In the end, a proxy’s job isn’t deception so much as delay, like leaving a body-shaped pillow in bed before a prison break. The goal is to buy enough time before you’re found （through facial recognition or some other sleuthing） that you can rightly claim: I’m not that person anymore. She doesn’t exist.
Proxies succeed because people want to believe. Even as our mother’s proxy deflects and circumvents us, some part of us longs to think that we’ve dreamed her disappearance; that we’ll throw out some dates and she’ll pick one and we’ll drive to a restaurant we all used to love and there she’ll be, waiting for us: our magical, beautiful mother.
3
Our father must have had a part in our mother’s decision to resume her anthropology studies, for her return to graduate school required that he pay our living expenses and pick us up from school three afternoons a week. We were ten and eleven. Embarrassed by his showy cars, we asked him to meet us down the street.
You’re ashamed of your old man?
The cars.
He next appeared in a faded Plymouth Fury, the first car he’d ever owned. Our father never abandoned a car. The Plymouth was burgundy and had a convertible top that we always begged him to put down.
One day he drove us to his office, roaring along the highway so our hair was matted from the wind when we arrived. In the lobby, our father put an arm around each of us and said to everyone we passed, My daughters, Lana and Melora. These are my daughters. He seemed to love saying the words. My youngest daughters, Lana and Melora, aren’t they gorgeous? And tough!
We rode an elevator to the very top: a sun-soaked office that overlooked the low, scuffed city and gray sea twinkling like static. It was only the tenth floor, but we had never been inside a tall building. We had never flown in an airplane. The glass went all the way to the floor.
Could the window break?
Hasn’t yet.
The walls were covered with gold and silver record albums inside frames.
Can we play those?
They’re not real, they’re trophies.
You won a lot of trophies!
Everywhere we looked were pictures of our father with musicians: at concerts, in recording studios, at parties. His age varied, the surfer’s shag retracting into stringiness, but he was always wearing shorts, always in motion. That was why he wore shorts, we realized—to move freely. Standing in that office, we recognized a link between our father’s restless, incessant motion and the trophies on his walls. One had produced the others.
* * *
Rolph was the only one of our half siblings that our mother ever asked about. “That sweet boy,” she called him, with a catch in her voice that perplexed us. Was it sympathy? Guilt? We found nothing sympathetic about Rolph; we feared him. He and Charlie were full siblings but nothing alike; where Charlie was easygoing and devoted to our father, Rolph’s strident black eyebrows telegraphed his perpetual outrage. He shared our father’s love of cars and arrived at the house with a shriek of tires and a hawking up of gravel that sometimes sprayed the windows. According to Roxy, Rolph raced cars in the desert, which our father had forbidden.
Rolph rarely looked at us directly. His gaze would wander into our vicinity, then swerve away as if from something painful.
Once, as we waited outside our father’s house to go home after swimming, we heard anguished cries coming from his fleet of cars. Thinking there might be a hurt animal, we crept among the cars to look. We discovered Rolph hunched in a backseat with the windows rolled up, sobbing with such hopeless abandon that he’d fogged the glass. Astounded, we stood watching him, and then Rolph caught sight of us through the window and went still. His face looked pale and tender, like a little boy’s. Years later, after his suicide, we would return again and again to that face through the car window, his misery and surprise. We gazed at Rolph and he watched us back: three sentient life-forms observing one another as if through aquarium glass.