When we reached our mother’s room at the hospital, we saw a sign on her closed door instructing us to check in at the nurse’s station before entering. The town of Mojave is at an altitude of nearly 2,800 feet, though it felt to me as if I were at the bottom of something instead, the signs for gas stations, restaurants, and motels rising higher than the highest tree.

Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. A song without words, but my mother knew the words anyway and instead of answering my question she sang them softly to me. Anyone who promotes the Mao era as the era most free of corruption, who knows Mao was responsible for the death of well over 70 million Chinese . Perhaps you should try a shorter trip first,” Paul had suggested when I told him about my plan during one of our should-we-stay-together-or- get-divorced discussions several months before. Each component demanded just slightly less than it gave, needing to be tended and maintained, filled and unfilled, hauled and dumped, pumped and primed and stoked and monitored.We’d both transferred to the University of Minnesota after that first year—she to the Duluth campus, I to the one in Minneapolis—and, much to our amusement, we shared a major.

You need to get the hell out of Minneapolis,” said my friend Lisa during one of our late-night heartbreak conversations. Part of me was terrified by the idea of him leaving me; another part of me desperately hoped he would. He stood next to my mother, a gentle hairy hand slung into his pocket, looking down at her in the bed. Chang welcomes Bo’s downfall: “I think it’s a very good thing this guy fell because he was a huge promoter of Mao, and he did it in a very cynical way. Chang has watched an online discussion of her explosive book on Mao, Mao: The Unknown Story, a 900-page account of the leader’s life written in 2005 with Halliday, disappear before her eyes.Not down over the light of her cheeks to the corners of her mouth, but away from the edges of her eyes to her ears and into the nest of her hair on the bed. It would turn out to be the last full day of her life, and for most of it she held her eyes still and open, neither sleeping nor waking, intermittently lucid and hallucinatory. Setting: The Pacific Crest Trail, a hiking route that stretches from the Mojave Desert all the way up to Canada.

I couldn’t let myself believe it then and there in that elevator and also go on breathing, so I let myself believe other things instead. I roamed the hospital hallways while my mother slept, my eyes darting into other people’s rooms as I passed their open doors, catching glimpses of old men with bad coughs and purpled flesh, women with bandages around their fat knees. Okay,” I said, and wrote Eddie’s address, though in truth my connection to Eddie in the four years since my mother died had become so pained and distant I couldn’t rightly consider him my stepfather any- more.

He was still the kind and tender man I’d fallen for a few years before, the one I’d loved so fiercely I’d shocked every- one by marrying just shy of twenty, but once my mother started dying, something inside of me was dead to Paul, no matter what he did or said. Her marriage dissolved as a result of her serial cheating and burgeoning addiction to heroin, leading her to adopt the surname “Strayed” as a reflection of her wandering from the once-traditional path of her life. When my mother asked him for more morphine, she asked for it in a way that I have never heard anyone ask for anything. In the fall we’d attend school in McGregor, the smaller of the two, with a population of four hundred, but all summer long, aside from the occasional visitor— far-flung neighbors who stopped by to introduce themselves—it was us and our mom.