Pictures of Us Page 3

  And then we didn’t say anything else for a long time. But I don’t know even now if I was trying to give him something to hold on to when he left, or shamelessly, wordlessly, trying to convince him to stay after all.

  IN THE END, INSTEAD OF CALLING Lucy, I went inside and made another piece of toast. After slathering it with butter and grape jelly, I leaned against the counter to eat it, and marshaled myself to attend to the day’s tasks. I had the Blair wedding proofs to sort and number, my own photos to develop, nearly a dozen phone calls to return either to clients or friends and a mound of laundry roughly the size of a small car.

  I’d always loved working at home. Michael and I had painted, and refinished floors, and spent countless hours at flea markets and antique fairs, hunting down treasures for the dining and living rooms. It was more than our house; it was a true nest, the one place I felt completely comfortable. My house was one of my favorite places to be. But until today I’d never noticed one of the disadvantages of working there—far too much time alone with my thoughts, the usual peaceful quiet tightened into a disconcerting silence.

  I made a halfhearted loop through the rooms downstairs to get myself started, picking up stray books and a sweatshirt of Emma’s, tidying the stack of magazines on the coffee table, which always seemed to expand on its own, thumbing through the junk mail piled on the sideboard in the dining room and throwing all of it away. But the house was too silent, too still—even Walter was lethargic, dozing on the kitchen floor rather than barking at passersby through the screen door.

  Before long, I was inventing errands to run, considering what I might need from the grocery store or the pharmacy, and I went upstairs to shower, as if I could scrub away my uneasiness. By nine, I was in the bedroom, damp hair twisted into its usual loose knot on the back of my head, rooting through a pile of clothes on the soft green chair in the corner, looking for a pair of halfway-clean jeans.

  When the phone rang, I jumped at least a foot. It couldn’t be Michael—he wouldn’t even be in his office yet. The later morning trains were notoriously prone to delays. One hand pressed to my heart, ashamed of my foolish nerves, I picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Tess Butterfield?”

  I said that it was, staring at my reflection in the mirror above the bureau, watching as my eyes widened when the husky voice on the other end continued.

  “This is Sophia Keating.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  YEARS AGO, WHEN I’D FIRST BEGUN taking pictures, I’d begun a project that I fully expected would never end. I’d started collecting old photos of my family, which I’d haphazardly stored in half-finished scrapbooks and albums or stuffed into shoe boxes up in the attic. I’d wanted a record of everyone, individually and together, and I’d pestered my grandmothers for snapshots of my mom and dad as kids, as teenagers, grinning in front of the Christmas tree, pedaling their tricycles, holding up a science trophy.

  There were wedding pictures, of course, and all the photos of them with us kids over the years, but very few of them together. I changed that, much to their dismay, actually. After a while, my mother called me a paparazzo when I showed up for dinner with my camera in hand.

  It was something like the growth chart so many parents etch into a doorway with pencil, mine included: Tess at two, Will at eight, Nell at thirteen. I even began to take the same pictures every year, on Thanksgiving and at the Memorial Day barbecue my parents always gave, a kind of living record, year by year, of a couple.

  It wasn’t just them, though. I’d done the same thing with my sister and brothers, and used the self-timer to photograph all of us together. The photos changed as we married, had children, the definition of our family expanding, fluid.

  Of course, even before Michael and I were married, I’d started what I only ever called my “Pictures of Us” file. Michael, me, Michael and me together, Emma, Emma and me—you get the idea. Emma’s birth had been an emergency caesarean, and although she had been born healthy and whole, I had ended up bleeding uncontrollably, so badly that the surgeon had decided on a partial hysterectomy to save my life. “Partial” meant removing my uterus, which also meant that Michael and I would never have more children, at least not naturally.

  That blow had taken less time to recover from than I’d believed, and much of it was due to Emma. We were in love with our miraculous baby girl, and by the time she was three we were completely satisfied with our little family. So I had never expected that my definition of my new immediate family would need some revision.

