Luckily, it all went fast. At the hospital, they gave her a shot to stop the bleeding and sent her home, telling her to stay in bed for four days to protect against further hemorrhaging, which was exactly what she did. I’d never seen Lilly stay in one place for so long. Part of it was exhaustion, but part of it was fear. She needed to obey those instructions to the letter because she knew she couldn’t go through anything like that again.

In those four days, Lilly and I examined it from all the angles. If she’d taken Samantha with her that night, she might have fallen or passed out, and who knows what would have happened. If she’d made it safely with Samantha to the hospital and they’d needed to admit her—a young unwed mother—it could have been social workers and the baby’s “best interests,” and (perhaps this seems paranoid now, but remember, this was the 1950s) they might have tried to take Samantha away. Because from the time of Samantha’s birth to the day Lilly and Samantha were discharged, those social workers kept making their little visits. I swear they were like circling hawks, telling Lilly how many “good families” were waiting for a healthy baby like hers, practically carrying Samantha away with their eyes. As it was, Lilly had left the baby sleeping peacefully that night, knowing I would be back for her. Perhaps Sam had woken up and cried herself to sleep before I returned, but she came through it just fine.

Lilly and I agreed that she had done the right thing, but it changed the way we looked at the world. We realized this was what it meant to be a woman alone and without money, a single mother. I think that knowledge stuck with us in different ways, perched on our shoulders like an invisible raven. Whenever there was a big decision to be made, there was that bird.

36. Exhibition announcement, “Lillian Preston, Photographer, Little Gallery, Hudson Park Library, April 10–30,” 1955, with reproduction of Pennsylvania Station

The Hudson Park branch still exists, though when I passed the flyer around, none of its librarians knew what I was talking about. If I’d been old enough to attend the library show, rather than being four weeks old, I could have known what normal was—meaning an exhibition that came and went without a trace—giving me a helpful basis for comparison. As it was, my only experience was the Lacuna Gallery disaster, which left me without a compelling argument to convince my mother to show her work more frequently instead of letting it pile up like she was some kind of photography-world Emily Dickinson, dooming us to a life of food stamps and crappy apartments.