Purity

The Rain Comes

Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was. On better days it spread across the bay and took over Oakland street by street, a thing you saw coming, a change you watched happening to you, a season on the move. Where it encountered redwoods, the most local of rains fell. Where it found open space, its weightless pale passage seemed both endless and like the end of all things. It was a temporary sadness, the more beautiful for being sad, the more precious for being temporary. It was the slow song in minor that the rock-and-roll sun then chased away.

Pip was feeling not so temporarily sad as she walked up the hill to work. Sunday morning, early, the streets were empty. Cars that in sunshine might have looked merely parked looked abandoned in the fog. From some direction and some distance, a raven was croaking. Fog subdued the other birds but made the ravens talkative.

At Peet’s, she found the assistant manager, Navi, loading pastries into the display case. Navi had wooden disks the size of poker chips in his earlobes and was scarcely older than Pip, but he seemed completely at peace with corporations and retail. It was her first day of work post-training, and the way he oversaw her, as she booted up the register and filled receptacles with liquids, was all business and no indulgence. She felt almost weepingly grateful to have a boss who was nothing but a boss; who let her be.

Three customers were waiting in the fog when she unlocked the front door. After she’d served them, a lull came, and into this lull walked a person she recognized. It was Jason, the boy she’d tried and failed to sleep with a year and a half ago, the boy whose texts she’d read. Jason Whitaker with his Sunday Times. She’d thought of him, their Sunday mornings, when she’d applied for the Peet’s job. But she’d figured that by now he’d found some other coffee place to be enthusiastic about.

She waited, with the particular exposure of a barista, while he claimed his preferred table with his paper and came over to the pastry case. To herself, she was no longer the person who’d left him waiting forever in her bedroom and then rained abuse on him, but he had no way of knowing this, because, of course, she was also still that person. When he stepped up to the cash register, he saw this person and blushed.

She gave him an ironic little wave. “Hello.”

“Wow. You work here.”

“It’s my first real day.”

“It took me a second to recognize you. Your hair is short.”

“Yes.”

“It looks nice. You look great.”

“Thank you.”

“Wow, so.” He looked over his shoulder. No one was behind him. His own hair was shorter, his body still skinny but less skinny than before. She remembered why she’d wanted him.

“What can I get you?” she said.

“You probably remember. Bear claw and a three-shot cappuccino, tall.”

She was relieved to turn away from him and work on his drink. Navi was occupied at the back with a large plastic drum.

“So are you part-time here?” Jason said. “Do you still work for the alt-energy place?”

“No.” She tonged a bear claw from the case. “I’ve been away. I just came back.”

“Where were you?”

“Bolivia and then Denver.”

“Bolivia? For real? What were you doing down there?”

She got the milk steamer squealing so she didn’t have to answer.

“This is on me,” she said when she was finished. “You don’t have to pay.”

“No, come on.”

He pushed a ten-dollar bill at her. She pushed it back. It lay there on the counter. Keeping her eyes on it, she said, “I never apologized to you. I should have apologized.”

“God, no, it’s OK. I’m the one who should have apologized.”

“You did. I got your texts. I was so ashamed of myself I couldn’t write back to you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I am, I suspect.”

“It was like a perfect storm of wrongness, that night.”

“Yah.”

“That guy I was texting? I’m not even friends with him anymore.”

“Seriously, Jason, you are not the one to apologize.”

He left the money on the counter when he went back to his table. She rang up his purchase and put the change in the tip jar. A year and a half ago she might have resented him for being cavalier about the money, but she was no longer that person. Somewhere she’d lost her capacity for resentment, and for hostility as well, and thus, to some extent, for being amusing. This was a real loss, but there was nothing she could do about it except be sad. She was pretty sure the loss predated the knowledge that her mother was a billionaire.

For a while the stream of customers was steady. Navi had to pull her out of the weeds more than once; accidental coffee and dairy wastages were running high. During another lull, Jason returned to the counter. “I’m taking off,” he said.

“It was nice to see you again. I mean, discounting my excruciating embarrassment.”

“I still come here every Sunday. But now you can think, ‘Oh, that’s just Jason.’ I can think, ‘Oh, that’s just Pip.’”

“Is that something I said?”

“It’s something you said. Will I see you next Sunday?”

“Probably. It’s not a popular shift.”

He started to leave and then turned back to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That sounded like something I didn’t mean. Asking if you’d be here next week.”

“It just sounded friendly.”

“Good. I mean — I’m kind of with someone else. I didn’t want to send the wrong message.”

She felt a small pang but no surprise. “Message of friendliness received.”

He was walking away when she found herself laughing. He turned back. “What?”

“Nothing. Sorry. Unrelated.”

When he was gone, more laughter escaped her. A stupid condom! Was anything funnier than a condom? If she hadn’t left Jason and gone downstairs to get one, a year and a half ago, she might never have taken Annagret’s questionnaire, and everything that had happened to her since then wouldn’t have happened. If she’d had a boyfriend, she wouldn’t have wanted to leave town. She would never have learned about the other condoms, the comedy of that. The comedy of her even existing. Navi was giving her a chiding look, but she couldn’t stop laughing.

In the afternoon, when her shift ended, she walked back down the hill. The sky was as clear as if there’d never been such a thing as fog. In theory, she was now supposed to work on a piece the Express had commissioned, a firsthand account of life as a Sunlight Project intern. But no matter how long or good the piece was, she wouldn’t get more than a couple of hundred dollars for it, and she still had her loan payments to make; hence the full-time job at Peet’s. She also didn’t know how to write about Andreas. It might be a year, or a decade, before she could sort out how she felt about his death, and she already had so much else to sort out, such a mountain of unsorted material, that all she’d been good for, after putting in her hours at Peet’s, was whacking dead tennis balls against the door of Dreyfuss’s garage.

Dreyfuss was supine on his living-room sofa, watching an A’s game. He was recovering from treatment of an intestinal parasite for which the freeganism of his housemates Garth and Erik was probably responsible. Garth and Erik themselves were temporarily in the Alameda County jail. Three days ago, they’d “assaulted” a real-estate agent attempting to show Dreyfuss’s house to prospective buyers, and crowdfunding by their anarchist friends had yet to raise enough bail for both of them.

“Someone smells like coffee,” Dreyfuss said.

“I brought you scones,” Pip said, unzipping her knapsack. “Do you want milk with them? I brought some milk home, too.”

“The challenge of stale scone and a perpetually dry mouth may be insurmountable without it.”

Dreyfuss put the bag of scones on his diminished but still convex belly and reached into it. Pip set the plastic bottle on the coffee table. “Yesterday was the use-by date, just so you know. Have you heard anything more from the bank?”

“Even Relentless Pursuit rests on the Sabbath.”

“It’s going to be fine. They can’t do anything until you’ve had your hearing.”

“Nothing I’ve learned about Judge Costa inclines me toward optimism. He appears to have an eighth-grade education and slavish respect for the rights of corporations. I’ve edited my presentation to the bone, but there are still a hundred twenty-two discrete narrative elements. I suspect that the judge’s attention will wander after three or four of them.”

Pip wasn’t so afraid of Dreyfuss anymore, and unfortunately his bank wasn’t either. She patted one of his heavy and nearly hairless hands. She didn’t expect him to respond in any way, and he didn’t.

Upstairs, in her old room, she changed into shorts and a T-shirt. Half the room was piled with Stephen’s belongings and scavenged crap, which she’d rearranged in more vertical form to make room for her mattress and suitcase. Two weeks ago, from her friend Samantha’s apartment, after emerging from the haze into which she’d put herself with Samantha’s Ativan, she’d called Dreyfuss to say hi and tell him he’d been right about those Germans. Dreyfuss told her that Stephen was adventuring in Central America with a twenty-year-old girl who had parental money. Currently Garth and Erik were Dreyfuss’s only housemates; she was welcome to her old room if she wanted it. The male filth of the house was even more disgusting than she’d imagined, but cleaning it had given her some direction for a while.

In Stephen’s pile of junk she’d found an old Pro Kennex tennis racquet. Dreyfuss’s garage door was loose in its frame and weakened by dry rot. Even the hardest-hit balls hopped back from it with a puppyish lack of aggression. Behind the garage was a wall of broadleaf evergreens that served as a backstop. Balls she bombed over it were easily replaced by searching the bushes in Mosswood Park. The deader the ball, the better it suited her purpose, which was to whack the shit out of it until she was physically exhausted. She thought this was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she’d ever done.

From some weeks of tennis in her high-school gym class, she knew she needed to keep her eye on the ball and address it sideways. Her backhand was still a flail, but the forehand — oh, the forehand. Her natural stroke was topspin, a ripping upswing. She could pound forehands for fifteen minutes, scurrying around the return caroms, repositioning herself like a cat with her mouseball, before she had to catch her breath. Each whack was another small bite taken out of a too-long late afternoon.

She’d still been in Denver, having crashed for some nights with her former share-mates in Lakewood, when the email headed le1°9n8a0rd came in. She’d sensed right away that the document attached to it was from Tom’s computer, which she’d promised never to violate. But later the same day, after a punishing bus ride to the Denver airport, there had followed two short emails from Tom himself.

Andreas dead. Suicide. I’m in physical shock but thought you should know.

PS: I’m in Bolivia, I saw him go. If he sent you something, please shred it without reading it. He was mentally ill.

More than shock, or dread, or pain, what punched her in the stomach and sickened her was guilt. And this was strange: why guilt? But she knew what she knew. The sick feeling was definitely guilt. Mechanically, because her group number had been called, she went ahead and boarded her cheap Frontier Airlines flight to San Francisco. There were soldiers on the plane. They’d been invited to board early, and her seat was next to one of them.

He was mentally ill. She’d both known this and not known it. Had seen it but also had done what he’d asked her not to do: had projected. Projected her own sanity onto him. If he really was dead now, she must have had it in her power to save him. This idea was obviously a form of self-flattery, but when she examined her memories of their times alone, it seemed to her that he’d been asking her to save him. She’d thought she was doing the morally right thing by rejecting him, but what if it had been morally the wrong thing? A failure of compassion? She scrunched herself down in her narrow airline seat and cried as inconspicuously as she could, keeping her eyes shut, as if this could make her invisible to the soldier in fatigues beside her.

