Snow was everywhere: in her boots, in her pants, in her mouth. She was panting, shaking her head to get the snow out of her hair, waving one of her hands around in search of a thicker trunk that could provide more upward leverage. She tried crawling on all fours, but the snow wouldn’t pack under her knees; it just fell apart beneath her, and she found herself sliding downward in terrifying spurts. Finally, she got one arm hooked around a pine tree and managed to seize a root with her other hand, and where her body had scraped the snow away, her feet were finally able to grab hold of the ground.
After struggling back to level ground and stepping back onto the deck, Mary Ellen rested for a moment with her hands on her knees. Her head was spinning. She did her best to brush the snow, dirt, and pine needles from her coat, then shuffled back inside and turned off the deck lights. Dropping her coat on the hallway floor, she went into her bedroom, locked the door, undressed, and burrowed under her comforter, dragging a pillow along with her.
Clamped hard against her face, the pillow couldn’t prevent the sobs from forming, but it absorbed them somewhat as they hurtled past her clenched teeth. The realization had torn into her like lead shot—hot and unrelenting, spraying pain in every direction.
There was nothing beautiful in this world.
• • •
When Mary Ellen woke up the next morning, bruises humming up and down her hip and thigh, she came up with a basic plan and held it tight. Dig out the car. Go into town. Call the police. She’d say the girl had shown up during the storm, and let them deal with her. Then she would drive home and resume her life, pretending this ill-advised sabbatical had never happened.
The snow had stopped falling; it was piled precariously on the pine boughs and slathered down the sides of their trunks. She thought about her camera, just another snow-covered mound. Going after it would take too much time, and navigating that slope was too risky. She could break a leg, or worse. Hunters were probably out there, ready to shoot anything that moved. And anyway, this seemed to be just the wake-up call she needed. The camera would stay behind, in this wild and implausible place, and she would return to civilized life, newly appreciative of her house and her family and the purposeful routine of her important and well-paid job.
Mary Ellen closed her eyes and tried to conjure the soothing balm of office carpeting and purring phones and her Outlook calendar neatly bricked up with meetings. It would probably take a few late nights and weekends to get her team back on track after her absence, but that was all right. Matt and the girls would understand. They always did.
Review the physician quals… Meet with the consumer solutions team… Narrow down the direct marketing tactics. She ticked through a list of tasks in her head, but around the edges of her drowsy musing came a new sensation—a feeling like tar, spreading stickily across the clear morning, making it hard to move.
She’d been lied to. Humiliated. Worse, the entire thing was her fault. She was the one who’d let the girl stay. She was the one who’d cared for her, fed her, listened to her, believed her. She’d tried to do the right thing, as if she could somehow find a glimmer of redemption in these lonely, unforgiving woods. But of course things didn’t work that way. Mary Ellen would not be let off with a few hours of community service.
She peeled off the covers and pulled her suitcase out of the closet. She began thrusting her clothes into it the way one does at the end of a trip—with sloppy ambivalence. Dig out the car. Go into town. Call the police. It was going to feel good, she promised herself, to free the car and climb out of this mess, even if she couldn’t muster much excitement about what awaited her back home. Sure, it was disappointing that her photography hadn’t worked out. And yes, she was probably giving up on it too easily. But that wasn’t entirely her fault. By tossing her six-thousand-dollar camera into the ravine, the girl had kind of made the decision for her.
Mary Ellen sat on the bed, letting herself be pulled a little further into the tarry darkness. She was always doing that, wasn’t she—letting people decide for her. What to eat, where to work, what kinds of pictures to take. “You had nothing but choices,” the girl had said, and on that point at least, she was probably right. Other people—people like Rose—faced real hardship; they hardly had any choices. And okay, maybe Rose wasn’t real, but somehow Mary Ellen couldn’t stop thinking about her imaginary struggle. Rose had chosen something better for herself, against all odds. There was no reason Mary Ellen couldn’t do the same thing.
She scrubbed her face with her hands and stood up. She went into the hall and pulled on her boots and her coat, whose folds were still wet from spending the night on the floor, the fur around the hood matted and flecked with mud. She went out the sliding door and followed the previous night’s footprints, which were slashed across the deck in a not-very-straight line, and stepped down into the trampled bracken. She scanned the slope, looking for a patch of black canvas interrupting
