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

It’s a safe bet this is the same hospital roommate, though all we see is her horizontal silhouette cast on the curtains blocking her bed from view. The doctors consulting their clipboards look concerned. As much as I’ve tried, I can’t remember if that bed was empty when I went to visit my mother at Memorial for the last time.