She only went back home for funerals. Her visa made it hard for her to travel, and she couldn’t get time off work. She owed her mother at least three Christmases, three New Year’s Eves, three sets of birthdays. To settle her debt, she bought her mother a cheap ticket to New York with an eight-hour layover in Panama City and another four hours in Miami. Her mother had never been on a plane, didn’t speak a word of English, and wasn’t sure how to prepare.

“Just follow my instructions,” the daughter said, and she wrote her mother a meticulous itinerary and a script for the customs interview. Her mother memorized some phrases in English: I’m traveling alone. I’m visiting for three weeks. My daughter lives here. Through Skype, the daughter then helped her mother pack, told her to leave all her tropical clothes and sandals at home, to bring nothing but black and beige sweaters and sensible closed-toe shoes. She watched her mother, with disheveled hair and dark circles under her eyes, roll her socks and underwear and fit them into small crevices in her suitcase alongside special coffee and guava candy that reminded her of childhood.

The night before the reunion, while her sweet mother flew over an ocean and snacked on peanuts next to a cosmopolitan teenage couple, the daughter drank three bottles of Corona as she scrubbed the bathroom sink and toilet, washed all the crusty pots and pans piled up on the stove, and threw away the containers of rice and meat that had spoiled in the fridge. She headed to the basement and washed her only comforter, musty and with faded blue stripes, so that her mother would be warm on the chilly New York nights.

The daughter eventually slept, but her mother didn’t. She just covered her legs with the flimsy blanket they had given her and waited. The teenagers put on an animated film that they didn’t watch, their eyes covered with silk eye masks, the boy taking up all of the armrest. Another mother across the aisle held her child in her arms while she ate dinner, sometimes bouncing him gently when he threatened to cry. The mother quickly polished off her own meal: penne pasta with marinara and a slice of brownie. The lights went dim on the plane, and she continued her waiting in the dark. The little plane moved slowly over the world map on the screen in front of her, and she willed it to move faster so that she could be comfortable and safe with her daughter, with no script to remember, no maps to follow, no heavy bags to carry. The sun came up as they were about to land in Panama. Squinting, she was able to see green mountains and a country road before she shut her window shade. So as not to disturb the teens, she hadn’t gone to the bathroom once, and her pants were getting uncomfortably tight around the waist.

At the third airport, the coffee she was bringing her daughter got inspected. The TSA officer grabbed the jar and said something she couldn’t understand. When she reached for it to show him what was inside, he yelled, then yanked it away from her and never gave it back. She filled out her forms with a pen she’d brought from home and managed to remember all her English phrases. She got her picture taken and her fingerprints scanned. People in uniforms said, “This way, ma’am,” and gestured with their arms to hallway after hallway.

In New York, she saw her daughter first, staring at a family’s “Welcome Back” sign. The mother ran up to her and squeezed her arms, grabbed her hand, hugged her tight, surprised by how solid her daughter felt, how alive and textured, after years of being only a pixelated image online. The daughter kept staring at the mother, still waiting for the mother to fully arrive in her mind, to look less like a cardboard cutout against the backdrop of that American airport. The daughter said, “I can’t believe you’re here,” and the mother said, “I can’t believe you’re real.” They stepped outside the airport holding on to each other’s arms. The mother marveled at how she could see her own breath. The air smelled icy. A thick fog blocked the view from the windows of the train from JFK. The trees along the way had no leaves.

Panting, the daughter carried the carefully packed bags up to her fifth-floor walk-up. The mother’s face lit up as she finally took in her daughter’s private world, a place she’d only ever seen through the computer screen, much like the famous attractions of the city she’d only ever seen on TV. She walked from one sight to the next, her gray bob swaying softly from side to side.

“Ah, that throw pillow! That painting! That couch! I recognize this one,” she said as she grabbed a small pearlescent vase from the edge of a bookshelf, a perfect dustless circle left behind where it had stood for years. The daughter held her mother’s other hand, which felt smaller in hers than she remembered, shriveled up, and she kissed it.

In the kitchen, the daughter placed fresh bread in a basket and poured hot water into a real teapot, then rested teacups on their proper saucers and served tea to her mother with precut melon in heavy bowls — all things she never did on her own, in her life of peanut butter sandwiches over the kitchen sink.

She also made a fresh pot of coffee in a pour-over dripper while the tea, which was mostly ceremonial, an excuse to bring out the best of her things, and which neither of them had the habit of drinking, got cold. They both took their coffee with milk and no sugar. They ate the fruit, then slices of buttered bread, quickly in between sips. Then the daughter poured another cup of coffee, and another.

