I was going up the elevator of the fanciest building I’d ever entered, a glass and concrete high-rise which soared over its neighbors, to meet the husband of the mother I hadn’t seen in years. Trying to quell the roiling in my stomach, I was breathing slowly through my nose. I felt shabby and small in my thrift store sweater and jeans, my matronly wool coat, surrounded as I was by steel and marble and more glass. Outside was the city under the hard morning light, gray and covered with a sprinkling of early January snow. It was only four hours away from my university town, about five hours from my hometown—something curdling inside me as I realized she was much closer than I’d ever thought she’d be. I hoped Mom’s current husband, Pete, would graciously pay for parking.

            Pete, whose existence I had just discovered today, called me in a panic at four in the morning, and I, snuggled deep into my blankets, reluctantly but instinctively reached for the phone. I knew it had something to do with her after all this time. Call it hard-won intuition. I was on the road by 5 AM.

            The elevator opened, and there he was. I suppressed a snort.

            His full name was Peter Magee, and from Googling as I idled in my parked car, trying to persuade myself to get out, I discovered he was some kind of businessman, that he was running for alderman. So, money. So, power. My mother had liked these things, but Pete wasn’t anything like what my mother usually preferred. He was red-faced, chubby, short, and balding. Not like my father, now in Florida, who was still a good-looking man. His middle had softened a little, but otherwise his full head of hair had only a few strands of silver, and his white smile gleamed against his dark, unlined face. I hated her a little more for settling for someone like Pete.

            “You must be Natalie,” he said, grabbing my hand. I let my wrist remain limp as he shook it. “Amy told me so much about you.”

            “I can’t imagine what she could have possibly told you.” It came out before I could think twice. Pete, to his credit, chose to ignore this dig, this reminder that my mother had abandoned her only child. He ushered me to a sleek living room—chrome and black leather and globular lamps with a fluffy white rug—and brought me coffee and cookies before starting business.

            “Your mother left in the middle of the night, with all of her things,” he began. “And I don’t know where she is.”

            I laughed. Pete looked stricken, and I stopped, feeling suddenly guilty. He reminded me a little of my father the day she walked out—that look in his eyes. The tremor in his voice. “Why not call the cops?” I asked.

            Pete wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, a thing that surprisingly reminded me of Dad, his preference for monogrammed linen. Maybe they were more alike than I thought. “You don’t seem shocked.” He folded the handkerchief and put it in his pocket. “Or worried.”

            “It’s not like I’ve seen her in eleven years. You can’t be surprised after all that,” I said. “But why not call the cops? Why am I here? How did you even get my cellphone number?”

            He said, “Your number, she kept on a Post-It note in her desk. She once said you were unlikely to ever change it if you didn’t have to.” I sipped from the mug, hoping Pete wouldn’t notice my trembling hand. The thought of her still knowing that about me. “As for the other question, she left a note telling me not to call the police.”

            This time, my eyebrows rose. “A note?” Though maybe I shouldn’t have been that surprised; Dad and I saw her walk out the door, the year I turned fourteen.  If nothing else, my mother always gave notice.

            He fumbled in his pocket. “Here,” he said, handing me a piece of crumpled stationary. I unfolded it; it was snow-white, rimmed with roses. I read, in my mother’s looping handwriting: 

            Darling,

            I have to go. Don’t call the cops. I’m fine. I’m not being forced.

            Don’t bother looking for me.

                                                                                                                                                Amy

            Next to her name, she had planted a lipstick kiss. I knew with barely a glance she hadn’t changed her lipstick in the last decade, that it was still Chanel’s Rouge Allure.

            “You should probably listen to her,” I said, crumpling the note and throwing it back at him. It bumped against his chest, fell to the sofa cushion. “If she doesn’t want to be found, she won’t be.”

            “But I need to find her!” He slammed his hand on the table. I supposed he was trying to look tough, like so many impotent men from those mid-century movies I adored and studied. The Ralph Bellamys, the flabby fiances high-spirited, sharp-tongued beauties left for Cary Grant.  He looked ridiculous. How could my mother marry him?

