lover ended up pregnant and came to America to raise their illegitimate child. That boy grew up and had a daughter: my mother, Alicia.
Somehow, all of this made my mom go crazy. My records stated she spent time in an asylum as a teenager after painting Wonderland characters on every wall of her home and insisting they talked to her in dreams. The day I was born, she jumped out of her second-story hospital room window to test the “fairy wings” the voices told her she had. She landed in a rosebush and broke her neck.
The doctor claimed she committed suicide—postpartum depression and grief over losing my dad months earlier in a factory accident. Whatever it was, one thing was never explained . . . the dime-size welts on her shoulder blades, too big and perfectly spaced to have been caused by getting pricked by thorns.
My opinion? She did have wings. Ones that never sprouted. If it made me crazy like her to think that, I could live with it. Because if I was off my rocker, it meant we had a bond. Something in common. As long as no one else ever knew.
My mother had also left behind a Polaroid camera—the kind that spits out completed pictures at the push of a button. I’d known how to use it since the age of five.
I snuggled deeper into the nest of photographs I’d dumped from my tote. It was something I’d become good at: hiding behind trees on playgrounds or parked cars at the mall to capture stolen moments of other people’s families and friends. I liked to surround myself with them—to cushion me from the absence of my own.
I lifted my denim jacket’s cuff to scan my watch. Only ten more minutes and school would be out. Then I could go to my apartment and pretend I’d been where I was supposed to be all day. I’d shown up at the beginning of my last class, long enough to be counted present, before “taking a trip to the bathroom” and never returning. With any luck, Mrs. Bunsby, my latest foster caregiver, would never know I’d skipped. I’d only been living with her for a month. I didn’t want to upset her and get thrown away again. Other than her being a forty-something-year-old vegetarian widow, she was the best keeper I’d had since I could remember.
I peered up at the sixth floor of the building. Our apartment was the farthest on the left, where the fire escape had rusted through and left a jagged black skeleton hanging askew and useless. I was aces at climbing, and had tried a few weeks ago to descend the railing and sneak out at night for a session with my camera. I had slipped and fallen.
Six stories was a long drop. I should’ve died, or at least broken multiple bones. But I lapsed into a dream state on the way down and somehow, when I woke up, didn’t have a bruise on me anywhere. I didn’t even ache. All I had was a strange memory of giant, flapping black wings.
Sorting through my pictures, I found one at the bottom of the pile: a sparrow-size moth with a blue body and black wings, splayed on a flower between a slant of sun and shade. I remember the day I saw it in the park, as if it was sitting between two worlds. I took the shot not only for the symbolism, but because I’d seen the bug before. My mother had sketched one that looked just like it on a slip of paper that she kept in her Alice books. The strangest thing was she’d also made a rough sketch of Alice from the Wonderland illustrations right next to it. Somehow—in her mind—they were connected. I’d lost the drawing during one of my many moves. So when I saw that identical moth, live and in person, I had to immortalize it with my camera.
Sighing, I tucked the picture into my Alice book to hold my spot. That shot was Mrs. Bunsby’s favorite. She said I had a gift, that if I kept improving, she would give me her late husband’s camera—a Yashica 44—along with his books on developing your own film.
She was one of the few adults who’d ever believed in me without being judgmental. But if Mrs. Bunsby knew that I thought this very moth had played a role in my mother’s Wonderland fantasies, she would think my imagination was too vivid, like my