By the time she got to Samantha’s, she was aware of a conflict of loyalties. On one side was her promise to respect Tom’s privacy, along with the pointedness of his warning that Andreas had been mentally ill; Tom seemed to have been implying that there was sickness in her very possession of a document. And yet: emailing her had been one of Andreas’s last acts on earth. Only a few hours had elapsed between his email and Tom’s. However sick he’d been, he’d been thinking of her. To imagine that this mattered was obviously another form of self-flattery — a failure of compassion for a suicidally tormented person, a failure to respect how little anything mattered to him but the pain he was in. And yet: it had to mean something that he’d sent her the email. She was afraid that it meant she was part of why he’d killed himself. If she was somehow responsible for his death, the least she could do to accept her guilt was to read the message he’d taken the trouble to send her. She reasoned that she could look at the document and still honor her promise to Tom by never telling him. It seemed like a thing she owed Andreas.

But the document was like a box she couldn’t put the lid back on; like the secret of nuclear fission, the so-called Pandora’s box. When she came to Tom’s description of his ex-wife’s forehead scar and reconstructed front teeth, the most terrible chill came over her. The chill had to do with Andreas and consisted of strange gratitude and redoubled guilt: in his last hour of life, he’d given her the thing she’d most wanted, the answer to her question. But now that she had it, she didn’t want it. She saw that she’d done a very bad thing to both her mother and Tom by getting it. Both of them had known, and neither of them had wanted her to know.

Without reading farther, she lay down on Samantha’s foldout bed. She wished that Andreas would appear and tell her what to do. The most deranged command of his would have been better than no command at all. She wondered if Tom might conceivably be mistaken about his death. She couldn’t stand his being dead; she missed him unbearably. She pawed at her phone and saw that Denver Independent, not normally known for spot reporting, had already broken the story.

jumped from a height of at least five hundred feet

She turned off the phone and sobbed until upwelling anxiety overwhelmed her grief and she had to go and wake Samantha and beg for Ativan. She told Samantha that Andreas had killed himself. Samantha, who had difficulty making sense of anything that didn’t refer to herself in some way, replied that she’d had a friend in high school who’d hanged himself, and that she hadn’t gotten over it until she’d understood that suicide was the greatest of mysteries.

“It’s not a mystery,” Pip said.

“Yes it is,” Samantha said. “I kept struggling to get over it. I kept thinking I could have prevented it, I could have saved him—”

“I could have saved him.”

“I thought that too, but I was wrong. I had to learn to see it had nothing to do with me. I didn’t need to feel guilty about something that had nothing to do with me. It pissed me off, knowing that. I wasn’t anything to him. I couldn’t have saved him because I didn’t matter to him. I realized it’s actually much healthier to be angry…”

Samantha went on like this, a fountain of declarative sentences about herself, until the Ativan kicked in and Pip had to lie down. In the morning, alone in Samantha’s apartment, she slowly read the rest of Tom’s document. She wanted the basic information, but she had to do a lot of skimming and backtracking to obtain it without reading too much about her parents’ sex life. It wasn’t that she was squeamish about sex per se; the problem, indeed, was that her parents’ weirdness about sex was so foreign to her, so old-fashioned, so intolerably sad.

There were plenty of other things in the document to be disturbed by, but by the time she’d reached the end of it she could sense that the biggest problem was the money. Certainly it was interesting to imagine having Tom and Leila as second parents. But she couldn’t call up Tom and say “Hey, Dad” without admitting that she’d broken her promise and read his document and betrayed him yet again. Realistically, unless her mother spontaneously volunteered his identity, there was going to be no Tom and Leila in her life. And she was willing to live with this, at least for now. But a billion-dollar trust fund? How many times had her mother said she loved nothing in the world more than Pip? If nobody and nothing was more important to her, how could she have so much money and still be letting Pip suffer with her student debt and her limited opportunities? Tom’s document was a testimonial of frustration with her mother, and she was feeling infected by it. She saw why her mother had been afraid that Tom would take her away and turn her against her. She could feel herself turning against her right now.

She swallowed another Ativan and emailed Colleen once more. This time, in less than an hour, after eight months of silence, she got a reply.

Fooled again. I’d thought there were no more ways for him to hurt me.

The reply had come through a 408 phone number, which Pip immediately called. Colleen turned out to be living in California, across the bay, in Cupertino, and working as chief legal officer for a newish tech company. She didn’t hang up on Pip but simply resumed her complaint with the world’s crappiness where she’d left off eight months ago.

“His women are all tweeting up a storm,” she said. “Toni Field says he was the most honest human being to ever walk the earth — in other words, ‘I got to fuck him, nyah, nyah, nyah.’ Sheila Taber says the Hegelian spirit of world history was alive in him — in other words, ‘I fucked him before Toni did, and for longer.’ You might want to get tweeting yourself. Stake your claim to the sainted hero.”

“I didn’t fuck him.”

“Sorry, I forgot. Your broken tooth.”

“Don’t be mean to me. I’m really upset about this. I need to talk to someone who gets it.”

“I’m afraid I’m pretty much a flaming ball of hurt and anger at the moment.”

“Maybe you should stop reading tweets.”

“I’m flying to Shenzhen tomorrow, that should help. The Chinese never understood what all the fuss was about, God bless them.”

“Can we get together when you’re back?”

“I think you’ve always had the wrong idea about me. It kind of hurts, but it’s also sweet. We can get together if you want.”

Pip knew she should call her mother and tell her she was back in Oakland. She now saw why her mother had been suspicious of her motives in going to Denver: one glance at the DI website, on her neighbor Linda’s computer, would have revealed her ex-husband’s head shot and weekly commentary at the top of the page. It must have tortured her to think of Pip there with him. It explained her silences and recalcitrance since then: she believed that Pip had found her father and was lying about it. If nothing else, Pip wanted to reassure her that she hadn’t lied about that. But she didn’t see how she could do it without revealing what she’d learned in the meantime and how she’d learned it. Her mother would die of shame, might literally die of being too visible, if she knew what Pip had read about her. Pip could simply keep lying, of course; keep pretending that her job in Denver had just been a job. But the thought of having to lie forever, and never mention the money, and deprive herself of Tom and Leila, and generally indulge her mother’s phobias and irrational prohibitions, made her angry. Although Andreas obviously wasn’t the most honest person who’d ever walked the earth, she thought her mother might be the most difficult. Pip didn’t know what to do about her, and so, for a while, she’d done Ativan.

Whacking a tennis ball was her poor-man’s Ativan. The Sunday sun had sunk behind the elevated freeway in a sky still fogless. California had been in a drought emergency for months, but only now, after the solstice (she’d sent her mother a not-birthday card saying nothing more than “Love always, Pip”), was the weather feeling properly droughty. If the fog had come back, she might have felt safe to stop whacking and go inside, but it hadn’t. She tried working on her backhand, sent two balls over the arboreal backstop and into the next yard, and reverted to her forehand. Could a more perfect manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined? Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a pock in the most pleasing of registers. Dogs knew a good thing, dogs loved tennis balls, and so did she.

When she finally went inside, all sweaty, Garth and Erik were at the kitchen table with two quarts of beer that a good Samaritan had bought them on their long walk home after bail had been made.

“Crowdfunding rocks,” Garth said.

“Especially when it’s effectively a loan,” Erik said.

“Are they still pressing charges?” Pip said.

“For now,” Garth said. “If Dreyfuss prevails at his hearing, the realtor becomes a trespasser that it was legitimate for us to repel.”

“I don’t think he’s going to prevail.” Pip picked up one of the half-empty bottles. “May I?” Garth and Erik hesitated just enough that she set down the bottle. “I can go buy some more.”

“That would be great,” Erik said.

“I’ll come back with lots and lots.”

“That would be great.”

On her way out to get beer, she looked for Dreyfuss and found him sitting on his bed with his face in his hands. His situation was legitimately dire. He’d managed to revive his old mortgage, but tech-driven market pressure had pushed the value of his property up by thirty percent or more in the year Pip had been away. This had triggered a new round of shenanigans with his modified mortgage payments. He’d been given differing figures for these payments and had naturally chosen the lowest one, provided by a bank employee who then disappeared and who the bank claimed to have no record of, despite his having taken down her name and location. But without Marie’s paychecks and Ramón’s disability checks, he couldn’t pay even the lowest figure every month. All he had going for him legally was his meticulous litany of the bank’s noxious and probably felonious behavior. Pip had tried to read this litany, but it was nearly 300,000 words long.

“Hey, listen,” she said, crouching at his feet. “I have a friend who’s a lawyer for a tech company. She might know some firms that do pro bono work. Do you want me to ask her?”

“I appreciate your concern,” Dreyfuss said. “But I’ve witnessed the effect that my case has on pro bono lawyers. At first there’s an agreeable atmosphere of bonhomie, of this-is-an-injustice-and-we-will-definitely-fix-it, of why-didn’t-you-come-to-us-sooner. A week later, they have their hands and faces pressed to the window. They’re screaming, Let me out of here! I suppose — oh, never mind.”

“What?”

“It occurred to me that if we could find a mentally ill lawyer, an already premedicated individual … It’s a silly thought. Forget I mentioned it.”

“It’s actually not a bad idea.”

“No. Better to pray that Judge Costa falls down a flight of stairs between now and a week from Tuesday. Do you believe in the efficacy of prayer, Pip?”

“Not really.”

“Try to,” Dreyfuss said.

* * *

The following Sunday, Jason was among the customers waiting when she unlocked the front door of Peet’s. Knowing that he had a girlfriend, Pip resisted overinterpreting his early arrival, but he did seem to have hoped to talk to her. Lingering at the counter, he updated her on the progress of his new statistics textbook and the presentations he’d been giving to professors who refused to believe that a method could be so simple and intuitive. “They say, ‘OK, the geometry works in that one special case.’ So I show them other examples. I ask them to give me their own incredibly complicated examples. The method always works, and they still won’t believe it. It’s like their entire careers are invested in statistics being an impossibly nonintuitive subject.”

“That’s what I always heard,” Pip said. “Do Not Take This Course.”

“And what about you? You didn’t tell me what you were doing in Bolivia.”

“Oh, well. I was interning with the Sunlight Project. You know — Andreas Wolf.”

It was amusing to see Jason’s eyes widen. The deification of Andreas was in full swing now, with candlelight memorials in Berlin and Austin, in Prague and Melbourne, and online memorial sites stretching to terabytes with messages of gratitude and sorrow; it was like the Aaron Swartz phenomenon, only a hundred times larger.

“Are you kidding me?” Jason said.

“Um, no. I was there. Not when he died — I left at the end of January.”

“That’s incredible.”

“I know — weird, right?”

“Did you actually spend time with him?”

“Sure. Everyone there did. He was always around.”

“That’s incredible.”

“Don’t say that too many times or you’ll make me feel bad.”

“That’s not what I meant. I know you’re really smart. I just didn’t know you were interested in Web stuff.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t. Then I was. Then I wasn’t again.”

