I could have groveled, cried, distracted him. Instead I laughed harder. “You really read my journal? What are we, in high school? Did you think I was cheating on you?”

“I don’t know what to think. Why don’t you tell me what to think? Better yet, tell me what you’re thinking because I sure as shit can’t read your mind. All of this, all of this…it’s like I don’t know anything real about you.”

    What was I thinking? I was thinking that I had done it again, ruined everything. I was thinking that I could never shake my ghosts, never, never. There they were in every word I wrote, in every lab, in every relationship.

“You’re fucked up, you know that?” Raymond said, and I didn’t answer. “You’re fucking crazy.” He threw my journal across the room, and I watched it fly open. I watched Raymond grab his keys and his wallet, his jacket, a heavy, unnecessary thing in that Peninsula sun. He collected every trace of himself and then he left.

* * *

—

“I really appreciate what you’re doing, Katherine, but everything’s fine. I’m fine and my mom is too.”

Katherine was a fast eater. She had cleaned her plate long before I reached the last segments of my roll, and we had spent the last few minutes in silence as I chewed slowly, deliberately.

“Gifty, there’s no game here. There’s no trick. I’m not trying to treat you or psychoanalyze you or get you to talk about God or your family or whatever. I’m just here strictly as a friend. One friend taking another friend to lunch. That’s it.”

I nodded. Under the table, I pinched the skin between my thumb and forefinger. What would it look like, to believe her? What would it take?

54

I left lunch and decided to give myself the rest of the day off. My mother hadn’t left the house or the bed since the day she came to visit me in the lab, but still, it made me hopeful that she was making progress. Maybe I could convince her to take a trip to Half Moon Bay with me.

I drove back to my apartment with the radio off and the windows down. My date with Han was coming up that weekend and I was nervous about it, playing over and over again in my head the possible ways it could go. If things went poorly, it might be just the thing I needed to convince me to graduate, leave the lab, if only to avoid seeing him every day. If things went well, well, who knew?

I turned into my complex. Someone had parked in my designated spot, and so I parked in someone else’s, becoming a part of the problem.

“Ma,” I called as I entered my apartment. “How would you like to see the Pacific Ocean?” I set my bag down in the entryway. I took my shoes off. I didn’t expect a response, so I wasn’t surprised to be greeted by silence. I poked my head into the bedroom, and she wasn’t there.

When I was a child, I had this sense of confidence, this assuredness that the things that I felt were real and important, that the world made sense according to divine logic. I loved God, my brother, and my mother, in that order. When I lost my brother, poof went the other two. God was gone in an instant, but my mother became a mirage, an image formed by refracted light. I moved toward her and toward her, but she never moved toward me. She was never there. The day I came home from school and couldn’t find her felt like the thirty-ninth day in the desert, the thirty-ninth day without water. I didn’t think I’d be able to survive another.

    “Never again,” my mother said, but I didn’t believe her. Without meaning to or planning to, I’d spent seventeen years waiting for the fortieth day. Here it was.

“Ma?” I yelled. It was a small apartment. From the middle of the living room you could see almost everything there was to see. You could see she wasn’t there. I raced to the bathroom, the only room with a closed door, but she wasn’t there either.

“Ma?” I ran outside, down the stairwell, across the pristine lawns, the parking lot with all its mis-parked cars, the sidewalks sparkling with silicon carbide. “Ma!”

I stopped short of a fire hydrant and scanned the complex. I didn’t even know where to begin looking. I pulled out my phone and called Katherine.

She must have known something was up, because she didn’t even say hello, just “Gifty, are you okay?”

“No, I’m not okay,” I said, and I wondered when the last time I’d said that was. Had I ever said it, even to God? “I came home and my mom is missing. Can you help me?”

“Hold tight,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”

When she pulled up, I was sitting on the hydrant with my head between my knees, staring at the striking red, the color somehow a reflection of what I was feeling.

Katherine rested her hand on my shoulder, squeezing it a little, and I got up. “She couldn’t have gotten very far on foot,” she said.

    As Katherine drove us around, first in my little apartment complex, and then out, off onto the main road that led to Safeway, to campus, I pictured every bridge, every body of water.

“Does she know anybody here?” Katherine asked. “Anyone she may have called?”

I shook my head. She didn’t have a church here; she didn’t have a congregation to hold her up. It was just me. “Maybe we should call the police,” I said. “She wouldn’t want that, but I don’t know what else to do. Do you?”

And then, under a tree, off the side of the road, there she was. She was swimming in her pajamas, no bra, her hair a nest. She used to scold me if I left the house without earrings on, now this.

I didn’t even wait for Katherine to pull over all the way. I just jumped out.

“Where did you go?” I shouted, running to her and folding her in my arms. She was as stiff as a board. “Where were you?” I took her shoulders in my hands and shook her forcefully, trying to make her look at me, but she wouldn’t.

Katherine drove us back to my apartment. She said a few words to my mother, but other than that the ride was silent. When we got to my place, she asked my mother to wait outside the car. She took my hand in hers. “I can stay if you want,” she said, but I shook my head.

She paused, leaned in closer to me, and said, “Gifty, I’ll be back first thing in the morning, and I will help you figure this all out, okay? I promise. You call me anytime today. Really, anytime.”

“Thanks,” I said. I got out of the car and led my mother back to my apartment.

Inside, she looked small and bewildered, innocent. I had been so frightened and angry that I’d forgotten to feel sorry for her, but, now, I pitied her. I pulled her into the bathroom and started running a bath. I pulled her shirt off, checking her wrists. I undid the drawstring on her pajama bottoms, and they slipped down themselves, a silk puddle on the bathroom floor.

    “Did you take anything?” I asked, ready to pry her mouth open, but mercifully, she shook her head, quick as a blink. When the bathtub was full, I had her step in. I poured water over her head and watched her eyes close then open, in shock, in pleasure.

“Mama, I beg you,” I said in Twi, but I didn’t know enough Twi to finish the sentence. I wasn’t sure how I would have finished it, anyway: I beg you to stop. I beg you to wake up. I beg you to live.

I washed and combed her hair. I soaped down her body, moving the sponge along every fold of skin. When I got to her hands, she grabbed one of mine. She pulled it to her heart and held it there. “Ebeyeyie,” she said. It will be all right. She used to say it to Nana when she washed him. It was true then, until it wasn’t.

“Look at me,” she said, taking my chin in her hands, jerking my head toward her. “Don’t be afraid. God is with me; do you hear me? God is with me wherever I go.”

* * *

—

I finally got her into bed. I sat outside her door for an hour, listening to the sound of her snoring. I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I knew I should stay there, keep vigil, but then I started to feel like there wasn’t enough air in my apartment for the two of us, so I sneaked out, something I’d never done when I was a teen in my mother’s house. I got on the 101 and headed north toward San Francisco, driving with the windows down, gulping the air, the wind whipping my face and leaving my lips chapped. I kept licking them.

“That makes it worse,” my mother always said.

She was right, but that had never stopped me.

I didn’t know where I was going, only that I didn’t want to be around mice or humans. I didn’t really even want to be around myself, and if I could have figured out a way around that, discovered the switch that could turn my own thoughts and feelings and harsh admonishments off, I would have chosen that instead.