Limited by my experience, I accepted my mother’s choices as inevitable and blamed myself. For much of my life, I was convinced that if I’d handled the post-Lacuna world better—the neighbors, the journalists, the newspaper headlines—things might have been different. Feeling responsible made me feel guilty, which made me feel angry, which made me say horrible things, which made me feel guilty, which made me feel angry, which basically describes the grim treadmill of my adolescence. But!—my teenage ghost screams from somewhere inside my spleen as I stare at this faded flyer for a gallery show long forgotten—this library show is proof that Lillian knew enough to choose differently, and if she had chosen differently, then our lives might have been less hard— but I am not a teenager. Lillian is dead, and it is time for me to give up the habit of blaming my mother.

DEBORAH BRODSKY: The night of the opening, Judy babysat while Cass and I went with Lilly to the gallery. It was the first time she’d left Samantha since that one night, and how different this time was! The whole Tuesday crowd was there, as well as the library people, the Times editor, and who knows who else. At first it threw me, seeing photos I’d watched Lilly print in the dark framed like that on a wall. It was like going from seeing Cass in her underwear to seeing her perform onstage: I needed time to recognize what I was looking at. But then something switched inside me, and the strangeness of the moment melted away. I felt like I was back in Lilly’s apartment right after she’d returned from the hospital with the baby, except that now, instead of just me, the whole world was crowding around to see what she’d made. For days after the opening, Lilly slept as much as Samantha did, but she’d pulled it off: two births in two months.