Pictures Of Us

Her hand lifted in a wave as she set out down the walk, and I paused at the screen door, as she ambled along the sidewalk, adjusting the volume of her iPod, her head swinging in time to the beat.

Our gorgeous girl had a brother. Biologically, at least. What else he might be to her was still up in the air, but Emma would be fascinated by the news initially and then the questions would come, rapid-fire and endless. She knew full well what year we’d been married, and she’d always been too perceptive for her own good. After all, she’d picked up on the weird vibe between Michael and me this morning, even if she hadn’t interpreted its cause correctly.

Michael touched my arm, and I turned to face him. Part of me wanted the comfort of burying my head in his shoulder, but another part of me longed to crawl into bed alone for a few days and hide.

“We’ll talk to her tonight,” he said. His dark hair was sticking up in spikes over his forehead, and in my mind’s eye I could see him standing in the kitchen, running a hand through his hair restlessly, wondering if he should join me. I knew him inside and out. That hadn’t changed, either—so it was even more surprising that he didn’t understand how imperative it was that we talk first.

“I’m not sure what there is to tell her yet,” I argued, slipping away from him and returning to the kitchen. The pale wood floor was warm; early sunlight had flooded the window over the sink.

“I’m going to talk to him today.” Michael caught my wrist before I could pick up my mug. “I arranged to call him at lunchtime. There are things I want to hear from him, too.”

I let him pull me against his chest, and I breathed in the clean scent of his shirt, and the spicier smell of his skin beneath it. With his arms around me, and his heartbeat the steady, comforting rhythm of a clock beneath my cheek, the rest of the world receded for a minute, as it always had.

“I’ll call you after I speak to him,” he murmured into my hair, and I nodded. “And then we can decide what to tell Emma, and everyone else.”

When he’d gone, gunning the old Volvo out of the driveway to make his train into Manhattan, I carried my tea onto the front porch, letting the screen door slam behind me once Walter, our aging beagle, had settled into a square of sunlight with a grunt. I had dozens of things to do, but my mind refused to focus on anything other than the fact of Drew Keating’s existence.

My fingers itched to dial Lucy’s number at her office, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was nearly impossible to get her on the phone lately, and we resorted to brief, flying e-mails more often than not, but that wasn’t the reason for my hesitation. Since junior high, Lucy had been my willing ear, my shoulder to cry on, but spilling this particular story seemed like a betrayal when even Emma didn’t yet know about her half brother.

As much as I would have welcomed Lucy’s voice on the other end of the line, what I really wanted was reassurance. Someone to reassure me that I had nothing to worry about, that I hadn’t taken Michael’s love for granted, that nothing about our life together was going to change. The problem was, there was every chance that Lucy would disagree.

DANCING BALLET PROFESSIONALLY requires an incredible amount of dedication, concentration and talent. I had all three, according to my teachers, but after ten years of training, and four summers spent at the New York City Ballet’s prestigious School of American Ballet, what I didn’t have was luck. I’d fallen during a rehearsal, thanks to an ill-timed jump into Jared Farmer’s arms, and smashed my right knee into pieces, quite literally, as I landed on the floor.

Everything I’d dreamed of, everything I’d worked for, was over in that moment, and I realized it even as I lay sprawled on the gritty studio floor. The pain was a blinding starburst, hot and relentless, like nothing I’d ever felt. My knee wouldn’t move—what had once been solid seemed to be a handful of dust now, and my lower leg a useless length of bone, my foot dangling from it like an afterthought in its scuffed pointe shoe.

Now, I barely remember the round of doctors’ appointments and consultations, the surgery and the recuperation. What I remember is the awful feeling of loss, and of being lost. I had nothing to focus on for the first time. For years, every free moment of my life had been occupied with dance. Studying my idols, training, practicing, living, eating and breathing ballet. It wasn’t a distant spot on the horizon; it was the here and now, packing lamb’s wool into my pointe shoes, washing my leotards, stretching my rebellious muscles every morning, absorbing Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and Stravinsky until I could hear the violins humming and swelling in my sleep.

