At Length

Okay, I’ll tell you what happened but I can’t tell you what it means.

…

It was the first week of December. That day, I had run nine miles, across three canyons, in a dry and windy heat. Afterwards, as I drove up to our house, the leaves were still streaming from the laurel tree in the front yard. They covered the stamp of dead lawn in great orange wafts. I had to wade through them to get inside, which was when I sensed something was wrong.

First of all, the Christmas tree lights were on. We never left them on, for fear of fire. Also, the water was running in the kitchen. We never left it on, for fear of drought. I turned the tree off then went to the kitchen and there she was, my mother.

She was wearing a cream Ann Taylor-ish sweater and a long wool tartan skirt, which seemed formal for a Wednesday. Her hair was clipped short and she was looking at the few holiday cards people had sent us, which were up on the fridge. I shut the water off. She turned around.

“Your door was unlocked.” Her voice wasn’t like my mother’s. Still, I started shaking.

“No, it wasn’t. It never is.”

“And you’re the only one on the street who doesn’t keep up with the leaves.”

“They’re overwhelming.”

“I don’t get a hug?”

Our kitchen was tiny and the dirty breakfast dishes were piled on the counter. It was like a kitchen for a college student and I wished it was larger because I needed more time to think. I needed time to think because my mother was dead.

But I didn’t have time.

In just two steps, I was hugging her. At first it felt strange but then my arms were around  her and I sank into her so deeply I could feel the fat on her back and her soft chest pressed against mine, just like I remembered. Without thinking, I shoved my face between her shoulder and neck. She still smelled like sweat and brand new magazines and Estée Lauder’s White Linen.

She patted my back. I didn’t want to let go, but she pulled away. “Alright,” she said, “that’s enough. I don’t have all day.”

I looked at her. She was smaller and thinner around the face, but she was my mother.

“So,” she said in a cheerful voice, “what do you want to do?” She looked down at my dingy running sweats. “I hope you understand that I’m too old to run a marathon.”

To do? I had no idea what to do with my mother. I didn’t even know what to do with myself. This was why I needed a larger kitchen! But I couldn’t let her go. I looked around, desperate, saw the kettle. “We can have tea. Do you want some tea?”

“Earl Grey?”

“Of course.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “We’ll have tea, look at your tree, see if we can’t perk it up a bit.”                         

While I made the tea, my mother went to the living room and sat on the couch. I put the tea leaves in the kettle and boiled the water, all the while searching for a reasonable explanation for her presence. Part of me wondered if I was high. Did running nine miles make me crazy?

When she was alive, my mother loved tea with sugar and lemon. From the window over the sink, I could see one perfect teardrop of a lemon on the tree, but something wouldn’t let me open the back door. I was afraid that if I left the house, she might disappear and I would never see her again.

When I brought the tea tray out, she asked if I had lemon.

“Look,” I said, “I’ll get a lemon from the backyard, but you have to promise not to move.”

She made a face. “Why would I move? Your couch isn’t very comfy but I’m fine on it.” All of the soft pillows were piled behind her.

“You swear?”

“I swear.”

I ran outside to grab the lemon. I had to give it a hard yank. Then I ran back in. She hadn’t moved.

“Phew,” I said out loud. I cut the lemon in eighths and brought a few slices to her.

She squeezed some in her tea, then smelled the rind. “Gorgeous,” she said.

Gorgeous. The word didn’t seem right. I said, “I don’t remember you using that word.”

She froze. The air felt dry, measured only by the muted tock of an old clock on the mantel, the one that never told the right time.

I said, “What word would you have used?”

She said, “Sit down. Have some tea. Relax.”

My mother wouldn’t have used the word relax.

I felt a prick of fear. I said, “I have to use the restroom,” and left.

…

I looked in the mirror. My face was the same. The bathroom was the same. I ran a towel across the filthy sink and it looked a little better. The fact that I thought I was going insane was reassuring. Insane people didn’t fear that.

So who was she?

Last year I worked on a show called Martian Made about a team of scientists who take regular people, including a librarian named Halley St. Clair, to a privately-owned space station on Mars to harvest energy for Earth while also secretly building an exclusive utopia in case of Earth’s destruction. During the fifth episode, Halley is having second thoughts. She’s been on Mars for six months and desperately misses her young daughter, Matilda, and wonders if her decision to help save the planet was worth leaving her child. To ease her guilt, Halley makes a hologram of herself and sends it to Mattie. The girl opens the hologram on Christmas morning. It’s uncanny, as if her mother was in the room, a woman with weight and smell. Mattie smiles but then she stares at the hologram and starts to scream. Cut to Halley weeping on Mars. The gift has been a terrible mistake.