“They confiscated the coffee I was bringing you,” the mother said. “Pilão, your favorite.”

“I’m so sorry,” the daughter said.

“And I got lost so many times.”

“Were you scared?” the daughter asked.

“At first. But then things started to happen just as you said they would. There were arrows everywhere at the airport, and they led me right to you. You really were at the end of the longest hallway, just as you promised.”

“And the flying?”

“I thought I’d feel lighter — weightless, even — but it wasn’t that different from being in an elevator. I felt tight and heavy the whole time.”

The daughter nodded.

Soon the table was covered in crumbs and brown rings of coffee from the bottom of their mugs, and the daughter brought hers to her lips, only then realizing that it was empty again. She put it down next to the fancy little cups of tea, still full.

The mother admired the tidy home, her daughter’s taste in bedding and furniture, though it was mostly from IKEA. The sun set before five, and she found this uncanny. The daughter suggested using her HappyLight to make this day last a bit longer. She pressed a button and their faces shone, the white walls an otherworldly bluish hue. Her mother gasped, delighted and shocked that one could have so much control over one’s day.

“My daughter,” she said, “living in a shoebox in New York City with a lamp for sunlight.”

At night, after they’d eaten the guava candy and brushed their teeth, the daughter made a bed for her mother on the pullout couch in the living room, the warmest room in the apartment, and her mother — oh, her mother, so sore and tired after the journey — fell asleep quickly. She didn’t remember to say goodnight or ask if her daughter had an extra pillow so that she could elevate her legs.

The daughter tried to sleep but couldn’t. She felt jet-lagged, though she wasn’t the one who’d traveled. Under her bed in her tiny bedroom: a box of secrets not worth keeping, but not worth revealing either. A purple vibrator, a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of prescription sleeping pills. Out in the open, resting on the shelves in the living room, all around her sleeping mother: Christmas cards from old roommates, postcards from distant friends, coffee-table books filled with appetizing dishes and far-flung places. Anything to make her look more impressive, even if she suspected they had little effect. Her mother hadn’t paid any mind to these items, which had been arranged so neatly for her benefit. She was focused on the details of how her daughter lived in that place, on the things that helped her daughter get by.

“What do you make with this?” she’d asked, pointing at a mixer. “And where do you do your laundry?”

Her own home was practical. Every surface was lined with the detritus of her days. Pills in their sleeves, cookbooks, scissors next to an open package. Nothing decorative, nothing vain, except for photos of her daughter in foreign places — London, Lisbon, Los Angeles — that she liked to show to every friend and delivery person.

The daughter realized too late, after too much restlessness, that she’d forgotten to take her pills that night. After five hours of interrupted sleep, she finally pushed her blankets to one side and got off her bed on her tiptoes to see if her mother looked comfortable. The whole apartment was dark, with only a sliver of light shining under the front door, coming from the corridor outside. The daughter turned on a lamp. Her mother was gripping the hem of the comforter with one hand and hiding the other under the pillow. She wore a white nightgown with a ruffled trim that made her look like a child. Her chest rose and fell slowly, and the daughter admired how peaceful she looked, not at all like she’d just arrived in a foreign country and now slept in a makeshift bed in someone else’s tiny apartment.

Still, the daughter couldn’t let her sleep, couldn’t resist trying to wake her. She touched her arm and whispered, “Mom, wake up. I’ll make us some breakfast.”

The mother mumbled something and turned to the other side, her mouth slightly open, her silver hair spread all over the pillow, her hands now pressed together under her face as if in prayer.

“I’m sorry,” the daughter said as she leaned over, her hand hovering over her mother’s head. “I’ll let you rest.”

The daughter was suddenly struck with the feeling that her mother had no idea where she was. She didn’t know these streets and would never be able to find her way home on her own. Her daughter was supposed to shelter her, guide her, help her get back when the time came. She trusted her daughter to do this, and gave her body over for safekeeping. So her daughter would keep an eye on her — to make sure she didn’t wake up on the pullout couch alone, to make sure she didn’t get confused.

The daughter walked into the bright kitchen. Daylight had just started to appear in the window above the sink, the kitchen immersed in a cold shade of purple. She opened the fridge and stared, thinking of what to prepare for the day. Soon her mother would arise, face her, talk like they hadn’t been apart more than they’d been together in their lifetimes. She squeezed the juice of an orange into a glass, warmed up a piece of bread in the toaster oven, brewed a strong cup of coffee, arranged everything neatly on a tray she’d never had any occasion to use.

In the living room, her mother dreamed she was really flying.