My mother came home after touring for three years as a vocalist and dancer with Ralph Ray and the Ramblers, but I don?t remember being reunited with her. I was four and my sister was two. I?d like to tell you about throwing myself in her outstretched arms, how she lavished me with her kisses, lipstick proof on my face, how she said, ?Darling, I?ve missed you like crazy and I?ll never leave again,? but that would be a reunion I saw in a movie. I don?t know if I?ve forgotten this time because it felt so natural to be with her that memories didn?t have to stick out, or if it was because three months later she was taken away from us again when she contracted tuberculosis. She had to be quarantined in the house in Minisink Hills. My sister and I went back to our grandmother?s house in New Jersey to wait.

The phone would ring during dinner, and my grandmother would talk to my mother, and tell her we were eating well and doing fine. My grandmother would hang up and explain that our mother was still very weak and couldn?t talk long. My father got to stay with her and I didn?t understand how the disease wouldn?t get into his chest, too. And why couldn?t we? My Aunt Elaine, his sister, moved into the house in Minisink Hills to help with meals and laundry. She slept in my room on a twin bed and my grandmother called her in the mornings to help plan menus because my aunt couldn?t cook.

In bed, my mother wore pink silk nightgowns with delicately embroidered linen bed jackets. She saved these and when my sister and I got sick she?d let us borrow them and we'd wear them over our flannel pajamas and feel like little stars.

During the four months that she recuperated, my mother made crafts from kits my father would buy her at the hobby store downtown. One of these pieces still hangs in her living room, a tree with thick branches patchworked out of fabric from our dresses and edged in thick black yarn. She painted a white plaster casting of a queen?s face in bright colors, gave her long eyelashes and bright red lips like her's. For years it sat on the sideboard in the dining room and goggled us while we ate. She knitted my sister and me scarves and matching hats popcorn-stitched out of soft wool so they wouldn't scratch.

My aunt told me years later that Ralph Ray came to see my mother and brought her baskets of fruit and cookies. She caught them kissing in the kitchen, and my mother sluffed it off and told her it was a friendly peck. At night my father played piano in the cocktail lounge at Vacation Valley, but during the day he wrote chamber music and art songs. He had a small office he?d rented downtown because he couldn?t work when people were in the house.

Ralph also brought over a bucket he?d made with a contraption in the bottom that spun so she could make splash paintings. You hooked a clean sheet of paper on nails, and while it rotated you squeezed paint out of tubes to make pictures that looked like explosions. No two could be the same. These paintings were framed and hung in the bathroom, but by the time my sister and I got home the bucket had been put in a box in the basement.

There was a stuffed llama waiting on my bed when we moved back to the house in Minisink Hills. A list of the foods my mother couldn?t have had been left by Aunt Elaine under a magnet on the fridge. My mother sat against fluffed pillows in the bed and put her arms out for hugs. I sat carefully on the edge of the bed, so excited to see her I couldn't bear to touch her.

My x-rays show I was exposed to TB, and I explain to my doctor how my glamorous mother had this romantic illness, like some Louisa May Alcott-showgirl hybrid, how she was taken away from us so cruelly. To my eye my x-rays look clean, but I picture the two of us linked by this brown shadow on our lung.