Meeting Michael was what saved me. From what, I’m not sure—depression doesn’t sound melodramatic even if self-destruction does. But as intently as I turned my eyes and my heart to him, I found that I was the focus of someone else’s fascination, and it felt good.

By the end of that day at the beach, Michael had asked about everything from my family and friends to what I dreamed about at night. He wanted to know if I’d ever cut my hair, which fell halfway down my back, and if I liked white peaches. He was fascinated by my knowledge of classical music—at least, the ballet-appropriate pieces—and he’d made me list everywhere my family had ever been on vacation. He wanted to know what my room looked like, if I slept on my stomach or my back and what I ate first thing in the morning.

As odd as it may seem, we didn’t have anything to do but talk that day and walk up and down the shoreline, our feet splashing in the salty tide. And it was incredibly freeing. In those hours, I didn’t have to think about the gaping hole in my life. Michael was filling it in with his interest in me.

It didn’t escape Lucy’s notice, either. “You’re in love with being loved,” she said two weeks later, when I’d disentangled myself from Michael long enough to join her in Cath’s pool. She was hanging on to the side, kicking her feet out behind her in lazy swipes, and her wet hair was slicked back from her face.

I swam away from her, stung. Michael was flipping through a magazine on a lounge chair just a dozen feet away, his eyes shaded behind a pair of dark sunglasses and his chest pink with sun.

“That’s…well, mean. And not true,” I said, paddling over to the concrete lip and tossing back my own soaked hair.

“Really?” She shook her head, shrugging. She was squinting in the fierce afternoon sun, her nose wrinkled in disapproval, each freckle standing out like a polka dot. “What is it you like about him other than how he’s completely obsessed with you?”

“You’re out of line, Lucy.” I managed to keep my voice steady as I said it, but my heart had squeezed into a tight fist. I didn’t want to fight, but I wasn’t going to listen to her accuse me of something she understood nothing about.

I was flattered by Michael’s interest, and I knew it even then, but I was also pleased by it because I’d fallen so hard for him. There were plenty of things I liked about him, not that I was about to spout off a list for Lucy’s benefit. He was smarter than any boy I’d ever dated, for one thing, and he was gentle and funny and kind, but there were a million little quirks that wouldn’t have mattered to anyone who wasn’t in love with him. The way his fingers were shaped. The way his left eyebrow was slightly crooked. The way he ate Oreos, around and around the edges until he swallowed the middle in one gulp. The fact that he was an awful swimmer but could run for miles without losing his breath. The short stories he’d written and collected in a plain spiral-bound notebook. The way he always carried a book with him wherever he went.

That he liked me was only one reason among the dozens I mused over as I lay in bed at night, and the idea that he’d given me something to do other than brood all summer didn’t occur to me at all until Lucy mentioned it.

It was rude and blunt of her to say it, but there are moments now when I wonder if she was wrong.

That summer was gorgeous from the beginning, just hot enough, lush and sweet scented. The old trees that lined the streets were thick with leaves, gardens had bloomed early, and every few blocks you could smell the chemical tang of chlorine from a backyard pool. Michael had been anticipating boredom his first summer away from Manhattan, where a kid with two doctors for parents could do pretty much whatever he liked, but we kept busy in the way only teenagers seem to do, wandering the streets hand in hand, drifting lazily in friends’ pools, talking for hours on my front porch, counting fireflies at dusk and listening for the tinny jingle of the ice-cream truck.

And kissing, of course. There was a lot of kissing.

I’d kissed boys before, if not extensively. I was usually too wrapped up improving my port de bras or learning a new variation for performance, and most of the boys in my ballet classes weren’t particularly interested in girls. But I had made out with Tommy Giuditta during the second installment of Friday the 13th, and I’d fooled around with Brendan Hastings at Billy Caruso’s party over Christmas break.

