The jaw was excruciatingly small and pulled to one side, as if she were frozen in an expression of trying to make up her mind about something or other. The mouth, despite its full lips with their pinup appeal, was similarly torqued. Helen, noticing how I stared but tried not to, swept the hair from her daughter’s face and said, “You might as well see it all.” An ear was pierced several times with studs; the opposite ear was proportionally sized but its ridges softened, as if it were sand on the beach washed over and flattened by the tides. Lily was born with craniofacial microsomia, classified as “severe” according to the grading scale known as OMENS. She had needed assistance even to breathe. When she was old enough, one of her ribs had been resected to supplement the absent bone of the jaw. Cartilage from that rib went to crafting her ear. The surgeons had been the best in the world. I could tell she would have been conventionally beautiful had she not suffered this anomaly in the womb, and she was still attractive, though mostly because she was compelling.

When the daughter went to use the shower, I dared to ask if Lily’s condition has had any influence in Helen’s notoriously ravaging style, her mangling of anatomy. The rib, the surgeries: How could it not have? “That’s offensive,” she replied. “I’m asked that because of my sex. If one of Frank Gehry’s sons were disabled, would you ask if that had affected his concept development? My interest in the body began before I became a parent. It is primal. I don’t have to use Lily for creative fodder. Remember what Juhani Pallasmaa wrote: ‘The origin of our understanding of space lies in the cavern of the mouth.’ I’m not the main practitioner with a corporeal bent, yet I am the one who is labeled a sociopath, a predator.”

I never knew my mother. A lab tech assaulted and hid her in a cable chase of the Genetics Department at Berkeley. She was a molecular biologist studying drought resistance in strawberries. My father had a nervous breakdown after her death, so at twenty months old I was sent to live with my maternal grandparents. I cultivated my mother’s passion for structure, but turned to architecture in lieu of science. Dannenforth was my heroine, a female authority in a profession hostile to estrogenic influence. Certain coincidences in our biographies—our motherlessness, abandonment by a father—also helped the flourishing of my worship, I admit. When Helen came to give a lecture at Rice, where I was pursuing a master’s, I waited to speak with her in the hall outside the auditorium. Once she addressed me, I muttered some phrase of thanks and fled, too filled with anxiety to permit her to become real.

Soon afterward, I dropped out of my graduate program. My grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and I returned to sell the house and set her up in an assisted-living facility. I was the sum total of extant kin—my dad, remarried, hadn’t reclaimed custody. Boxes of knickknacks and mementos were the raw materials from which I constructed the model of my mother. Gardens were her solace, as were birds. Pads of paper were filled with graphite nests, their twiggy tessellation like the still life of a tornado. It occurred to me that a nest is the epitome of dwellings, a safe haven between firmament and roots. There was a metaphysical warmth to the belongings I sorted through, as if I sensed spirits lingering under afghans, doing dishes, slamming the screen door the way she had as a child and later the way I did as a child.