“Wait, what?”
“I am, actually. Moving in with him. I didn’t want to tell you and I know you need me, so I told him not for a bit. A couple of months. More if you need.”
Olivia leans forward and touches Rebecca’s hand. “You do what you want to do. I’m happy for you. You’re happy, right?”
Rebecca smiles. “I am. I feel like it’s lame—you know, maintain independence and all that. Like after all this proving myself, I shouldn’t be content to move into his place and ask for half the closet. But I want to. Because I like his house. And he gets up early like me. Goes to sleep early. We’re boring. But he cooks and I don’t and, you know, I love him.”
“You’re going to be fine. And it’s okay to love someone. And to want to be loved. It’s not a weakness.”
“Yeah, I get it. And I have a couple of bank accounts he doesn’t know about.” She smiles. “The mathematics of risk—I like them in my favor.”
“Come on, a drink to this.”
Friday night. Barry Manilow slides to the Bee Gees. Fans on high. Glasses poured full. The world pounds at the doorstep, chaos and bills and expectations and doubt all held back. Another splash of wine, another song. Sitting on the couch, rehashing childhood and loves and old dreams of a future that turns out to be now. It’s not till the dregs of the second bottle that she remembers her anxiety and why—that she’d given Peter Darrow the film to print.
Just like that, the night skids to a stop. A threshold breached. Rebecca leans over in a wobbly flash, hand on her shoulder as she tells her not to worry—but Rebecca doesn’t know. Olivia’s told no one other than Peter about the film. Until now. As Olivia speaks, Rebecca sinks farther into the velvet clutch of the couch and rubs her forehead till a reddened streak appears. Then Mason swaggers into the room, with a girl on his arm and a wide smile on his face. “What it is, ladies?” And so she tells him. The girl he brought home says she should go, and he lets her.
The next day is cooler. Crows strut in the yard, stabbing at the ground, and Olivia’s head’s in a vise, Rebecca hiding in her room. When Mason enters the kitchen, he sees Olivia and laughs almost proudly, as if he should take credit.
“Can’t say I didn’t know this was coming,” he says as he pours sugar into a cup. “And that’s my shirt.”
She looks down at a T-shirt stained with old paint. Somehow she’d also put on the red sweatpants from Geneva. “I found it in the dryer.” She swallows heavily, watching him rinse lemons in the sink. “I needed something soft. Sorry.”
“Take it. It’s yours. God, you two last night. Laverne and Shirley on a tear.”
She lowers her head back onto the table.
“Drink,” he says after a bit, handing her a glass. “Water, sugar, salt, lemon. Down it.”
So she does, so fast it rises back up. She tilts her head back and breathes in and out, forcing the rhythm. “I think I need to lie down.”
“Obviously.”
She’s on the first stair in the living room when there’s a knock on the door. “Mason,” she says, barely a whisper.
“Got it.”
She’s just hit the second-floor landing when she hears Peter Darrow’s voice. Everything rises in her—hangover, fear, guilt—and she doesn’t move until Mason calls to her, as if perhaps she could’ve slipped through the moment undetected. Slowly she returns and there he is, in what must be his weekend wear: brown Adidas warm-up pants with white stripes on the sides and a matching zippered sweatshirt. His beard, miraculously, is even wilder, as if fed by the extra hours of sleep. She tilts her head, trying to understand, and in turn, Peter’s eyes widen when he sees her.
Then, mercifully, he looks to the triptych of the discarded Christmas trees. “Yours?”
“An assignment. From way back when.”
“I could tell. Not that it’s an assignment but that it’s yours.”
“You can?” she asks, alarmed. “Isn’t that bad?”
He smiles. “No. We are who we are, and we like what we like. And lucky for you, you know how to trap a gaze. You’ve got an eye and an awesome sense of composition. And a real ability to capture mood.”
“I’m drawn to mood.”
“I can tell. It’s one of those intangibles you either get or you don’t.”
And then she sees it: the Pee-Chee folder in his hand.
He continues, holding it against his leg as if knowing she’s spotted it but not ready. “I’ll tell you the one that really got me. Of what you turned in.”
“The one in the kitchen? When we were hiding?” When we were hiding. Said like when we were at the lake or something equally as nullifying.
“That’s a damn fine photo. Haunting. Better than most of the crap I print. But I’m talking about the man reading the paper.”
The man. “Delan.”
He nods. He knew that but was encouraging distance. “Again, the intangible. Like the older man looking out the window. Pure emotion. Emotion is what’s lacking in Miller’s photos.”
“I know. They’re just of an old woman. You don’t even know she’s dying.”
“Because there was no one else. No response, no reaction to the moment. They evoked nothing. But these Christmas trees—shit if you didn’t nail the intangible. I feel worse for them than the dying lady.” He motions toward the hall. “But the man—Delan—I’m assuming that was here.”
She nods. “Guess I didn’t even need to go to the Middle East.”
“To take a good photo? No. You already had it. But for you? Only you know that.”
Suddenly she can’t take it and sits heavily, sloppily on the stairs. She leans her head against the wall, and the room tilts.
“That photo, though,” he continues. “The blinds, the window, the angle. Your composition. Everything else can be a skill, but composition’s where a photograph becomes art.” He glances back at the triptych. “You know
