I took my computer with me into the kitchen, where Joan was at the table drinking coffee and reading the Sunday Chronicle. I set my laptop down beside the discarded Arts section.

  “Good morning,” she said. “You slept in. How was yesterday?”

  “It was interesting,” I said, taking out milk and cereal.

  “Is that the word you use when you don’t really enjoy something?”

  I could hear the smile in Joan’s voice. “No, I had fun. I just didn’t know anyone very well, so the whole day was meeting new people.” I poured myself a cup of coffee and brought my breakfast to the table, where I sat down. “Have you heard of Bernice Bing?”

  She considered the name for a moment. “I don’t know. Who is she?”

  I turned my laptop around to face her, showing her the bio. “She was an artist here in San Francisco. She’s dead now.”

  Joan skimmed the bio. “She had a show at SomArts, and I taught there around the same time. I might have met her, but I’m not sure.” She began to click through the pictures. “Her work feels familiar to me somehow.”

  “I thought some of your early paintings looked like these,” I said.

  Her eyebrows rose a little but she nodded. “Abstract Expressionism. It was hard to escape in the fifties and sixties. You know, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Most of the famous Ab-Ex artists were men, but that’s because back then it was still acceptable to say that women couldn’t be painters.”

  “But you were painting,” I said. “And Bernice Bing.”

  “Oh, sure. Women were painting—including Jackson Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner. But we haven’t always been seen. I think that’s changing now.” She turned the laptop back to face me. “But tell me why you’re looking up Bernice Bing. What led you to her?”

  “I saw this poster yesterday.” I showed her the photo on my phone. “I thought it was interesting. I mean, I wanted to know more.”

  She zoomed in on the photo. I wondered if she was reading the tagline about Bernice Bing as a visionary Asian American lesbian artist. I wondered if she would say the word lesbian out loud. I wanted her to.

  But she gave me back my phone and said evenly, as if nothing were out of the ordinary at all, “That’s where it all begins. Wanting to know more. You should keep looking.”

  * * *

  —

  That afternoon I went back to the studio, taking my old telescope with me. I opened all the windows and put one of Grandpa’s astronomy tapes on the TV, listening to him talk about sunsets while I opened the telescope case. The last time I used the telescope I must have taken it apart, because it was completely disassembled. I laid out several halves that would snap together to form the long barrel of the telescope, multiple O rings that would clamp it together, the focuser tube halves and several lenses that were smudged with fingerprints and needed to be cleaned.

  “What color is the sun?” Grandpa was saying. “Contrary to popular childhood crayon colors, it’s not yellow or orange. The sun is white, which you can see if you observe it from space. Or, if you’re not in space, at noon when it’s highest in the sky.”

  I found a folded-up printout at the bottom of the telescope box that contained the assembly instructions. I smoothed it out on the worktable and started to sort the pieces.

  “When the sun sets or rises, though, it appears to be yellow, orange, or even red. Why? This is due to the scattering away of light particles by the atmosphere.”

  Grandpa pulled up a slide that illustrated light scattering. It showed a series of suns—a white disc overhead at noon, descending through shades of darkening yellow-orange to an orange-red disc at sunset, low over the horizon. A beam of light emanated from each sun, and as it struck the atmosphere, which was symbolized by a fuzzy white line, particles of light were reflected in all directions. The light particles looked like squiggly arrows colored blue or violet or green, to illustrate the color of the light that was scattering.

  “At sunset, when the sun is low, the light has to travel farther through the atmosphere than it does at noon, when the sun shines straight at us. That means more of the blue and green light is scattered away, leaving predominantly yellows and oranges. That’s why the sun appears redder at sunset. Remember, it’s not actually red. It’s the scattering of light that makes it seem that way to our eyes.”

  I finished laying out the telescope parts, and as I compared them with the guide in the instructions, I realized something was wrong. The objective lens—the one that went at the far end of the telescope—was missing. I looked inside the case, but it was empty. Without the lens, the telescope wouldn’t work.

  I sat down in the camping chair, disappointed, and looked back at the TV. Grandpa had moved on to discussing how mirages worked to bend light, creating illusions like the vision of shimmering water over a desert. He smiled almost conspiratorially at the camera. “This is what is so amazing about science. It can show you what is really happening. You may think you see something, but in fact it’s something else.”

  My phone rang, the sound cutting through the still air. I immediately hoped it was Steph, but just as quickly knew it couldn’t be. She didn’t have my number.

  I picked up my phone from the table and read International Caller. There was only one person I knew who would have that ID. She was in Munich for an opera festival. I wondered what finally made her call me. I paused the video and answered the phone.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  “Aria, how are you?” she said. My mom had a slight Chinese accent when she spoke English. She spoke French and German, too, but I wasn’t sure if the accent carried over to those languages.

  “Fine.” I waited for her to acknowledge the rocky way we had left things.

  I heard the clink of porcelain against a table on her end of the phone, and I realized it was after midnight where she was. If she had just returned from the opera house, she would be drinking an herbal tea for her throat. This was when she usually called me, and as if everything were completely normal, she asked, “How is your summer going?”