            Pete continued to rant, “That’s why I called! If she ever talked about anyone, it was you! I thought you might know where she went. If you don’t have any luck, I’ll get a private detective. Just try to think and if you can’t come up with something by tomorrow, just tell me, and I’ll get a detective.”

            I could have said:  I didn’t even know she was only four hours away until you called me this morning. How would I know any better than you where she could be?

            The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them. “Do you at least have a current picture?”

            A few hours later, I was driving around a city I didn’t know, the photo Pete had given me nestled in my pocket. She still looked much like the mother I remembered from my childhood. Professionally done, her sitting on a bench in a garden. Her hair was still black and cascading past her pearly shoulders, which were bared in a flowered blue sundress. An oversized straw hat to shade her still fair, unblemished skin. She looked at the camera, with the faintest smile on her reddened lips. She didn’t look like she was a day over thirty-five when she was, in fact, forty-six. When I was young, many a gray-haired person had told her she looked like an Asian Rita Hayworth. They probably didn’t know that the all-American Rita was once Margarita Cansino, before Columbia Pictures made her dye her dark hair red and laser her widow’s peak away, to erase all traces of having once been a Spanish dancing girl.

            When Pete had handed me the photo, I stared at it for what felt like an eternity. I traced my finger over her face.

            Now, in my car, every once in a while, I, fruitlessly, hopelessly, looked out the window. Catching the face of every dark-haired woman passing by. Are you my mother? Are you? Are you?

***       

            When I kissed a boy for the first time, Sean Cho, who was the only semi-cute boy I could get to kiss me at the positively elderly age of seventeen, my mother’s voice, unbidden, unfortunate, bubbled up in my memory.

            “Your great-grandmother, Dimples, General MacArthur’s secret lover, was the first woman to kiss in Filipino film.” In that moment, I accidentally bit Sean’s lip until it bled. Even years after she had left, my mother was ruining my life.

            Enter: My mother, Amaranta “Amy” Lozano (now Magee unless Pete ever got over it and divorced her like any sane man would), who came from somewhere next to the ocean in the Philippines, a tiny barrio with only a white-sand beach and turquoise waves to its name.             

            Except this, according to my mother, wasn’t true. Amaranta Lozano was actually born Amaranta Cooper MacArthur, in Washington, D.C., to General Douglas MacArthur, the savior of the Philippines, and his teenaged mistress, the actress Isabel Rosario “Dimples” Cooper, the one the fifty-year-old hero picked up while saving our godforsaken brown skins and then brought, like a delicate parakeet, to America. When Dimples, already pregnant, was exposed by political enemies and cast out by her lover, to hide her shame, she sent her daughter to be adopted by a couple named Lozano in her homeland and tried and failed to make it in Hollywood.

            Did you notice the discrepancy? It was now past the new millennium, 2016. My mother was under fifty years old. Douglas abandoned Dimples in 1934. My mother never was good with numbers, with time, with abstractions. What she was good at was being beautiful, handling things she could touch and see.

            Among the lies, the errors, she continued to spout, to believe, was that we were the direct descendants of the American soldier Filipinos worshipped so dear and the first woman to kiss onscreen in Filipino cinema. She loved grandeur like that. For a long time during my childhood, I’d believed it, too.

            “Tell me about Grandma Dimples,” I’d say. She’d tell me, instead, about her days growing up by the ocean, about the starfish she’d play with on the beach and the fresh coconuts she’d drink from every morning, because she’d never actually known Grandma Dimples. Grandma Dimples hadn’t been a mother at all, much less a grandma. Or she’d say: 

            “Grandma Dimples wore an ermine cape, white as snowflakes, even when the sun looked like a cooked egg yolk and made the puddles evaporate.”

            Or

            “Grandma Dimples danced with General Dwight Eisenhower and Bing Crosby and President Franklin Roosevelt all in one night at a ball in the American embassy.”

            Or

            “Grandma Dimples was going to be a Hollywood star, but Lana Turner got jealous. Sent her mobster boyfriend after her to threaten her. She ran and became a hairdresser, because she could make others beautiful, even if she herself could not be beautiful for others to see. Do you know Lana Turner’s blond curls? She made many women have the same hair, so there were many Lana Turners and so Lana wasn’t special anymore. That was her revenge.”

