It was late by the time I got back on the subway, but I must have looked too crazy to mess with. Back at the apartment, I told Danny he had to leave. My mother was getting discharged, and she and I were moving to Ohio. After that Danny cried, and I cried, and he was tender with me in all the ways I’d always wanted him to be, but I couldn’t feel a thing.

The next day I gave notice at Bohack’s and got on the subway to bring my mother home. She was too weak to do any packing, so Danny came over to help while she issued instructions from the couch. The clothes I couldn’t take on the plane, I packed into boxes along with all the books and hats and shoes and dishes and records, but the apartment was mostly film. Lillian had always kept her negatives in boxes, so we didn’t have to do anything except stack them in one place, but it made me realize how invisible they’d always been, boxes of negatives piled in the corner of the living room, reaching up to the ceiling, lining her side of the bedroom and filling her closet, boxes stacked and pushed together to make night tables beside our beds. Then there were the prints and the darkroom equipment. It was way too much to fit into Danny’s brother’s Plymouth, but his cousin’s uncle was in the moving business, and if we didn’t mind waiting, he could use a slow period to borrow a truck. Another of Danny’s cousins was in secondhand furniture; Danny would show our stuff to him to see if he couldn’t get us something for it instead of pitching it to the curb. It was a long drive and a lot of lifting, my mother said. At the very least, Danny should keep whatever he could make off the furniture and she would pay him for the gas and for his time, but Danny said his reward for driving our stuff to Cleveland would be seeing me.

Packing up the apartment, I wanted to remember the birthdays and bad dreams and funny conversations and wiggly teeth and yelling and laughing and darkroom times before my mother got sick, but instead I saw the life I’d been living with Danny behind my mother’s back. I was so mad at those memories for getting in the way that I didn’t cry when Danny drove us to the airport in the borrowed Plymouth, or when he kissed me goodbye, or when I looked out the plane window to see New York getting smaller and smaller. I didn’t cry until the clouds blotted out even the idea of Bohack’s and Immaculate Heart and JHS 23 and PS 542 and Kaja’s house and the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t cry until there was nothing left to see.

Cleveland, 1970–76

103. Untitled [Walter Prescott driving], Detroit, 1970