There was nothing quite like J. H. Hennessy’s studio when she was in the prime of her career. This secret world was accessible only via the coded elevator or via a dark staircase that ended at a door with no knob, just a key in a lock. Inside it was old and new. Elderly window sashes, sleek white walls. Old floorboards, new black and white graphic floor paint. From the ceiling hung immense light fixtures, gifts from a fellow artist, messes of lightbulbs and dried grasses and leaves. From the floor grew metal floor lamps with shades cut sharply so that they threw light in geometric, lacy shapes. Gradient thumbprints dotted every flat surface, including the white grand piano, where Jay had thoughtlessly tested new paints. And of course there were the paintings, in all states of finish. The eyes were alive. The hands were alive.

Once the elevator door had hissed closed behind them, Jay took just one moment to look out one of the studio’s windows for something and then, when she didn’t find it, she returned to make a great fuss over Hennessy. She had her try on several of the dresses she had thrown on the sofa. She posed her in multiple ways in a simple wooden chair. She messed with her hair and played at braids and put lipstick on her and wiped it off. All the while she told Hennessy how pretty she had grown up to be, how wonderful a painting they were going to make together. No! Not a painting. A series of paintings. An exhibition. It had felt like a day that happened to someone else. Hennessy sat very still in the chair, like an animal by a highway, afraid to move lest she dart from safety to something worse. She was cold in the white shift but she didn’t want to even shiver in case her mother remembered Hennessy was not usually treated like this.

But the spell hadn’t broken. They’d worked all day, all evening. The next morning, Jay was still enthused. She ordered in a very grand breakfast of pastries from one of the bakeries and then they went back up for more work, this time up the rickety back staircase that ended in the door with no knob. They spent two weeks like that, with Hennessy sitting still in the chair and not shivering and her mother painting her and takeaway and delivery bags piling up in the stairwell.

At one point, Jay put her brush down and said, shocked, “I made you. One day you’ll grow up and be a woman, and I made you.”

Jay looked at Hennessy, and Hennessy suddenly had the impression that Jay was really seeing her, really thinking about what it meant to be Hennessy, to be Hennessy’s mother.

Jay looked from Hennessy to her painting and back again, and then she said, “How wonderful you’re going to be.”