            I found a picture of Dimples Cooper once, when I was older and knew better than to believe my mother. I had to admit the resemblance was striking. Something about the eyes and how Dimples looked at the camera, the invitation in her smile. This was her in her prime, when she had a future to spare, no thought of her pathetic death by overdose to come, abandoned by the man who brought her to America, abandoned by her dreams.

            When I was born, of course I had to become part of my mother’s Tinseltown delusion. Mom called me Natalie, after her favorite actress, Natalie Wood, the Russian who played Puerto Rican in West Side Story. My mother loved West Side Story; I only stomached it for Rita Moreno and Jerome Robbins’s choreography. I preferred Splendor in the Grass, where Natalie was luminescent, bursting with repressed youthful ardor.  She never got to sleep with her high school boyfriend and ended up in a mental asylum, due to madness from this self-imposed celibacy. Natalie’s character had believed her mother when she told her good girls didn’t have premarital sex, and her boyfriend slept with the town whore because she couldn’t give it up. In West Side Story, her teenage lover died in a violent shootout. In real life, Natalie Wood married three times, before falling off a yacht and drowning at forty-three. Natalie was doomed to always have bad romances, on and offscreen. I had to wonder if having Natalie’s name infected my own life. Sometimes, I couldn’t tell.

***

            I ate the last bite of my burger, juice dribbling past my lips. I dabbed a napkin on them, before reaching for a couple of fries and dipping them in ketchup. My mother would have either scolded me for ruining my figure or joined me herself. Dad had been the one who cooked proper Filipino food at home, stewing pork in vinegar and soy sauce or chopping pechay and potatoes for nilaga. Mother was more likely to order pizza if Dad wasn’t coming home in time for dinner. She never seemed to gain weight herself and regarded my rounded stomach and pimply face in adolescence as an affront to her genetics. Even now, I didn’t much take after her. She used to sigh and tell me I looked too much like my father.

            “You would have been handsome,” she’d say, “If you were a boy.”

            After aimless driving, I had stopped at a diner. I pulled out my phone and the photo and idly typed notes, reviewing all the information I knew and which Pete had given me: 

            Mom left Dad and me—2004—divorce finalized after she moved out and never saw her again; Dad got full custody

            2004-2008—????

            2009—met and married Pete

            LEFT AGAIN—2016

            Now ??????

            I hesitated, then pressed the Facebook app on my phone. Typed in Amy Magee. After I changed the filters, there she was. I scanned her feed (hadn’t been updated in a few days and the last two posts were a photo of Audrey Hepburn with a quote—“Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible’!”—superimposed over her black sweater and a picture of a newly purchased Louis Vuitton wallet). I clicked her photos and started looking at the life my mother led after she had left me behind.

            I won’t lie. Since she had left, I had typed the names I’d known—Amaranta Lozano, Amy Mercado, Amaranta Mercado, Amy Lozano—in search engines, in social media search boxes. Of course, I hadn’t known her new name or whatever names she had been using before she met Pete, so I hadn’t been able to find her. If she had left an online trail before Pete to begin with.

            I pored over her photos:  Her with Pete on a beach in Oahu, under a waterfall in Costa Rica, on an elephant in Thailand. Parties where she was sleek in a little black dress and pearls or fiery in red or softly glowing in rosy pink organza.

            The stream stopped going back in 2009, when she had married Pete, gotten a Facebook to post her wedding photos (a courthouse wedding then a small reception at a chic French restaurant with Pete’s friends—I suspected that none of them were hers). Frustrated, I closed the app and contemplated my plate strewn with crumbs and gobs of ketchup. Of course.

            I wrote, Did she go into an alternate dimension for five years? Then I stuffed my phone back into my coat pocket.

            She must have done—something. Pete met her when she got a job as a receptionist in his office; she had just moved into town; and it was but a couple of months before they moved in together and married. According to Pete, after the wedding, she didn’t work and mostly stayed at home, as far as he knew, if they weren’t traveling or going to parties, galleries, or concerts. He didn’t recall anyone she was close to in particular; it was like a revolving door, the friends who came by the house. None lasted more than two visits before he never saw them again.      