…

Her hair was different, the bangs cut like Betty Boop. They made her look more stylish. I wondered how old she was but kept quiet, which was my trick when I knew I was about to ruin something. I needed to get this right if I wanted to learn more about this person, my supposed mother.

“Well,” I said to her, “how have you been?”

She blew on her tea, then glanced at her watch, which was more like a bracelet, and said, “How have you been?”

I was trembling. This felt delicate. “Well,” I said, looking at the Christmas tree, “I have to admit I kind of hate Christmas trees.”

She looked up. “You do?”

“Especially here where it’s so hot. It’s such a false thing to do, to bring some woodland forest tree into our little house and put lights on it and pretend it’s cozy.”

“I see you don’t have many of the family ornaments.”

“I don’t mind candles and small things to decorate, but the tree feels silly. Especially in the desert. It actually makes me kind of sick.”

She shook her head a little, which felt familiar. “You always need everything to be authentic, but authentic to what?”

“I suppose you’re right. I wish I wasn’t like that.”

“We can’t really change these things about us, and maybe you don’t want to. Maybe you should just be idiosyncratic and get a succulent or a cactus and decorate that.”

“Max would hate that.” The minute I said his name, I felt pressure in my chest, along with a desperate need for her to stay, even though I didn’t even know who she was or why she was here. Would she love him? Would he make her disappear? For a moment it was fade-to-black and I could barely breathe. When I came to, my mother was still looking at the tree, possibly to save me embarrassment, and I resolved not to think about my child. If I was in a strange realm, it seemed that Max, or Emil, would break the spell. Thinking itself might break the spell. I resolved to not think.

She turned to me then smiled. “Did you look under the tree? There might be something for someone you know.”

I looked and saw that there was a package that had not been there that morning. It was extravagant  — five boxes, each one getting smaller, tied together with curled gift ribbon. The wrap was expensive — green fir trees set against a deep purple background. The ribbon was a lighter green. It was beautiful and exactly what I would have chosen if I was the kind of person who, like my mother, made big deals out of small things.

“Wow,” I said. She motioned for me to take it so I knelt under the tree and picked up the gift. There was heft to it. A store-bought holiday sticker had my name on it and after the “from” it read “Mama” in my mother’s correct and powerful cursive. There was even a candy cane tied on top, as though I was a child.

“Thank you,” I said. The moment was so still and I didn’t want it to end, even if she wasn’t my mother. It was hot inside and out, dusty Los Angeles heat, which was strange because of the Christmas tree. She was there in plaid wool, like we were late for church or headed to Nordstrom’s. The old clock ticktocked. She was looking at me and I wanted to cry again because I didn’t know what she was, but I felt the warmth of her, and it was different than heat.         

“Oh,” she said softly, when she saw my tears.

But the way she said oh made me feel strange. That’s not what she would have said, not at all. I wanted to stop crying. I thought about dead things. Bombed out buildings. World War 1 nurses, how they smelled death up close—

Then she said, in a way that was more like her, “Stop right this minute. You’re being ridiculous. It’s just a silly present.”

I stopped. I said, “I don’t have a Christmas present for you.”

She waved me off. “Oh, there’s time. You always get the best presents.”

My heart took off. Compliments were often spun from nothing, but my mother had had a way of pronouncing them like she was setting a full pitcher down on the table. When she said that I realized that I hadn’t trusted anybody’s opinion since my mother died. No wonder I felt myself getting dumber and uglier every year! But now, it seemed, she was back and would once again bring her own thoughtful judgement and clarity to my life.

The clock chimed five times which meant it was almost four. I had to get Max in an hour. Emil usually got him but he was working late. Then I would have to make dinner, give Max a bath, get him to bed, attempt some work— stop thinking! I looked at my mother in the microscopic glare of the sunlight. If she were my mother, she would be 80. This woman looked 60. She was an imposter. An actress. She shook her head.“Margaret,” she scolded. “Where did you go?”

Without thinking, I got off the floor and moved next to her on the couch. Without thinking, I started to touch her. In retrospect, I told myself that I was testing her — was this a hologram? a robot? — but I just wanted to feel her. I petted her soft upper arm. I petted the top of her head. Petting her felt so calming, like rubbing my own arm, like I was a mammal, or a baby. After a while she said, “What are you doing?”

“Well, oh, nothing,” I said. “Do you want more tea?”

“Oh sure,” she said, which is not something she would have said.

We sipped fresh tea and then I followed her around my small house while she looked critically at how I had arranged things.

She stood in front of a small framed painting of Joshua trees in the desert. It was a simple painting. The sky was plain blue, but just right, the rocks ochre and yellow. “I like this,” she said.

I nodded, pleased. “I picked that out for my husband’s birthday last year.”

