• • •
After breakfast, Mary Ellen cleared the dishes and sat back down across from the girl with a cup of coffee. “So what are you doing here?”
“I’m not a drug addict or anything,” Rose said, stretching her arms across the table. “I’m not, like, dangerous. I just needed a place to stay for a while, and then I got sick. I’m sorry I made such a mess of your house.”
“Where are you from?”
“New York.”
“City?”
“You don’t usually come here in the winter, do you? It seems more like a summer place.” The girl propped her chin on her fist and watched Mary Ellen’s face.
“Sure, I guess.” Mary Ellen shrugged. “So you ran away from home?”
“Not really. I have someplace I need to be.”
“Well, how old are you?”
The girl rubbed her cheeks with both hands. “Eighteen.”
“No you’re not.”
“I am.”
“You’re too young for me to let you just wander off into the woods.” Mary Ellen sipped her coffee. “But you can’t stay here. I’m supposed to be working on my photography, not taking care of some…kid.”
Rose’s face clouded over, then she straightened up. “You’re a photographer?”
“Well…yes.”
“I could tell this was, like, an artist’s house. All the books and stuff, and the paintings,” she said.
“Right.” Mary Ellen wrapped her cold fingers around the mug. She hadn’t seen any paintings.
“I guess that pays pretty well, huh.” Rose swept her eyes to the side in a gesture that encompassed the furniture, the light fixtures, the leather sofas.
“Photography?” Mary Ellen laughed. “Not really. No.”
“So you do something else?”
Mary Ellen took her mug into the kitchen and rinsed it out. The girl’s curiosity was like a flashlight aimed straight at her face. Mary Ellen didn’t feel like going into it all—her boring job, her predictable life. She’d come here to get away from all that. “I do what most artists do,” she said, returning to the table. “Teaching…consulting. Freelance art reviews.” Her face turned warm, but there was also a pleasant flutter in her stomach, a flicker of excitement. “And I did pretty well in my divorce.” She moved her hands under the table, twisted off her wedding rings.
“Oh.” The girl nodded slowly. “No kids, I guess. I mean, it doesn’t look like a place you’d bring kids to.”
Mary Ellen shifted her weight on the hard wooden bench. Clean, uncluttered rooms…vast expanses of glass…a view uninterrupted by swing sets or soccer goals. “I prefer a more unfettered lifestyle,” she said. “Like now. This trip was very spur-of-the-moment. A gallery in Philadelphia is thinking about offering me a solo show, but they want to see some new work. So I came here to work on my portfolio. I’m playing around with some ideas about agency and intentionality.” Rose’s face screwed up in confusion, and Mary Ellen waved her hand. “Never mind, sorry. Sometimes I forget that not everyone likes to read critical theory.”
“Yeeeah.” Rose yawned and stretched her arms.
“You must be tired.”
“Kind of, yeah.”
Mary Ellen studied the girl for a moment, trying to decide what to do next. She seemed harmless enough, and Mary Ellen didn’t feel like trying to get her back into the car. “Why don’t you take a nap,” she said. “I want to go for a walk, take a few pictures. We can talk more later about what…to do.”
After Rose went downstairs, Mary Ellen dropped her rings into a zippered pocket on the side of her wallet. This didn’t feel like a betrayal any more than coming to this house felt like leaving her husband. She was just taking a break from her life, auditioning for a part. Was she credible as an artist, as the owner of this house? Could she make a place for herself in this world?
She took out her Nikon and sat at the table, wiping it carefully with a cleaning cloth, inspecting the lens for dust. She peered through the viewfinder at the treetops outside the window. The hemlock boughs bounced lazily in the breeze, releasing light puffs of snow. It was a relief, actually, knowing she could inhabit this world not as herself, but as a person who belonged here. She might even learn something—a different way of looking at the world, or a better understanding of what it all meant. Maybe, as Justine, she could even let go of the things that were weighing her down—her job, the situation with Matt and the girls, her father’s accident—and approach her photography from a place of clarity and peace.
Feeling a surge of excitement, Mary Ellen pulled on her coat, gloves, and boots, shouldered her camera, and opened the door. After pausing a moment, she turned back to pull her wallet from her purse and slide it into her pocket.
Outside, she walked around the side of the house to the back deck, still pocked with footprints from the day before. She went to the edge and looked down the slope, which was perilously steep, black rocks and fallen boughs poking up through the snow. She could barely see the creek at the bottom, just a grayish flattening of the landscape where it was frozen at the edges, a narrow black stroke down the middle. The sound it made was like a cold wind blowing through dead leaves.
Mary Ellen moved back toward the middle of the deck, wondering why there was no railing. Someone could so easily trip and fall over the edge, then plummet to the bottom. She followed the path of footprints off the side of the deck and into the woods, where the top of the snow was littered with needles and broken-off branches. All around her, trees leaned against each other like drunks at a party; some, snapped in half, bent to the ground, their upper branches held out stiffly to break the fall. Mary Ellen raised her camera a few times, but couldn’t think where
