he loved. Not that philosophy doesn’t have its place in a balanced society, but it’s not exactly a driving force in the new economy.”

Oh, I was such a fickle creature, so ready to abandon everything I’d learned if it meant I might get a pat on the head from her. “I completely agree, Theresa.”

“ Theresa .” She looked surprised. “So formal. No one calls me that anymore.”

“What did I call you when I was little?”

She smiled, a little rueful. “Mama. But that sounds so childish. How about…Mom?”

“ Mom. ” The word tumbled off my tongue, I was so eager to use it. We grinned at each other. I hated to disrupt this moment, but the longer I went without confessing, the longer it felt like everything so far had been a lie.

“So, Mom , there’s something really important that I need to talk to you about. It’s what I was trying to talk to you about yesterday—”

She picked up the salad bowl and proffered it to me. “Have some salad. I got this balsamic in Modena, it’s amazing.” I shook my head, and she set it back down so soundlessly that I worried I’d somehow insulted her. “Sorry, please go on. I didn’t mean to change the subject.”

The room had grown unbearably hot. Sweat was gathering in beads on my forehead and I reluctantly sacrificed the napkin to dab at them. “It’s about Dad.”

“Yes, we need to discuss him. What to do about that. I know you won’t like this, but I am going to have to consider legal recourse. It’s truly unforgivable, what he did to us.”

“Yes. OK. I understand. But wait—no. No, that’s not what I was trying to—” I gave up on finding a graceful way in, and instead just dropped my confession in her lap, a grenade with the pin already pulled out. “Mom, listen. Dad—he’s the Bombaster.”

“He’s—what?” Her chin shot up. Her mouth began to form a shape, as if she was about to object, and then it froze. “The…from the—”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God,” she croaked. She set down the wineglass on the table with a horrible crystalline finality. The room went so silent that I could hear the sound of a cable car clanging its bell ten stories below. “Tell me this is the punch line to a joke I’m supposed to get.”

“I wish it were.”

She closed her eyes. I could see the slash of her eyeliner, trembling along the edge of her lids. Her voice dropped, until it was a nearly inaudible whisper: “Would he do that? Of course he would. Oh God, it does make sense—Peter, and Baron, and Harvard. And that manifesto, it sounds just like the garbage he was spewing at the end. I should have put it all together the minute you said he was still alive.” She didn’t appear to be talking to me, so I let her puzzle everything through on her own. Then her eyes flew open again and she fixed them on me. “Then that means…you’re the one in the red dress. The girl who shot the security guard.”

“That was self-defense, a mistake really. I swear. And I didn’t know what Dad was up to. He asked me to come with him to Seattle and distract the security guard. It wasn’t until afterward, when I saw the news about the explosion, that I found out what I’d been involved with; and that’s when I ran away—” The flood of my words suddenly stopped as I registered the look of horror on her face. She had pushed herself back in her chair, as far away from me as she could get, and was staring at me as if I were the monster, not my father.

Her forefinger moved to the edge of the torn cuticle, found the Band-Aid, and began to fiddle with it. “Esme—this is—this is…” Her thoughts kept dying in her throat.

“I’m so sorry.” I felt like I’d just done something terrible to her. HadI?

She jumped up and began to pace back and forth behind the table, her palms on either side of her head. “What a nightmare. I can’t—” She stopped pacing and looked at me again. “Your father, you really don’t know where he is? Is he in San Francisco, too?”

I realized that my answer was going to make me sound like I’d lied the previous day, but it couldn’t be helped. Reluctantly, I nodded my head.

“My God, he’s going to come after me, too, isn’t he?” Her voice had grown high-pitched and panicky. “Picking off the old gang, one by one. He’s lost his mind. We need to call the police immediately. I’m going to need protection.” She walked across the room to where a small leather purse was sitting on a side table and began to rummage throughit.

“OK,” I said. My voice sounded very small. Of course she was going to be scared for her life; I’d anticipated that. But somehow this wasn’t the response I’d expected. There was no you poor thing or what do you need or how terrible this must have been for you. “But—what about me? Can you help me, Mom?”

This time, the word Mom made her visibly flinch. “Help you?”

“I think the FBI might know who I am,” I said. “I think someone at Signal told the authorities about me today, and now I’m not sure what to do. I know I need to stop Dad. But what will happen if I go to the police? I’m wanted, too, aren’t I? They’ll put me in jail. Or worse.”

She had extricated a phone from her purse but she was just staring at it now, not dialing. “Right. I see. OK. Let me think this through.”

“Maybe if you go with me, to talk to the police. Or make a public statement, or something, explaining that I wasn’t really his accomplice, but his victim? You’re famous. People will listen to you.”

She slowly tucked the phone back into her purse. “I think you’re overestimating my influence.”

