By the weekend, the transfusions had given my mother more energy, and the antibiotics had started bringing her fever down. Assuming her blood count stayed good, she would come home by the end of the next week, as soon as the antibiotics were done. To celebrate, she and I rode the elevator to the hospital roof, where benches had been installed inside a sort of chain-link cage that let patients look out over the city without the hospital having to worry about anyone jumping off. Lillian adjusted the focal length of her lens to get a decent shot of the view. As she clicked away with her non-IV hand, I told her about Sister Elaine’s eyes tearing up in U.S. History while she recited the Gettysburg Address, and about a man paying for his groceries with only nickels, and it felt almost like Before. Then Lillian turned to me. Listen, she said.

Instead of taking pictures, her camera hand was gripping my arm. It didn’t feel like a sick person’s hand.

When you’re with Danny you have to be careful, she said. Diaphragms don’t always work, and even if he says he has rubbers, that doesn’t mean he’ll put one on.

For a moment it seemed like everything—the clouds, the birds, the cars on the street way down below—was standing still. It couldn’t have been quiet, but my mother’s voice canceled out the other sounds. My heart started beating like when you’re leaving a drugstore with a lipstick stashed in your pocket. A voice inside me said to deny everything, but my mother didn’t look angry or disappointed. She didn’t even look sick; she looked like a person telling the truth.

Angie’s sister knows a clinic where you can get the Pill as long as you’re sixteen, I said.

You’re fifteen, Lillian said.

Angie’s old enough, I said. She’ll go for me if I ask.

Good, my mother said, and nodded. Her fingers on my arm weakened. Her face changed back into a sick person’s face.

That night I stayed out drinking with Danny and his friends and woke the next morning from a blackout to him on my couch. Danny explained that he had wanted to take me back to his house to sleep it off, but I’d insisted on going home. Given the state I was in, he’d been afraid to leave me alone. He said it was a sign of how much he loved me, him staying the night, because when he went back home that morning there’d be hell to pay.

So don’t go, I said. He was eighteen. He could tell his parents he was moving in with his cousin. For as long as my mother was in the hospital, we could be together all the time.

102. Untitled [Doctors conferring outside a curtained bed], New York, 1970