“Oh!” She cried, looking in my closet. “This was my dress. I’ll bet you look lovely in it, even if you can’t fill it out.”

It was a ‘70s purple polyester dress covered in flowers. “I had it hemmed.”

She frowned. “You don’t do your own hemming?”  

In the bathroom, she wiped her finger across the counter and made a satisfied sound. She noticed I didn’t have many toiletries or make-up. “That’s fine,” she said. “You were always like that. One thing for one purpose. I guess that makes sense for you.”

In the small hallway, she grazed the book shelf. It was full of books about movies and art and screenplays. “There aren’t many of my books,” she said. I found a dog-eared copy of The Magus and opened the flap. She looked at her signature and the year, 1977, in her own perfect cursive.

I followed her into Max’s room, which was really just a large closet, and crammed with a tiny bed, a small dresser, and piles of idiotic stuffed animals with cute big eyes. She did not seem impressed and I started to feel nervous. Maybe this was a parenting intervention. Ever since Max was born, I’d dreamed of asking my mother how to be a mother, but now that she was in front of me, I felt hot and defensive.

“I know it’s small,” I said, “but he likes it.”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s at least cozy.”

“That stung. “You know, this is all we can afford.”

“I think you have a nice home.”

“Things are different now, Mom,” I said, my voice sharp. “Houses are more than a million dollars. What do you expect?”

She stiffened. “All I’m saying,” she said, “is that this might not be your forever home.”

“I knew you’d hate it.”

We stared at each other.  I could see a line of blonde-white roots across her scalp. Her teacup shook a little.

Then I collapsed. I didn’t want her to leave. I never wanted her to leave. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m just happy to see you. You’re right. This house is too small. It’s not our forever home.”

My mother shifted back to her usual posture. Sensing equilibrium, she smiled. “I think you’ve done lovely things here. This is a a great home for your family at this time.” Then she took a sip of tea with finality and formality.

At this time? Forever home? Lovely?

Who was this woman?

…

I should not have allowed her to go outside but she wanted to see the lemon tree. She mentioned specifically that she wanted to touch it and smell it, and she’d so recently been dead so we went outside.

She admired the lemon tree but was not impressed with the rest of the yard, which was, admittedly, a barren patch of dirt and and various sage plants in distress. Then she lit up.

“Is that yours?”

She was pointing at the ‘77 VW Bug parked in the drive. It was yellow with a beat-up black leather interior. Emil bought it off Craigslist when we thought we couldn’t get pregnant and now it barely started.

“I just love it,” my mother said, rubbing dust off the window to get a better look inside. She opened the passenger door. “You know, I had a boyfriend in England who had one.”

I stopped. This was the first detail about her life that she’d given me. “Was this the one you loved or the one who loved you?”

She eyed me. “Does it run?”

I was nervous. “It’s not smogged.”

“That’s so you,” she said, laughing, her eyes bright and, I thought, real.

…

She managed to get it started then drove like a teenager. I wondered if she remembered how to drive — but she waved me off and talked about places like Bob’s Big Boy while I tried to catalogue all the ways she was not like my mother: her nose was too big; her back too straight; her eyes too bright. But the more I thought of things that were wrong, the more I realized that I hadn’t remembered as many details about my mother as I thought I had, and the details I did remember didn’t account for her changing or growing older.

“Oh,” she said, as she rounded a tight corner, “I wish I’d just bitten the bullet and bought one of these!”

To “bite the bullet” was definitely a phrase my mother would have used. It was also a line I’d given Halley St. Clair. When the team had to decide whether or not to activate their emergency flight shield after they hit a debris storm off Phobos, Halley said, “We’ve gotta bite the bullet… and bite it…now!” as molten rocks rained down on them.

I thought I’d based Halley on Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died in the ’86 Challenger explosion, but now that I was with my mother again, I saw that Halley was based on her as well, or that there was something about Christa, some innate quality, that also reminded me of my mother. They shared an optimistic, can-do spirit that had always eluded me. A lot of women —teachers and librarians and primary care physicians — in the ‘80s and ‘90s had those qualities. On the day the Challenger was launched, these women expected us to be excited and proud. We were supposed to wave flags and believe we could do anything. But then, right after the explosion, we were supposed to forget it had ever happened. It was a mechanical error, we were told, a fluke, so keep believing.

Keep believing in what?

…

After driving towards the foothills, my mother decided she wanted to go to the grocery store. She said she missed cooking for me. I didn’t remember my mother ever cooking for me, specifically, but I was pleased.