Although it would have disappointed her, by showing Jason to be as starstruck as most of the world seemed to be, she expected him not to let the subject drop. But he did. He asked her what her plans were now. She confessed that she couldn’t see much farther than going home after work and whacking a tennis ball. He said he’d recently taken up tennis himself. He remarked that they should hit together sometime, but it was a vague remark, deflated by the known fact of his having a girlfriend, and he retreated to his favored table with his Sunday Times.

Whatever chemistry she and Jason had had was still there, if only in the form of regret about never really having acted on it. She realized, with additional regret, that he was probably the sweetest good-looking boy who’d ever shown strong interest in her. She felt chagrined that she’d failed to appreciate this when it might have mattered. She hoped that he was feeling some additional regret of his own, now that he knew that Andreas Wolf had esteemed her.

After a long hiatus, she was back on Facebook. It was a way of letting her old friends know she was in town without actually having to see them, but her main motive was defensive. Among her Facebook friends was her mother’s neighbor Linda, who reassured her that nothing much had changed in her mother’s life, and who seemed happy to convey Pip’s substanceless greetings to her. It was Pip’s hope that Linda might show her Facebook page to her mother or at least report on what was on it — i.e., almost nothing. Pip was living in her old house in Oakland and working at Peet’s, end of story. She wanted to spare her mother the torment of imagining her still in Denver, reunited with her father. Linda was gabbiness itself and could be counted on.

After her shift ended, and after she’d whacked the ball and showered and walked to the BART station, she couldn’t resist checking out Jason on Facebook. His capacity for enthusiasm was everywhere in evidence. But of course what she wanted to know was how pretty his girlfriend was. The news on that score was mixed. The girlfriend had a great face and a scarily hipster look and a scarily French name, Sandrine, but she appeared to be a full foot shorter than Jason; they looked awkward together. With a shudder of revulsion at herself, and at Facebook, Pip turned off her device.

She was on her way to a Peruvian restaurant in Bernal Heights, maximally inconvenient to her, because Colleen apparently had foodie tendencies and wanted to try it. This after Colleen had twice bailed out of earlier dates at the last minute, pleading overwork. If her intention was to keep punishing Pip and make her feel small, it was working well.

The season of gray was on Bernal Heights. Shouting techies in their twenties filled the restaurant. Colleen was at a small table awkwardly situated by a wait station; she’d left Pip the chair that was in the waiters’ way. Pip was struck by the unnecessary makeup Colleen was wearing and by the obvious priciness of her silk jacket and jewelry. She remembered that Colleen’s stated ambition was to do boring, safe things.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “It’s quite the schlep from Oakland.”

“I ordered some small plates,” Colleen said. “I have to go back to the office later.”

Already it was clear to Pip that Colleen had been a summer-camp friend, not a real friend, and that she shouldn’t have kept sending her emails. But she had no one else to talk to about Andreas, and so she ordered a sangria and talked. She led with the big picture — that he’d killed a man in Germany and had brought her to Los Volcanes in some insane attempt at a cover-up — so that Colleen might see that what had happened at the Hotel Cortez wasn’t personal.

“I think he was really sick,” Pip said in conclusion. “Sicker than anybody knew.”

“This is not exactly making me feel better about spending three years wanting him.”

“I wanted him, too. But the side of himself he showed me was too scary.”

“You really think he killed someone.”

“He said so. I believed him.”

“You know, I’ve been reading way more about him than is healthy. It’s pure masochism. But I haven’t seen anything about a murder.”

“Even if he left a confession or something, I’m sure they covered it up. It’s hard to see Willow or Flor not protecting the brand.”

“You should tell the world,” Colleen said. “Just to squish fucking Toni Field and all the others. ‘Your sainted hero was a psychopath.’ Would you do me that favor?”

Pip shook her head. “Even if I wanted to go public, who’s going to believe me? I have other problems anyway. He told me who my mother is.”

“You mean, besides being your mother?”

“She’s a billionaire, Colleen. She has a trust fund worth, like, a billion dollars. She’s like a renegade heiress. I can’t begin to figure out how to deal with that.”

Colleen frowned. “A billion dollars? You told me she was poor.”

“She changed her identity. She ran away from it. Her father was president of McCaskill, the food company.”

“That’s your mother?” Colleen gave Pip a sidelong look, as if Pip herself were a pile of money and Colleen was deciding whether to believe her eyes. “That’s what Dear Leader told you?”

“More or less.”

“I guess it’s obvious why he liked you.”

“Thanks a lot. He didn’t care about money.”

“Nobody doesn’t care about a billion dollars.”

“Well, my mom didn’t. I’m not sure it’s even still there.”

“You should try to find out.”

“I just want everything to go away.”

“You should definitely find out.” Colleen reached across the table and touched Pip’s hand. “Don’t you think?”

By the time she got back to Dreyfuss’s house, very late, there was a long email from Colleen in her in-box. It wasn’t the email’s content that was strange. Colleen apologized to Pip for making her come all the way to Bernal Heights; the next time they met, which she hoped would be soon, Colleen would come to Oakland; so great to see Pip again; really liked the new haircut … There followed several paragraphs of vintage Colleen on the crappiness of the legal profession, the crappiness of China, and the crappiness of the techie she’d dated for two months before discovering his passion for tax avoidance. What was strange about the email was its timing. For eight months Pip had waited for a few warm words from Colleen. Only now, within two hours of her saying the word billionaire, was she getting them.

Was Colleen aware of how obvious she was being? Pip thought not. Then again, maybe she herself was being paranoid. She remembered what Andreas had said about fame, the loneliness of it, the impossibility of trusting that people liked the famous person for himself. She suspected that being a billionaire would be even lonelier in that regard.

The next day, Monday, brought another long email from Colleen, plus two affectionate phone messages. On Tuesday, Dreyfuss had his injunction hearing with Judge Costa, who gave him ten minutes to present his case and then issued his judgment: fifteen days to vacate the house. On Wednesday, Jason left a Facebook message for Pip, asking if she wanted to hit with him. This wasn’t a message that a boy with a serious girlfriend sent innocently to a girl he’d nearly slept with in the past. Pip might have felt glad of it, or at least flattered by it, had Colleen not suddenly become so friendly. Now all she could think was that her connection to Andreas had piqued Jason’s interest. Was this going to be her new normal? She’d already had enough trouble trusting people; now she was facing a whole lifetime of not trusting them. She wrote back to Jason: To be discussed at Peet’s. Then she did some research and made some phone calls. Early the next morning, Thursday, she flew to Wichita.

* * *

From the back of the cab from the airport, she saw the name McCaskill on Little League fields, on a big pavilion downtown, on a day-care center and a food-distribution depot on the city’s slummy east side, on billboards affirming that MCCASKILL CARES. The midday heat was as intense as anything she’d experienced in Bolivia. Lawns were fried nearly white, and the trees looked ready to drop their leaves three months early.

Thanks to air-conditioning, the offices of James Navarre & Associates were chilly. Pip had barely opened her mouth when the receptionist led her back to a large, wood-paneled office where Mr. Navarre was waiting at the door. He was short and white-haired and apparently one of those men who weren’t comfortable in clothes that weren’t rumpled. “My God,” he said, staring at Pip. “You really are her daughter.”

She shook his hand and followed him into his office. The receptionist brought her a bottle of cold water and left them alone. Mr. Navarre continued to stare at her.

“So,” she said. “Thank you for seeing me.”

“Thank you for coming here.”

“I have pictures of my mom, if you’re interested.”

“Of course I am. I’m also obligated to be.”

Pip handed over her phone. She’d selected night pictures from inside her mother’s cabin, so as not to betray her location. Mr. Navarre looked at them and shook his head as if confounded. On one wall of his office were photographs, Midwestern faces in exotically unstylish clothes and settings, somebody else’s idea of America. Pip recognized David Laird, her grandfather, one of the objects of her research, on a golf cart with a rumpled and younger Mr. Navarre.

He handed the phone back to Pip. “She’s alive?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Where?”

“I can’t tell you. She doesn’t know I’m here, but she wouldn’t be happy about it. She just wants to be left alone.”

“We’d given up looking,” Mr. Navarre said. “Her father tried to find her more than once, in the nineties. After he died, I was obligated to try again. He always thought she was still alive. Me, not so much. People die all the time. But unless I could prove that she was no longer among the living, and had left no heirs, I was barred from dissolving the trust.”

“So it’s still there. The trust.”

“Absolutely. Administering it has made me a very wealthy man. I have every reason to insist that you tell me where your mother is. She won’t have to do anything more than sign the receipt on a piece of registered mail. She can go on doing nothing, but she needs to know that she’s the beneficiary.”

“No. Sorry.”

“Sandrine—”

“That’s not my real name.”

Mr. Navarre nodded. “I see.”

“I don’t want anything to change. I just came by to ask you a favor.”

“Aha. I’ll hazard a guess. You need money.”

“Not even. I mean I do, but that’s not what I’m here for. Can I talk?”

“I’m all ears.”

“I’ve been living in Oakland, California. There’s a house there that’s in foreclosure, and the guy who owns it has to vacate it in less than two weeks. He’s a good guy, and the bank is trying to steal his equity. So I was thinking, there’s a lot of money in the trust, and you get to decide how it’s invested. My impression is that you don’t have to do much except write big checks to yourself.”

“Well, now, in fact—”

“The money’s mostly in McCaskill stock. You’re required to leave it there. How much work can that be? And you get, whatever, a million dollars a year for that.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just do.”

“You’ve been in touch with your mother’s ex-husband. He told you.”

“Maybe.”

“Sandrine. Work with me here.”

“I’m the guy’s granddaughter. David’s. That makes me a Laird, and I’m asking you a small favor that doesn’t personally cost you anything. The amount of money is nothing compared to what’s in the trust. I want you to buy my friend’s house, right away, and then charge him some rent he can afford. It won’t be a lot of rent, so it won’t be a great investment. But you can invest the money any way you want, right?”

Mr. Navarre made a tent of his fingers. “I have a fiduciary responsibility to invest the money wisely. I would need, at a minimum, your mother’s written authorization. I admit that it doesn’t seem likely she’ll be challenging my decisions any time soon, but I need to be covered for that eventuality.”

“Does the trust say that I’m the heir?”

“There is a per stirpes clause, yes.”

“So let me sign.”

“I can’t knowingly let you sign under a false name. Even if I were inclined to make this particular investment.”

Pip frowned. She’d thought of a lot, during the two flights it had taken her to get to Wichita, but she hadn’t thought of this. “If I give you my real name, you’re going to use it to try to find my mother, even if I ask you not to.”

