While you’re asleep, Maura goes through your laptop. She’s gone by the time you wake up, you don’t even have to drive her home this time. But you pull open your computer in the morning and there are photos of you, photos of you beside your mother, photos of you beside your friends, photos of you from thirteen through today. She’s emailed three of your middle school friends, how did she even find their emails? You can hardly bear to read what she’s written except it starts with, I miss you, and then, throughout the paragraphs, Do you remember? Do you remember? Do you remember? She’s opened a bunch of your mother’s essays in your browser, left a comment on one calling her a bitch, which you delete. You don’t need that phone call. She’s been reading Wikipedia, has articles open with titles that look like the runup to a joke. Folie à deux, how a baby forms in the womb, the Freudian uncanny, Death of the Author. There’s definitely a punch line coming here.

* * *

Sometimes your mother calls you in the middle of the night. She doesn’t do it often. She does it just rarely enough that you can’t excuse not picking up. She could be stuck on the side of the road somewhere. She could be in the hospital. You’re estranged, but you are still a daughter. Something still happens in your rib cage when you think of your mother dead.

On most of these calls, she will talk to you like she hasn’t called you in the middle of the night. The neighbors’ health, your job, have you been to the local farmers’ market, have you had your flu shot, she’s doing the NAMI walk this year, have you thought about it, the cookies she’s making. Like it isn’t twelve-thirty, one, two. “Mom.” Does your voice waver? Maybe a little. “Mom. Mom. It’s the middle of the night.”

And she’ll sigh. She’ll say, “I feel like we never talk anymore.”

Once, though, last year, one-fifteen, you’d been having trouble getting to sleep anyway, holding a cup of tea between your cold palms, seven weeks since your boyfriend left you. Some of his stuff was still piled up by the door; was there something wrong with the way that closeness happened to you? So you couldn’t sleep.

And then your mother’s tear-stained voice on the phone, out of nowhere, like God saying, Yep.

You took a long, deep breath. “Are you all right?”

And she said: “Did I do enough for you, Maura? Could I have done more?”

* * *