Sometimes, Jaime went looking for his mother. She was in many of the photos on the walls of his apartment, of course, so that was often the first place he found her. But she haunted his father’s drawings, too, the ones he sent from Sudan or wherever he was on assignment. His father drew her everywhere—in the desert, in the rain forest, on a beach with the surf lapping at her toes. Even when she wasn’t smiling in the drawings, it seemed as if she were about to. Jaime kept most of his father’s drawings in a folder on his nightstand. He would go through the drawings one by one, sometimes for hours.

But since his mother had been a scientist, and an important one, she also lived in the heads of other people; on the web, Jaime had to share her with anyone and everyone. All Jaime had to do was type her name into the search box on his phone, and there she was: her towering hair; the easy confidence that shone through on the screen no matter where she was pictured, no matter what she was doing. It was like seeing a ghost. He would forget and touch the screen—expecting to feel the skin of her arm or her cheek—and be surprised by the cool glass under his fingertip.

Even more eerie than the images that popped up on his screen were the videos. The interviews and the lectures, the conversations and panel discussions. When he was younger, he watched these videos incessantly, memorizing everything his mother said, though he didn’t understand much of the complex physics that was her specialty. His favorite video clip had less to do with physics and more to do with the challenges of being a young black girl with an interest in science.

“Oh, there were certain people who tried to talk me out of it. Tried to persuade me to do everything else, anything else,” she said in the clip. “I was tall and athletic, so I should take up basketball or track and get a scholarship, these people said. I could study accounting or nursing. Something more practical than all this pie-in-the-sky stuff, they said.”

The interviewer said, “And what did you say?”

“I said that those are fine dreams to have, but they weren’t my dreams. Occasionally, those same people would get angry.”

“They would argue with you?” the interviewer said.