At the store, my mother looked at every item like she was buying a bracelet at Tiffany’s. She made a face at the fish counter, pressing her finger into a package of salmon to check the spring. The bass was expensive. The tilapia looked “fishy.” But she raved over the lumpy raw shrimp and picked out a pound, shrimp-by-shrimp. She was going to make me a Louie salad. It was too early in the season to make it with crab, which is proper, she said, but she’d make do with shrimp. I started to cry: a Louie salad had been my mother’s favorite thing to eat.

“Stop it, Margaret,” my mother whispered. The old guy behind the counter was already pretending not to notice me.

After this, I followed my mother, who picked out lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, mayonnaise, and parsley. When it was our turn to check out, she stepped aside. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t have money.” She opened her purse and revealed a travel package of tissues, a small notebook, and a tube of mauve lipstick, the kind that matched her lips. She seemed proud of herself.

I gave the checker my card.

On the way out, my mother admired a polka-dot blouse in the window of the Humane Society thrift store next door.

We went in and looked at the blouse. It was twelve dollars. I wanted to buy it for her, but she didn’t think it was worth it. “Not for used,” she said.

Then we looked at other things in the store. She admired a pale green teapot with lavender violets. She turned it over. “Limoges,” she said.            

I didn’t tell her it was just like one of the many pieces of her beloved porcelain we donated after she died, along with most of the books and records and furniture and figurines.

Back at my house, we drove through the hills of leaves that had collected over the driveway. Though she didn’t say anything, I felt defensive. “Max likes to play in them,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said. “But yours is the only house on the street with leaves.”

That was a remarkably rude thing to say, but when I got out of the car and looking down the street I saw it was true.

…

We worked together in the kitchen, my mother swiftly reprimanding me when I stirred instead of whisked, diced instead of sliced. She was appalled I didn’t own a mandolin. I smiled. Just as a compliment from her felt so solid, sparkly bits of criticism like this felt light and intimate, like real sugar. Soon I forgot about everything but her chit-chat and the crisp, gorgeous salad that we ate in the backyard. It was delicious and a little boring, just like something my mother would have made. The finely-chopped parsley was what did it. Only my mother would understand the importance of parsley!

Just as the sky started to darken, she got up, smoothed her skirt, gathered all of the dishes into the large wooden salad bowl and told me she had to go.

“Bye, Mom,” I think I said.

“Bye, Love,” she’d said, which was something my mother never would have said but by then I didn’t care.

…

The next day, I made sure I was home at the same time but nothing happened.

By four, I knew she wasn’t coming and my body began to ache for her body, like I was a child. At five, I went to pick up Max, and held his little body close, but he wriggled away from me. By six, when I was grating cheese for quesadillas, my pain had become anger. Who had done this to me? Who had hired this out-of-work actress to hurt me? Was it Emil? Could he have arranged this? Could he have even imagined it? When he got home from set, I looked into his tired eyes and it didn’t seem possible.

After dinner, Emil put on a David Bowie record and started a bath for Max. He was desperate to make Max like cool songs. When he came into the kitchen later, he asked me how my project was going. I had been hired to write a treatment for a television series about a nurse during World War 1. The first draft was due just before the holidays but I was embarrassed by how much of a soap opera it had already become. I explained this to Emil and said, “I just thought I was better than that.”

He laughed, “I’m sure it’s fine. Just add blood.”       

In truth, I hadn’t written one word of the treatment. It had already gone to shit in my head.

“Okay,” I said, as I swept up the last of the crumbs on the counter, “What about this? One of the nurses, an American named Hannah, falls in love with a soldier who dies in her arms at the Somme. But then a year later, she sees him, or a simulacrum of him, during the spring offensives. Is she crazy or has he returned?”

He thought about it. “So it’s a ghost story now?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So it’s sci-fi?”

I escaped.

In the tub, I dumped a tidy pile of shampoo on Max’s head and scrubbed his scalp with my fingertips, kneading and scratching just-so to Bowie’s magical droning.

…       

When she didn’t come the next day, I paced the house. By then I was sanguine and able to lay bare the facts without judgement: a flesh-and-blood woman who claimed to be my mother arrived at my house. I drove her to the store then she made me a salad. The real question was not who this woman was but why this woman was in my kitchen and how did she get there.

I thought about Jorge, who had been my boss on Martian Made before it was cancelled. He was rich. He could have funded this entire operation. He could have hired a casting director to find my mother, a researcher to give her biographical basics, and hair and make-up to make her seem as close to the original as possible. Before we were cancelled, we’d outlined future seasons of the show, and imagined many scenarios that brought people back to life — AI, clones, robots. Maybe this was an improvisation, like how we’d troubleshoot dialogue. Or maybe this was some kind of gift, like from the show? I knew that Jorge would do a lot to try to make me happy, even if only for an afternoon. Sometimes we went to these trendy ecstatic dance classes together. They were silly, of course, but cathartic, and afterwards we’d get coffee and talk about things we hadn’t told other people. We’d even gone to an ayahuasca weekend in Yucca Valley. I told him that when my mom died, I was filled with anger. It was two-thirty in the morning. We were in a large fake French country-style kitchen. A few goddess-types ladled thick vegetable soup into goblets. Jorge lowered his voice and told me that when his husband died of cancer, only four months after the diagnosis, he went into shock. They had twin four-year-old girls. He didn’t want to be alone. I asked him if he’d been angry too. He said he was still angry, and I could see both of his arms turn blue.   

