I asked about my father exactly once.
Before that I only wondered, the way you wonder about the weather in a country you have never visited. My classmates talked about theirs constantly. One had a father who coached football, one had a father who owned a shop, one had a father who shouted too much. Mine was simply not there. When a teacher asked us to draw our families, I drew myself and my mother, and she looked at the paper and said, "What about your father?"
"He's not there."
"Not there where?"
"Anywhere."
She smiled awkwardly. "Maybe draw him anyway."
I did not. That evening, while my mother washed a plate, I asked her whether I had ever had one.
She stopped. "Yes."
"Where is he?"
She dried her hands slowly. "I don't know."
"Is he dead?"
"I don't know."
"Did he leave?"
She looked at me. "Yes."
"Why?"
Something shifted in her eyes. Only slightly, but I saw it. "I don't know."
I nodded. "Okay."
She waited. "Do you want to know more?"
I thought about it. "No."
That surprised her. "Why not?"
I shrugged. "Because you stayed."
She turned toward the sink. I saw her wipe her face with the edge of the towel, and I pretended not to. I understand now that she could not have answered me, and that day I did not need her to. I had her.
At sixteen I started working in her laboratory. At first she only let me watch.
"Don't touch anything."
"I know."
"You always say that."
"Because I know."
"And then you touch something."
"I don't remember doing that."
"Yesterday."
"That was an accident."
"So you do remember."
"I was curious."
"Curiosity is how laboratories become crime scenes." She pointed at the door. "Out."
I laughed. She tried not to. I stayed.
The first real experiment I ever ran on my own failed so completely that she had to help me work out why. I stood over the ruined plates, feeling my face go hot, ready for her to say it was all right, and she didn't. She said, "Good. Now you know what it looks like when it's wrong," and handed me a clean pipette. I loved her for that more than I would have loved comfort. She never lied to me about how hard things were. She only stayed in the room while I found out.
At university I turned out better than she expected, and it frightened her a little. She did not want me ordinary. She only knew what ambition can do to a person. I loved difficult problems. I would stay in the laboratory while the other students went out, and when I failed I became angry, and when I succeeded I became unbearable. She told me so.
"You're becoming arrogant."
"It's confidence."
"You're seventeen. Seventeen-year-olds should be confident about football."
"I don't play football."
"Exactly."
I went back to my notes. When I looked up she was watching me, and the pride in her face was plain, and I took it back to my desk like something I had stolen. It mattered more to me than anything anyone else ever said.
I became a doctor, and then a researcher, and then, without either of us quite deciding it, we became known. Our work on infectious disease got into journals, and then into newspapers. We were invited to conferences. People quoted us.
I understood how far it had gone one afternoon in a pharmacy queue. A woman a few places behind us kept looking at my mother, and at last she said, "Excuse me. Are you Dr. Floria?"
My mother said, "I might be."
"My daughter was in the hospital with a resistant infection two years ago. They used your protocol." The woman's voice had begun to shake. "She's fourteen now. She plays the trumpet. Badly. Loudly."
My mother did not say anything for a moment. Then she took the woman's hand in both of hers and said, "Please tell her to keep going," and let go, and looked at the shelf of vitamins as though it had said something interesting. Outside she walked a full block before she spoke.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
I was. I kept it to myself, and she spent the rest of the walk pretending she had not been moved, and I spent it pretending I hadn't seen.
She hated interviews. I enjoyed them, and afterward she would tell me so.
"You talked too much."
"I answered the questions."
"You answered questions they didn't ask."
"You're jealous."
"Of what?"
"My fame."
She regarded me for a long moment. "You fell asleep at a lecture I gave."
"I was tired."
"You snored."
"I did not."
"I have witnesses."
I winced, and she shook her head and smiled. As long as we were working side by side, nothing else seemed to matter.