My mother and I missed the news about Agent X because we spent most of that January cooped up in a beach bungalow outside Jerusalem, Rhode Island. Prior to that we had been living in Providence, stalking an elderly man Mum had tracked all the way from Anaheim, California-a man she contended was my father. I found her crusade embarrassing and pointless: If she had been foolish enough to get knocked up by an old goat who ran off the first chance he got, it was more an expression of her character than his. Having lived with her for seventeen years, I knew all too well what a pain in the ass she was. The guy had my sympathy.

When we began leafleting his Pawtucket neighborhood, the codger spooked and fled to his summer cottage by the sea.

"You can't get away from me that easily," Mum muttered nefariously, late into the night. "Oh no, buster. If that's what you think, you got another think coming. Yes indeedy." We had to pack up and leave our little Gano Street apartment during the wee hours of the morning, a drill I was quite familiar with after a lifetime of covert maneuvers.

"Isn't this fun?" Mum said breathlessly as we loaded the sputtering Corolla. Her eyes were bright and wild. It was cold.

"Oh, sure," I said. "What am I supposed to do with my bike?" I had just gotten it for Christmas-a new Huffy.

"Just leave it chained under the stairs, honey. We'll get it later."

That was the thing about her: She knew we would never set foot within a mile of this place again, not with all the back rent and utility bills we owed. Caches of our abandoned pets and possessions stretched from coast to coast, and she acted as if someday we would follow it all home like a trail of bread crumbs. Did she even realize we were butting up against the far side of North America? The only place left to run was the Atlantic Ocean.