It went fast after that. Dot and I took turns staying with her. Lilly wanted to go home, but the docs wouldn’t let her. Instead they started her on chemo along with everything else. Dot was a mess. She wanted to be with Lilly, but she was afraid Jane would call and she’d miss the chance to tell her what was happening. I went around to a bunch of stores until I found one with a telephone answering machine, which was something I’d only ever seen on The Rockford Files, a big ugly black box with buttons on it and tape cassettes inside. I hooked it up and helped Dot put a message on it telling Jane everything that was going on. I kept coming over to make sure the thing was working, and to see if Jane had called, but the kid had phoned about three weeks before Lilly got sick so it didn’t seem likely.

When Lilly realized she wouldn’t be going home, she asked me to bring her the timed-exposure camera. I knew all about how she’d done the portraits of her and Jane, but that contraption hadn’t come out of its box since she’d left New York. Boy, was that camera something. Not much in the looks department, but the mechanism was a real beaut. Even though Lilly gave the credit to some guy named Kubiak, it was clear from how she described it that she was the brains behind the gizmo. By this time, she was too weak to work the tripod. I set it up for her, then she adjusted it herself until it was the way she wanted. She had the cable release for it lying next to her on the bed. Every day at visiting hours, I’d check to see if she’d triggered the thing, thinking I could ride her about it, but she never had. She asked if I’d develop the film for her once it was exposed. When I told her that she could develop it herself after she got better, she looked so peeved that I told her I would do it.

One day I’m talking to Lilly when she gasps and her eyes get wide. I’m thinking this is it until she starts crying and saying “Deb” over and over again. Suddenly, a long-haired woman with freckles is bending over the bed. The two of them are hugging and repeating each other’s names in a way that sounds like one of those languages where the same word said different ways means a dozen different things.