My mother had a hand in the early design of the Total Phone. She didn’t invent it. The first set of Total Phones was cobbled together in a garage by a hairy engineer by the name of Miles Handy. But my then young mother, Candace Hardwick, was a known force among the glittering pool of genius that spawned new gadgets in those days, and she was part of the team assigned the task of making the Total Phone portable, affordable, and salable. My mother was fascinated by the idea that technology might alleviate alienation and loneliness, create positive emotion, jiggle the electrons of a person around just so to create a feeling of absolute peace and connection with other human beings, all without using drugs. In the early days of the Total Phone’s development, when I was a toddler, my mother practically lived in the booth you had to strap yourself into to use the thing. She was an addict. She made a lot of Total calls to a coworker named Saul, mind-melding through the night, tears of ecstasy streaming down her face. As you can imagine, there were a lot of Total betrayals in that period. You didn’t have to be in the same room or even the same country to have the most intimate and complete experience of your life. Anyway, my father was upset. It nearly ended their marriage. They stayed together because of the pregnancy. My father was a stand-up guy. When the baby was born, the small-town doctors didn’t know what to say. They had never seen anything like it. It was my mother who told them that E was a Total. It was my mother who drove her, still mewing like a kitten, to the Total Care Center in Greenwich, and dropped her off without discussing it with my father. She then drove home, went to bed, and stayed there for two years.

It was the last week of summer. In a few days I would go back to boarding school. The sun flashed through the trees as we drove. I tilted my head up, shut my eyes, and saw red flares of sunlight as they passed through my eyelids, jolting me over and over.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked. “You look like you’re having a fit.”

“If you close your eyes, the light makes you twitch,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I remember that. I haven’t done that in a lot of years. You’d think I’d have time, but it never occurs to me to shut my eyes when Dad is driving.”

“Because he’s such a bad driver,” I said, and she smiled.

“He isn’t good with the physical world.”

“I need a rain jacket,” I said.

“Oh, Noodle, why do you tell me everything at the last minute?”

“Mine is short in the sleeves, I just tried it on.”

“I’ll order one,” she said.