  With a sinking feeling, I realized she wasn’t going to acknowledge anything. “Fine,” I repeated.

  “What are you occupying yourself with? I hope you’re taking advantage of this time to prepare yourself for college. MIT’s going to be a lot harder than high school.”

  She had never been enthusiastic about my love for astronomy, although as a good Chinese mother she couldn’t exactly tell me not to pursue science. Instead she often implied that I wasn’t entirely cut out for it, or that my interest in it would die after high school. I generally avoided thinking about my relationship with her, but even I was aware that that was one of the main reasons I applied to MIT—to prove her wrong.

  “I’m taking an astronomy course on video,” I said stiffly. Grandpa was frozen on-screen in mid-gesticulation, his face distorted into a look of surprise.

  “You are?”

  “Yeah. Grandpa recorded one of his classes on video and I’m watching it.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s lucky for you. You can get a jump start on the fall.”

  “I’m just watching it for fun.”

  There was a beat of silence, and then Mom said, “Your grandpa wasn’t the only scientist in the family, you know. One of my cousins or aunts—I don’t know the exact relation—she was an engineer, I think. She worked at that place in Los Angeles. The one that builds rockets. You know the one? Your father’s sister works there.”

  “The Jet Propulsion Lab.”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “You never told me that before.”

  “I forgot. I think it was my cousin Eddie’s sister who worked there. Eddie just sent me a video of his grandson. He won a piano competition.”

  I wondered if this was the cousin Dad had mentioned, but I didn’t ask for more details. In my experience, it was best if I said as little as possible on the phone with her, because that made her get to the point faster, and she always had a point.

  “Listen, I have good news. I’m flying out to Hong Kong in a few weeks and I have a brief layover in San Francisco, so I can see you.”

  My gut clenched. “Oh. Really?”

  “It’s less than twenty-four hours, but there’s time for me to meet you for lunch at the hotel.” Her voice lowered, as if she were getting serious. “Aria, I’m sorry I’ve been in Europe for so much of this year. I wish I could’ve been with you. You’re becoming a young woman and you need your mother’s guidance more than ever.”

  I said in a tight voice, “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “You need to take a step back and think about who you’ve been spending your time with.”

  “I’m not spending my summer with anyone now,” I snapped.

  “You need the time to yourself,” Mom said, her tone hardening. “And we need to talk. In person, not over the phone. I need to look in your face and see what kind of a girl you’ve become. I wouldn’t raise my daughter to—to expose herself like that.”

  As if I’d done it on purpose.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked.

  “We are not getting into this again,” I said.

  To my surprise, she didn’t argue with me. She sighed, her breath sending a rush of static over the international connection. “I blame myself. It’s all my fault. I should have been there for you, and I’m going to change things.”

  She sounded so melodramatic, and yet I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of hope. I wanted to believe her.

  “I know we don’t get along all the time, but we need to talk,” she said. “I’ll be in San Francisco on July twenty-fifth. Would you come and have lunch with me?”

  She made it sound like I had a choice, but I could never have said no. “Okay,” I agreed.

  “Good,” she said, sounding relieved. “I can’t wait to see you, darling. I’ll have Jeri email you with the details.” Jeri was her assistant who booked all her travel. I’d gotten a lot of emails from Jeri over the years. “I should go now. I need to get my beauty sleep. I’ll see you in San Francisco.”

  On Monday I accompanied Joan to Spirit Rock, a nearby Buddhist retreat center, for their weekly meditation night. She had been a regular for a while, but I’d never gone with her until now. She wore cloisonné earrings in the shape of flying birds, and they glowed turquoise and emerald green and pink in the golden evening light as we walked from the parking lot to the community hall. It looked like a giant double-wide trailer, and when we entered the meditation room, the floor creaked and swayed, as if it wasn’t quite fixed to the ground.

  Joan seemed to know a lot of people, and she introduced me to some of them before the meditation began. They greeted her with hugs and smiles, asking about her art and whether she was going to teach another class. Most were middle-aged or older white women, and I was probably the youngest person in the room. I remember thinking that Joan was different here, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  The teacher, who sat cross-legged on a low platform in front of the altar, was a wiry, balding white man with a bushy gray mustache. About a dozen people sat on cushions on the floor facing the altar, but we sat in the uncomfortable folding chairs lined up in rows. I struggled to stay awake during the half-hour meditation session, but eventually a bell rang to indicate the end, and everyone shifted and stretched, making the plastic chairs squeak. And then the teacher began to speak.

  “A little over a week ago we marked the summer solstice—the longest day of the year. I was in London at a conference then, and everywhere on the news were pictures of people at Stonehenge celebrating the solstice. Stonehenge, of course, was built to align with the movement of the sun. On the solstice, people are allowed to walk into the actual ring of stones that makes up Stonehenge, and if you’re standing there—in the middle of the stone circle—at dawn on the summer solstice, you’ll see the sun rising just to the left of what they call the Heel Stone. Apparently there used to be another stone beside the Heel Stone that would have actually framed the sunrise, but it’s gone now. Stones, of course, seem immovable. Permanent. But even stones fall down. And yet we don’t stop putting them up, do we?”

