The answer soon becomes clear, not with words but with images that blink to life in her mind. Her vision of this world is overlaid with another. There is an electrical whine in her ears. Her skin tingles and her tongue feels like it’s growing fatter. “What’s happening?” Nora says and puts her hands to the side of her head as if to hold it in place. She is rocking or the boat is rocking or the sea is rocking or the Earth is rocking. “What’s happening?” she says again, but she already knows the answer.

In the way of mother and child, they are two even as they are one. Life cradling life. Sharing. Talking to each other.

Why is it that you can forget a thousand smiles and sunlit days, but you can never forget a cruel word or a slammed door? That’s the sticky trap of memory. It rarely gives you what you want. Over the past five years, all boundaries have collapsed between her personal and professional life. As a detective, you focus on the bad things, so her life is focused on the bad things. When she looks at others, she sees addiction, unpaid debts, and love affairs gone wrong. When she looks at herself, she sees an abandoned marriage and a lost child.

But memories are surfacing. Mia is helping her see what was once eclipsed. The three of them seated at a window table at Macleod’s as Mia dipped her French fries into her hot cocoa. The three of them walking along the pier and tossing bread crumbs and naming the greediest, fattest seagull Fred. The three of them walking the entirety of the Safeway parking lot to collect all the spare change people dropped. The three of them adding a chewed-up wad of grape gum to the Market Theater wall. The three of them trying to count the cobblestones along Pike Place even though Mia couldn’t make it past thirty. The three of them stopping to listen to a pink-haired man strumming a guitar with a sticker on it that read THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS and applauding when he finished. The three of them hiking through the Hall of Moss in the Hoh Rain Forest and Mia blowing out her diaper in the child carrier backpack. The three of them sledding at Crystal Mountain, and Mia licking a snowball before tossing it to give it slime power. All of this came together in her mind like a steadily twisting knot of roots upon which her notion of family grew.

But there was more, much of it unfamiliar. Scarves of cosmic colors. Moons that looked like the skulls of dead gods. Flowers with babies curled up in their blooms. A mouth that yawned open and spilled out tentacles. Or was it an eye opening? Or was it a door opening? A door. A door. A door. Someone was knocking at the door.