It was possible that I was Jorge’s guinea pig, that he was creating a whole scenario for me to be able to be with my mom again so that he could find out what it would take to hire someone to become his late husband.

I texted Jorge: How are things? Miss you three. x

He quickly responded. Miss you! Martinis soon? Or a hike? Or both?

If he had arranged for an actress to play my mother then he was also playing it pretty close, like so close maybe he didn’t do it. Like so close, maybe I was insane or my mother was alive. I texted back: Both!

…       

On Monday, there was a polite knock at the door. When I opened it, she smiled and quickly said, “Sorry I didn’t call first. I meant to give you some advance notice but time got away from me. So don’t worry, I won’t even look it if’s a mess!”

It was not a mess. I had been cleaning the house every morning just in case she came back. “No,” I said to her. “I’m on a cleaning streak.” I pointed out towards the front yard, where there was only the thinnest layer of leaves on the ground. “Look.”

“I saw that,” she said. “I barely recognized your house it looked so nice.”

I let the insult hang around. She seemed proud of it in a way that did not seem like my mother.

That day, she wore a white blouse and a red sweater vest under a light wool blazer. Her jeans were like the ones I remembered her wearing, the control tops she used to get at Macy’s. But there was something different about her. She was breezy and breathless, like some director’s idea of a secondary character in a screwball comedy. My mother’s voice was rich and demanded attention. This woman’s voice was sharp and begged for it. She certainly wasn’t my mother, but an actress who had studied the part. I wasn’t about to get sucked in again. I said, “How did your father die?”

She sighed, as though she expected this. “Vodka.”

That was true. “When did Eddie disappear?”

“He came back. I’ll sit if you don’t mind.”

“I know that. When did he go away?”

“You were a senior. It was a tough time.” She was thinking out loud. “He missed your graduation.”

“What’s your favorite movie?”

“Alright,” she said. “This is very rude, you know.”  

I kept going— “What was your favorite thing to eat for breakfast? Why did you cry in San Francisco that one time?”

“Please,” she said, “I get it, but it’s obnoxious.” She looked up at me, her eyes the color of icy root beer, like my mother’s. “How can you expect me to remember everything the way you remember it? How do you expect me to care more about the things you cared about than what I cared about? And did you ever stop to think that what I told you might not have been the truth? That maybe I watered stuff down because you were a child? Don’t you do this with your own child? Do you even tell me the truth?”

This information was stunning but I couldn’t stop. “What did Eddie call me, when I was little? What did you used to call me? When I was little?’”

She was still annoyed. “He called you Uglyface.” She paused then said, softly, “I called you Emmie. You’re my Emmie.”

Right.

I felt an unlocking. She came in gently, her hand on my arm. “It’s okay,” she said as I shuffled backwards and sat on the couch next to her. “There’s the rub,” she whispered. “This is why we can’t have it all.”

When my mother died, it seemed sudden, but that was a lie. For three years, she’d kept her illness, and its symptoms, a secret.

Sitting on the couch, she smiled at me. “Better?” Her voice was wistful, like she was very wise and I was a small child. I nodded. This version of my mother frightened me a little. Still, I let her get close. I took in long draughts of her.

“There you are,” she said. “There you are.” I fell deeper into her soft, damp blazer.

After a while, she handed me another gift. This one was thin and rectangular, the length of my forearm. This time it was wrapped with shiny red paper and green ribbon. “For your tree,” she said.

I dutifully knelt down and put the gift under the tree next to the first one then she asked if we could go on another drive.

…

A few days later, my mother brought a tiny gift — no larger than my index finger — finely wrapped with gold foil paper and a green ribbon. This time she wore bifocals. She looked like a Gloria Steinem acolyte. “Sorry,” she said, “but I lost a contact.” My mother had not worn contacts.

We drove to a small French cafe and sat close to each other and ordered the same thing, which was a pleasant surprise. When I wasn’t with my mother, I imagined all of the questions I would ask her but while we were together eating hearts of palm salad, I felt so embedded in the present that I couldn’t think of a single thing to ask her. It was as sweet and hypnotic as sleeping in on a Saturday morning while life buzzed outside your window.

