Madagascar was not the first expedition on which I had accompanied my mother. We'd started traveling together the year I turned seventeen, after my father called from Alaska to say he wouldn't be returning from his ice-fishing trip and my mother, a biologist who specialized in rainforest primates, told me it was time I saw the world.

As we landed in Fort Dauphin, south of Madagascar's capital, the morning sun blazing copper through the small windows, my mother told me to stop calling her mother and to start calling her June, adjusting her oversized black sunglasses—she'd started wearing them all the time, even at night and indoors—as she explained mother made her feel old and undesirable. In the year without my father, the same year she turned forty-five, her age had appeared on her face like a terrible secret. The delicate half-moons underneath her eyes had hardened and crinkled, lines appeared in her forehead. Her hair grayed, though she'd dyed it blonde to cover the evidence. It was even startling to me, the person who saw her day after day. Sometimes I wondered if she wasn't in Madagascar to research deforestation and primate populations for her latest book, but to charge through the vines and bushes in hope of finding some fountain of youth, to splash river water on her face and paste mud against her skin; to look for a cure.

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