  And now Sophia Keating, the author of that revision—well, part of it, at least—was on the phone. Waiting for some response from me.

  I wasn’t prepared for a conversation with Sophia. Not now, half-dressed and still damp, and maybe not ever. I was teetering between gratitude and vicious jealousy—I could thank her for raising her son alone all these years, leaving Michael out of it, but I was also tempted to scream, Why? Why did he sleep with you?

  The first sentiment, of course, was petty and unfeeling. The second was about as mature as my fifteen-year-old daughter on a bad day.

  So instead I said simply, “Hello.”

  Her voice was low, a bit husky, and there was no way to guess if it was her usual timbre, or if she was as nervous as I was. “I know this is unexpected,” she said, and I dropped onto the bed behind me, nodding wordlessly. “All of it, including this…conversation.”

  It wasn’t a conversation yet. I prayed the discussion would at least be a short one. My heart was banging clumsily as I said, “Unexpected is a good word for it.”

  “I know.” She cleared her throat, and somewhere on the other end of the line I heard a siren wailing, distant and fleeting. “I just wanted to tell you that I don’t want anything from Michael. What I mean to say is, Drew would like his help, but it’s nothing financial, nothing…well, it’s for him to explain, really. Drew, I mean.”

  I couldn’t help it—pity for her had already twisted into a painful knot in my throat. She was so completely ill at ease, so apologetic. Whatever had driven Drew to contact Michael was obviously not his mother’s idea.

  “And you need to know that I didn’t tell Michael when I got pregnant because…well, when we broke off it was pretty clear he was going to make things work with you. And I cared about him—it wasn’t just some fling, you know? But I didn’t think…Well, I didn’t want to get in the way. And I don’t mean to sound like a martyr…” She trailed off, and I heard the brief note of panic in her tone. She was saying too much, getting in too deep.

  Revealing things I was quite sure she hadn’t intended for me to know.

  “Sophia…” I paused once her name was out. What was there to say? Thank you for raising my husband’s kid all by yourself? I couldn’t imagine what being a single parent would have meant, and when I thought about Emma’s babyhood, her full-speed-ahead toddler years, the idea of handling a child alone was enough to make my stomach lurch in despair even now.

  I couldn’t very well blame Sophia for sleeping with Michael, much as I wanted to. That was my fault as much as his, and not hers at all, really. Michael had been free to see other people then. And so he had.

  Twenty years, a marriage, a child and a mortgage later, the idea of him in another woman’s bed still made me ill. My man, I was tempted to screech. Mine.

  The trouble was, all those years ago I had told “my man” I needed space. Now I couldn’t envision anything more absurd. Space for what? Where was this infamous space that everyone wanted? It loomed like a gaping black hole, ready to swallow me up, regrets and all.

  “It’s okay,” I finally said, remembering the woman on the other end of the line, who was waiting for some response from me. What a pathetic word to offer, but it was all I had at the moment. “Drew has every right to speak to Michael, and Michael is…looking forward to meeting him.”

  That was true, I realized. Michael was confused and upset, but there was no mistaking the flicker of curiosity in his eyes this m
orning, the way his gaze seemed focused somewhere distant. North, in fact, toward Boston.

  “I just felt I needed to tell you that,” Sophia said. “I can’t really imagine what this is like for you. Not that a phone call from me necessarily makes it any easier.”

  Her soft, husky laugh punctuated her words, and I found myself smiling. No matter what I would have liked to believe about Sophia Keating, she was turning out to be remarkably hard to dislike.

  “It does help,” I offered, staring out the window, trying to picture her face, the room she was sitting in as she talked to me.

  But when I hung up, I couldn’t avoid the knowledge that I’d lied. Talking to Sophia hadn’t helped at all. Liking her was going to make everything that much harder.

  “IT’S BEAUTIFUL, isn’t it?”

