12

The following morning, long before I opened my eyes, I heard Michael on the other side of our hotel room, the rapid clicking of laptop keys. Dawn light filtered through the shoji screens, red against my pulsing lids. I ached with grief, but this grief was not the sharp, suffocating grief that accompanies a recent death. It was a field of grief, a sea of it. There were no edges. The night before, a friend had sent me a passage from Moby-Dick, a description of a ship in a gale, a caution against the attempt to sail back to land: “In the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is the ship’s direst jeopardy.” Before I fell asleep I read it again and again, as if trying to interpret a spiritual text. I was in a gale. My mind was wild, grasping, seeking solid ground. But there was no solid ground. I kept my eyes closed, trying to orient myself. You’re in San Francisco. Japantown. Your husband is here. It’s Thursday, June 30. One phrase of Melville’s had remained with me overnight: “the lashed sea’s landlessness.”

The sound of Michael at the keyboard was comforting. I was sure he was chasing down leads. I smelled coffee. Michael had spent many years in Africa, investigating warlords and third world dictators, and had written a book that exposed the underside of foreign aid. Dogged research was second nature to him. The work often began with a hunch—and hunches often led to dead ends. Only sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they led straight to indisputable facts. As long as I could hear the sound of Michael typing, it felt as if something was happening.

“You up?”

“Yeah.”

Slowly I opened my eyes. The room was dim, Michael silhouetted against the shoji screens. A couple of Starbucks paper cups were next to him on a small table. He had gone to sleep obsessed with my mystery first cousin, A.T. Often, on Ancestry.com, family trees and the pages associated with them are administered by a separate person, and in A.T.’s case, there was an actual name attached to his page: Thomas Bethany. Michael had been digging and digging into all sorts of people named Thomas Bethany, the one identifiable link to A.T., and had come up with nothing but dead ends. There were death records for several men named Thomas Bethany; there was a Thomas Bethany who was a middle school soccer star from Rhode Island. Down the road, Michael will tell me that he found a Thomas Bethany who was a huge supporter of presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Michael brought me one of the coffees, and I propped myself up in bed. Bed was where I wanted to stay. Bed would continue to be a place from which I would try to navigate my ship in the gale.

“It’s not Thomas Bethany,” he said. “It’s Bethany Thomas.”

I tried to clear my head. I looked up at Michael. He was wired, hopped up on coffee. I had a feeling he’d been up for hours. Besides, we were still on East Coast time. I grabbed my own laptop from the bedside table and opened it to my page on Ancestry.com. There he was again, whoever he was; the small blue person-shaped icon. He looked so harmless, really, like a cartoon figure.

“Why?”

“A.T.,” Michael said. “T.”

“I don’t get it.”

“People tend to do this—administer these things—for their relatives. T. Like Thomas. Maybe A.T. is the husband, brother, father, whatever, of someone named Bethany Thomas.”

I was having a hard time computing. A.T. B.T.—who were these people to me? They were as abstract and surreal as the fractions and decimals representing genetic code.

“Have you gotten anywhere?”

“Not yet. But I’m pretty sure I’m right. I think we should get some help with this. What do you think about calling Jennifer Mendelsohn?”

Jennifer Mendelsohn is a journalist based in Baltimore. We hardly knew her. In fact, I don’t think either of us had ever met her. We were friendly with her brother, the writer Daniel Mendelsohn. But hers was one of those warm acquaintanceships born of Twitter. Her handle, @CleverTitleTK, often appeared in my Twitter stream, and we had engaged with each other over the years in a way native to our cultural moment. A decade earlier, such a relationship would have made no sense. A decade hence, Twitter might well be obsolete, replaced by another mode of rapid-fire communication. But in June 2016, it was simple enough for me to direct-message @CleverTitleTK, whose brief Twitter bio read: Old school journo. Genealogy geek.

Michael had known of Jennifer Mendelsohn’s subspecialty in genealogy because when Ancestry.com returned his own altogether unsurprising results, it turned out that the two of them were distantly related. He had shown up on her page as a fourth, maybe fifth cousin. During an email exchange, he learned the depth of her interest and knowledge of these testing sites.

“She might be able to help us—maybe there’s another level of information here I can’t access.”

My phone pinged almost instantly. It was @CleverTitleTK sending her phone number.