It seemed significant the city that had been Kaja’s home for the last year and a half was now also the location of my mother’s leukemia treatment. The first three car trips, I kept my face glued to the window as soon as we hit Detroit’s city limits, convinced that spotting Kaja was just a matter of hypervigilance. When that failed, I told Grandpa Kaja’s address. He calculated that she lived only five miles from the hospital, and my confidence in fate was restored. Before I’d left Brooklyn, I’d written to say I was moving to Cleveland and that Lillian was sick, but I was still waiting for a reply. The force of my longing when I asked Grandpa if we could make a surprise visit must have been impressive, because as we were leaving Detroit, he told Grandma to make a detour.

Around the hospital were a few nice buildings that might have been mansions once, but toward Kaja’s neighborhood, those were replaced by crumbling row houses. After driving down a wide, empty street lined with vacant lots and the occasional building, we turned onto a smaller street with regular houses like the ones in my grandparents’ part of Cleveland. People were on sidewalks and porches, and kids rode bicycles like in any other normal neighborhood, except that suddenly my grandparents were locking their car doors and telling me to lock mine. When Grandma started driving slower, I figured we were almost there. Then she said in a scared, shaky voice that she was going to turn around and pulled a U-ey in the middle of the street. Grandpa told me he was sorry, but we needed to go back. What was wrong? I wanted to know. It wasn’t my friend they were worried about, Grandpa explained; but in a dark neighborhood like this one, my grandmother continued as if she and my grandfather had merged into one ugly person, it was better to be safe than sorry.

104. Untitled [Dorothy Prescott holding a breakfast tray], Cleveland, 1970

Looking at Grandma Dot’s face as she walks through that doorway, I want to stroke the side of her wrinkled cheek, smooth the bent collar of her dress, and tuck the stray strand of hair back behind her left ear. Did my mother transmit her tenderness for this complicated, contradictory person in the moment when she snapped the shutter; or did it happen in the darkroom, as she finessed the print’s lines and curves, darks and lights? Then again, maybe those are my own feelings being tapped. For the eleven years between my mother’s death and Grandma Dot’s, my grandmother scrupulously opened and closed doors and windows to keep the room containing Lillian’s three-box legacy and voluminous collection of negatives at the proper temperature. Grandma told me that my mother had left me “some things” I could have when I was ready, but for eleven years I didn’t ask what they were, and she didn’t say. At first I was too full of sadness and anger, guilt and regret to want to know. Next I told myself I was too busy, because that sounded better than admitting I was afraid. Then Grandma died, and it was time to claim the things whether I felt ready or not. I walked up the stairs of the empty house on Fernvale and into my mother’s old room. Seeing those boxes waiting for me was like getting one last message from them both: my mother had left me a way to show her my love, and my grandmother had safeguarded that opportunity, an opportunity I was sure I had squandered.