  Struggling to keep my coffee from spilling as my sister, Nell, jerked her well-worn little Civic to a stop an hour later, I glanced across a sprawling, shaggy yard at an enormous farmhouse. Its white paint was peeling, and one of the pale blue shutters on the second floor was askew, but the porch was trimmed in gingerbread, and two brave potted ferns flanked the front door. Beautiful was stretching it, but the place did have an air of old-world, dilapidated elegance. A shingle swinging in the breeze above the picket fence read Willowdale Farm.

  “It’s…lovely,” I said cautiously, climbing out of the car after her. It certainly didn’t seem like the kind of place that catered weddings. Behind the house, a faded red barn leaned to one side beneath a pair of willow trees. Even on a bright spring morning, the farm seemed a bit sad, ashamed of its disuse and disrepair.

  Nell had called before I’d left the house. Not that I’d had any idea where I was going aside from away—from the phone, from the bed Michael and I had shared for so long, from the unfinished work piled on my desk, which I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on. Taking a drive out Route 78 to see the place Nell swore was right for her wedding reception was the perfect distraction.

  After one brief, failed engagement and countless boyfriends, Nell was getting married. She claimed that anyone under fifty was still eligible for a traditional white gown, and she had picked one out two months ago with my mother and me in tow. She wanted the whole deal—fancy reception, bridesmaids, throwing the bouquet, everything. Of course, I would be doing double duty as maid—I refused to call myself “matron”—of honor and photographer. The wedding album would be my gift to Nell and Jack, her fiancé.

  “I know it’s not much now,” she was saying, sweeping one arm toward the grounds, her dark blond hair swinging. She’d inherited my mother’s thick sleek hair, while I’d gotten my father’s unruly curls. “But they’re turning it into a restaurant and catering facility, and they’re only asking peanuts for anything scheduled before the first of the year.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, struggling to visualize the grounds cleaned up and a fresh coat of paint on the aging shingles. “But will it be done by September?”

  “Partly.” She was hedging, walking away to inspect the few lonely tulips blooming near the fence. A nurse for almost twenty years now, she was wearing a denim jacket over light blue scrubs, which meant she had a shift at the hospital later. She looked much younger than her forty-seven years.

  Actually, it wasn’t the wedding that meant so much to her. It was Jack. The prospect of sharing the rest of her life with him, after waiting for so long to find someone—that was the important thing.

  “He’s the one, Tess,” she’d told me nine months ago over beer at the Trolley one Friday night. Even in the dim light of the bar, cigarette smoke choking the air, her eyes shone. Big and blue, they’d always been a mirror of Nell’s feelings—she couldn’t lie to save her life. And for too many years they’d reflected nothing but disappointment that was rapidly sharpening into bitterness.

  “He’s gentle and funny and kind and…” She bit her bottom lip to stifle a grin. “He’s so good in bed. I can’t even tell you.”

  “Please don’t.” But I laughed when I said it. My sister was happier than I’d ever seen her, and I could only hope that Jack was the paragon she made him out to be.

  The thing was, he’d been close by all along. A high-school art teacher in Springfield, he adored his students and gave private drawing lessons out of the Craftsman cottage he’d restored over the past ten years. He paid his taxes, he volunteered at the juvenile center in Rahway twice a month and he liked cats and dogs.

  “Clearly, he’s perfect,” my mother had teased at Thanksgiving, when Nell had chosen to introduce him to the family en masse.

  “I like to think so,” Jack said, not missing a beat, and everyone had laughed, including Emma, whom I thought had developed a bit of a crush on him. What was more, he obviously adored Nell.

  If he wasn’t arguing about a wedding reception at Willowdale Farm, why should I?

  “It’ll be great,” I said, reaching out as she walked past me and grabbing her hand. She looked at me, eyes hopeful and even brighter than usual in the warm sunlight. “I can imagine some gorgeous pictures on that porch and under the willows.”