…

I tried to catch Ed on his evening commute, but he was with the kids at a playground. He answered like he always did: “I’ve only got a minute.”

“Hey. Hi.”

“I’ve only got a minute.’

“Weird question but have you ever, I don’t know, seen Mom?”

There was a pause and a rustling sound. Then I heard him yell. “Get out of there! Now! Sorry,” he said to me. “Gwen has strep. What? See her? Yeah, all the time.”

“You do?”

“Yeah I have those dreams, you know, where I have to choose between you and her. They’re really annoying.”

“You do?”

“I told you about them. You don’t listen. It’s always this epic thing, like there’s a flood or a terrorist thing. I always have to save somebody’s life, you or her. I have to choose. It’s horrible.”

“But like, have you seen her in person?”

“You mean someone who looks like her?”

“Sort of.”

There was silence on his end. I didn’t know if he was worried about me or had lost a child. Then he said, “You still there?”

“Yeah.”

He shouted, “No! Stop that!” I moved the phone from my ear. He was talking to one of the kids. He said, “I’m talking to your aunt. Yes, she will buy you a present. Yes, nothing homemade.” There was a pause. I put the phone back to my ear. He said, “You’re coming for Christmas, right? The kids ask about Max every day.”

“Yes.”

“Great. But don’t bring weird presents, and please don’t bring Mom haha.”

“I just drove her to the airport. She’ll arrive at your place in two hours.”

“Cool! Can’t wait for her to judge everything about me.”

“Eddie,” I said, mimicking her voice, “I love what you tried to do with the house. I think it’s so positive you let the kids behave however they want. Of course you don’t take the paper.”

There was a hole of silence on his end. “Dude that was too good.” He paused then said, “But for real, I talk to her.”

“Yeah?”

“But I don’t see her when I talk to her, you know?”

“No, I’ve never talked to her before.”

“Before?” Then the sound got muffled again. “I gotta go. Bye.”

When he hung up, I kept my ear to the phone, which is something I did when I felt that something went wrong and I needed to figure it out. I stood that way for a while until I realized that I’d been mocking my mother’s new voice, not my mother’s real voice, which I didn’t even remember anymore.

Three hours later, Eddie called me back and said that he only had a minute but that he had seen her in the years after she died. He’d seen her walking up Geary. He’d seen her watching him from a bench while he played basketball with his sober buddies. “Or,” he mumbled, “I saw women that looked like her that I really wanted to be her.”

He waited for me to respond with something meaningful about myself.

“Okay, thanks for telling me,” I said.

“That’s it? This is the part of the conversation, M, when you share.”

I said, “Sorry.”

…

There was an online world of websites and forums full of people who claimed to see ghosts. Most people on the forums wrote about power and meaning and symbolism. But there was a different group that was far more interesting. These people did not care if you believed them. These people explained the reasons why a ghost would visit you and then gave clear and specific advice about how to ask your ghost what it wants and what you can do to help your ghost. If you didn’t follow these steps, these people wrote, you were screwed.

My mother died when I was twenty-three and I was now forty-three. I had lived a whole person’s life since she died. What did she want? What had I done wrong?

Maybe my mother was back because I had chosen to forget her. Maybe she wanted a place in my life, and in Max’s life. Maybe she felt I’d cheated her by getting over her without mourning her, whatever mourning meant, technically.

…

I stood in front of a painting of heavy, dark, dense, deciduous, twisting trees. Dutch Master trees. The kinds of trees that warned you not to enter the forest. This painting made me nervous because it reminded me of myself, my own mind, each tree, each branch, a thread of thought that I’d prefer to cut off.

My mother was across the gallery. That day, I was prepared with a list of things to ask her so that I could find out what she wanted from me — but hadn’t found the chance. She stared at a still life painting of a bouquet of flowers, and I suddenly remembered that she had collected prints of famous still life paintings and tacked them up in her bedroom. Hadn’t she also been a painter, before I was born?

“Look at that,” she said as I joined her. “It’s from the 17th century. Nosegay on a Marble Plinth.”

The deep black background gave the painting a rich, moody feeling, and the detailed, realistic-looking flowers gave it a sense of hyper-life, and even smell, a dusky, bitter smell. The artist, a Dutch woman named Rachel, had saved the brightest white paint to highlight the snapped branches. She’d also painted delicate flower-like insects feasting on the flowers, their antennae sipping the last of the sugar.

My mother eyed me. “It’s like a polaroid, like we’re right there. What do you think?”

I moved closer to her. We looked at the painting together, until I felt something sinister about the beauty and the detail of the painting. By its nature, a bouquet was a dead thing, and I sensed that Rachel must have taken a perverse pleasure in painting something so overripe and so close to collapse.

