It’s a mid-life crisis, she thinks, some kind of late stage guilt fueled by her 50th birthday and Ophelia’s 18th. The silence between the two of them is fragile, thick with tension and the turn signal clicking incessantly with every lane change. It feels like a cab ride; Ophelia pulls her knees up closer and wonders if this is how things are between mothers and daughters, a sort of inalienable isolation that haunts every interaction.
Her mother’s eyes are locked on the darkening road, her time-worn face illuminated only by streetlamps and the last embers of sunset. She can’t quite remember the last time her mother picked her up from school; her days are bookended by Dad’s smile. His car smells like sweet cologne and there’s a tube of her favorite chapstick in the glovebox. The Mazda reeks of faux leather and gunpowder. The specter of her upcoming high school graduation looms large above them both, enough to goad her mother into acting like her mom.
After ten minutes, when Ophelia has twisted herself until her back is almost completely to her mother, Agatha decides to speak.
“How've you been?”
The question is so simple that, for a fleeting moment, Ophelia wonders if she should dignify it with an answer. It’s the kind of thing you ask a coworker. It’s the kind of thing that a mother should already know.
“I’m fine, I guess,” she mutters. It’s a half-truth; to explain the details of the breakup would take too much time, and what her mother doesn’t know has never hurt her. “How’s work been?”
The two of them have an unspoken agreement about Agatha’s job. Ophelia doesn’t ask about it, or know anything other than the broad strokes — it’s something with the government, maybe scientific, based on her degrees, or combat judging by the bruises that she thinks she can hide. When she does ask, she will not get an answer, a lesson learned through trial and error.
Ophelia asked when her mother stopped making her breakfast, small hands clinging to the hem of her shirt. She asked when her mother would step outside during movie nights, pajama-clad and yelling on the phone, or on her seventh birthday, when her candle wish was to bring Mama back from her job, or when Dad had to change the gauze on her mother’s wounds after yet another weekend business trip and when the wince of isopropyl alcohol against her shoulder was pushed down in the name of reassurance. So, when her mother’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, her jaw set, Ophelia takes it as an answer.
“Do you think you’re going to be able to make it to my graduation?” Her friends have told her that this shouldn’t be a question she has to ask. Some of them understand what it’s like to have a mother who hates you (and these same few are the ones who tell her they wish they could trade lives). They don’t know what it is to love a mother without knowing her, to meet a living ghost. They do not understand why she brushes off the pamphlets they slide her about neglect, the counselor’s meetings, the conversations with Dad or with anyone else about the whole thing. No one else but her can know what it means to love Agatha Rights.
“I’ll try my best, honey,” replies her mother, more of a sigh than a statement, and in that moment Ophelia can see the future. She has been her mother’s daughter for long enough to know that she will show up just after the applause from Ophelia’s valedictory speech has died down, clutching wilted flowers, and slide into the empty seat that Dad always saves on an off chance. It will be something close to enough because she will hug Ophelia afterwards, rest her head on her shoulder and tell her that she’s sorry, that a meeting ran long but it’s all over now, and they can do whatever Ophelia wants for the rest of the night. She will not understand why her daughter pulls away at that moment and cries, but she will try to learn, and that will sting the most out of it all.
But for now, no one is in tears. The road home is long and dull, even when the monotony is broken up by an ancient CD that her mother insists on playing. Ophelia recognizes a few songs from the kitchen dance parties of her childhood, a few more from Dad’s playlists. She catches herself nodding along to the beat and wonders if she’d get along with her mother if she knew her.
She flips down the mirror from the sunshield and holds her own gaze — undeniably, Dad is painted across her face. She has the slope of his nose; she has his eyelashes, dark and sweeping across his pale green eyes; she has his tendency to talk with his hands and his love of key lime pie and his height. When she looks back at her mother, though, she notices something that has not occurred to her far too long: Agatha, who is beginning to gray, is a slightly shorter carbon copy of her, as if Ophelia had been chewed out by something incomprehensibly large and spat back out to raise herself.
When they pull into the garage, her mother hangs behind in the car. Ophelia slings her backpack over her shoulder and cracks the door to the house, from which she is met by warm light and the smell of sourdough bread. When she thinks that her daughter is not looking, Agatha fishes a box of Pall-Mall unfiltered reds from the glovebox and lights one with a match from her purse.
