My bedroom was a wreck. I had to quash the sudden sense of betrayal. It wasn’t like my mother had any obligation to keep my bedroom intact, with its outdated Popples pillowcase, my Rubik’s Cube one spin from being solved, the stack of ratty thirdhand textbooks from my undergrad courses. But I hadn’t expected her to tear the room apart. My mattress bare and sagging against a wall, my dresser pushed aside haphazardly. Strangest of all, the books and the papers. My whole collection, I realized. Scattered all over the floor, a chaotic layer of Homestead headlines and titles and photos. The entire fucking timeline of research that I had painstakingly put together on my own, now rooted from the top shelf of my closet and spread everywhere, some of the pages ripped, some with big squares cut out. My gaze landed on a photo of me and my mom, taken when I was a toddler. Our heads had been sliced out, replaced by a bare rectangle that showed the ugly green carpet pushing through.
I left my bedroom with my heart hammering. “What the hell?” I said, and it kept repeating. What the hell, what the hell. A mantra blaring through my head in the eerie silence. Somebody had been going through my things. Digging up the Homestead.
Moving on the balls of my feet, like someone would overhear, I made my way up the narrow staircase. In my mother’s small, angled bedroom, the feeling of weirdness grew even stronger, dizzying. My mother had been tidy. Not a neat freak—neither of us were—but I’d never seen this level of chaos. Books and notebooks and papers scattered everywhere. A half-full coffee cup growing lily pads of mold.
My mother hadn’t taken many clothes, wherever she’d gone. Most of her blouses and pants had been kicked to the floor of the closet in ungainly heaps. In the bathroom, her hairbrush was curled through with dark brown strands that matched mine, but threaded with gray. A preview of what my own follicles would do in another twenty-three years. The jar of coconut oil she used as moisturizer sitting half-open, releasing its warm, nutty smell. Her smell. But the trash can was overflowing, and the shower curtain was removed, and the grout was darkened into stark outlines between the tiles.
I breathed in, out, shut my eyes. I’d find her. Our DNA was identical. Our heartbeats once synced up. Our menstrual cycles, too, much to my adolescent embarrassment. Maybe our mindsets would finally match as well.
My eyes landed on the clock, and I hesitated. The clock was as big as a dinner plate and broken, a cheap plastic thing perpetually stuck at a quarter past four. I started toward it, stopped. It couldn’t be that easy—
I lifted it off the wall. My mother used to stash things inside the clock’s interior. A hiding spot I’d discovered when I’d peeked inside to see if I could replace the batteries, back in May of ’82. That time, I’d discovered the letter inviting us to the Homestead reunion, already a month late, our chance long gone. Later, in sixth grade, I’d retrieved a packet of fruit-flavored Nicorette pellets, even though I’d never once seen my mother with a cigarette.
The last time she’d hidden anything inside the clock, I was in seventh grade, maybe eighth. I’d retrieved a letter. Urgent loops of handwriting. Like a love letter—I think about you all the time—but devolving into sudden fury—You can’t ignore me forever. The only signature a letter T. My mother had never dated, barely even had friends, so it must’ve come from one of our stalkers, those lonely strangers who loved us and hated us with the same unearned intimacy. Why had she kept it? Fascinated, I reread the letter again and again until my mother caught me one night, crouched in front of the disemboweled clock. She tore up the letter without a word, flushing the torn confetti down the toilet. Since then, she’d stopped hiding anything where I could find it. And I’d searched everywhere. Even pulled out a floorboard looking for secret crawl spaces.
My mother’s refusal to acknowledge our past had chafed between us for years. Our twin resentments, forever at odds. She hated my constant need to know-know-know. I hated that she couldn’t embrace the world-changing history that she’d—we’d—been part of. The letters from Bellanger were my only direct lifeline to the Homestead, and sometimes I wondered what I’d have done without them. With only my mother in my life, would I have forgotten that I was a scientific milestone in the flesh? My own memories were fading around the edges, a little fuzzier every time I handled them. I couldn’t even get a pure image of Bellanger’s face in my mind anymore. Just a vague sense of height and warmth, leaning over me.
I stared down at the clock now. Why not? Using the tip of the car key, I maneuvered the screws out of the flimsy plastic and then lifted the backing away. My heart jumped, that old thrill of illicit discovery. A smallish marble-cover composition notebook had been tucked next to the battery compartment. Bingo.