You were like a storm cloud bursting. You pounded your fists into the sofa and kicked and thrashed, and after you fell onto the floor, you didn’t stop. When I tried to console you, you pushed me away. “Why didn’t you tell me?” you raged, your kicks landing on the floor, the furniture, my shins. From the corner of my eye, I saw Grete and Kaja standing frozen in the doorway. Each time I reached out, you fought. Your fury was like nothing I’d ever seen. Only after you thrashed in such a way that your head hit the table did you let me hold you. “He lied!” you sobbed as you clutched at me, burrowing into my chest. “He’s not my real daddy, and we are never going back.” Your anger tore at you like it was breaking you in half. The only thing that felt worse than being so unprepared was my guilty relief that your rage had shifted away from me.

56. Self-portrait, Brooklyn, 1961

This isn’t the first shadow in Lillian’s work: there’s also that picture of Charles in the park. I could say this proves Lillian’s secret sense of connection to my long-lost sperm donor, but I think by the time she took this, she’d forgotten that other portrait almost as completely as she’d forgotten him.

Unlike Charles’s photo, all we get here is the dark silhouette of Lillian’s head and shoulders centered along the picture’s bottom edge. My guess is that she’s standing on Ninth, because I remember seeing rails there from the old streetcar route. The way the rails pass through her dark outline at a diagonal makes it seem like her silhouette has fallen onto the tracks and can’t get up. Depending on my mood, this feels either funny, like her shadow is a cartoon character, or disturbing, like her shadow is, well, her shadow.

If she’d opted for a boring title like Ninth Street, none of this would be an issue, but something called Self-portrait begs interpretation. Grete, as Lillian’s onetime closest friend, is better equipped for that than I am. I figured she’d be just as hard to find as everybody else, but for kicks I started by trying the old phone number that had lodged in my memory along with assorted jingles, elementary schoolteachers’ names, and state birds, dating from when my brain was absorbent and spongy. Grete picked up on the second ring.

GRETE WASHINGTON: One day Lillian arrived at my door and said, I am leaving Ken. It came as a shock, but also I was surprised when Paul left me, so I think that I am not the best judge.