            My mother’s inertia didn’t surprise me. She hadn’t worked, when she was still married to Dad. She barely did housework either and would leave tasks half-finished, overcome by boredom. I swept the piles of dirt she left on the floor into the trash; I took out the clothes she left in the dryer for days and ironed and folded them. After a few too many meals of pink and cold chicken and incinerated broccoli, Dad took over cooking, after coming home from the hospital. When we called her for dinner, she would swan down the stairs in a slippery ivory robe, kiss Dad absently on the lips, and pat my head, before sitting down at her place. Afterwards, she’d go upstairs; sometimes, she’d beckon me to join her in my parents’ big bed, to watch movies together, mostly whatever was on TCM. Dad would join, too, sometimes, even though his preferences were documentaries or action films. We’d watch movie after movie. Then, our movie nights stopped, and a year later, she left. That was probably the first sign.

            All she did, even then, was watch movies and—I stopped. I texted Pete.

            Watching movies was one of only two things my mother ever did consistently; the other was picking up and dropping new artistic hobbies like they scorched her. When I was young, she had tried singing, piano, ballroom dancing, and acting (surprisingly, despite her Hollywood delusions, she couldn’t even stick with this one; she quit a community theater production of Guys and Dolls in a huff when they didn’t cast her as a lead). What hadn’t she done?

            A ting:  Lessons? I don’t know. She did talk sometimes about maybe taking a painting class? But she never told me if she took one or not.

***       

            Just two weeks before I found myself searching for my mother in a strange city, I had Christmas with my father in his apartment in Florida, an enjoyable week where we watched A Christmas Story, What a Wonderful Life, Bad Santa, Die Hard, and assorted seasonally appropriate films in companionable silence.  He had moved south when I was a senior in undergrad, taking a more low-key job at a private clinic. I was glad to see him leave the house, the big echoing house, in the suburbs.

            I had finally persuaded him to take some of his vacation beyond the couple of days allotted to Christmas and New Year’s. I had three weeks off from my PhD program, a place so close to home that Dad had asked once why I hadn’t tried another region while I was still young with few ties.

            I shrugged. “Light teaching load,” I said, “The stipend.” Thinking back, I wondered if I believed, unconsciously, that she would return home someday, that I needed to stay put.

            During It’s a Wonderful Life, when George and Mary were dancing in a pool, Dad asked me if I was dating anyone.

            “No,” I said. I never really dated anyone long-term, although I went out with men, a motley assortment of other graduate students, entry-level professionals, bartenders, and artists, even a bassist for a shitty bluegrass band. I ate dinners and drank lattes they paid for and sat in dark theaters with them, waiting for the curtains to open on plays, concerts, and movies. I politely accepted their hands on my knees, their lips on my neck, sometimes resenting them for interrupting my viewing. It was worse if they were talkers, the kind who liked to tell me what little they knew about whatever we were watching, though they knew that I studied film. If I did find them acceptable, if they let me watch in peace, I let them into my apartment, where I kept the lights dim. I preferred to keep their faces in shadows.

            “It’s a shame,” he said and then went back to digging into the dwindling pile of buttered popcorn.

            Dad himself never remarried after the divorce. Irritated, I asked him why then. 

            “I don’t know, Nat,” he said. On the TV, James Stewart was giving Donna Reed the moon. “No one felt right, I guess.” He wasn’t looking at me when he said this.

            What I really wanted to ask him was Do you still love Mom? Because I thought he did. When I was looking in his desk drawers for batteries once, I found a picture of them, from when they were dating. They were so young, Dad in shorts and socks that went a little too high up his calves, squinting behind his glasses. Mom wearing a denim dress, her hair blowing in the wind. They were next to the ocean. He was looking at her; she was looking away, at the horizon.

