Mary Ellen enlarged a few more of the pictures and found them equally compelling. She deleted the ones that showed a glimpse of her leg or her coat, leaving her with twenty-eight unadulterated photos. She tried cropping a few of them and tweaking the exposure, then shook her head and undid all of the changes. Purity was the idea here. She needed to just let the photos be what they wanted to be.
She drained her glass, savoring the euphoric tingling in her extremities. The pictures were so wild, so uncontrolled. They weren’t trying too hard; they weren’t trying at all. She couldn’t wait to send them to Justine.
She’d go to town in the morning. Justine had told her the local library had Wi-Fi, so she would go there to send the files. Then maybe she’d check her email, give Matt a call. If the library had a printer, she could bring Rose some information on scholarships.
Of course, she’d picked up on Rose’s hint about helping a younger person trying to make it in the world. Mary Ellen actually thought it was cute, the way Rose had promised to pay it forward. “We artists have to stick together,” she’d said, and Mary Ellen supposed she had a point. If only she’d had a mentor back when she was in school—someone like Justine, who could have recognized her potential and urged her to stick with her art major. Someone who might have persuaded her to turn away her parents’ money and all its messily attached strings. A word or two of encouragement—that’s all she’d really needed.
Her mind was whirling now; she’d had too much to drink. She decided to go to bed so she could leave early in the morning, before Rose woke up and asked to come along. She wasn’t ready to put the girl on a bus to Pittsburgh. She still had so much to tell her.
• • •
That night, Mary Ellen dreamed about a man who wasn’t Matt, someone with black hair and a low voice and a face always in shadow. She was in bed with him, but it wasn’t a betrayal because in her dream, there was no Matt, so there was no sense of alarm or shame the way there was sometimes in her other dreams. She and the man were both undressed, but they weren’t having sex. They were just melted together in a full-body embrace, their protrusions and recesses locked like the teeth of a zipper. Something intense was pulsing between them, passing back and forth like an alternating current—anxiety/acceptance, longing/gratification, questions/answers.
As dawn broke and she emerged from sleep, Mary Ellen kept her eyes closed for as long as she could, savoring the dream’s vapor trail. She felt a little guilty that it wasn’t Matt in her dream; it was never Matt. These sorts of dreams were almost never about a specific person. She wasn’t fantasizing about men with broader shoulders or wider jaws or more imaginative wardrobes than her husband. It was just her subconscious conjuring an abstract “other,” a warm body with which she could pulse and thrum and experience a kind of urgent, transporting closeness that simply didn’t exist in real life.
She opened her eyes and gasped. The deer was back, right outside her window, as if risen from the dead. She was nosing at something on the ground, lifting her head now and then to glance around, ears swiveling. She looked straight at Mary Ellen, almost boldly, her nose sugared with snow. Mary Ellen stared back. Had she dreamed the deer’s death in the woods? No, she could clearly remember the fading warmth of the flank under her hand, the seep of snow through her pants. This had to be another one. She raised herself up on one elbow, and the animal startled away. Mary Ellen smiled, reassured to see a deer looking so alive, so peaceful, so uninterested in her mistakes.
It was early; the snow was just beginning to catch the reluctant morning light and drag it through the trees. She fell back against the pillows. Matt would like that—a deer at the foot of the bed! She’d have to tell him about it when she called him from town. She wondered what he was doing, if he was sleeping in, enjoying the quiet of the empty house. Probably not. The ability to sleep late was one of those things they were both losing in middle age, along with eyesight and an interest in new music. If she had to guess, he was probably at the diner, sitting at the counter eating pancakes with whipped cream.
She remembered how adorable she’d found it, the first time he ordered his favorite breakfast in her company. There had been something so sweet and boyish about Matt, with his messy hair and messy apartment, a kind of jovial helplessness that stirred tender feelings in her. He’d always resisted her mothering, though. He wouldn’t let her clean his bathroom, no matter how forcefully she claimed not to mind, and he refused to let her take him shopping for clothes. To his credit, he did grow up a lot during those early years. He learned to cook and clean; he started going to an actual hairdresser. Mary Ellen understood, and loved, that he did these things to make her happy, and because he wanted a partner instead of a parent.
He kept eating pancakes with whipped cream, though, and ice cream with sprinkles. The charm of this had long worn off—she supposed her own adorableness had faded just as much, was there any point in pretending otherwise?—but now they were bound by an intense familiarity that exerted its own gravity. No one knew her as well as Matt did. No one else could predict, even before she knew herself, what she was going to order at a restaurant. No one else could read her eyebrows, her neck tendons, her grip on a toothbrush like they were complete sentences written in his own handwriting. No one
