Next page: A poor-quality black-and-white photocopy of another clipping. The words were hard to make out, but the photograph had transferred well enough. Eight girls, perhaps my own age, were sitting around a long table with sewing cards strung with yarn. All their round, pale faces were turned towards the camera, cards poised over the table. Each girl wore the same stoned, automaton stare, as if she knew her picture was being taken but wasn’t sure what it should mean to her. “New drugs to modify behavior . . . activities provided . . . once-troubled girls into ladylike young women . . . Finley claims high success rate, but says more funding still badly needed.”

I put the picture away and began to flip down through another series of headlines, these too suggesting ongoing money problems. I idly wondered if the place had ever been solvent at all.

One wealthy family had withdrawn its support, though its members had previously contributed enough to have the dormitories named after them. Despite Ms. Finley’s constant begging, the government couldn’t be bothered to lend a hand. Enrollment was down. Pine Breeze was operating at cost.

1978: My mother.

I stopped. A giant picture of my mother stared out at me from the manila folder, buttressed by the caption: “Pine Breeze Patient Dead.” I knew it was her, even though I only had the one old picture to guess by—and even before I caught her name beneath the photo. That spooky family likeness stared me in the face, and it chilled me a tiny bit.

I picked up the article. It crackled between my fingers as I read.

“Leslie Eve Moore, sixteen-year-old patient at the Pine Breeze adolescent facility, died sometime yesterday morning, apparently as a result of a difficult childbirth. Officials at Pine Breeze are withholding comment at this time except to say that the girl received the best medical care they could offer, and that they are deeply sorrowful. A spokesperson for the girl’s family insists that they were unaware she was pregnant when she was committed to the institution. A lawyer from the NAACP has demanded an investigation, claiming that the family was never told of the pregnancy and that Leslie was not given proper medical attention, possibly because she was of mixed race. No details are available regarding the infant at this time.”

My mother.

And me, now the same age as she’d been then. The picture was an old studio portrait in 1970s sepia tone, one she hadn’t been happy to have taken. She wasn’t frowning, but her smile was forced, and her hands were clenched in her lap, smashed hard across her thighs rather than folded there. The yellow dress she wore had a butterfly collar that made her neck seem too long and thin. She looked awfully fragile for a juvenile delinquent, but there was a certain stubbornness around the set of her eyes and the full line of her mouth. I’d have been lying if I said I didn’t recognize it.