“Let’s slow down here,” Mr. Navarre said. “Look at this from my side. I do believe that Anabel is alive and you’re her daughter. This is a highly unusual situation, but I believe you’re telling me the truth. But if you come to me next month and say you want another investment, for some other reason — where does it end?”

“I won’t do that.”

“So you say now. But if all you have to do is ask?”

“Well, then we’ll have this discussion again. But we won’t. It’s not going to happen again.”

Mr. Navarre increased the steepness of his tented fingers. “I don’t know what happened in that family. Your family. I never understood your mother or her father. But the decisions he made about his stake in McCaskill created a heck of a lot of ill will. Given the tax hit he took, leaving her a quarter of the estate, he had to put most of the rest in charitable trusts. I know you think I get money for nothing, but liquidating enough shares to pay the estate-tax bill wasn’t nothing. And meanwhile Anabel’s brothers only got about eighty million apiece fungible. The rest is in trusts they control but don’t much profit from. All this to make sure the daughter who hated David got her money in a lump. To say I never understood it is an understatement. And now you won’t even let me tell her the money is there?”

That is correct, Pip thought. Everyone needs to keep conspiring to protect my mother from reality.

“I can work on it,” she said. “But it has to be me. I don’t want her getting some registered letter from you. If I agree to work on it, will you buy this house in Oakland?”

“Why should I do that?”

“Because I’m the heir and I’m asking for it!”

“So you’re crazy, too.”

“No.”

“You could speak to your mother and be a billionaire, but instead you’re asking me to buy a house in foreclosure for some third party. This person wouldn’t happen to be your boyfriend?”

“No. He’s a well-medicated schizophrenic in his forties.”

Mr. Navarre shook his head. “You don’t want to eradicate malaria. You don’t want to send poor kids to college. You don’t want to take a private trip to outer space. You don’t even want to be a cokehead.”

“Aren’t all the Lairds and McCaskills messed up from having too much money?”

“About half of them, yeah.”

“Didn’t one of my uncles try to buy an NBA team?”

“Better than that. He wanted the David M. Laird Jr. Charitable Trust to buy it.”

“So it sounds like my weirdness is totally within normal parameters.”

“Listen here.” Mr. Navarre sat up straight and fixed Pip with a look. “I’m never going to have to report to you. I’m older than your mother, and I have a fondness for fatty red meats. It’s not because I owe you any courtesies that I propose the following. You’re going to tell me your real name and sign an authorization. After you leave here, you’ll go to the Laird family doctor and leave a blood sample. Six months from today, if I don’t hear from you sooner, I will hire a detective to locate your mother. In return, the trust will buy your friend’s house. I give you that, you give me your mother.”

“You have to buy the house right away, though. Like, today or tomorrow. Monday at the latest.”

“Do you agree to the terms? You’ll have six months to sort things out with your mother.”

Pip was weighing her wish to help Dreyfuss against her aversion to having a conversation with her mother. She realized that even if she didn’t have the conversation, her mother wouldn’t know for sure it was her fault that Mr. Navarre had found her. Her mother could imagine it was Tom’s fault, or Andreas’s. She could sign the registered receipt, burn the letter without reading it, and go right on denying reality.

“My legal name is Purity Tyler.”

It was four thirty by the time she’d signed the authorization, been phlebotomized at the doctor’s office, and taken another cab to the airport. Jets on the tarmac shimmered in fumes and unabated sun, but something was happening to the sky, some premonition that its depthless blue would soon be a more local gray. Her connecting flight, to Denver, was showing a delay of forty-five minutes. She had to be at work the following afternoon, but it occurred to her that she could miss her connection in Denver and rebook for the morning. She’d boldly asked Mr. Navarre to reimburse her for her flights and cabs; the trip so far had cost her nothing.

She couldn’t see Tom without admitting that she’d read his memoir, and although she felt a craving for Leila’s forgiveness she worried that Leila still considered her a threat and wouldn’t be happy to see her. With her phone, she searched instead for Cynthia Aberant and found her listed as an associate professor in a community-studies program. The only impeccably kind and well-behaved person in Tom’s entire memoir was his sister. Pip dialed her office number and got her.

“This is Pip Tyler,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

“I’m sorry. Say your name again?”

“Pip Tyler. Purity Tyler.”

There was a dead cellular silence. Then Cynthia said, “You’re my brother’s daughter.”

“Right. So, I was hoping I could talk to you?”

“You should talk to Tom, not me.”

“I’m on my way to Denver right now. If you had, like, even just an hour tonight. You’re the only person I can talk to.”

After another silence, Cynthia assented.

The flight, in a too-small jet, dodging thunderstorms, cured Pip of any desire for future air travel. She expected death the whole way. What was interesting was how quickly she then forgot about it, like a dog to whom death was literally unimaginable, while she rode in a cab to Cynthia’s. Dogs again had it right. They didn’t trouble themselves with mysteries that could never be solved anyway.

Cynthia’s house was in the same neighborhood as Leila’s husband’s. She came to the front door holding a glass of red wine. She was a plus-size woman with long gray-blond hair and a pleasant face. “I needed a head start,” she said, raising the glass. “Do you drink?”

Her living room was an academic version of Dreyfuss’s, her art and her books and even her furniture steeped in leftism. Pip sat down by a cabinet with Latino peasants depicted in bright primitive paint. Cynthia took an armchair whose cushions bore the imprint of her body’s ample contours. “So, you’re my niece,” she said.

“You’re my aunt.”

“And why are you here and not at my brother’s?”

Pip drank her wine and told her story. When she was done, Cynthia poured her more wine and said, “I always thought Tom had a novel in him.”

“He says it in the memoir,” Pip said. “He wanted to be a novelist, but my mom wouldn’t let him.”

Her aunt’s expression hardened. “She was all about not letting.”

“Did you not like her?”

“No, I did like her, at first. I wanted us to have a relationship. But she was somehow not approachable.”

“She’s the same way now. She’s really shy underneath.”

“I didn’t like how she treated my stepmother. But Clelia was a person of strong judgments herself, and so I cut your mother some slack. But then … this is probably in the memoir…”

“The spitting thing?”

“I was there in the room, I saw it happen. Tom explained it to me afterward, and I sort of understood — I’m no friend of agribusiness and bare-knuckled capital. But I couldn’t help thinking that Tom had made a mistake. I thought, ‘This woman is nuts.’ And then for years I hardly saw him and I never saw her — I was raising my own daughter. But even from afar I had the sense that he was in a toxic relationship. He was so loyal to her, I could never get anything out of him while they were together. Even afterward, he wouldn’t really speak ill of her. I thought he should be way angrier than he was. But eventually things worked out well for him. He’s outstanding at what he does, and Leila — well, you know. Everybody loves Leila. He should have been married to her all along.”

“Right. Everyone can see she’s more wonderful than my mom.”

“She is pretty great. I don’t see why you’re talking to me and not her.”

“She seemed to think I wanted to take Tom away from her.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. They seem to be more of a unit than ever these days.” Cynthia refilled her own glass. “But here you are. Tell me why again?”

“Because I don’t know what to do.”

“You want my advice.”

“Yes, please.”

“You might not like it.”

“Give it to me anyway.”

“I think you should be really, really angry.”

Pip nodded. “It’s hard, though. I feel like I betrayed Tom by reading his memoir, and now I’m betraying my mother by going to Wichita and knowing things behind her back.”

“That’s nonsense, if you’ll pardon me.”

“How is it nonsense?”

“I got very mad at Tom when he told me about you. You lived in his house for however long, for weeks, and he knew you were his daughter and didn’t tell you. Don’t you think you had a right to that information?”

“I guess he was respecting my mom’s privacy.”

“Really? Is that not the most infuriating bullshit? Why should he protect her? Why should he defer to his ex-wife at your expense? She got herself pregnant without telling him. She never told him that she had you. She used him — she used you—to continue some never-ending fight she had with him. He could have had a daughter, you could have had a father, but she ‘wouldn’t let him.’ On what planet does he owe her anything?”

“That’s a helpful insight.”

“On what planet do you owe her anything? From what Tom tells me, you spent your entire childhood below the poverty line. Your mother made you for her own selfish purposes—”

“No, that’s harsh,” Pip said. “Weren’t you a single mom, too?”

“Not by choice. Gretchen’s father knew about her, and she knew about him. They have a relationship now. And I did everything I could for Gretchen. I quit organizing and went back to school because of her, so she didn’t have to suffer from my personal choices. What personal choice did your mother ever give up for you?”

Tears came to Pip’s eyes. “She loved me.”

“I’m sure. I’m sure she did. But by your own account, she doesn’t have anyone else in her life. She created you to be what no one else can be for her. I’m angry at the selfishness of that. I’m angry that she’s the kind of ‘feminist’ who gives feminism a bad name. I feel like going over to Tom’s right this minute and slapping him in the face. For enabling her fantasies. She had real gifts — it’s such a waste. I don’t see why you’re not out of your mind with rage.”

“I can’t explain it. She’s a really lost person.”

“Well, fine. I can’t make you be angry if you’re not. But do me a favor and try to keep one thought in mind: you don’t owe these people anything. They owe you, big-time. It’s your turn to call the shots now. If they give you any resistance, you’re within your rights to nuke them.”

Pip nodded, but she was thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?

Cynthia made them a simple dinner, opened a second bottle, and talked about the world as she saw it: the concentration of capital in the hands of a few, the calculated demolition of faith in government, the worldwide abdication of responsibility for climate change, the disappointments of Obama. She oscillated between anger and despair, and Pip both did and didn’t share her anger. Certainly it seemed unfair that she’d been stuck with a shitty world of her parents’ making. They’d put her in an impossible position personally, and they belonged to the generation that had done nothing about nuclear weapons and less than nothing about global warming; it wasn’t her fault. And yet it was oddly comforting to know that even if she could identify the ethically correct thing to do with a billion dollars, and proceeded to do it, she could never alter the world’s shitty course. She thought of her mother’s spiritual Endeavor, her striving merely to be mindful. For better or worse, she was her mother’s daughter.

She kept thinking about her mother after she went to bed, in Gretchen’s bedroom. What Cynthia couldn’t know was how she’d made her mother smile. The pure, spontaneous love in that smile, every time she’d caught sight of Pip. And the shyness of it, the visible worry that Pip might not love her as much as she loved Pip. Her mother had a childlike heart. From reading the memoir, Pip suspected that she’d never stopped loving Tom, even to this day. Oh, the heartbreak of that scene with the stuffed toy bull: Pip knew exactly the nuttily, childishly hopeful look that her mother must have had on her face. There had been stuffed animals on her own childhood bed, a small menagerie of them, and she and her mother had played with them for hours on end, giving them voices, inventing moral crises to resolve. The little child and the big child, the one whose hair was going gray, the one whose shy sidelong glances the little one sometimes caught. Her mother had needed to give love and receive it. This was why she’d had Pip. Was that so monstrous? Wasn’t it more like miraculously resourceful?