  “I know!” She was beaming again, and she leaned in to give me an impulsive hug. She smelled like citrus and laundry soap, and her lips were cool on my cheek. “It’s going to be beautiful. Shabby-chic maybe, but chic nonetheless.”

  I laughed and looped my arm through hers as she led me inside, eager to introduce me to the female half of the couple who’d bought the place and show me the dining room.

  “Kara and Peter remind me of you and Michael,” Nell confided as we waited in the drafty front hall. I was admiring the wainscoting and the vintage sconces. “They met when they were in high school, too, and they knew it was love even then. Just like you two.”

  There was a wistful note in her voice that I thought was more habit than anything else. As much as Nell loved Michael, part of her had been envious of us for years, of the time we’d already had together, of what she called the “lightning bolt” method of falling in love. How often had she told me, teary and heartsick after yet another breakup, that I should be grateful I’d found my life’s mate before I’d even had to go looking?

  “He found you,” she’d said, although this was frequently uttered after a beer or two. “Love found you. How lucky is that?”

  Very lucky, and I knew it. I knew it now, at least. Back then, I wasn’t always so sure. I was still in high school, a vague lifetime ahead of me, and there were moments I felt I’d simply traded one comforting certainty for another. Ballet had been my future for as long as I could remember, part vocation, part passion, part habit. After the surgery, even after I met Michael, I would sneak up to my room before bed or on a Sunday afternoon, warming up quickly before donning pointe shoes and testing pliés and relevées. Each time, my knee had shrieked its disapproval, and my body had stalled, unaccustomed to the physical demands after months away from the barre.

  Michael had offered another kind of certainty. If ballet had been my first love, Michael was my second—he wasn’t so much the one as another one, although I’d never said that to him, and it wasn’t the case now, or even after a few months together. But even if he wasn’t exactly eloquent about it—and he wasn’t, back then—he’d never been afraid to tell me that I was the one for him, the one and the only.

  September 18, 1983

  Tess,

  I can’t believe how much I miss you already. Feels like months have gone by since I saw you, instead of just a week and a half. I’ve been busy, too, getting adjusted to life here in Straus. It’s a good dorm—Harvard Square is just outside—and I have a single room, which suits me. It’s not huge, but then, I don’t have to share it.

  At the same time, since classes haven’t really started in earnest yet, I don’t have a lot to do but read and think about you. So I’ve been thinking about you a lot—what you’re doing, what school is like your senior year, if your new job is all right, everything. I’m pretty happy to be here (I mean, it’s Harvard. Who wouldn’t
be?) but in those empty moments that I’m waiting around, wishing for something to do, I’d really rather be there, with you.

  I began writing a short story about this, but I’m not going to share it yet. If ever. It’s still pretty rough, and in some places it keeps turning into a Penthouse letter. Not that I ever read them, you know. Really. Okay, forget I said that. Really, I’m reading poetry. All the time.

  When I’m not thinking about you, that is. Have I said how much I miss you? I think I have, but it bears repeating. It’s so infuriating that we met only to be forced apart three months later. I guess it could have been worse (not meeting at all), but when you find something so awesome, you want to keep it next to you. You want to be able to touch it and look at it. Now I’m making you sound like an object, which is not the point at all. (Maybe I’m not cut out to be a writer. Crap.) It’s just, I love you, Tess. You’re the biggest part of my life, even way up here in Cambridge.

  Write soon. I love you. And also? I love you.

  Michael

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LATER THE SAME DAY NELL AND I toured Willowdale Farm, I was trimming fresh green beans in the kitchen when Michael came home. He pushed open the screen door and leaned down to pet Walter, who greeted him with his usual drool-and-pant doggy grin.

  “How’s my girl?” he said, setting his briefcase down and tossing his jacket on the back of a chair.

  I could sense him hovering behind me. He usually kissed the back of my neck when he found me this way, whispering kisses that made me smile and wriggle away before the meat burned or the vegetables dissolved into mush.