I said, “It’s beautiful,” but that was a lie. What I wanted to say was: Do you think you meant to tell me about yourself, if you’d lived, and I’d grown older?

But I was afraid the answer would have been no.

When we left, my mother passed the painting of trees. She studied it for a moment then said, “This one reminds me of you.”

Ashamed, I looked at it again. Losing my mother had felt like being lost in the middle of a dark forest just like that, and for the longest time I thought that being in the middle of that forest, that old numb feeling, was grief. But it was dawning on me that numbness was not grief. The numbness was how it felt when you avoided grief.

These thoughts felt radical. I put my arm around her.  I said, “I don’t think I like landscapes.”

She said, “Yes, you do.”

I squeezed and felt the softness of her arm, and I thought about how easily our bodies fit into the bodies of the people we loved, or needed, and how that closeness could trick us into thinking we were understood.

…

It took a while longer to find people online who claimed to see dead people as actual living people. These people were gut-punched and embarrassed. Nobody really believed these people, and they had no advice.

…

The next time she came over, she said she felt chilly so she watched me rake the front yard from inside the living room. I raked every day now. I also deep-cleaned the house and bought flowers for the table, as though my messiness had been a twenty-year aberration, the coping mechanism whereby I planted layers of filth between myself and the world, layers so dense nobody would ever expect me to find my way out.

When I came back inside, we sat on the couch and admired the tree. There was a dusky silence. I was nervous. Winter holidays were only a week away and I was afraid that if I left, my mother would leave too and never come back and I’d never know why she was there. Perhaps, in that moment, I should have said, “What are you here for?”

But I didn’t. I was too afraid of breaking the spell. Suddenly my mother straightened up and pulled her lavender shawl up to her neck. She said “One is missing.”

I followed her gaze under the tree.

She said, “One gift is missing.” Her voice was nervous.

I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the tree. It was true; the last gift she’d given me was missing. “I bet Max took it.”

“He would just take a gift? That did not belong to him?”

I was still. It was a horrible situation. I was ashamed of Max, and of my mother too.

“Well,” she said, “it’s fine, of course, he’s just a child.”

I looked up at her, grateful. She smiled too, and it felt real. Then I asked if she had a pair of running shoes. If she did, I could take her up in the foothills the next time she came over. I could show her my favorite trail. 

She hesitated. This was the first time I’d planned for her return. Maybe that was not how this worked? Or maybe she just didn’t have running shoes? My mother’s idea of nature was a garden party. Her only tennis shoes had been Keds.

“Look at that,” she said, studying her bracelet watch. She stood up, smoothed her pants.

I jumped up. “You’re not leaving?”

“It’s late,” she said and walked out the door.

Through the picture window, I watched her go. When she was halfway up the block, I looked down and saw that she’d left her purse.

…

I’ll warn you now: this is not a mystery or a thriller. I want to make sure you don’t get excited, or expect too much.

…

My mother walked north for two blocks then headed west. Past a coffee shop, a lamp store, and a cobbler, I followed her. Past strollers and shopping carts, I followed her.

Past apartment buildings made to look like ships and apartment buildings made to look like Hawaiian motels, I followed her.

I followed her until the sky was gold and green, illuminated by an army of beautiful aerosol pollutants. I followed her until it got dark. My phone buzzed. It was Max’s school. It was after six. I sped up.

“Mom,” I said.

She didn’t turn around. She was on the phone.

“Mom!” I shouted louder. Then I ran to catch up with her.

She was shocked to see me, and immediately put the phone behind her back. I heard a male voice on the other end.

“Here,” I said, holding her purse out.

“Oh, how silly of me,” she said, taking it. Then she turned around and kept walking.

I watched her leave, desperate, my tears coming. Her visits had taken on an unspoken set of rules and though I didn’t understand these rules, I knew that I had broken them by following her. I figured that was the last time I would see her, and that I had wasted it, just like I had when she was alive.

…

Ms. Veronica said it was fine that I was late, especially because I’d sprained my ankle, but to please not do it again. I nodded solemnly and pretended to limp over to Max, who was happily drawing.

Ms. Veronica explained it was a get well card for me. Max handed me the drawing. The front of the card read “MAMA.” Inside, he’d drawn a stick figure of me with a twisted foot.

On the way home. I checked a voicemail from Ed. He said he wasn’t mad at me anymore and when he had those epic dreams, the ones where he had to choose whether to save mom or me, she was always telling him to save me.

…       

Emil wondered if everything would fit in the Jeep. I stared at him so long he had to remind me we were leaving in two days to go up north to Ed’s for the holidays.

That night, after I put Max to bed, I poured a jar full of red wine and started working on the treatment about the World War I series. Since I hadn’t finalized anything yet, I sorted through the beats of the show as a ghost story, comforted by the rules and conventions that, if I leaned into them, and only twisted them just so, would ultimately serve me.