            According to Mom, they met when she waiting at the metro station in the middle of January, below freezing, and she’d forgotten her gloves. He noticed her rubbing her hands, snowflakes falling around her black hair, and he offered her his own. After slipping them on—suede, fleece-lined, she noted—she asked him for his name, cautiously, in Tagalog. 

            “Felix,” he said. “Felix Mercado.”

             Of that incident, my Dad only said, “When she put them on, it was like I was holding her hands, keeping them warm.”

            He was a medical resident, American-born, on the cusp of thirty, an orphan. She had dropped out of her nursing program and was trying to hide from the INS, since her student visa was no longer valid. She never spoke of the parents Lozano she left behind in the Philippines, save for my imaginary Grandma Dimples and Grandpa Doug. I tried not to think about how their mutual needs may have conspired to bring them together, how my father’s gloves, his hesitant, American-accented Tagalog may have been a beacon, how my mother’s black hair and eyes must have looked against the falling snow. I wanted to believe that yes, it was fate pushing them both onto the snowy train platform at the right time, nudging my shy father to pluck up the courage to give her his gloves. That those gloves became the first time they held hands, if only through transference.

            I had to believe my father still loved my mother, couldn’t bear other women, if I must be honest. Because if he didn’t and was still alone and unloved, what would that mean? That there was a reason my mother had left beyond her own unknown whims? That something about him—me—couldn’t keep her, even repulsed her?

            I didn’t ask him. We finished the film, then rummaged for another. I let the question die on the tip of my tongue.

***

            I walked up to a brick building, which looked like a warehouse. My feet ached, and my breath rattled hard in my chest.

            I had Googled a list of local art classes and teachers and called each one. This had been the eighth one.

            “Amy? Yeah I had an Amy. Asian, right? Middle-aged but didn’t look it?” It was a woman’s voice. Her name was Dara Carter.

            I asked if I could swing by.

            The warehouse had been converted into studios, and wandering around a maze of partitions, I found the space, with a placard on the wall.

            “Dara?” I asked. A woman was standing on top of a canvas, splattered with paint, in reds and greens and yellows. A can was in her hand and a brush in the other. She was splashing black paint all over the canvas. I involuntarily stepped back. The painting looked like finger-paint to me, though Mom had always lectured me about Jackson Pollock and also, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. That was one interest we never shared.

            Dara Carter was gray-haired, willowy. Her silver braid fell long down her back. She wore a paint-spattered blue smock. Her eyes were also blue, the color of a soft summer sky.

            “You must be Natalie? Come in.” There was a light twang to her voice. She walked off the canvas and put down her can and brush. She walked to a sink and washed her hands, dried them on a towel. She went to a corner and unfolded a paint-smeared chair, put it well away from the canvas. “Don’t worry. It’s dry.”

            I sat down cautiously anyway. “I won’t waste your time. Is this your student?” I showed her the picture.

            She took it. “That’s her, although she didn’t go by Amy Magee or Amy Mercado or Amy Lozano. She told me Amy MacArthur. My private lessons are pretty informal, and most of my students pay in cash so—” She shrugged. 

            Figures. “She suddenly left me and my stepfather in the middle of the night.” I doubted Dara knew the state of my relationship with my mother and thought she didn’t need to know more. “She left a note, but we were worried about her and hoped that we wouldn’t have to call the cops. Did she tell you anything?”

            Dara shook her head. She leaned over and gently rubbed my shoulder in a circular motion. I flinched, but it felt nice. Soothing. “I’m sorry. Amy canceled her lessons three days ago. Took all her work, too. Said she was moving, didn’t tell me where. I didn’t even know she was leaving behind a family. I’m sorry about that.”

            Not just was leaving. Had already left, once before, and probably would again and again. It was a distinction I didn't want to explain. I felt something wet in my eyes, but I turned my head away. I hadn’t wanted to admit, even to myself, I was hoping there would be more here.

            “Are you going to be all right, dear?” Dara asked.

            “What do you think?” Dara flinched, but I couldn’t focus on her. The paintings in the studio were blurring. Reds, blues, pinks, purples, blacks, golds. Splattered, dripping. The room was tilting sideways. Automatically, I thought of German Expressionism and its heirs, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari especially, its funhouse landscapes. Mid-thought, I stopped myself, nauseated. Even now, everything filtered through film. Just like her.

