The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Homes

wad in their pocket? It creeps me out, this indescribable subtlety of biology. In her pockets I find the same things I find in mine.
    I am reading a pile of clothes, a messy house, looking for information, clues.
    I remember the writer James Ellroy talking to me about his mother’s clothing—getting his murdered mother’s clothing out of the police evidence room—years after the fact. He talked about taking the clothing out of the sealed plastic bags and wanting to smell it, wanting to rub his face with it.
    There is a tendency to romanticize the missing person—to think about her is to allow her in. I hear her voice in my head—unreliable though she was, she is the only one who could explain to me what happened.
    When I leave, I put four boxes of assorted paper into the rented car. I have no idea what I’ve taken, what it might add up to. I drive my two friends into downtown Atlantic City and take them out for dinner at one of the casinos. I feel indebted—I couldn’t have gotten through the day without them. The setting is surreal, a faux underwater ice palace. We sit staring at the slowly melting sea-creature ice sculptures surrounding us. The lighting constantly shifts, green and purple and blue—like Jacques Cousteau on acid. The three of us order the same thing—steak and baked potatoes; it’s as though we need a good meal to ground us. We are silent, stunned—it’s hard to know what to say after a day like this. In the end Ellen pays for the meal. I use the wad of money from her black pants, and whatever is left I leave as a tip.
    That night in New York, I clean my apartment. Frantically, hysterically, I go through everything, throwing things out—I have shower caps from every hotel I ever stayed in, soaps, shampoo. I have everything that she had. I throw it all away. I cannot be like Ellen—it can’t all happen again the same way.
    I think of the flowers she had turned into a plant, the plant I saw through the kitchen window, the plant with the Christmas tree lights turned on, and me, a Christmas baby, the thing that couldn’t be forgotten—did she leave the lights on for me?
    I struggle with how to narrate the confusion, the profound loss of a piece of myself that I never knew, a piece that I pushed away because it was so frightening.
    The autobiography of the unknown.
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    A couple of months later, I call Norman—he says, “Let me call you right back.” It’s the first time we’ve spoken since Ellen’s death. He tells me that he saw Ellen in Washington not long before she died. I have no idea if this was the first time they’d seen each other in almost forty years or if they’d been seeing each other repeatedly since their independent reunions with me. He tells me that he knew she was sick. The doctor had told her that she needed a kidney, and according to Norman, Ellen wanted him to ask me for one. He becomes adamant; she asked him and he said no. He told her that they couldn’t ask me for any favors, on account of how neither of them had ever done anything for me. He tells me he offered his own kidney—that he called his doctor and asked about it. I believe he asked his doctor something about it but beyond that it seems unlikely. We’re talking on his car phone because he’s afraid to talk to me from his home phone, but he expects me to believe that he could give Ellen a kidney—would he tell his wife, his children? I believe that when Ellen asked Norman, he said no at first and then agreed to ask me and told Ellen that I’d turned her down. That would explain a lot. It would explain why I didn’t hear from her before she died.
    When I speak to Norman, I get emotional and think, Oh no, I’m reminding him of her. I tell Norman that I’ve had enough, that I can’t do this again, that I don’t want one day to get a phone call summoning me to another church, where