Here’s the thing: the original image is beautiful. The grainy, vandalized version that was stamped onto newsprint and TV screens and preshrunk cotton-poly annihilated the spectrum of blacks, whites, and grays that Lillian fine-tuned until the dark stain on the pale sheet so naturally matched the dark eyes in my pale face you’d assume the picture just happened like that, without anyone popping Dexies in order to spend crazy hours dodging and burning the print in the darkroom between putting her kid to bed, and then getting that kid off to school the next morning, and then heading off to waitress for six hours, all so she could run that circle all over again.

Back when Lillian and Nina and I were first going through the photos for the Lacuna, this picture was the only one that took me by surprise. Standing beside that bed at age six, I may or may not have noticed Ro-Ro; but either way, I wasn’t thinking photo session, making this one of the few pictures I hadn’t known Lillian was taking.

Part two of the surprise came from the picture’s location. The eight-year-old examining the photo had forgotten that this terrible, scary morning had occurred before Lillian and I moved into our own apartment. Maybe for reasons of trauma distribution, I’d separated being forced to leave the only father I’d ever known from fearing for my remaining parent’s life. And yet there was my mother in Grete’s bed; and there was six-year-old me in my underwear, holding out milk in Kaja’s favorite drinking glass, the one with rabbits on it; and there was a tennis-ball-sized stain between Lillian’s legs as if she had peed the bed, only dark.

That stain was surprise number three: not because I’d forgotten about it but because I’d never seen it before. Ro-Ro, after all, had been positioned above the foot of the bed, angled down. I had been standing near my mother’s head, too short to see anything beyond the mattress’s facing edge.

You’re bleeding, I remember telling Lillian as we looked at the photo. I was having a miscarriage, Lillian said. What’s a miscarriage? I asked. For the three seconds preceding her clarifying answer, I’d thought it was a bloody kind of flu.

I’m going to tell you a secret: I hate this picture.