The door is open. The room’s walls are white-painted drywall, undecorated, and the furniture—chairs, low tables, a bed—is made of plastic or metal and easily folded away. There is one small window. The room is impeccably clean, despite being filled with machinery and paperwork—he was never one to remain idle, even when ill. At least here it smells brightly of peppermint salve and lemon-scented cleaner, not of decay and death. A machine in the corner beeps as Tai approaches the bed, with me just behind her.
Dad must have converted part of the old house into a treatment room. The sight is enough to make me bite my lip so hard it might fall off.
The bed is empty, of course. But his clothes are stacked on top of the clean sheets, and I spot the Mickey Mouse T-shirt Tai insisted on buying at Disney World and mailing to him when she was twelve years old. There’s the cozy waffle-weave shirt he used to wear while reading the science journals out in the garden. At the bottom of the pile are the matching flannel pajamas Mama got all of us for Víxmís one year, stained by the juices of platter after platter of roasted scallops and chestnuts.
It’s impossible not to imagine him here, alone. So small in the bed, smaller than ever before, but deeply familiar, with the cloud of white hair that replaced the jet black and a peaceful, blank expression. A plain white shirt buttoned simply down the front, loose around his concave chest.
When the tears come, hot and fast and unexpected, it’s easy, somehow, to forget that we decided to stop protecting each other, that Dad and I were never close at all.
Mama was the one I loved—the one who loved me—and—
Mama killed herself.
I’m sure; I’m sure, even though there’s never been any official evidence. She was a complex prism of a woman working her whole life to crush this paper doll vision people had of her. And she mostly failed. This harsh reality, plus chemical imbalances, stressors, genetic vulnerability, and so, so much more—they are just some of the billions of facets of my mother they never saw. That’s what my Stökéwood memories imply—that’s what I had to convince myself, in order to move on.
The machine in the corner moves then—rattles forward—and I jump away, tasting blood. It’s more than a machine. It’s got legs, two jointed hunks of plastic. It’s got a light panel for a face, and two eyes shaped in the emoji-approximation of a friendly smile. It’s … a Clouded Cage–branded robot. One of those boxy things I’ve seen on the internet, produced by an arm of Teddy’s sprawling tech company. A cousin of the security mannequin in the yard.
“Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle,” Tai says under her breath, as the robot’s legs grind and stomp toward us, and I wipe my wet face, hard, before Tai can see.
It takes me a minute to notice that the robot holds an origami box made of notepaper in its hands.
“For you,” the robot says, bowing.
Its voice is honeyed and familiar somehow, not the expected graveled electronica. Feminine. So it’s a she, I think, a cold finger tracing my spine.
“Mina?” I ask.
Hearts fly across her panel in greeting as I take the box from her. The paper feels familiar between my fingers. It’s grained with nubby flecks of real lavender, the same kind Mama used to use.
“Should I … open it?” I ask, stunned into speaking my thoughts.
“Holy fuck,” Tai whispers, dropping onto the bed. “Isn’t that Mama’s favorite paper? What if it’s from her? What if—?”
“It’s not,” I reply curtly, bitter metal on my tongue.
I sit on the edge of the bed, next to Tai, and carefully undo the folds in the paper, remembering how to refold them as best I can. My fingertips leave imprints on the tissue-thin sheet. My breath catches when I see Dad’s spidery script—
And the July date, the week before his death in August.
To my daughters:
It pains me that you should return to your childhood home on so unhappy an occasion. I hope you can forgive me for delaying news of my illness and deterioration; I have followed along with great pride as you excelled in America, and I did not wish to disrupt your progress. Life is to be spent creating something greater than oneself—it is not to be spent bemoaning the inevitable passing of an old man whose best days are long behind him. I differ from many of those my age in this belief, but I believe your mother would have agreed.
It is she who also provides me with the reason for this letter today—it is she who requires that I ask a favor of you in this delicate moment.
I carry with me a few sources of great shame in life. One is that I lacked the courage, or the wisdom, to share the truth about her with you. Your mother was not who she said she was. She bore secrets that no child should hear about a parent who has left this world—not, at the very least, until they become adults. Or so I believe. In fact, some of these secrets are still not mine to share—and I imagine there are others still unknown to me.
My voice wavers and breaks. The words are unlike Dad in their sheer quantity and in their melodrama. “Should I … keep reading?” I ask. A futile question, meant only to provide a couple of moments to help quiet the panic building in my skull. Because it would be impossible for me to leave this unread, if it truly holds secrets about Mama, good or bad.
Tai nods, riveted, tears already staining her pink cheeks. I turn my eyes back to the page.
Your mother was a mystery to me in many ways. In her final months with us, I believe she discovered something dark in Viloxin, perhaps at my own company, that she would not reveal to me. She would not speak to me in those final months, and she refused to explain why. And so, my daughters, that leads me to another great source of shame: I returned to my work, out of frustration and foolishness, for this was my custom at the time, and she in turn devoted herself to a new and final project at her institute. A project by the name of White Fox.
A tremor zips from my fingers to my shoulders. We’d always been told growing up that her final project did not actually exist—that those long nights she spent working were imagined. I never believed it in full. We simply believed it as much as we needed to, so that in our memories, our hours together remained her most precious ones.
“So White Fox was real,” I whisper.
Yes, White Fox. I very much appreciate that this script has wreaked havoc on our lives since portions were leaked to the media those years ago, while you were in America. As the script was lost with your mother, I thought it was best to tell you, as children, that it never existed. That the document leaked to the media was false. Why sully the memory of your mother by speaking about a lost and incomplete nightmare of a text? But the situation has changed, and I now believe every fragment of White Fox held clues only you two can decode. She once mentioned to me that the script was, at least partially, “a map for my two girls to better understand me, once they are grown.”
This brings me back to the beginning: What exactly is this favor that I ask of you now, my daughters?
I ask that you find your mother.
I pause, fingers trembling too hard to read on.
“Manon!” Tai tears the pages from my grip as spots sparkle and fade in my vision. She reads on as I focus on my breath.
She is living on Viloxin, though she is drastically changed from the woman we knew.