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“A danger to herself,” I say.
He raises his eyebrows. The hairless skin on his scalp bunches up in surprise. “Okay … but do it fast. Don’t want trouble if the owners come by,” he says.
“I’m a software engineer,” Eddie explains. “If you allow me to scroll through the footage, I can do it quickly and leave it exactly as is after we’re finished.”
The manager motions for us to proceed. We walk over to the dated security screens, and Eddie takes control of the panels.
“What time do you think she arrived?” he asks me.
“Sometime between six thirty and six forty-five,” I say.
He scrolls back through the footage of the first screen, which covers the exterior of the building. A couple of people walk by the entrance, someone walking their dog, another holding a Starbucks to-go coffee cup, and then at the 6:44AMmark, I spot a woman with a black baseball cap.
“That’s her,” I tell Eddie.
He goes slowly through the footage of her approaching the building. We watch her enter, but her hat obscures her face. No luck.
Eddie moves to the second screen that covers the lobby and scrolls back to her entering it. She steps inside the building with the cap still on, presses the elevator button, and disappears inside—still, no luck.
At 7:03AM, we watch her run out of the stairwell back into the lobby as I chase after her. And then it happens—for a split second, her baseball cap falls off.
Eddie zooms in on the moment the hat drops and grabs a screenshot of her face on his phone. It’s not a great image, but it’s something.
“Got it,” Eddie says.
“Time to get goin’,” the manager tells us.
“Thank you,” I say.
“No need to thank me ’cause this never happened,” he says.
CHAPTER3
THERE’S ONLY ONEthing about losing my mom at fifteen that I have ever felt lucky about: I wasn’t younger when she died. Had I been, say, five years old, I probably wouldn’t have any memories of her, but because I was a teenager, and my brain was more fully formed, thankfully, I do.
Eddie and I are upstairs in my office. He’s busy downloading facial recognition apps on his phone while I’m methodically going through every memory I have with my mom, especially from the year before she died, to see if there was any sign that she might’ve been introuble.
The problem is, when I think about her, the last thing that comes to mind is trouble. Dad used to tease her for being a goody-two-shoes. She once got a parking ticket, and he jokingly announced at the dinner table, “She’s going to prison, Beans.”
They were graduate school sweethearts who met at UCLA in their first semesters. He was in law school, and she was getting her PhD in psychology. He said when he saw her in the cafeteria, laughing with a couple of her girlfriends, it was love at first sight for him.
“She was so full of life, so luminous, I knew I had to introduce myself,” he told me.
They married after each of them finished their respective graduate programs. I was born shortly after that. My dad never lost his marvel of my mother. As far as he was concerned, she walked on water and could do no wrong.
When I entered adolescence and began acting out at times, he always defended her. “You’ve got the best mother in the world. Listen to her,” he told me.
I only ever heard them fight once. A couple of months before she died, it was late at night, and they thought I was asleep, but I wasn’t. The fight was so unusual that I got out of bed to see what was happening. I remember approaching their bedroom quietly, placing my ear on the closed door to hear what they were arguing about.
“Don’t we matter?” Dad asked Mom.
“It has nothing to do with you,” she said.
“It has everything to do with us!” I had never heard him raise his voice with her before.
“I’m spending the night at Pearl’s,” she announced. Pearl was her oldest friend in LA. As Mom approached their bedroom door to open it, I quickly ran back to my room before they could discover me eavesdropping.
The following day, when I woke up, she wasn’t there. Dad told me she’d left early for work due to a patient emergency, but I knew that was a lie. When I came home from school later that afternoon, she was in the kitchen unpacking groceries. I told her I’d overheard her and Dad fighting the night before.
