As the tour group is led across a green space that is touted as some kind of social gathering spot, Emi leans on my shoulder. “Wanna get out of here?” I say, and she immediately agrees. She’s hungry and thirsty; I’m tired and need to lie down. So we loiter behind the rest of the group until we are free to break off and go our own way unnoticed. We find a restaurant nearby and get some food and drink. The restaurant is set up so that the tables are next to deep, long, built-in benches, stacked thick with cushions. I’m so tempted to lie down, and Emi says, “Just do it! You’re exhausted!” So I ask the server if it’s okay if I lie down on the bench for a minute and she looks at me like I’m crazy for even asking and tells me to go for it. We eat our lunch and I lie on the bench, propped up with pillows, recuperating before we head back out into the sun and find a taxi to return us to the hotel.
The next night we visit friends for dinner, friends we’ve known since Emi was twelve or thirteen, who live nearby. I rest all day so I can be ready for the noise of teenagers excited to reconnect and catch up in person, plus the competing din of grown-up dinner table conversation, and once we get there, it is a comfort to see them. I’ve explained a little, via email, about what’s been going on with me, and with our family, over the past year or so, and so it’s not so hard to talk about. I’ve also become better at being a narrator, about understanding which details are important and which are irrelevant to what a listener wants to know, about being able to tell my story, our story, without saying more than I need to or more than someone is ready to hear. I’m grounded in a timeline now—the flu, the cough, the pain, the diagnosis, the treatment, the halfway point, the prognosis—rather than lost in a muddle of context-free facts and feelings and uncertainty. And things aren’t as raw, as new, as painful. I can talk about the divorce as a matter-of-fact thing, about all of it as a matter-of-fact thing, and it all feels, if not understandable, at least able to be understood.
We end our trip by traveling back through Boston, where we are able to spend time with one of my aunts and with my grandmother, Emi’s great-grandmother. Nina, my leaker friend, lives outside of Boston, and I threaten to meet up with her, too, but she says no, I shouldn’t bother adding another leg of travel to this already big trip. “When we meet, it’s going to be when we are both fully sealed and healed,” she tells me, “that’s the plan!” Her daughter also went to art school, to RISD, in fact, and now lives and works in fashion in New York City, and Nina’s other plan is for us to meet her when Emi goes to the summer program at Parsons. And we do: Barely recovered from our big trip to Providence and Boston, I travel with Emi to Parsons a week later, to set her up for her three-week summer school course, and we have lunch with Nina’s daughter, Nina Skyping in from bed to say hi. “Next time we do this, we’ll all be there in person,” Nina says, and I concur.
Emi thrives at the Parsons summer session, finding her way in to understanding and expressing her experience of the last year and a half of upheaval in her life through a photography project she undertakes. Her anxiety series of photos captures the claustrophobic, dissociative feeling of panic attacks and disintegration, and she has a breakthrough, not just in finding a new way to process everything she’s been feeling, but in transforming those very personal feelings into something artistic and universal. She, too, is becoming better at mastering a narrative, at learning how to tell the story of her life. Her photos provide a context, an entry point for understanding, a way in. She’s no longer just taking pictures. She’s making sense of a process. She’s making sense of herself. She’s making art.
In the fall, after school resumes, when she’s in the thick of the college application process, I take her to National Portfolio Day, where representatives from all the major art schools across the country come to a city and evaluate the portfolios of prospective art school applicants. She meets with reps from six schools, including Parsons, and all of them are impressed by her anxiety series. All of them mention her excellent use of light, of perspective; her remarkable understanding of how to center herself in the dramatic moment, to frame a scene; the cinematic sensibility she brings to her photos. She speaks with the Parsons rep longest of all, maybe forty-five minutes of critique, and comes away from the experience feeling heartened by the feedback she receives. She adjusts her portfolio, tailoring each submission to the comments she received from the school representatives she spoke with at the event, and finishes her applications far ahead of deadline. She has decided, after her summer experience there and the great feedback she got from the rep at National Portfolio Day, that Parsons is her top choice, and she submits her application early,