* * *

On Sunday, Jason again was waiting when she unlocked the door of Peet’s. He loitered at the counter, ignoring Navi’s unfriendly looks, until Pip could speak to him.

“So stop me if I’m being too intrusive,” she said. “But can I ask why you aren’t with your girlfriend on a Sunday morning?”

“She’s a late riser,” Jason said. “Like, afternoon late. She stays up online until four in the morning.”

“Do you guys live together?”

“It’s not that kind of thing.”

“But it’s the kind of thing where it’s OK to play tennis with a girl you used to date.”

“Totally. I’m allowed to have friends.”

“Jason. Listen.” Pip lowered her voice. “Even if your girlfriend’s OK with our being friends, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

He seemed innocently puzzled. “You don’t even want to hit with me? I’m not as good as a brick wall. But I’m getting better.”

“If you didn’t have a girlfriend, I’d be happy to hit with you. But you do, so.”

“You’re telling me I have to break up with my girlfriend before you’ll hit with me? It’s a pretty substantial upfront investment for just hitting a tennis ball.”

“The city’s full of people you could hit with for no investment. I don’t know why you’re suddenly so interested in hitting with me. Why I suddenly stopped being the abnormal girl who does scary things.”

He blushed. “Because I’ve had two weeks to sit and watch you behind the counter?”

“Hmm.”

“No, you’re right, you’re right,” he said, holding his hands up. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

She felt a little sick, seeing him back away from her, his implied compliment echoing in her ears. But she was even sicker of betraying people.

When she got home from work, under a mercilessly clear sky, she found that she had no appetite for whacking the ball. It was like the spaghetti with eggplant in Tom’s memoir: all at once, her satisfaction was exhausted. She both wished that she could hit with an actual person, a kind person, with Jason, and was relieved that she couldn’t. Another lesson of Tom’s memoir was that there ought to be a law against boy-girl relationships before the age of thirty.

The TV was on in the living room, but Dreyfuss was absorbed in typing on the computer. “I’m filing a complaint of judicial misconduct,” he explained to Pip. “There’s a clear pattern of bias in Judge Costa’s decisions. I’ve examined more than three hundred relevant cases, and I believe the evidence can safely be described as compelling.”

“Dreyfuss,” Pip said gently. “You can stop doing that.”

“I’ve amassed a wealth of new information about Costa since Tuesday. I hesitate to use the word conspiracy, and yet—”

“Don’t use it at all. It’s a worrisome word, coming from you.”

“Some conspiracies are real, Pip. You’ve seen that yourself.”

She pulled up a chair next to him. “I should have told you this sooner,” she said. “Somebody is buying the house. Somebody I know. Somebody who’s going to let us keep living here.”

An actual emotion, worry or sadness, flickered in Dreyfuss’s face. “I own this house,” he said. “I have equity in this house. I bought it with my departed mother’s money. I’m not letting go of it.”

“The bank took it before the market rebounded. You lost it and you’re not getting it back. I did the only thing I could think to do.”

Dreyfuss narrowed his eyes. “You have money?”

“No. But someday I will. When I do, you can have the house back as a present from me. Can you trust me? Everything will be OK if you trust me. I promise.”

He seemed to recede into himself, into a more familiar absence of affect. “Bitter experience,” he said, “has forced on me a policy of never trusting anyone. You, for example. You’ve always struck me as a responsible and generous person, and yet who really knows what’s in your head? Still less what will be in your head in the future?”

“Believe me, I know how hard it is.”

He turned back to the computer. “I’m filing my complaint.”

“Dreyfuss,” she said. “You don’t have any choice but to trust me. It’s either that or wind up on the street.”

“There will be further legal actions.”

“Fine, but in the meantime let’s work out a rent we all can pay.”

“I fear estoppel of the fraud claim,” Dreyfuss said, typing. “To pay the supposed owner rent concedes the legitimacy of the sale.”

“So give the money to me. I’ll write the checks. You don’t have to concede anything. You can—”

She stopped. A tear had rolled down Dreyfuss’s cheek.

* * *

Evening sunlight was in the trees of Mosswood Park when Pip coasted up to the tennis courts on her bike. Standing next to Jason was an absurdly proportioned brown dog, huge-headed, low-slung, extremely long. It was smiling as if proud of the nest of ratty tennis balls at its feet. Jason caught sight of Pip and waved to her needlessly, goofily. The dog swished its bushy and cumbersome tail.

“This is your dog?”

“As of last week,” Jason said. “I inherited him from my sister. She’s going to Japan for two years.”

“What’s his name?

“Choco. Like his color, chocolate.”

The dog presented Pip with a drooly, dirty tennis ball and pushed his head between her bare knees. End to end, there was a whole lot of Choco.

“I wasn’t sure I could handle having a dog,” Jason said, “but he’s got this thing for chewing lemons. He walks around with them in his mouth, sort of half bitten, lots of slobber. He looks like he’s wearing this big idiotic yellow smile. My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes.”

“The acid can’t be good for his teeth.”

“My sister had a lemon tree behind her apartment. I’m putting him on a reduced-citrus diet. As you can see, he still has his teeth.”

“Excellent dog.”

“And a champ at finding tennis balls.”

“Next best thing to lemons.”

“Right?”

Four nights earlier, Jason had sent Pip a one-line message on Facebook: check out my relationship status. This she had duly done and mostly been dismayed by. The last thing she wanted was to be in any way responsible for a breakup. Among other things, it seemed to oblige her to be worth breaking up for: to be available. And yet, of course, she’d literally asked for it. Of all the ways she could have said no to hitting a tennis ball, she’d chosen to make an issue of Jason’s girlfriend. Not only could no one else be trusted — she herself couldn’t be trusted! She’d wrapped herself in relationship ethics when her real motive was to take Jason away from Sandrine. And sleep with him herself? She was certainly hungry to sleep with someone; it was practically forever since she’d done it. But she liked Jason a little too much to think it was a good idea to sleep with him. What if she started liking him even more? Relationship pain and relationship horror seemed probable. She’d written back:

Obviously saying this WAY too late, but … I’m going through a lot of stuff of my own right now and I can’t really promise you anything but returning balls hit to my forehand. Should have been MUCH clearer about this on Sunday. I apologize (again, again, again). Please don’t feel you have to follow through and hit with me.

To which Jason had replied, very quickly, just hitting works for me.

As soon as they were on a court, she discovered that he was bad at tennis, even worse than she was. He tried to crush every shot, sometimes missing the ball altogether, more often sending it into the net or over her head, and his good shots were unreturnable bullets. After ten minutes, she called a time-out. Choco, leashed to the outside of the fence, stood up hopefully.

“I’m no tennis pro,” she said, “but I think you’re swinging too hard.”

“It feels fantastic when I connect.”

“I know. But we’re trying to hit together.”

His face clouded. “I suck at this, don’t I.”

“That’s why we’re practicing.”

He swung less hard after that, and the hitting was somewhat more satisfactory, but their longest rally in an hour was six hits. “I blame the brick wall,” Jason said as they walked off the court. “I’m realizing I should have drawn a line representing the top of the net. And maybe a higher line to represent the baseline.”

“I sort of do that mentally,” Pip said.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to hear how to calculate the probability of a six-hit rally, given an arbitrary error rate of fifty percent? Or, slightly more interesting, how to calculate our actual combined error rate, given the empirical frequency of four-hit rallies?”

“Sometime I would,” Pip said. “But I should probably get home.”

“Do I suck too much to do this again?”

“No. We had some fun rallies.”

“I should have told you how much I suck.”

“Whatever you didn’t tell me is dwarfed by how much I haven’t told you.”

Jason bent down to unknot Choco’s leash. There was something humble and patient about the dog’s very low-slungness, the drooping of his heavy head. His grin was silly, possibly in a sly way, suggesting awareness of his more general silliness as a dog.

“I’m sorry if I freaked you out,” Jason said. “By breaking up, I mean. It was already in the works. I just didn’t want you to think I’m the kind of guy who, you know. Sees two people at once.”

“I understand,” Pip said. “Loyalty is good.”

“I also don’t want you to think you were the only reason.”

“OK. I won’t think that.”

“Although you were definitely a reason.”

“Got that, too.”

They didn’t speak of it again, not the next time they hit, three days later, nor any of the many times they hit in August and September. Jason was every bit as compulsive about whacking the ball as Pip was, and for a long time the intensity of their mutual concentration, on the court, was an adequate substitute for the kinds of off-court intensity from which she was still shying and for which Jason, his eager personality notwithstanding, was sensitive enough not to pressure her. But she liked him a lot and loved Choco. Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life. In hindsight, now that she’d read Tom’s memoir and knew the historical depth of her mother’s concern for animals, she was surprised that her mother had never had a pet. She guessed that she herself had been that pet. There was also her mother’s strange cosmology of animals, a simplified trinity consisting of birds (whose beady eyes frightened her), cats (which represented the Feminine but to which she was totally allergic), and dogs (which embodied the Masculine and therefore, whatever their charms, could not be allowed to disturb her cabin with their pushy male-principle energies). Pip was in any case so dog-starved that she would have fallen for one far less excellent than Choco. Choco was weird, very unneedy as dogs went, a kind of Zen dog, all about his lemons and sly acknowledgment of his ridiculousness.

Hitting two or three times a week, she and Jason got better — enough better to be depressed or enraged when they were suddenly worse again. They never played games, only rallied, working together to keep the ball in play. Week by week, the light began to change, their shadows at the baseline stretching, the autumn-scented dusk arriving earlier. It was the driest and least foggy season of the year in Oakland, but she minded it less now that it meant consistently ideal tennis conditions. All over the state, reservoirs and wells were going dry, the taste and clarity of tap water worsening, farmers suffering, Northern Californians conserving while Orange County set new records for monthly consumption, but none of this mattered for the hour and a half that she was on the court with Jason.

Finally there came a crisp blue afternoon, a Sunday, the day after Daylight Saving ended, when they met at the park at three o’clock and hit for so long that the light began to fail. Pip was in an absolute groove with her forehand, Jason was bounding around and achieving his own personal-best low error rate, and although her elbow had begun to ache she wanted never to stop. They had impossibly long rallies, back and forth, whack and whack, rallies so long that she was giggling with happiness by the end of them. The sun went down, the air was deliciously cool, and they kept hitting. The ball bouncing up in a low arc, her eyes latching on to it, being sure to see it, just see it, not think, and her body doing the rest without being asked to. That instant of connecting, the satisfaction of reversing the ball’s inertia, the sweetness of the sweet spot. For the first time since her early days at Los Volcanes she was experiencing perfect contentment. Yes, a kind of heaven: long rallies on an autumn evening, the exercise of skill in light still good enough to hit by, the faithful pock of a tennis ball. It was enough.

