Midway through the summer, Lillian wrote to say she’d found a Catholic school with a special fund for “children in need” for which I qualified, thanks to my crap grades at JHS 23 and having a working single mother on food stamps. Being a photographer was a resumé detail my mother kept off that application. I thought it was funny that what had made me valuable to the Quakers would have gotten me blacklisted by the nuns. I briefly considered making a stink about being forced to join the plaid-skirt nation, but if wearing a uniform meant getting to spend eighth grade at my own desk, with my own books, without worrying about getting beaten up, it seemed like a good trade.

Upon returning home in August, Lillian hugged me so hard I could hear her heartbeat. Hearing that steady rhythm, I was flattened by the realization that my stubborn, clueless mother was nothing more than a pile of organs held together inside a flesh sack. I suddenly felt wildly protective of Lillian and privately vowed never to do anything purely for the sake of hurting her. Of course, not hurting someone for harm’s sake isn’t the same thing as not hurting them at all. Which is to say that I went on to hurt my mother in ways that I continue to regret, even now that she has been dead thirteen years.

95. Cardboard box containing 100 contact sheets marked with variously colored grease pencils, 1968–69

Once when I was little, Lillian let me inside her darkroom to see the trays, the bottles, the enlarger that looked like a miniature deep-sea diving helmet with an old-fashioned camera hanging off it. This was where Mommy worked, she told me. I shouldn’t ever come in or I’d ruin her photos. That was it until a few weeks after I started eighth grade. As if talking about going to the store for a carton of milk, Lillian mentioned that if I ever wanted to come into the darkroom, I just had to knock and she’d let me in between stages. She went on about how peaceful it was and how beautiful to watch the images appear. Then, because I hadn’t said anything, she stopped. Was that something I might want to see? At first I could only nod because my throat had dried up. Yeah, I said, trying to keep my voice even. Yeah, it was.

I ended up spending a big chunk of that year in the dark. Somehow, being with Lillian in the darkroom was different from being with her anywhere else. Talking with Nina had felt like talking to a big sister, and Grete had always felt like a friend, but it had never been easy in that way with my mother. Because the darkroom didn’t have running water, Lillian had to lug in a big container of hot water from the kitchen and then wait for it to cool to the right temperature before mixing the chemicals. She had a thermometer, but she’d been doing this so many years, she knew by touch when the water had cooled to seventy degrees.