We’re a few hours in when something starts to go wrong with the epidural. Not all at once, but a creeping awareness of sensation starts to tug at my attention as I lie there and look at the trees outside, and read, and make small talk with my husband.

At first, I ignore it. But then I start to get nervous.

“I can wiggle my left toes,” I say, not really to anyone. Observationally.

The amygdala assigns emotional significance to clutter I can’t throw away. To souvenirs and books throughout our house. To clawhammers, backpacks, yard signs we hang on pegboards. To ordinary places we visit again and again. This precious tiny thing deep inside my head also helps form shiny new memories. I want to hold on to my amygdala for a long time. Keep it healthy and functioning. Feed it. Maintain it. That sort of thing.

The basement is filled with junk and gems. I promised myself no space of mine would ever get this packed, but even in her delirium, Mom has conquered. Her gaze was voracious, her taste, sweeping. She was a champion of designers. She was a one-woman environmental disaster, with a carbon footprint as big as a mall.

Maybe the woman holding the child was way too close to the edge of the pier. Way too close for way too long. Maybe that is what the shopkeeper told the Vancouver police when she phoned in her response to the Amber Alert. Maybe the ginger-haired artist who owned the Rare Button Shoppe—herself the mother of a curly-headed toddler—feared for the safety of the child on the pier.

Maybe you saw her serving champagne on a one-for-you, one-for-me basis at a big nun party, shooting corks for children to catch. Later, you’d bond that one summer week watching science fiction movies in the novitiate basement. You’d be thrilled when she came to live in your same convent. It would make sense, the life-sized poster of Spock in her bedroom, just down the hall from yours.

She cracked open one late afternoon. Just like a porcelain doll falling off a shelf. Like the dolls she collected, displayed, and cherished. She shattered in her mind and exploded on to our beings. Shards of her screaming hit our small ears and pierced our hearts. We were her children. She was our mother and then she was not.

Somewhere in a cardboard box in our basement lies a cassette tape of me at three years old being coaxed by my mother to sing into a tape recorder. “Canta,” she says.” I must be fascinated by the turning cassette reels, because I ignore her request and say, “Está andando.” “Si, está andando. Canta.” A few seconds pass during which I am either reaching for buttons or fiddling with the tape case, because my mother starts to get mildly frustrated.

Do you even remember me? Or was I nothing to you, a little conquest, a trifling diversion that for one brief evening made you feel powerful? Do you know how hard it has been for me to understand what happened that night? To remember how naïve I was, even at twenty-five, and not feel ashamed? To stop blaming myself for getting drunk on a few cups of sake, and for being unable to shove your six-foot-plus body off of me? Did you plan it, or was it merely a crime of opportunity, your secret safe because I was in town for only a few days?

I think about becoming a dead girl, not because I want to be one, but because of how possible it is for me, out in public, to become one. I’ve read the news, the stories, watched the true crime documentaries and listened to the podcasts. In Youtube videos, a beautiful woman applies makeup while detailing another’s gruesome murder. I walk through the aisles of the store, filling my cart and avoiding eye contact with men I don’t know, wondering how many of their mouths have watered at the thought of wringing my neck.

I winced, not because it was time, but because the nurse had used my full name, a name only my mom still called me. As the nurse announced it I briefly felt as though I was a teenager being called to wash dishes or explain a grade on my report card. But my mom was miles away now, not there to micromanage me as I made a big decision for myself.

Years ago when I went to a hammam in Istanbul I didn’t bring a bathing suit. Thinking I was being culturally sensitive or some anthro major nonsense, I figured we would go naked. But the ladies at the public bath the Turkish woman who was marrying my American friend took us to were all wearing bikinis or one pieces. I spent the afternoon cringing in my white granny underwear, a towel awkwardly draped over my chest.

“Do you work?” the man prompts as he pushes his little girl in the swing adjacent to my son, completely oblivious to my visceral reaction.

The swing set yells my fury while I think of a response. Squeal, squeal! My sleep-deprived brain is now fully awake.

Barbie. Everyone’s favorite (or favorite-to-loathe) doll-slash-role model-slash-best friend-slash-impossible ideal-slash-icon of cultural demise. Even though I’ve always harbored a fairly incurious attitude toward the Barbie-as-perfection phenomenon, I nevertheless loved playing with my inanimate, buxom, rubbery friends. I didn’t compare myself to them, and they didn’t dictate my self worth. They were just one population in an only child’s universe of dessert-scented dolls, bathtub mermaids, and little plastic people who lived in a furnished tree.

I’m still sitting in this car going nowhere, staring at the side of our house with its mildew stains branching across the siding because we’re overdue for a power wash. The car was a splurge purchase several years ago. A Volvo with peanut butter leather interior which, every time I run my hand over, brings me all the way back to an elementary school friend, whose parents drove a similar car, had oriental rugs, and a dog too designer for our cocker spaniel neighborhood. A time when I thought it might be possible to live forever, or at least frozen in time like Harrison Ford in Star Wars, to be thawed out later. The hero never really dies. 

We broke up on a Thursday in a foreign country where I only spoke a disjointed version of the language. In a charming little restaurant, he sat across the table from me, reached for my hand, told me he loved me, but…I guess the rest doesn’t really matter. He was back on the dating apps two days later. It’s such a disorienting thing to feel your entire world implode, to watch dreams of a life together disappear into thin air. I questioned if they had ever been within reach at all. They weren’t, but I didn’t know that yet.

Cold. Alone. Dead. These were the few words that registered among the many spoken to me on that horrific afternoon when they came to tell me my son was gone. Fentanyl was added to the mix over the coming hours.

“Who? What? How?” repeated over and over again was all I could muster in response.

“We don’t know,” was their answer.

My living, breathing nightmare had only just begun.

My toddler is standing next to my bed. Again. I swing my legs out of bed. “Lie down,” I whisper. He rushes back to his makeshift mattress on the floor, lies down, and waits for me to tuck the blankets around him. Again. At least he’s not screaming at me about this routine anymore. We’ve done this back-and-forth battle two nights in a row now. If I don’t give in, the worst should be behind us. I just hope my husband doesn’t sabotage all my efforts by allowing him to crawl into his side of the bed. Since I’m awake I might as well write about it.

There are people who have this rare gift. They may be charming and intelligent, but that's not what will make you fall for them. They will look at you with adoring puppy eyes across the table, oblivious to the rest of the dinner guests. They will deliver prideful this-hot-girl-is-my-lover looks when you're out together. They will make you think every crazy-in-love song ever written is about the two of you, you just used to think it was some soapy wordplay because you'd never felt like this before.

Who would have thought we’d be back here again? Me, blinded by your headlamp, white-knuckling a tooth-shaped stress toy with your name and number printed on it. You, on your swivel stool, tapping your running shoes to the eighties soft rock that seeps through the walls like the smell of the salmon your assistant reheated for lunch.

It was supposed to be a fun weekend. Just a quick overnight from Oakland to Los Angeles. A visit with Joe’s family that would double as a celebration of my forty-first birthday. My boys, Max and Leo, then seven and four, would be with their dad for the weekend. Things were still a little iffy on their dad’s end, with only six months sobriety under his belt, but they’d all be at his parents’ home. The boys would be safe under their grandparents’ watch.