In near-darkness afterward, outside the fence, she put her arms around Jason and her face to his chest. Choco stood by patiently, his mouth open, smiling.

“OK,” she said, “OK.”

“It’s about time,” he said.

“I’ve got some things I have to tell you.”

* * *

The rain came three weeks later. Nothing made Pip more homesick for the San Lorenzo Valley than what passed for rain in the East Bay. Rain in Oakland was ordinary, seldom very heavy, always liable to yield to clear sky between the chaotic tentacles of Pacific storm cloud. Only up in the cloud-trapping Santa Cruz Mountains could the rain continue for days without a break, never less than moderately heavy and often coming down an inch per hour, all night, all day, the river rising to lap at the undersides of bridges, Highway 9 covered with sheets of muddy runoff and fallen boughs, power lines down everywhere, PG&E trucks flashing their lights in the torrential midday twilight. That was real rain. Back in the pre-drought years, six feet of it had fallen every winter.

“I might need to go home to Felton for a while,” Pip said to Jason one evening while they were walking, under umbrellas, down the hill from the St. Agnes Home. She’d been visiting Ramón at the home every month or so, even though things had changed between them. He was wholly Marie’s adoptee now, not Stephen’s at all. He had new friends, including a “girlfriend,” and he took very seriously the janitorial duties he’d learned to perform. Pip had wanted Jason to meet him before she drifted out of his life altogether.

“How long is a while?” Jason said.

“I don’t know. Weeks maybe. Longer than I have days off for. I have a feeling my mom’s going to be difficult. I may have to quit my job.”

“Can I come down and see you?”

“No, I’ll come up. It’s a five-hundred-square-foot cabin. Plus I’m worried you’ll run for your life when you meet my mom. You’ll think I’ve been concealing the fact that I’m like her.”

“Everybody’s embarrassed by their parents.”

“But I have actual reason to be.”

Pip was Jason’s newest enthusiasm but thankfully not his only one; she could get him off the subject of her virtues by mentioning math, tennis, TV shows, video games, writers. His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard. If she wanted something more, like visiting Ramón with her, he agreed to it enthusiastically. He had a way of making whatever they were doing the thing he most wanted to do. She’d watched him rapidly eat four generic vanilla-cream cookies and then stop and marvel at a fifth, holding it in front of his eyes and saying, “These are fantastic.”

If she became a rich person — and she could already feel herself becoming one; was sensing the mentally deformative weight of the word heir—Jason would be the last boy who’d liked her when she was still nobody. He did admit that her interning with Andreas Wolf had “confirmed” his assessment of her intelligence, but he swore it hadn’t had anything to do with his breakup. “It was just you,” he said. “You behind the counter at Peet’s.” She trusted Jason in a way that might well prove to be unique, but she didn’t want him to know this. She was aware of how easily she could blow things with him, and she was even more aware, thanks to Tom’s memoir, of the hazards of love. She felt herself wanting to bury herself in Jason, to pour her trust into him, even though she had evidence that self-burial and crazy trust levels could result in toxicity. She was therefore allowing herself to be heedless in sex only. This was probably hazardous, too, but she couldn’t help it.

They had more sex as soon as they got back to Jason’s apartment. Starting to fall in love with a person made it bigger, almost metaphysical; a John Donne poem she’d studied in college and failed to appreciate, a poem about the Extasie and how it doth unperplex, was making sense to her now. But in the wake of the Extasie she became anxious again.

“I think I’d better call my mom,” she said. “I can’t postpone it any longer.”

“Do it.”

“Can you just keep lying there like that while I do? With your arm there? I need you to hold me in case I feel like I’m getting sucked in.”

“I’m picturing somebody getting sucked out of a blown-open airplane,” Jason said. “They say it’s surprisingly hard to hold on to a person when that happens. Or maybe not so surprising when you consider the air-pressure differentials that keep a hundred-ton plane aloft.”

“Do your best,” she said, reaching for her phone.

She loved having a body now that Jason loved her having it. She was clutching his arm when her mother answered.

“Hi, Mom.” She braced herself for a Pussycat!

“Yes,” her mother said.

“So, I’m sorry I haven’t called in so long, but I’m thinking I might come down and see you.”

“All right.”

“Mom?”

“You come and go as you please. If you want to come, come. Obviously I can’t stop you. Obviously I’ll be here.”

“Mom, I’m really sorry.”

There was a click, a cessation.

“Holy shit,” Pip said. “She hung up on me.”

“Uh oh.”

It hadn’t occurred to her that her mother might be angry at her; that even their extreme case of moral hazard might have limits. But now that she thought about it, her mother’s entire story, in Tom’s memoir, was one of serial abandonment and betrayal, followed by scorching moral judgment. Pip had always been safe from this judgment, but she could tell, from the fact that Tom still seemed afraid of it, even after twenty-five years, that it was awful to experience. She felt afraid of it herself now, and closer to Tom.

The next day, she gave notice at Peet’s and called Mr. Navarre to tell him she was going to have the conversation with her mother, and to ask him for five thousand dollars. Mr. Navarre could have been judgmental or teasing about the money, but apparently he was impressed that she’d waited four and a half months to ask for any. She enjoyed the feeling that she’d passed some test, exceeded some norm.

Microclimates of the San Lorenzo: the pavement at the Santa Cruz bus station was nearly dry, but just two miles away, at the top of Graham Hill Road, the driver had to put his wipers on. Winter night had fallen. Pip’s mother’s lane was spongy with redwood needles dislodged and sodden with the rain, the sound of which surrounded her polyrhythmically, a steady background patter, heavier drippings, hiccuping gurgles. The musty wood-soak smell of Valley wetness overwhelmed her with sense-memory.

The cabin was dark. Inside it was the sound of her childhood, the patter of rain on a roof that consisted only of shingle and bare boards, no insulation or ceiling. She associated the sound with her mother’s love, which had been as reliable as the rain in its season. Waking up in the night and hearing the rain still pattering the same way it had when she’d fallen asleep, hearing it night after night, had felt so much like being loved that the rain might have been love itself. Rain pattering at dinner. Rain pattering while she did her homework. Rain pattering while her mother knitted. Rain pattering on Christmas with the sad little tree that you could get for free on Christmas Eve. Rain pattering while she opened presents that her mother had put aside money for all fall.

She sat in the cold and dark for a while, at the kitchen table, listening to the rain and feeling sentimental. Then she turned on a light and opened a bottle and made a fire in the woodstove. The rain fell and fell.

The person who was both her mother and Anabel Laird came home at nine fifteen with a canvas bag of groceries. She stood in the front doorway and looked at Pip without speaking. Underneath her rain parka she was wearing an old dress that Pip loved and, indeed, coveted. It was a snug and faded brown cotton dress with long sleeves and many buttons, a kind of Soviet worker-woman’s dress. Back in the day, her mother would probably have given her the dress if she’d asked for it, but her mother had so few covetable possessions that depriving her of even one of them was unthinkable.

“So I came home,” Pip said.

“I see that.”

“I know you don’t like to drink, but this might be a good night for an exception.”

“No, thank you.”

The person who was both her mother and Anabel left the parka and groceries by the door and went to the back of the cabin. Pip heard the bathroom door close. It was ten minutes before she realized that her mother was hiding in the bathroom, not intending to come out.

She went and knocked on the door, which was just boards held together with crossboards. “Mom?”

There was no answer, but her mother hadn’t used the hook that served as a lock. Pip went in and found her mother sitting on the concrete floor of the tiny shower, staring straight ahead, her knees drawn up to her chin.

“Don’t be sitting there,” Pip said.

She crouched down and touched her mother’s arm. Her mother jerked her arm away.

“You know what?” Pip said. “I’m mad at you, too. So don’t be thinking being mad at me is going to get you out of this.”

Her mother was mouth-breathing, staring. “I’m not angry with you,” she said. “I am…” She shook her head. “I knew this would happen. No matter how careful I was, I knew that someday this would happen.”

“That what would happen? That I’d come home and want to talk to you, and be honest, and be part of the two of us again? Because that’s what I’m doing.”

“I knew it the way I know my own name.”

“What is your name? Maybe let’s start with that. Will you come sit in the kitchen with me?”

Her mother shook her head again. “I’m getting used to being alone. I’d forgotten how hard it is. It’s very hard, even harder this time, much harder — you brought me so much joy. But it’s not impossible to relinquish desire. I’m learning it again. I’m making progress.”

“So, what, I’m supposed to leave now? That’s what you want?”

“You already left.”

“Yeah, well, hey, but I came back, too, didn’t I?”

“Out of duty,” her mother said. “Or out of pity. Or because you’re angry. I’m not blaming you, Purity. I’m telling you that I will be all right without you. Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything. I had the joy of experiencing your goodness for a very long time. It was enough. I have no right to ask for more.”

“Mom. Stop talking like that. I need you in my life. You’re the most important person in the world to me. I need you to stop being Buddhist and try to have an adult conversation with me.”

“Or else what?” Her mother smiled faintly. “You’ll leave again?”

“Or else, I don’t know, I’m going to pull your hair and scratch you.”

Her mother’s failure to be amused was nothing new. “I’m no longer so afraid of you leaving,” she said. “For a long time, the prospect was like death to me. But it’s not death. At a certain point, trying to hold on to you became the real death.”

Pip sighed. “OK, frankly — you calling me pussycat, me not being able to end a phone call with you, I’d be happy to retire all that. I’m a lot older than I used to be. You wouldn’t believe how much older. But don’t you want to know what I’m like now? Don’t you want to know the person I’ve turned into? It’s the same old me but also not. I mean, aren’t I interesting to you? You’re still interesting to me.”

Her mother turned her head and gave her an empty look. “What kind of person are you now?”

“I don’t know. I have a real boyfriend — that’s one thing. I’m kind of in love with him.”

“That’s nice.”

“OK, another thing. A big thing. I know what your real name is.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Will you say it for me?”

“No. Never.”

“You have to say it. You have to tell me everything, because I’m your daughter and I can’t be in the same room with you if all we do is lie.”

Her mother stood up gracefully, with her Endeavor-perfected limberness, but her head hit the shampoo basket and knocked a bottle to the shower floor. She threw herself angrily out of the stall, stumbled on Pip, and ran from the bathroom.

