For chemo not to kill you before it cured you, it couldn’t happen all at once: after being on it for a few days, my mother had to go off it to give her body a chance to recover. I could measure how good or bad a week she’d had by how many film canisters were on her bedside table. She seemed in slightly better shape during recovery phases, but either way, we had to wear face masks and couldn’t touch her, since her immune system was shot. The chemo had knocked out her white blood cells along with the cancer cells, it being a poison that couldn’t tell the difference.

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