***

            I called the rest of the art studios. Nothing. No Amy Anything who matched my mother’s description. The sky was purpling.

            I was going up the elevator again, empty-handed, resigned. My mother had gotten her wish. She was as good as gone, probably on to find her next sucker. I imagined her like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—giant hat on a perfectly coiffed head, sailing forth to find more handsome suckers, richer suckers. Her film ending at her next wedding—no mention of the wreckage left, the ennui certain to happen after the glow faded. The elevator doors opened to reveal Pete.

            “Did you find anything, Natalie?” He asked so quickly, so eagerly. I grimaced and didn’t bother trying to hide it.

            “No.”

            “Really?” His disappointment was overwhelming, sickening. I gagged, trying to swallow it, but Pete already had his back to me, leading me to the sofa. I knew he was trying to hide his tears, and believe it or not, I softened, a little.

            “I thought I had a lead with the art lessons. Nothing. Did my mother really leave nothing behind?”

            “Beyond the other stuff I told you, no.”

            I clenched my fists but took a deep breath and thought. Think, Natalie. What did Amy—Mom—love?

            Well, there was one thing. It was stupid, basic, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt.

            “Pete? Did she have a preferred theater?”

            “What?”

            “A theater. A movie theater. You know how she is about movies.”

            And for the first time, Pete sounded genuinely surprised. “You’re right, I didn’t even think of that. She was always going to The Majestic.”

            “What?”

            “The Majestic Theater. It’s an old-timey place. Not a lot of screens. A specialty theater, mostly art films, black and white movies.” He coughed. “They used to make me fall asleep,” he said bashfully. “So she went by herself.” He stopped. “Oh, she bought a painting of it. From an auction we went to for kicks. Here, follow me.”

            Dreamily, I followed him to what looked like their master suite. I registered it:  a big, low bed, white walls, black furniture, in keeping with the theme. One wall mostly window, so I could see the sky now a deep blue, lit up from below from city lights, cars. So impersonal, so modern.

            Except for the painting.

            “I didn’t understand when she got it,” he said. “And she paid so much for it, too, bid too much for it, I thought. It didn’t match the place, but she hammered it up herself.”

            It did not match the room, a sentimental monstrosity in an elaborate gilt frame. It was of a movie theater, in the evening, in the grand old mid-century style. The marquee lined with burning bright bulbs. Movie posters vivid against its outer walls. Even a red carpet. The Majestic, it said across the top of the marquee. Tonight, Natalie Wood—

            I stared, my eyeballs burning.

            Entering the theater was a woman with dark hair in a gold dress and high heels to match. Holding her hand was a small girl in a white frilly dress. The woman bent down to smile at the child, her face in profile. The girl’s face was up, a smile curling up her cheeks.

            I turned around, my breath harsh in my lungs. “Where is this place?” I demanded.

***

            This was the final sign. Six months before my mother left my father, Dad and I were prowling the specialty shops in the nearby city, trying to find the right gift for Mom’s birthday, what she called her tenth anniversary of turning twenty-five. Dad said this was an important birthday, that it deserved an important gift, something not just bought hastily at our suburban mall. Something rare and strange, like the treasure you find hidden in a dragon’s cave.

            “What about this?” he said in the handbag section of a marbled department store. He pointed at a purse with buttery-smooth leather, studded with gold.

            I shook my head. “No.” Mom did not like purses, the thought of being burdened with useful things.

            “What about this?” said my father in the stationary store, paneled in wood and smelling of new paper. He lifted a fountain pen, black, with a silver nib bright and cutting.

            “No,” I answered. Mom was terrible at writing thank-you cards, writing down dates in appointment books. She once said handwritten cards were only for lovers and ex-lovers, adorned with lipstick kisses.

            “This?” said Dad in the shoe store, a dim little shop we stumbled upon at the end of an avenue lined with posh designer outlets. It smelled of polish and made me sneeze. In his hand, he was holding a pair of pumps, with soles red as fresh blood. If you wore them and someone looked at your feet as you walked away, the flash of red was like a wink.

