On the satellite image you could see the square of the guesthouse, its terra-cotta roof, next to the aqua rectangle of the pool. She wrote once that sometimes when the oranges ripened, they grew so heavy that they fell from the trees and splashed into the water, that a jacaranda tree bloomed with tiny violet flowers right outside her window. I’ll bring you here one day, my love, when the timing is right. When I see the sign. I ran my finger over and over the words so many times that the ink was more faded than any other line. I was still waiting for her to tell me when she was ready for me, when I could join her and start my real life. I had written her so many letters over the years, letters full of questions: Which famous people have you met? What are the parties like? Does it ever rain?

I looked up other things, too: Bus tickets to Los Angeles: $313. A night at a cheap motel: $55. A taxi ride from the Greyhound station to Montvale Road: $45. I checked them against what I had written in my notebook a few months ago—plus money for rent, for food, for clothes—I needed to save enough so that when I found my mother I wouldn’t be a burden to her, the way Des was always telling me I was. Two thousand dollars was the amount I came up with, the number that would make me feel safe.

I walked home and slid The Wisdom of Tarot from underneath my bed. Her handwriting was spidery and strange in the margins, like something that might crawl off the page. The book was heavy in my lap; I flipped through it, a musty smell rising from the mold-flecked pages, until I found the section on the Moon. The book said that the Moon represented what was in shadow, parts of ourselves or parts of others that had yet to be revealed. To learn the truth behind a mystery, it advised leaving a crystal out at night to charge in the moonlight or even a sliver of your fingernail or a piece of your own hair. There were notes scribbled in the margins that I couldn’t make out, but I assumed it meant the spell must be good, if my mother had done it before. I fingered a ribbon of hair at the back of my head, one that I wouldn’t miss. Then I sliced it off with a pair of kitchen shears and stroked it in the palm of my hand.