Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

VivversOC: Do you guys keep links to AG—like articles and stuff we’ve sent to eachother?

LindsEE!: u mean like bookmarks?

VivversOC: or whatever, just keep track somehow

LindsEE!: Im not that organized lol

Stoph1: why? its automatically saved in ur browser history

VivversOC: I know dude but when I try to go back thru my history all the links are dead

Stoph1: probly an issue with your settings.

VivversOC: that’s what I thought but it’s not.

Stoph1: u gotta remove your “clear history” window.

VivversOC: dude I know how to work my settings i’m not 60 yrs old

Stoph1: sorry miss sensitive

VivversOC: can u guys just check? If you don’t have the URLs i will send links

Stoph1: ok boss

Xavey: viv I checked my links don’t work

LindsEE!: Mine either weird right?!!?

Stoph1: nah it’s just linkrot

VivversOC: ???

Stoph1: linkrot = urls to webpages that no longer exist. Usually for content that’s really old

VivversOC: so it just expires and like falls off the internet?

Stoph1: nope, somebody pulls them down

2021

Irene Brenner sat in the rocking chair on her porch, watching the sky shift from its monochromatic dome, flat and still as pool water, into the chaos of sunset. The look and feel of her “town” were deceiving: colonial brick, white columns, humidity pumped into the air by some unseen machines. If you strolled through its center and looked straight ahead, you might think you were in New England. If you drifted out into the “neighborhoods” here—Irene’s blue Craftsman bungalow was situated on an unnamed street lined with eucalyptus trees and more bungalows identical to hers—you might think you’d been transported to some spot in northern California, perhaps Berkeley or Oakland. Some of the bungalows on Irene’s street were painted in other colors of the resident’s choosing, an option granted after sixty consecutive days of good behavior.

As if paint color mattered.

Irene’s house had been blue when she’d moved in.

The architecture of the landscape was incoherent, but there was no disguising the singular desert sky overhead. No way to mute its bright, hard stars. As a young woman, the summer before her senior year of high school, Irene had driven from Austin to Los Angeles to look at UCLA, and the desert states had been her favorite passageways: their starkness, their scorching days and freezing nights, the wild panoply of stars. She established a vague intention to end up in New Mexico or Arizona, but higher education was second-rate in those states—and Irene wanted better for herself. Yale was her first choice and when she was accepted, she didn’t think twice about going. She could live in the desert later.

And here it was—later—and she was doing it. Living in the desert. In a desert. In some desert. She’d been here for years and still did not know its name. The staff referred to it only as the Colony. She could not point to it on a map. Long ago, she’d stopped asking them where she was. The answer had always been the same: information will become available after you’ve agreed to cooperate.

Irene had never agreed. She’d considered it, at certain times, like when she stared out the window above the lone twin bed of her bungalow at night and calculated how old her daughter would be. Where she might be living, and with whom? There had been the California license plate of the people who found her, so Irene settled on images of her girl sitting under a palm tree beside the ocean, reading poems, sun on her face. Irene tried to imagine what her face looked like, whether her eyes had stayed blue (they often changed after infancy, didn’t they?), whether she’d inherited the slight bump in the bridge of her nose, the one Irene had always longed to have corrected.

As if a young face needed correction of any kind.

She tried to imagine the shape of her daughter’s body. She wondered if she loved sports, as Irene had, and books, and the sound of language. If she, too, hated dancing and found most boys nearly impossible to talk to, except for the ones she longed for, with whom it was completely impossible. She wondered if her daughter was also too hard on herself, endlessly seeking out her own flaws.

If only Irene had known how perfect she’d once been. She wished she could somehow tell her daughter this, wherever she was: you are perfect.

Although Irene had last seen the girl as an infant, her car seat receding in Irene’s rearview mirror, she pictured older versions of her daughter and somehow missed that person. She pictured a mane of dark hair, soft blue eyes, a strong jawline, and bold eyebrows. She saw her wearing braces and Velcro sneakers, kicking a ball on a playground. For a time, in Austin, when she was working as an admin and eating tuna straight from the can at night, she was obsessed with these imaginings. Who was tucking her into bed at night, making her breakfast, driving her to school? She thought of the white BMW that had pulled into the Cades Cove Inn, of the two people who had emerged from it.

Was the girl with them ?

At Irene’s lowest point, a year after the birth, she’d paid several hundred dollars online to trace the license plate of the BMW. California, 4EVRFIT.

Were they the ones who adopted her?

The car had been owned by Lawrence D. Bourne, of Newport Beach, California. A real estate developer. He was married to Elise S. Bourne, née Brocken, a fitness professional. The report was several years old. It made no mention of children.

Irene stopped reading the report, her tuna stuck in her throat; she was no longer hungry, her body electric with despair. She would not research the girl further. She would live and grow in Irene’s mind only. Real knowledge was too painful.

At work, she’d started to hear of people writing “blogs”—then a brand-new format—and the idea appealed to her. She’d always liked journaling but found it lonely and aimless. The prospect of a few readers—even invisible strangers—was oddly comforting.

She signed up for a Blogger account and began posting about her experience. For weeks, she had no followers. This emboldened her; she began to write more openly about Yale, about the night of the party, about the pregnancy. About how it unfolded, in those terrifying nine weeks. About giving up the baby, and how it had cracked her heart in two.

The more she wrote on her blog, the more her sadness gave way to anger.

I birthed a child a little more than two months after becoming pregnant. It disrupted my entire life and derailed the course of my future. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. I know that this has happened to other women. Why aren’t scientists obsessed figuring out WHY?? IS ANYONE LISTENING? Why is it not in the national conversation??

One morning she woke up, and she had followers. Three, to be exact.

I’m listening,one of them, Danielle-A, wrote. This happened to me, too.

Later, after Irene had gotten deep into blogging about AG, Henry Duarte showed up at the front door of the little house she’d rented in Leander, claiming to be a gardener looking for new work. He had a pickup truck with Duarte Landscaping on the side, a business card, a lawn mower in the bed of his truck. He’d been so young, with his ramrod posture and apple-hard muscles and lineless face.