  A low ripple of laughter went through the room.

  “I don’t know how many of you have seen Nancy Holt’s monumental work of land art called Sun Tunnels,” he continued. “It’s in Utah. There are photographs, but to get the full effect you have to be there in person. It’s a series of massive concrete tubes that are positioned to line up with the sun at the summer and winter solstices. Sound familiar? When I was a child, I thought erroneously that we were closer to the sun during the summer, and closest at the summer solstice. Of course I learned later on that the seasons have nothing to do with how close or far the earth is from the sun. It’s the tilt of the earth’s axis, instead, that marks the seasons. At this time of year, the northern hemisphere is most tilted toward the sun, making it warmer in our neck of the woods. Paradoxically, the earth is actually closest to the sun during our winter. I think this goes to show that what seems to be true may not be true.”

  The teacher gave us all a tiny, ironic smile.

  “What seems to be fixed—Stonehenge, even—is not fixed. This brings us back to the core teaching of the Buddha. Impermanence. Nothing is permanent. Everything changes.”

  He paused, and the entire room seemed to exhale.

  “Flowers bloom and die. Stones rise up and are slowly weathered away. People change, too, obviously. We change continuously. We age. Our hair grows. We even shed our skin. This can seem frightening or overwhelming, and I think maybe that’s why we build structures like Stonehenge, or make art like the Sun Tunnels. The stones frame this constant change with the illusion of permanence, and for a moment—while we are watching the sun framed by the stones—for a fleeting second the world seems stable. Beautiful and miraculous. But you know what makes it a miracle? The fact that we are present in that moment, experiencing it fully, before it inevitably changes.”

  A shiver went across my skin. I curled my fingers around the edge of the plastic chair and hung on to it, but beneath me I imagined I could feel the floor swaying as it had when we’d entered.

  After the talk ended, everyone went to the lobby to make themselves paper cups of tea, which they took out onto the steps and into the soft dark night. I remember the whisper of the breeze on my skin, the smell of mulch and mint tea, and the way light from the community building’s doorway spilled in a yellow rectangle onto the ground. It glinted on Joan’s wedding ring, which she still wore, as she raised her cup of tea to her mouth. There was something about the angle of shadows across her face or the way she lifted her arm that made her look younger to me, as if time had slipped backward and she was drinking tea somewhere else. In her studio, maybe, but not the one in Woodacre; somewhere I’d never been, and she was studying a painting in progress and asking herself if it was finished yet, or if there was more waiting to emerge from the canvas.

  Someone was asking Joan whether her next gallery show would take place before the end of the year, which surprised me. I hadn’t known she was even thinking of doing another show. Of course she’d exhibited before and was represented by a gallery in San Francisco, but since Grandpa had died, she hadn’t shown any new work. I realized, with a little shock of dismay, that even though I knew Joan was an artist I had ceased to think of her as being one.

  That’s what made her look different to me that night. She was Joan West again, and it was only in seeing the artist return that I recognized that part of her had been muted for years. It became clear to me in an instant how incredibly life-altering Grandpa’s death had been for her. How it had overturned so much of who she was, or at least called it into question. Was this why she had begun coming regularly to Spirit Rock? I had never thought of my grandparents as religious, though Grandpa’s funeral had been at a church. I remembered, suddenly, a Buddha statue in their small Berkeley backyard, overhung with dripping green leaves after a rainstorm.

  And now she was here, in this community who knew her better than I did. I felt uncomfortable and thrilled by this revelation all at once, as if I’d discovered a stranger inside someone I loved.

  That summer, when Joan was working in Grandpa’s old office, I spent most of my time in Joan’s old studio, watching Grandpa’s lectures while I sorted through his files. Sometimes I took Analemma on hikes nearby, and on the way to the trailhead I passed houses that still had their signs up for marriage equality. I hadn’t noticed them before, but now I seemed to see them everywhere. A VOTE NO ON PROP 8 bumper sticker peeling from the back of a Prius; a rainbow flag flying from a wooden front gate.

  When I returned, I’d take a glass of ice water out to the deck, where I’d scroll through my phone waiting for a text that didn’t come. I began to think that maybe my friendship with Mel, and by extension Steph, was over. You’re invited to this summer, period, Mel had said. But I was convinced there was a loophole. Sometimes friendships didn’t get off the ground, even if they had a promising start.

  One afternoon I finally brought the Adrienne Rich book outside with me. It had been lying on the nightstand by my bed ever since I found it in the basement, one corner of the photo-booth strip peeking out from the top. I sat down on the lounger in the shade and pulled out the pictures of my parents. I expected it would hurt to see them like that, so young and happy, but the twinge I felt soon dissipated, and then I was studying the images as if they were celebrities or criminals. It didn’t seem possible that I was related to these two people. They had lived in a world I didn’t know, and it unsettled me, making me think about branching universes and whether there was another one where they had stayed together. What kind of person would I be if I had grown up in that world?