Emil went to sleep at midnight. I said I’d be right there but instead found myself looking under Max’s bed for wadded-up wrapping paper. It was there, along with the tiny, empty box. Had it contained anything at all? Then I saw something near the door: a small gold pin embellished with a porcelain rose.

I went into the living room and opened all of the gifts. There was a pewter spoon with a fox’s face carved into the handle and a lime green t-shirt she used to wear and a postcard of Cézanne’s Still Life with Skull, and a few other small and useless things I remembered she’d had. I laid them across the coffee table but they didn’t mean anything to me, except that she’d had them. I was angry. I was sick of clues and secrets. I wanted something real.

It was four when I finally fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, ashamed and very Uglyface at seven, Max was looking up my nostrils at a large booger I could feel when I took a breath.

…

The next day, I was surprised to see her. She wore navy Keds and looked sweetly maternal in her control-top jeans, but by the way she eyed me I could tell something had shifted. Her eyes were brighter, and her smile was too-large.

The bug started on her third try. I turned on the oldies station and told her to head north to get to the hiking trail but she went south driving very, very fast.

I said, “Where are we going?”

She didn’t answer. Then we were speeding down side streets. I looked at the odometer even though I knew it didn’t work. My heart was pounding. That’s how I knew she was angry.

I looked ahead and tried to slow my breath. Hadn’t I felt my heart stop a beat every time she came to the door? Within minutes, we reached Sunset Boulevard. She turned right to head west. I said, “Where are we going?”

This time, when she glanced at me and shrugged, I saw her root beer eyes. It could still be her, I thought. It could still be my mother, but a mother I didn’t know. I imagined we were inside 1977, the year this car was built, the year she did not yet have children, the year she was still a painter, and it felt wild.

We sped down Sunset, cutting off cars, changing lanes. The car was hot and smelled like gas so she rolled her window down and kept driving until a van moved into the lane and she had to put the brakes on so suddenly my head hit the dashboard.

…

In the rearview mirror, I saw a red mark the shape of a quarter on my forehead. I pressed down on it.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”        

I nodded. I could still hear the long squeal of the bug’s shitty brakes coming to a stop millimeters from a U-Haul logo. I said, “It’s okay. I’m okay.” I wondered if I was in shock. “Uptown Girl” played on the radio. I thought, What a dumb song. 

She said, “What a dumb song.”

I must have laughed because she looked relieved. “Okay,” she said, “where do you want to go? I’ll take you anywhere,” and she gave me her normal smile, the harried one, the formal one, the one I recognized, and I was so grateful to have her back.

…

When we got to the beach, the sun was going down and the sky, coral and gold, was alive in a sinister way, like a carnival. We walked along the beach path avoiding skateboarders and bicyclists. She seemed happy. I remember coming here with her once when I was unhappy in college.

A couple walked nearby, a young woman with a shock of white hair and her partner, who wore skintight pastel leggings that made her butt look like a nice bowl of lilac pudding. When they were in front of us, the first woman squeezed her lover’s hand. An old man in bike shorts with long arms was roller-blading, his strides like a whale moving through water.

When it grew dark, we found a free bench. I inched closer to my mother, felt the warm, wet heft of her.

I asked,“Have we done this before?”

“Maybe,” she said, and I could sense her thinking. “When I visited you in college.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

She put her arm around me. It barely fit. I put my head on her shoulder, on her soft cotton sweater. The fresh, business-like scent of White Linen had faded and what was underneath was sour and complex but that was fine. The sun was setting. I closed my eyes. I did not know her but I remembered the animal way I fit into her body when I was a child, the way we curled up on the couch and watched violent detective shows. I remembered she was always soft and clean and I used to stab her fleshy brown moles with my finger until she begged me to stop. Then I thought about Max, who crawled into my bed, and we pretended to be bears or wolves, mammals in our filthy den, humming and nuzzling. The threads between us were so strong, so sticky. Nothing mattered — no words or secrets or stories —  just the smashed up intimacy that was, for better or worse, all we could ever hope for. One time I woke up and Max was looking into my eyes and told me my breath stunk more bad than anything he’d ever smelled in his whole life, and that he wanted to breath it one more time, and I smiled because that’s how close we were, and that’s as close as we’d ever be to anyone.

…

It was late when I woke up. The breeze was crisp and marine, and I was cold because she was gone. I sat upright, looked around. The path was empty. She’d left the car keys next to me.

…

I drove home on the freeway and parked in the leaves. When I got inside, I took my sneakers off and went into my bedroom. You, Max, were sleeping in there with Emil, your deep, sleeping breaths like leaves always falling. I got in bed and dug in deep.