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lived here were too old or ill to live on their own. Some no longer dreamed of a bright future, but counted the days until the end.
    I paused at the nurses’ station and smiled at a middle-aged woman with thinning black hair and large glasses. Her name tag read
Delores
and I knew from past visits that she liked to bake chocolate chip cookies on Fridays, loved the romantic comedy
Love, Actually
, and had a wicked crush on the grandson of one of the center’s patients. She liked to share details of her life and might well have told me far more if I encouraged her. Conversations were meant to be a back-and-forth kind of event, much like a tennis match, but whenever she lobbed a ball of information my way, it never crossed back over the net. It was all I could do to talk at the weekly AA meetings, with little inclination to chat further.
    Tug on one thread of information and then, suddenly, the entire tapestry unraveled.
    I signed
L. Smyth
and dug my driver’s license out of my wallet. Aftera cursory check, Dolores smiled up at me. “Ms. Amelia is having a good day today. She’s sitting up in bed and more clearheaded than normal.”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œHey, Charlie,” the nurse said, grinning.
    The dog’s ears perked up. Since I’d arrived, we were both trying to get the hang of this new routine.
    My aunt Amelia’s more lucid moments were a blessing and a curse. I enjoyed visiting when she remembered me and we could talk about her younger days living in Alexandria. She was born in 1942 and had been a babe in the city during World War II. She enjoyed talking about the city in the 1960s, when her parents moved the family to the Prince Street house. After a stint in New York trying to make it as a singer, she moved back to Alexandria and became a music teacher. She was twenty-six when she met Robert Murphy, the man she would marry. Two weeks ago she talked about her first dance with him, and tears glistened in her pale gray eyes. Her parents never knew how Amelia and Robert met, but they were thrilled that they made such a good match. Her eyes glistened with mischief as she said, “You know, Robert and I had sex on our second date. We were alive for each other.”
    â€œI never knew.” I tried to sound a little scandalized.
    â€œWe Smyth women are good at keeping secrets, aren’t we, Lisa?”
    No truer words were spoken. We Smyth women were lip locked when it came to secrets.
    My worn brown cowboy boots, which I’d purchased from a street vendor in Nashville several years ago, clicked against the tiled floor in time with Charlie’s steady steps. I wore jeans and a loose-fitting black T-shirt that skimmed the top of my hips. Corded rope hemp bracelets, now a faded blue, wrapped around my wrist, and long silver earrings tangled in my shoulder-length blond hair. As I pushed open the door, a glimpse of my slightly yellowed fingertips had me self-conscious. No matter how much I scrubbed, I could never erase the silver nitrate stains that plagued wet-plate photographers. I’d chosenthis antiquated, cumbersome, and time-consuming method of capturing photographic images as a teenager when I found a large bellows camera at an estate sale. My mother didn’t roll her eyes, but she clearly considered this one of my fads. I was drawn in by the camera and soon found a tripod on which to mount it and assembled the collection of chemicals to treat the eight-by-eight-inch glass negatives. My first attempts to re-create the black-and-white images, made popular during the Civil War by Matthew Brady, produced misty frayed photographs filled with technical flaws. As imperfect as my first efforts were, they offered a different perspective that fascinates me to this day.
    No matter how many times I coated the large glass negatives with the wet collodion mixture, sensitized the plates in silver nitrate, or stood with the large lens cap exposed while the camera slowly trapped