You go to the Trader Joe’s and stock up on the expensive spiced tea you used to love, ginger and chai. You put Nutella in the cabinet. You buy a few puzzles, a stuffed animal, your favorite books when you were nine, thirteen, seventeen. Of course, you’ve tried being kind to her—you’re not a monster—but this may be more prophylaxis than kindness. Keep her seen to, keep her busy. You walk two blocks to the bookstore. There is a stack of hardcovers on the new-releases stand, your mother’s name stamped onto them in smooth raised letters. Almost unanimously, your therapists have encouraged you not to read her writing, but there are concrete realities to prepare for. Or at least concrete presences, even if their reality is dubious. Thank God for small mercies, maybe, that you did not wake up to twelve of yourself in the kitchen this morning, a Maura for every essay. That does not mean a promise for tomorrow morning. Take the collection off the shelf; the cover is simple but well done, a traditional family tree that, halfway up its trunk, shifts to a web of neurons like cracks in a plate. Clever. Your mother has titled the book Parthenogenesis.

* * *

Mercies or not, you don’t get a long reprieve. One of the Mauras comes with you to therapy the next morning. She’s eight. She perches on the back of the couch behind you, braiding your hair while you try to speak. Braiding it badly; she keeps pulling. “This is an invasion of privacy,” your therapist says, as you extend the book across the table to her. She opens the book in her lap, and then shuts it again quickly. Maybe she doesn’t want you to think she’s reading about you. You two have already discussed this—I want to hear things the way you want to share them, she said.

Toward the end of the session she says, “Why do you worry so much what your mother thinks of you?” And you and Maura both break up laughing. She falls off the sofa, rolls across the floor, just nearly misses landing at your therapist’s feet and instead bangs her shoulder on the little coffee table. “Shit,” your therapist says, and you nod your agreement. You’ve got a headache setting in that grips your whole spine; you could almost mistake it for sympathetic pain. “That’ll leave a bruise.”

* * *

Does Maura know what she is? If she is anything. Does she know she isn’t right? That she is written.