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fails. She sees herself, convex in the mirrored peephole of the apartment door. She looks gnomic. A circus version of herself.
    A rustling on the other side, and then the door is opened by a girl of eighteen or so. She’s tall and reed-thin, wearing faded ripped-up blue jeans, a black tank top, black boots that look like they must weigh five pounds each. Two long dark-brown braids snake down her shoulders. Possibly an intern from ICP. Or maybe a very lucky Pratt student.
    The girl cocks her head to one side.
    “Clara,” she says. “Robin said you might be coming.”
    Clara steps into the foyer, which is exactly as she remembers it: the pile of mail, the stacks of magazines. The New Yorker, Harper’s, People, The New York Review of Books, Vogue, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, the odd National Enquirer —her mother subscribed to every newspaper and magazine, from the highbrow to the low. It looks possible that not a single magazine has been thrown out since Clara left. They are piled waist-high on the console table and on the floor, teetering, threatening to fall over.
    Above the console, the same Irving Penn nude, a woman curled around herself, her pale expanse of belly exposed, a single mole dotting her fleshy hip. It had been a gift from Penn, given to Ruth on the occasion of her first gallery show. There was hardly a great photographer who had not made a gift of his or her work to Ruth Dunne at some point over the years. Without even looking, Clara knows the rest of the photographs hung in the public areas of the apartment: the Cindy Sherman self-portrait, the Berenice Abbott nightscape of Manhattan, the series of Sebastião Salgado images of war.
    Where the hell is Ruth?
    The girl with the braids is still standing there like some sort of sentry. A last shaft of dusty light from a west-facing window slices across her body. There is something in the steadiness of her gaze, her self-possession, that is making Clara even more uncomfortable than she already is.
    “My mother—” she says quietly, more a statement than a question. She is angry, she realizes.
    “She’s resting,” the girl says, looking at Clara curiously.
    Clara has no idea what this means. Resting. Ruth never rested. She slept four, maybe five hours a night, tops. Clara remembers wandering into the kitchen once—it must have been three in the morning—looking for her mother. And there was Ruth, slumped over the kitchen table, her head resting on her folded arms. The only light in the room was the glow cast from the city outside the window. What are you doing? Why are you sleeping here? she asked her mother. The look in Ruth’s eye when she raised her head—it was as if she were staring straight through Clara, as if she were seeing someone else entirely.
    “Is she in the studio?” she asks the girl.
    “No. Her room.”
    Why is the girl here? She’s acting like she knows things—important things. Ruth has always done this with all her little acolytes, these willing servants who think that somehow to be in the same room as greatness means they’ll absorb it.
    “Listen, I—” the girl starts.
    “What’s your name?” Clara interrupts.
    “Peony.”
    Peony. Of course. It couldn’t be a normal name.
    “I guess you haven’t seen your mother in a while,” says Peony.
    “You could say that.”
    The girl keeps staring at Clara while pretending not to stare—another trait endemic to New Yorkers that Clara has forgotten over the years.
    “I wouldn’t recognize you,” the girl finally says. “I mean, from the photographs.”
    Clara feels this like a physical shock. Like someone has come up behind her, grabbed her around the waist, clamped a hand over her mouth. She waves a hand in the air, quickly trying to make the whole thing go away. Not that. Anything but that. The flood of images—she closes her eyes for a moment, a trick she learned a long time ago, and shuts them out.
    “I’m going to see my mother now,” she says. Her