“Mom!” Pip said, chasing her.

“I want nothing to do with that part of you.”

“Which part of me?”

Her mother spun around. Her face was pure torment. “Get out! Get out! Leave me alone! Both of you! For the love of God, please just leave me alone!”

Pip watched, horrified, as the person who now seemed entirely Anabel fell onto her bed and yanked the comforter over her head and lay there rocking herself, crying full-throatedly in pain. Pip had expected difficulty, but this was extreme by any measure. She went to the kitchen and knocked back a glass of wine. Then she returned to the bed and pulled the comforter away, lay down behind her mother and put her arms around her. She buried her face in her mother’s thick hair and breathed in her smell, the most distinct of all smells, the smell that there was nothing like. The brown dress’s cotton was soft from a hundred washings. Slowly her mother’s crying subsided into whimpers. Rain pattered on the sleeping-porch roof.

“I’m sorry,” Pip said. “I’m sorry I can’t just leave, I know it’s hard. But you created me and now you have to deal with me. That’s my purpose. I’m your reality.”

Her mother said nothing.

Both of you?

Pip lowered her voice to a whisper. “Do you still love him?”

She felt her mother stiffen.

“I think he still loves you.”

Her mother took a sharp breath and didn’t let it out.

“So there’s got to be a way to move on,” Pip said. “There’s got to be a way to forgive and move on. I’m not leaving until you do.”

* * *

How she got the story out of her mother, the next morning, was by letting her believe that Tom had told her his version of it; she figured, correctly, that her mother would find this intolerable. Her mother omitted the details of her conception, saying only that it had occurred the very last time she’d seen Tom, but she was surprisingly calm and articulate about other details. Pip’s actual birthday was February 24, not July 11. She’d been delivered naturally, by a midwife, in a safe house in Riverside, California. Until she was two, she and her mother had lived in Bakersfield, where her mother cleaned hotel rooms for a living. Then, by bad luck (because Bakersfield was really nowhere), her mother ran into a college friend who asked too many questions. A new friend from the women’s shelter knew of a cabin for rent in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and there they moved.

“I heard terrible stories in the shelters and safe houses,” her mother said. “So many women who were punching bags. So many stories of men whose idea of love was stalking and stabbing their ex-wives. I should have felt guilty about misrepresenting myself, but I didn’t. Men’s emotional cruelty can be every bit as painful as physical abuse. My father was cruel and my husband was crueler.”

“Really,” Pip said.

“Yes, really. I told him it would kill me if he ever took money from my father, and he did it. Did it specifically to hurt me. He slept with my best friend to hurt me. He took my advice and encouragement and used it to make a career for himself, and then, when I was struggling with my own career, he abandoned me. You’re only young once, and I gave him my youth because I believed his promises, and then, when I wasn’t young anymore, he broke his promises. And I knew it all along. I knew he would betray me. I told him all along, but it didn’t stop him from making promises to me, which I believed because I was weak. I really was like the other women in the shelters.”

Pip crossed her arms prosecutorially. “And so it seemed OK to you to have his baby without telling him. That seemed like the morally right thing to do.”

“He knew I wanted a baby.”

“But why his? Why not some random sperm donor’s?”

“Because I keep my promises. I promised him I’d be his forever. He could break his promise, but I wasn’t going to break mine. We were meant to have a baby, and we did. And then, right away, you were everything to me. You have to believe me that I stopped caring who your father was.”

“I don’t believe you. You had some sort of a moral competition going. Who’s better at keeping promises.”

“Things had become so violent and dirty between us. I wanted something purely good to come of it. And something did. You did.”

“I am far from purely good.”

“No one’s really perfect. But to me you were perfect.”

This seemed to Pip the right moment to bring up the money, by way of demonstrating her imperfection. She told the story of her visit to Wichita and explained that her mother needed to be in touch with Mr. Navarre. The way her mother shook her head in response was more bewildered than adamant.

“What would I do with a billion dollars?” she said.

“You could start by getting Sonny out to pump the septic tank. I’ve been lying awake at night worrying about what’s in there. Has it ever been pumped?”

“It’s not a real septic tank. I think the owner made it out of boards and cement.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“The money is meaningless to me, Purity. It’s so meaningless that I’m beyond refusing it. It’s just — nothing to me.”

“My student debt isn’t nothing to me. And you’re the one who told me not to worry about the money.”

“Fine, then. You can ask the lawyer to pay your debt. I won’t stop you.”

“But it’s not my money. You have to be involved.”

“I can’t be. I never wanted it. It’s dirty money. It ruined my family. It killed my mother, it turned my father into a monster. Why would I bring all of that into my life now?”

“Because it’s real.”

“Nothing is real.”

“I’m real.”

Her mother nodded. “That’s true. You are real to me.”

“So here’s what I need.” Pip ticked off her demands with her fingers. “Student loan paid off in full. Four thousand more to pay off my credit-card debt. Eight hundred thousand to buy Dreyfuss’s house and give it back to him. Also, if you insist on staying here, we should buy the cabin and really fix it up. Grad-school tuition if I decide I want that. Monthly living expenses if you want to quit your job. And then maybe another fifty thousand in walking-around money while I try to start a career. The whole thing is less than three million. That’s like five percent of one year’s dividends.”

“From McCaskill, though. McCaskill.”

“Their business wasn’t only animals. There’s got to be at least three million you can take in good conscience.”

Her mother was becoming distressed. “Oh, why don’t you just take it? All of it! Just take it and leave me alone!”

“Because I’m not allowed to. It’s not in my name. As long as you’re alive, it’s just going to be great expectations for me.” Pip laughed. “Why did you start calling me Pip anyway? Was that something else you ‘knew all along’?”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t me,” her mother said eagerly. Pip’s childhood was her favorite topic. “It was in kindergarten. Mrs. Steinhauer must have given it to you. Some of the little kids had trouble pronouncing your real name. I guess she thought ‘Pip’ fit you. There’s something happy about the name, and you were always such a happy girl. Or maybe she asked you, and you volunteered it.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“I didn’t even know it was your nickname until we had a parent-teacher conference.”

“Well, anyway. Someday you’ll be gone, and the problem will be mine. But right now it’s your money.”

Her mother looked at her like a child seeking guidance. “Can’t I just give it all away?”

“No. The principal belongs to the trust, not you. You can only give away the dividends. We can find some good animal-welfare groups, responsible-farming groups, things you believe in.”

“Yes, that sounds good. Whatever you want.”

“Mom, it doesn’t matter what I want. This is your problem.”

“Oh, I don’t care, I don’t care,” her mother wailed. “I just want it to go away!”

Pip saw that bringing her mother back into firm contact with reality was going to be a long and possibly hopeless project. Nevertheless, she felt that progress had been made, if only in her mother’s willingness to take orders from her.

The rain went away, came back, and went away again. When Pip was alone in the cabin, she read books and texted Jason and talked to him on the phone. She liked to sit at the kitchen table so she could watch the pair of brown towhees in the side yard as they foraged in the wet tree litter or perched on fence posts for no apparent reason but to show off how splendid they were. To Pip, no bird could surpass the excellence of brown towhees; in their avian way, they were as excellent as Choco. They were a perfect medium size, more substantial than juncos, more modest than jays. They were neither too shy nor too forward. They liked to be around houses but retreated under shrubs if you disturbed them. They didn’t frighten anything except little bugs and her mother. They preferred hopping to flying. They took long and vigorous baths. Except under the tail, where the feathers were peach-colored, and around the face, where there were subtle gray streakings, their plumage was similar in color to Pip’s mother’s faded brown dress. They had the beauty of the second glance, the beauty that only revealed itself with intimacy. All Pip had ever heard a brown towhee say was Teek! But this they said often. The call was sharp and cheerful, like the squeak of a sneaker on a basketball court. It couldn’t have been simpler, and yet it seemed to express not only everything that a towhee would ever need to say but everything that really needed to be said by anyone. Teek! According to the Internet, brown towhees were rare outside California and unusual in being monogamous and mating for life. Supposedly (Pip had never witnessed this) the male and the female sang a more complicated song in breeding season, a duet that announced to other towhees that he and she were spoken for. Indeed, wherever you saw one towhee, you soon saw the other one. They stayed together in one spot year-round; were Californians. Pip could imagine a whole lot of worse ways of being to aspire to.

As the days went by and the reality of the money sank in, she began to catch glimmerings, in her mother, of the young woman she’d read about in Tom’s memoir, the rich girl whose vestigial hauteur was expressing itself again. One night she found her mother scowling at the tired dresses in the tiny closet on the sleeping porch. “I suppose it wouldn’t kill me to buy a few new clothes,” she said. “You say not all of the money is in McCaskill stock?”

And one morning at the kitchen window, glaring at her neighbor’s chicken coop: “Ha. Little does he know that I could not only buy his rooster, I could buy his whole house.”

And again one evening, returning from her shift at New Leaf: “They think I can’t afford to quit. But if I catch Serena rolling her eyes at me one more time, I might just do it. Who is she to roll her eyes at me? I don’t think she’s bathed in a week.”

But then, pensively, to Pip, at the dinner table: “How much of my father’s money did Tom take? Do you know? That has to be our absolute limit. Not even for you will I ever take more than he took.”

“I think it was twenty million dollars.”

“Hm. Now that I say that, I’m having new thoughts. I’m afraid I may not be able to take anything, pussycat. Even one dollar is too much. One dollar, twenty million dollars, it’s the same thing, morally.”

“Mom, we’ve been through this.”

“Maybe the lawyer can pay off your debt. He’s certainly done very well for himself.”

“You at least have to buy Dreyfuss’s house. That was a moral crime, too. A worse one, in my opinion.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. There is no afterlife. And yet, my father … The idea that he might somehow know … I need to think some more about this.”

“No, you don’t. You just need to do what I tell you.”

Her mother looked at her uncertainly. “You did always have good moral sense.”

“I got it from you,” Pip said. “So trust it.”

Jason was begging her to come home, but there was the pleasure of the mountain rain and the related pleasure of being on new, more honest terms with her mother. To the loving that had always been in Pip was coming a new and unexpected sense of liking. Anabel had been likable, at least to Tom, at least in the beginning, and now that her mother was allowed to be Anabel again, to acknowledge her old privilege and dip a toe in her new privilege, to have a bit of an edge, Pip could imagine how the two of them might actually be friends.

She also still had a task so daunting that she kept finding fault with every moment when she could have performed it. It took her two weeks to admit to herself that, in fact, no time on no day was a good time to call Tom. She finally chose a Monday at five o’clock in Denver.

“Pip!” Tom said. “I was afraid you’d never call.”

“Really. Why’s that.”