            I didn’t say anything; I took them to the counter. “Wrap them up, please,” I said to the cashier.

            It was only later that I learned that some people saw shoes as one of the worst gifts you could give. Giving shoes means that the receiver will walk, no, run away from you. That they will always wander the world, never resting. Far away from the giver.

            Of course, others see this wanderlust as a gift, something that is of great value. To give shoes to someone means that you are cutting them free, to go where and when they will.

            Sometimes, I wondered if the day I handed my mother the present was my greatest error, the day I caused our household to break in a way that was irreparable. I think of my father, so willing to trek into the city for a day to enter stores he would never shop in himself, he being the kind who wore fraying t-shirts he bought in college.

            Other times, I thought of the last day, when my mother walked out the door, her car already loaded with her possessions. The way I looked at her shoes, the shoes that winked red at me as she walked away. That when my hand grazed hers, I knew, I knew, what I was telling her was, “Take these shoes and go.”

***

            I found The Majestic easily enough downtown. It was hard to miss, the lights pouring out of the doors and from the marquee. No red carpet, though, since it was after all a Wednesday in January, right after New Year’s. It was now late at night, the shadows deepening from violet. It was precisely the type of movie theater my mother preferred and resented our hometown for not having. She had to make do with a chain theater, a big concrete box with sticky tile floors.

            “What’s playing?” I asked at the box office. There were flyers for an Eighties Night, An Evening with Hitchcock, stacked neatly inside. An elderly man was manning the counter. I idly wondered if he had been here at the theater’s opening, decades ago. He was the right age.

            He rattled off a list of names, and I stopped him at Gilda, Rita Hayworth’s signature film.

            “One please for the next showing.”

            He smiled. “You’re in luck. You have seven minutes. Great movie. Have you seen it before?”

            I smiled back. “I just took a noir seminar. I loved it.” This was only partially true. It was disturbing to me, the way Gilda and her lover Johnny treated one another, after they reunited in the film after years apart. The torment they put each other through, how Gilda pretended to cheat on him behind his back. How a guilt-ridden Johnny denied her sex after their marriage, after her first husband’s apparent suicide from despair at Gilda’s adulterous betrayal.  I never bought the soft-focus ending when they reconciled, for good.  My mother, of course, had loved it.

            Inside, the floors were marble, the walls lined with red velvet curtains. A listless teenager at the snack counter, another one waiting for tickets. A slow night. I gave my ticket to the usher, and he ripped it. I went straight to the theater. The doors were open, beckoning.

            I stepped inside. There were a few people scattered across the room, some digging into bags of popcorn, slurping on sodas. I saw the telltale lights of a few cellphones. The chairs were red velvet, the curtains were red velvet. Above me, I knew, was a gilded balcony.

            There.

            The lights were starting to dim. The doors shut behind me with a soft thump. The curtains were drawing away, to the sides, and there she was.

            A woman with long black hair, sitting in a seat in the center, a few rows away from the front. I couldn’t be quite sure it was her, but I knew.

            Mother? The question was dammed behind my lips. Mom?

            It would only take a few more steps, a tap on the shoulder, to confirm it was her. A firm It’s me, Natalie. I could imagine what she’d do, say.

            Stand up, sweep me into her arms, weep into my hair, whispering my name NatalieNatalieNatalie over and over again. A spotlight would fall on us.

            Or

            Smile up at me. I knew you would come, she’d say and pat the seat next to her. I’d sit down, and we’d watch Gilda, and I’d finally learn to love it, finally buy Gilda and Johnny’s union, their movie-ending kiss, the one that changed everything bad and broken about their relationship before.

            Or

            It wouldn’t be her. It’d be a stranger, a face I didn’t know. I’d whisper, I’m sorry. Walk away, forget about all of this, forget about her. Go back to my life as it now was. Pretend Pete never called me, pretend I never wondered if my father still loved her, pretend I never saw the painting of a mother and child who could be her and me.

            The music was starting. The lights were now completely out. Behind me, the camera was whirring. The screen was lighting up, turning bright and silvery.