Driving home that day, I nearly ran into the back of a RAV4. And that’s when I had the idea to visit my father’s old friends, the ones who were still alive. Banked in traffic, in grey light, on Punt Road yet again, I thought about those names from my childhood, my father’s supposed friends: Abbie, Charlie, Denis. Names tethered to flashes of memory, to photos, rooms, gestures, admonishments, strange excursions in cars to who knows where. Names that flared up every now and then. Who were these people, and what did they know about my father that I didn’t know? Maybe I could ask them what sort of person he had been. Who was he? What were the moments that survived? Out of fear, my father had remained a mystery to me. I was afraid to unwrap the forgetfulness that held him where he was: vague, embalmed, harmless. That’s how it all started. I didn’t expect things to turn out the way they did.

2.

2.

Our mother’s name was Catherine Kelly, and she made a point of remembering almost nothing from our childhood, or of remembering only in quick clichés that couldn’t possibly be true. She was in a fog for most of it, she once told me, and there are days I still half-wonder whether we even had a childhood at all, Tara and me, or whether that old beige leather folder of family photographs wasn’t actually fabricated, like those photos in Blade Runner, which were handed out to Replicants to augment their artificial memories. Staged holidays. Photoshopped birthdays. Who were those naked children and those animals they seemed to love so much, those rabbits, that endless supply of cats and birds? Nor did our mother remember much from her own childhood, it seemed. She rarely spoke about her own family unless we pushed her.