“Leila and I think about you all the time. We miss you.”

“Leila misses me. Really. It’s not a problem that I’m your daughter?”

“Sorry, hang on. I’m shutting the door.”

There was a fumbling, a bonk, a rustle, a clunk.

“Pip, sorry,” Tom said. “What are you telling me?”

“I’m telling you I know everything.”

“Yikey. OK.”

“It’s not what you think. I didn’t read your document.”

“Ah, good. Good. Excellent.” Tom’s relief was audible.

“I deleted it,” she said. “But Andreas told me who you were, before he died. That made the research easy, and then my mom told me everything.”

“Jesus. She told you. It’s amazing you’re even speaking to me.”

“You are my father.”

“I shudder to imagine her version.”

“It’s better than no story, which is what you gave me.”

“That’s a fair point. Although sometime I hope you’ll give me a chance to tell my side.”

“You had your chance.”

“True enough. I had my reasons, but it’s a fair point. And I’m assuming this is why you called me? To tell me I blew it with you?”

“No. I called because I want you to come out here and see my mother.”

Tom laughed. “I’d rather be dropped in the middle of the Congolese civil war.”

“You cared enough about her to keep her secret for her.”

“I suppose … in a sense…”

“She obviously still matters to you.”

“Pip, listen, I’m very sorry I didn’t tell you anything. Leila’s been after me to call you. I should have listened to her.”

“Well, now I’m telling you how you can make it up to me. You can get on a plane and come out here.”

“Why, though? Why would I do that?”

“Because I won’t have anything to do with you if you don’t.”

“I can tell you, from our side, that would be a loss.”

“Wouldn’t you like to see my mom again anyway? Just once, after all these years? All I’m asking is that you guys forgive each other. I want to be allowed to see both of you, but I can’t do it if I feel like I’m betraying one of you whenever I see the other.”

“You don’t have to feel that way with me. I don’t have any claim on you.”

“But I have a claim on you. And you’ve never had to do anything for me. This is the one thing I’m asking.”

Tom sighed heavily across the time zones. “I don’t suppose there’s any liquor in your mother’s house?”

“I’ll make sure there’s liquor.”

“And we’re talking — when? Next month?”

“No. This week. Maybe Friday. The longer you guys think about it, the worse it will get.”

Again Tom sighed. “I could do Thursday. My Friday nights are for Leila.”

Pip felt a twinge of resentment and was tempted to insist on Friday. But the road back to friendship with Leila was looking long enough already.

“One other thing,” she said.

“Yep,” Tom said.

“I’ve been looking at DI every week. I keep thinking you’ll do a big story about Andreas.”

“He wasn’t well, Pip. I saw him at the end, I saw him go over the cliff. The only thing I feel is sadness. Leila’s annoyed by the postmortem adulation, but I find it hard to begrudge him. He was the most remarkable person I ever met.”

“The Express is still waiting for me to write something about him. I feel the same thing you do, sadness. But I also feel like somebody should tell the real story.”

“About the murder? It’s your call. One of the costs would be the girl, the one who helped him. There could still be legal consequences for her.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“But he left a confession, which his people covered up. There’s definitely a story if you want to pursue it.”

Was Tom also worried about his own complicity in the murder coming to light? Probably not, if he believed that Pip hadn’t read his memoir.

“OK,” she said. “Thank you.”

When her mother returned from work, Pip explained to her what had to happen. She was relieved that her mother didn’t immediately have a meltdown. But the reason she didn’t was that the entire concept made no sense to her.

“What on earth did I ever do that needs to be forgiven?”

“Um — had me and didn’t tell him? That’s pretty big.”

“How can he blame me for that? He abandoned me. He never wanted to hear from me again. And I gave him that. Like everything else. He always got everything he wanted. Just like my father.”

“Still, at some point, you should have let him know about me. On my eighteenth birthday, whatever. It was wrong of you not to. It was spiteful.”

Her mother huffed and puffed at this, but finally she nodded. “If you say so,” she said. “And only because it’s you saying it.”

“Weak people hold grudges, Mom. Strong people forgive. You raised me all by yourself. You said no to the money that everyone else in your family couldn’t resist. And you were stronger than Tom. You put an end to it — he couldn’t do it. You got everything you wanted. You won! And that’s why you can afford to forgive him. Because you won. Right?”

Her mother frowned.

“You’re also a billionaire,” Pip said. “That’s a kind of winning, too.”

The next morning they rode the bus into Santa Cruz. It was a clear cold morning between storms. Homeless people were wearing their sleeping bags like shawls, Christmas bows were shivering on lampposts, the sky was full of wheeling seagulls. A hairdresser at Jillz trimmed Pip’s mother’s hair in a flurry of split ends. Then Pip took her for a manicure, and it was Anabel, not her old mother, who instructed the Vietnamese manicurist not to cut her cuticles, Anabel who explained to Pip that cutting cuticles was a racket, because they grew back quickly and needed to be cut again. It was Anabel who briskly worked through racks of dresses, through store after store, and continued to reject things long after Pip’s own patience was exhausted. The dress that she finally deemed “adequate” was vintage and full-skirted, sexy in a prairie-schoolteacher way, with twin lines of buttons on the bodice. Pip had to admit that it was the most suitable dress they’d seen all morning.

She’d asked Jason to get a Zipcar and fetch Tom from the San Jose airport, so that she could stand guard over her mother and try to keep her calm. “Bring Choco, too,” she said.

“He’ll just be in the way,” Jason said.

“I want him in the way. Otherwise my mom’s going to focus on her freak-out. She’ll meet you, she’ll meet Choco, and, oh yeah, here’s the ex she hasn’t seen in twenty-five years.”

On Thursday morning, another storm arrived. By late afternoon the rain was drumming so hard on the roof that Pip and her mother had to raise their voices. Darkness had fallen early, and the lights had flickered several times. Pip had prepared a bean soup and laid in other supplies, including ingredients for a Manhattan. After her mother had showered, Pip applied a blow-dryer to her hair, brushing it and fluffing it. “Let’s give you some makeup, too.”

Her mother muttered, “Why I’m dolling myself up like this…”

“You’re putting on armor. You want to be strong.”

“I can put on my own mascara.”

“Let me do it. It was something I never got to do with you.”

At five o’clock, while Pip was lighting a fire, Jason called to report that he and Tom were stuck in traffic near Los Gatos. Her mother, sitting on the sofa, was looking altogether very good in her vintage dress, like the older Anabel she was, but she was doing her rocking thing, her mildly autistic thing. “You should have a glass of wine,” Pip said.

“I feel betrayed by my Endeavor. The time I most need it … where is it?”

“Endeavor to drink some wine.”

“It will go straight to my head.”

“Good.”

When the Zipcar finally came up the lane, its wipers laboring hard, its headlights making a white fury of the downpour, Pip left the side porch where she’d been waiting and ran, under an umbrella, to greet Jason. He looked a little harrowed by the drive, but his first thought was her first thought, which was to lock lips. Then Choco barked, and Pip opened the car’s rear door and let him lick her face.

Tom emerged from the car tentatively, umbrella first. Pip thanked him for coming and kissed his meaty cheek. Somehow in the fifteen feet between car and front door Choco managed to get not only soaked but covered with wet redwood needles. He squeezed past Pip and ran inside. Her mother raised her arms, as if to ward him off, and gazed with dismay at the needles and muddy paw prints on the floor.

“Sorry, sorry,” Pip said.

She corralled Choco and led him back onto the side porch, where Tom was scuffing his feet. “That is the most hilarious dog I’ve seen in my entire life,” he said.

“You like him?”

“Love him. Want him.”

They went inside, followed by Jason. Her mother, by the woodstove, wringing her hands, shyly raised her eyes to look at Tom. It was clear to Pip that both of them were struggling not to smile. But they couldn’t help smiling anyway; both of them, broadly.

“‘Hello, Anabel.’”

“‘Hello, Tom.’”

“So, Mom,” Pip said, “this is Jason. Jason, my mom.”

As if in a trance, her mother turned away from Tom and nodded to Jason. “Hello.”

Jason gave her a kind of vaudevillian two-handed wave and said, “Hey.”

“So, like I said,” Pip said, “just a quick H and G here. We’ll come back after dinner.”

“You’re sure you won’t stay?” Tom said anxiously.

“No, you guys need to talk. If there’s anything left to drink later, we’ll help you drink it.”

Before any entanglement could develop, Pip hurried Jason outside. Choco was so long and the side porch so narrow that he couldn’t turn around to make way for them but had to skitter backward. “Can we leave him here?” she asked Jason.

“I brought his porta-bowl and lemons.”

Pip had intended to give her parents two hours alone, but in the event it was closer to four. First she and Jason had to go to the state park and make love in the back seat. Then, when they’d managed to get their pants back on, they had to take them off and do it again. After that they had dinner at Don Quixote’s, where a local cover band, Shady Characters, was playing. Just when it was time to be leaving, the band launched into a must-dance song, the soul-sister song.

“Hate the lyrics,” Jason said, dancing. “Hate the cooptation for a car commercial. And yet—”

“Great song,” Pip said, dancing.

They danced for half an hour while the rain came down and the San Lorenzo rose. Jason was a silly dancer, a thinking dancer, and Pip loved that he could do what he did and she could do what she did, which was not think, just move, just be happy in her body. When they finally went outside, the rain had paused and the roads were end-of-the-world empty. Driving up her mother’s lane, they saw Choco standing on the cabin’s side porch, a lemon in his mouth, his tail swishing in its complex way. Jason let the car roll to a stop in the driveway.

“So,” Pip said. “Here goes.”

“Are you sure I can’t just stay in the car?”

“You’re getting to know the parents. These are the parents.”

But as soon as she opened her door, she heard the voices. The shouting. The sound of raw hatred. It was coming right through the cabin’s thin walls.

I did not say that! If you’re going to fucking quote me, quote me accurately! What I said was—

I’m telling you the DISGUSTING SUBTEXT of what you said. You hide behind what everyone agrees is normal, you get the whole world on your side that way, but you know in your heart that there’s a deeper truth—

The deep truth that I’m wrong and you’re right? That’s the only deep truth you ever knew!

You know it yourself!

You just ADMITTED that you have no case! That there isn’t another person on earth who thinks you have a case—

But I do and you know it! You know it!

Pip shut the door again, to block out the words, but even with the door closed she could hear the fighting. The people who’d bequeathed a broken world to her were shouting at each other viciously. Jason sighed and took her hand. She held it tightly. It had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn’t sure she would. Only when the skies opened again, the rain from the immense dark western ocean pounding on the car roof, the sound of love drowning out the other sound, did she believe that she might.