Michael tasted different, felt different from other boys. I couldn’t get enough of touching him. The wiry hair on his chest was fascinating. The smooth, firm muscles in his upper arms responded beneath my fingers. And his mouth was hot and faintly sweet, like nothing I’d ever tasted.

When he touched me…well, that was different, too. I was so familiar with my own body, the strength of my legs, the jutting definition of my ribs and hipbones, the painful bunions and scabbed blisters on my feet, that I was convinced it couldn’t hold any surprises. But when Michael and I were kissing, tangled together in his bed or on the sofa in my deserted living room long after everyone had gone to sleep, I never failed to be awed. My body understood a whole host of things I didn’t, apparently, and Michael had been the one to introduce me to them. There was heat, a slow softening that blurred every edge when Michael touched me, but there was also an electric buzz, a new, urgent energy. Need, I know now.

I was consumed with it those first weeks we were together, restless and irritable when he wasn’t within arm’s reach. To satisfy my parents—who had explained that although not dancing certainly wasn’t my choice, I would have to spend at least some of my vacation productively—I’d found a part-time job at the cinema downtown. Michael wasn’t working, since his mother felt that the loss of his father, moving out of his first and only home and preparing to leave for college were quite enough for him to deal with.

I’d been heartbroken to learn that he had graduated already—he was only a few months older than I was, but he’d started kindergarten early or something like that. I was too shattered to listen to the explanation, and anyway, I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was come September, he’d be leaving for Boston and Harvard.

One afternoon when I didn’t have to work and Michael’s mother had taken his sister, Jane, into the city for the day to visit friends, we were sprawled upstairs on his bed, drinking iced tea and feeding each other potato chips. We’d been talking about Michael’s favorite bookstore in Greenwich Village and had drifted into a strange conversation about reading The Scarlet Letter for school, and then about what classes Michael would take at Harvard, where he was going to major in literature.

I could feel him pulling back, the muscles in his shoulders stiff and his eyebrows drawn together over those huge, dark eyes. He would make noises about putting off school for a year, finding a job in town and waiting for me to graduate. He’d done it before, and although I’d stopped him each time, I was learning that he had a stubborn streak as wide as the sky.

I didn’t want him to go, but I didn’t want him to stay, either—not with me as the cause. What if he stayed and hated me for it? What if he stayed and realized he didn’t really love me, even though he’d said it a million times already, like a prayer between kisses, whispered in my ear at the movies, written on scraps of paper he left in my shorts pockets or my bag. It was then that I’d realized that being the object of love gave you power. And I was desperate not to use it the wrong way.

I pushed up on my elbows without warning, nudging the nearly empty chip bag to the floor. Michael looked up; he’d been lying beside me on the bed, his dark brown hair gleaming amber in the sun and one cheek flushed with heat.

I sat up completely and peeled off my T-shirt and bra, then swung my legs over the side of the bed to shimmy out of my shorts and panties. Michael sat up, too, eyes wide, his mouth opening as if he was about to speak.

I held out my hand as I lay back on the pillows, and he straddled me, his jeans rough against my naked thighs, his T-shirt warm and soft against my breasts. “Tess?” he said.

I didn’t answer, but he let me tug off his shirt, and groaned as I ran my hands over his chest.

“This was more romantic in my head,” he said as I fumbled with his zipper. “There were going to be, like, candles and stuff.”

I smiled as he shrugged off his jeans. My blood was racing, but it felt good. We’d been giving ourselves to each other for weeks, fitting the smaller pieces into the bigger ones, revealing colors and shadings, creating a puzzle that was very definitely an “us” instead of the separate entities “me” and “him.” I wanted to finish this now, I wanted all of it, and I didn’t want to wait. “Doesn’t matter,” I told him, taking his face between my hands, studying the shadow his eyelashes made on his cheeks before he kissed me.

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 morning, 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.