We were each handed a cotton smock to wear and nothing else. Mine ended halfway up my thigh and Lil’s went down to her ankles. Then we were brought to another room and told to wait for our medical exams. No one seemed interested in explaining what the hell we needed a medical exam for. We were with a bunch of women now, all in cotton smocks that didn’t fit. Most of them were black or Puerto Rican and young. A lot were strung out like the girl in the shower. One kept asking if anyone had a piece of candy, something sweet to keep the DTs away just for a little, but our cotton smocks had no pockets.

When it was my turn the doc asked was I a virgin, then said he was going to check me for VD. I wasn’t a hooker or a junkie, I told him. I was there because my art gallery got shut down—but the doc said I had to spread my legs anyway. When I asked why, the guard told me to quit it in a voice I didn’t like the sound of. So I did like I was told, and the doc rammed a speculum into me so hard that I screamed. What kind of art do you show at your gallery? he wanted to know. You’re hurting me, I yelled. I like art, he said.

68. Mommy is sick, Brooklyn, 1961

Before I opened the last box of my three-box inheritance, I hadn’t seen this photograph in twenty-five years. Funny thing is, I thought I had, because that’s the way brains work: once you can read, you can no longer open a book and see a jumble of letters; after you get to know someone’s face, you can’t see her as a stranger.

I had forgotten there weren’t any black bars.

For twenty-five years, my memory had been slapping black bars over my eyes and chest in this photo the way I’d seen it in the newspaper when the case first went to trial, and on television when the case went back to trial, and on T-shirts when “Mommy Is Sick” became a punk rock anthem. For twenty-five years I’d been turning my body into a crime scene.

Here’s the thing: the original image is beautiful. The grainy, vandalized version that was stamped onto newsprint and TV screens and preshrunk cotton-poly annihilated the spectrum of blacks, whites, and grays that Lillian fine-tuned until the dark stain on the pale sheet so naturally matched the dark eyes in my pale face you’d assume the picture just happened like that, without anyone popping Dexies in order to spend crazy hours dodging and burning the print in the darkroom between putting her kid to bed, and then getting that kid off to school the next morning, and then heading off to waitress for six hours, all so she could run that circle all over again.