Dr. Rights’ promotion is approved in secret by a small committee looking to fill a newly vacant seat. None of the committee members have ever met her family; few can be bothered to remember that she has one, that her personhood extends beyond the claustrophobically white room they’ve gathered in. When she asks about what to do with them, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice, she is met with two options.
The first comes in the form of a manila folder slid to her across the conference table by the aging man at its head. As soon as she opens it, she gags. The Photoshop job isn't good, admittedly, but she is met with the sight of her own body, laid out in a velvet-lined coffin and done up in heavy makeup. She realizes, as she thumbs through images of a faked home invasion at different angles, how much she looks like her daughter. Ophelia’s face stares back at her, time-worn, and Ophelia’s hair spills over her shoulders, and Ophelia has three wounds through her stomach and a fourth gashed across her throat from which blood pours profusely.
It’s a sick fate, one that she’d imagined for herself the day she signed her contract, and one from which she has always protected her family. And yet, says the cold growing in her chest, it has not been enough. The photos, still as they are, seem to be moving. The rest of the folder is no easier to stomach — falsified funerary records, a hefty life insurance payout, and an MTF strike team ready to remove her have been set up without her request. They've even got a source for a cadaver that no one will be able to trace.
She asks for the second option and they provide it in the form of a small orange pill bottle.
Dr. Rights is dismissed early that day to prepare. She stops at the nearest grocery store and hides her tear-stained face in her arms as she picks out a bundle of flowers. She swipes her business credit card and prays that her daughter still likes pink roses.
Ophelia dips her head when her mother sneaks through the back doors of the auditorium, taking advantage of the thunderous applause to hide the creak of the aging hinges. She’d spent months working on the speech, a fact that anyone who knew her could attest to. Her teachers are proud, Dad is proud, her friends are proud and tearing up in the audience, and her mother’s face is contorted into a polite and reciprocal smile. She lets herself imagine what it would be like to have a mother who is proud of her, and can’t quite choke back the sob that arises at the thought as she hurries offstage in her cap and too-short gown.
Agatha knows what she has to do; the weight of the world presses on her shoulders as her daughter stares at her from across the kitchen counter, partially obscured by the bouquet already wilting in a vase. She’s wearing the pajamas that Agatha had gifted to her a few years back and stabbing a fork into a piece of cake. It’s chocolate, both of their favorites, picked up on the way home as an apology for missing out.
She runs her tongue over her teeth, feeling at the same uncorrected gap that she can see when Ophelia grins. She drinks in the idyllic picture — her husband at her side, her pride and joy in front of her — and hopes that her family is doing the same, taking in as much as they can as if they can possibly know what is going to happen.
Ophelia does not always like her mother, but she loves her, and that love is enough to keep her from questioning the bitter taste in her morning coffee, a taste she still has no chance of recognizing as an almost-lethal dose of amnestics. The same one is administered to her father by a woman whom Ophelia is already beginning to forget, who, in a few short hours, will never have been real.
As soon as they are unconscious, Agatha throws her duffel bag in the passenger seat and drives to Benjamin Kondraki’s Foundation apartment. She throws back her own pill on his threadbare couch. He has the courtesy to turn away.
When Ophelia and her father wake up, they will know each other as a small family unit, one that never had another member. Agatha will wake up feverish and retching, and Ben will joke that it is morning sickness, and she will find herself reaching for a blank space in which a memory of a pregnancy would live.
By the time Ophelia has a daughter of her own, small and pink and bursting with life, she will never have had a mother. The parts of her that can’t be accounted for by Dad (her freckles, her olive skin, her tooth gap and love of romance movies) will exist only as remnants of an unknown woman’s genetic contribution. She will change her last name twice; once, in college, to Dad’s, and once in the courthouse to her wife’s.
Agatha Rights’ last name will be lost, as will her first, to a letter-number designation. The milestones she misses will fall into the gaps amnestics have torn through her memories. The years will pass slower, but they will pass; she will look into the mirror long after Ophelia is gone and find a woman greying and unrecognizable.
When the O5 council finds itself in need of a new member, they don't waste time on waxing poetic at her cremation. Her ashes are scattered to the snow around Site-17.
A plaque with her name is erected somewhere, though no one can be bothered to check the spelling.