As soon as it happened, I rehearsed the sound of it as if it were something long ago in the past: painful, yes, but so long ago now—“Oh, I was nineteen when my father died, I was a grown-up.” “Well you know I was almost twenty when he died.” As if it didn’t bother me anymore. I started saying these things to myself over and over, as if to a stranger I was meeting and telling him about my life: “You know, nineteen is old enough to be out in the world alone.”

For a long time, I haven’t thought about the years that preceded your death. I didn’t remember them, I put them away. Oh, I knew I was the daughter of Edgar Evans Rogers, I recognized myself in pictures on gallery walls. But anything that didn’t confront me with material evidence, I forgot. As for the things that did, I changed their stories, without meaning to exactly. Or, if the first lies were intentional, the later ones were helpless.

In the weeks after you died, I dreamed about you every night. Often the dreams were realistic, almost factual. Events I could no longer recall while waking, I relived in my sleep.

Now I never dream of you. I dream about stealing and running. Or about that girl at the museum: I got to the hospital to see her. Who is she, and how is it that she succeeded in immolating herself for you? Who is she—or perhaps, who was she—wearing my name, that she knew me so well?

I tried to please you before myself, but I was young, Papi, and I wanted my life, it seemed only fair—I asked myself sometimes if I was being fair in wanting myself for myself. I knew I had to get away, but even about that I was ambivalent: I went to college far from home, but came back at every opportunity, just to check—maybe I was wrong, maybe you had missed me.

The way you’d shout if I knocked into anything in that room. I broke a lens once, that was bad. You could yell so loud it was frightening, as if you could kill me. I would hear the sound of your voice and everything would go blank, I wouldn’t see or hear anything, just wonder dully, what comes next? A fist? But you never hit me, you never dared touch me outside the demands of your craft. Because you hated me, perhaps. People are very careful around those they hate, they have to make sure their hands don’t betray them.

How black your hair was and I liked to take a bath in your bathroom. Suddenly I see you sitting on the edge of the tub, I was little then. Once or twice when Mariette was away, you washed my hair. Afterward, as you combed the tangles out, I could feel your impatience travel through the comb. Feel your hands resist pulling and hurting me.

Sometimes on a Saturday in the summer, we would get up before five to take pictures in the gulch behind the cattle ranch. The light at that hour was perfect, you said.

On the night before you were cremated, Mariette asked if I refused to bury you with Mother because then the two of you would have excluded me forever, there in the dark under the quiet dirt. She was right, of course, I didn’t want you in that double grave, under the epitaph you chose for her: “Why did my love outlive you?” And since your will made no provisions for your remains, I abolished them, had you burned up, expected you to disappear. And for a while you did. But now you’re back.

I was walking home last week and the name Diane Castleton came into my head. I was walking on Sixth Avenue. Diane Castleton, Diane Castleton, I kept saying as I saw myself pass in shop windows. Who is Diane Castleton? I thought. I tried to find her in my life: had I done her wedding? Was she someone from some party: an introduction, ignored at the time, that resurfaced? Then suddenly I knew.

You were mysterious, sleeping with Diane for all those years. When I found out I wondered at what I thought was a betrayal, but Mother was dead for a long time, and I see now that life isn’t simple. Still, Diane was old, her hair was gray, she was fat. When I shook her hand in the lawyer’s office, I felt the fleshiness of her fingers, and I looked for a ring, something you might have given her over the years. It wasn’t that I begrudged her anything, God knows—I didn’t want what I’d inherited—just that thinking of Mother, that girl who was so beautiful, and your misery—for what else could explain your life other than despair?—Diane was just the last person. Maybe that’s the answer, though, maybe it could only have been someone so different from my mother.

Suddenly, without trying, without wanting to, I can smell your hands, the way they always smelled of the darkroom chemicals, even when you washed and washed them before meals. Hear you saying at the dinner table, out of the blue, well at least we know you aren’t a lesbian, Ann. Mariette’s little smothered gasp. I must have known then that you followed me. But I was so careful. So secretive. Still, you knew all along that I wasn’t just the good girl I tried so hard to be, that the straight A’s, the quiet studying in my room, the forty-seven Girl Scout badges—it was only part of the story. And my good-girl life wasn’t the one that you found useful.

No, there were two Anns, and that was how it started with the speed: the only way I could study all night, the only way I could keep two selves going, the only way I knew how to smile and say, believing it, I’m fine. And the fact that for those brief excited hours I did feel well.

I never really learned to manage the diabetes: that was another thing, I resisted learning how. Looked to my insulin shots as a simple cure to my otherness, a reversal of fate. Without the injections, I was a diabetic, but the needle restored me to my rightful place, among normal people. I know it must be possible to do better—how many times have I been told about athletes who are diabetic and all those other healthy achievers?

I never feel well anymore. After a hit, I feel ecstatic for a few hours and it’s like an antidote to all those years of insulin reactions. But then I have to pay.

Trying. Trying. Always trying. After that first time in college, I knew I had an answer. Even in all those years when I was fine, when it wasn’t necessary to be more than one Ann, the possibility of two has always existed. Like a bad habit only temporarily conquered.

And what about you? What were you like? Obsessed with your work, you rarely spoke, and when you did you were not kind. The things you said when I was little, just to be mean—saying if I made faces the wind would change and the face would stick and I’d look like that forever and you’d never take another picture of me. And that was all I had, wasn’t it? Me on one side of the camera, you on the other. I didn’t have any value apart from that. Not for you. Not for me.

You were a handsome man, I always thought so, your eyes were the kind of brown that burned, warm isn’t the right word for them. And your mouth, the top lip so defined and controlled, the bottom one thicker, improvident. Greedy.

Your back was very broad for a man who never cared for any “physical culture,” as you so quaintly called it; when you died I saw what a big man you were, like I never did when you were alive. You looked bigger lying down, bigger in death. And you still are big, so big—monolithic. In that particular way of dead American celebrities, you’ve continued to grow. I wonder if perhaps your fame—some would say infamy—would have made you happy. If anything would have.