After all I’d done with Mr. Wythe, telephoning my parents should have been easy, but I cried all the same. I’d always known I would let them back into my life at some point, only I’d pictured it happening in a hazy, distant future sparked by a change in Father’s health, not my own.

Grete cried when I told her, which made me cry, too. It felt strangely good to cry together, not for my diagnosis but for our friendship, which we hadn’t properly mourned. Jane is to call Grete whenever she likes, Grete’s home is her home, sentiments Jane accepted like the echoes they are. And now I’m crying because I’m reading your description of when I was a new mother just home from the hospital, and you arrived at your apartment to the shaky note I’d taped to your door. Deb, I hope your goddaughter won’t ever need a second family, but it is a great comfort to know that she has one with you.

101. Untitled [View from hospital roof], New York, 1970

At first Danny was nervous about coming over to my place after work, but I reminded him that we were safe: his mother thought my mother was home with me, and my mother was in the hospital. Besides, I told him, he was doing a good deed, keeping me company. I could tell that Danny sometimes just wanted to watch TV with his arm around my shoulder, talking during commercial breaks about his day at the store, or my day at school, or about what was happening with my mom; but that wasn’t what I wanted at all.

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.