Being at Immaculate Heart was both simpler and more complicated than being at JHS 23. Pretty much everyone else had been learning catechism since kindergarten. My total ignorance of Catholicism’s greatest hits, ranging from the Lord’s Prayer to the Holy Sacraments, was a constant source of amusement; but I learned that I liked history and biology, and that I was good at memorizing dates and the various divisions of the nervous system. I met a girl named Angie who smoked under the bleachers. She showed me how to blow smoke rings, and I taught her how to slip lipsticks into her purse. When Kaja visited Grete on weekends, she and I would sometimes hang out. I’d tell Kaja about the nuns and the darkroom, and she’d teach me about Mansa Musa and Solomon Northup and all the other stuff she’d been learning at the back of the bookstore. She and Grete were fighting all the time. Her mother kept criticizing the Movement school and everything else in Kaja’s new life, and she’d tell me at great length how she and her dad were sick of it. Then I’d say something sympathetic, the way I always did when Kaja groused about Grete, and we’d head to Atlantic Avenue for halvah and Coke.

When Lillian answered the phone toward the end of March and her face went pale at first I thought something had happened to Grandpa. Then she asked me if Kaja had ever talked about leaving New York. Paul had just telephoned Grete to say that he and Kaja had moved to Detroit. I told Lillian everything I knew, which wasn’t much. Then my mother handed me the phone, and as Grete wept on the other end of the line, I forced enough air into my lungs to repeat what little there was to say.

GRETE WASHINGTON: I went uptown to Paul’s apartment, but it was empty. According to the police, this was not an abduction, because Paul and I were not legally divorced. I made a trip to Detroit the next day. I brought Kaja’s favorite spice cookies and also the stuffed bird that she had left behind. I was stupid to think that such a trip would make a difference. After I returned, I did not consider what I was making: I sat at the loom only to stop the trolls in my brain. I tried to live as before. I went to work, I saw my friends. Nothing felt as it should. My first shroud was twenty feet long. All the months of its creation, I slept beside my loom, making for myself a bed of the finished sections. When Lillian saw what I had made, she looked at me with new eyes, eyes that gazed directly at me rather than from slightly above. With a voice of admiration, she told me that this shroud was the most beautiful piece I had ever made. I thanked her. Then I told her to leave. I was trembling with anger, but of course Lillian did not understand. She asked to know if she had said something wrong. Yes, I told her. For years she had looked down on my happiness. But Grete, she told me, she always knew I was more than a simple craftsman. This beautiful work proved that she was right. I told her that I did not want this beautiful work. I did not wish to be considered complex or interesting. I wanted my daughter. Finally, I told her that really she must go before I did something we would both regret.