The night before her appointment, Lillian gave me a piece of paper with the telephone number of her parents in Cleveland. Before now she never spoke to me of her parents, so I thought they had died. I was to call this number in case something happened, in which case I would also need to tell them about Samantha.

Tell them yourself when you are ready, I told her. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next year; you will have time.

Promise me you will call, she said. Yes, I told her. If it comes to that, of course I will. Then we stared at one another—very silently, very seriously—and that was how we became sisters: not by pricking our fingers and sharing our blood but by sharing our fear.

JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1961: Ken was calling every night. First he would ask if I’d done it yet, and then he’d ask to talk to you. I tried to coax you to the phone every time, but you said you’d only talk to your “real” daddy. “What’s a real daddy?” I asked. “The daddy who makes you,” you said. “The daddy who makes you breakfast?” I asked. “The daddy who makes you laugh?” Each time, Ken said I’d turned you against him. Then he’d cry into the phone before getting angry again, and then cry some more. Each time I apologized—for you and for me and for everything—until one evening Ken called and I told him the date of the appointment. “That is two days before Sam’s sixth birthday,” he said, and hung up.

57. Self-portrait, Brooklyn, 1961

The location is the same, but the composition is different: all we get is the shadow of Lillian’s decapitated body. Her torso fills the frame, the rail slicing across the base of her neck along the photo’s top edge.

JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 1961: I went to the service entrance of an apartment building and rang three times. At first no one came. I was afraid I’d written the address wrong or that something had happened. The idea of starting all over again knocked the air out of me. Soon it would be eight weeks, and then no one would take me. I tried the door again. This time a man opened it and led me down a dark hallway to a dark door. When this door opened, I realized its edges had been taped over so that light wouldn’t leak into the hallway from the other side.