It was beginning to dawn on me that my mother wasn’t going to magically solve everything with a wave of her hand. “But I need help.” I could hear my voice go high, on the verge of hysteria. “None of what’s happened is my fault, I swear.” Would anyone believe that? I wasn’t sure my own mother did. Even I didn’t believe it. After all, I had uploaded the manifesto to the internet. I had helped my father murder Peter. I had destroyed and hidden evidence. I’d had two months to turn my father in; the fact that I hadn’t was utterly damning.

I hadn’t driven the train, but I had gone along for the ride. Of course I was complicit.

What I wanted was for Theresa to soothe my fears with a fistful of motherly platitudes. You’re right, it’s not your fault, you were a child, you didn’t know any better. But she just stood there, staring blankly out toward the Gothic filigree of Grace Cathedral, solving a puzzle inside her head.

“All right, I know how we proceed,” she finally said. She pivoted to regard me. The woman before me was once again the severe woman behind the lectern on Monday: Cool and collected and a little bit terrifying. Like a warrior, but my warrior. “I am going to connect you with a very good lawyer. I’m thinking Rhona Silverberg, she owes me some favors. Her fees will be astronomical, but I’ll cover that, don’t worry. You’ll go the authorities with Rhona first thing tomorrow and you will tell them everything . Including how they can locate your father.”

Relief coursed through me— a plan, finally a cogent plan —and I thought of Lionel, and how I’d insisted to him that I needed to confer with my mother first. I had been right, hadn’t I? “OK. You’ll come with us, too, right?”

A look of faint apology washed over her face. “I’m so sorry, but that’s not going to be possible,” she said. “I’m going to leave town. Tonight. Just to be safe.”

“Where are you going?”

She shook her head. “That has to be a secret. The whole point of leaving is so that Adam won’t know where I am.”

It took a minute for the implications of this to sink in. “You think I’d tell him,” I said slowly. “You think I’d help him murder you.”

She tugged the edges of her cashmere cardigan tightly together, across her chest. “No, I’m not saying that. But why take unnecessary risks?”

And maybe I shouldn’t have blamed her for this. I was a stranger to her, tied though we were by blood and a very distant past. She didn’t know a thing about my loyalties or motivations. She had no real proof that my presence in her living room meant that I’d decided to turn my back on all that. But it broke me in pieces to realize that even after I’d finally found what I’d been hunting for so hard, I still didn’t have the mother I’d wanted to find. One who believed in me, unquestioningly.

She continued. “Now. When the press comes to you—and they will come; they will figure out the whole story as soon as your father’s real identity is released, and it will be quite the media frenzy—don’t tell them that we were in touch this week. And you shouldn’t tell them that I’m paying your legal bills, either. As far as the world is concerned, I didn’t know you’d survived until the authorities came to me to let me know that you’d turned yourself in, and that you and Adam were still alive.”

I tried to wrap my head around this, and failed. “But why?”

She laughed, a little wanly. “You don’t want me to get in trouble, too, do you? What if they think I helped you and your father hide out? Or worse? The media is sensationalistic, and it can influence the authorities, like it or not. No, better to keep me out of it, I think.”

I gazed down at the plate in front of me, at the unappealing wreckage of my meal, limp lettuce swimming in congealing meat juices, chicken bones gone waxy. I looked away, and over to the glass table, where the faded photo albums sat forgotten in a stack. There would be no convivial stroll down memory lane this evening.

“So when will I see you again?”

“I couldn’t say. But don’t worry. I’ll make sure that Rhona is helping you with everything you need. She’s a bulldog and if anyone can get you out of this, she can.” The expression on my face must have given away my hurt. “Esme, I’m sure you understand how complicated this is. But it’s just for now. When all this is over, and everything has been sorted out by the legal system, I’m sure we can reconnect and start over.” She tried for the lopsided smile again, but this time only managed a painful-looking grimace.

And that was when I realized, with a blinding burst of clarity, what her evasions were all about: She wanted to see if I was going to be convicted of murder before she decided to claim me as her daughter. Until then, she could profess to be just another one of my father’s victims; not an abettor of any kind. After all, her reputation as a tech guru and futurist might be sullied if she was somehow associated with the Luddite Bombaster and his criminal daughter. She was more worried about her credibility than she was aboutme.

“So you’re saying, as far as you’re concerned, I don’t exist,” I said slowly. “I died fourteen years ago, and that’s it, until you decide otherwise.”

She frowned, and smoothed the blond cap of her hair, where not a single strand had gone astray. “That’s not what I said,” she said. “I promise, I’ll be in touch eventually.”

I stood up from the table. The napkin, still in its meticulous folds, fell from my lap and onto the floor. I didn’t bother to pick it up. I staggered toward the door on stiff legs, as if I were a zombie; which was what I really was to my mother, wasn’t I? A dead person, thrust back into being, but with little resemblance to the person I once was. It would have been easier for her if I’d just stayed in my grave.

“Don’t feel obliged,” I said before I shut the door.