It was easy to miss, if I hadn’t been familiar with her long, tangled hair, if I hadn’t seen her peacoat draped over the chair in our room, day after day. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have noticed it. She was only in the background, after all, only in the corner of the photograph. She was never the focus, never in the forefront.
But then, there was the one where she had not managed to avoid my lens, where her face stared up at me, her eyes large and unblinking. Watching me, always watching.
I clasped the photograph in my hand, which was now trembling, and left the darkroom, not bothering to clean up, not bothering to switch off the lights, but walking out into the dark, out into the snow, the steady throb of it making even the short walk between the darkroom and our house nearly impossible. I kept the photograph, the evidence, hidden inside my coat. An effort to keep it protected from the elements, so that when I produced it, when I placed it in front of her at last, there would only be a streak here or there where it had been distorted by the snow.
She had been sitting at her desk, head bent over a book, and made no move to rise at my abrupt entrance. She was silent for a moment, looking down at the photograph, a strange stillness to her movements as she raised her eyes and asked, “What is this?” Her face closed and unreadable.
“Look,” I said, my hand shaking as I pushed the photograph closer to her. When I was met with the same stony silence, I thrust my finger toward the figure displayed before us. “I know it’s you, Lucy,” I said, doing my best to make my voice hard. “The photograph may be a bit grainy, but I know it’s you.”
She did not speak, and in the absence of words, my eyes traveled to the photograph. I was struck, then, by just how grainy the photograph actually was. I scanned it again. Everything was just as I remembered, but it was as if the focus was off, just a tiny amount, so that the distinct lines of each face—her face, in particular—were blurry rather than sharp. Shadows.
She frowned, standing now. “You saw me in New York?”
No, that wasn’t what I had meant. I shook my head. “No, in the picture,” I said, fumbling for words. “You were there, I know you were.”
“Alice, I’ve been here the entire weekend.”
Her hands were on my shoulders, her fingers pressing into my skin. It was meant as a gesture of comfort, of concern, I knew, but instead I felt as though her fingertips were burning into my flesh.
I had to get out.
My heart had begun to beat, fast and unsteady. My throat felt as though it were closing up, and each breath was a struggle, a strain. I felt my skin begin to flush, and I wrenched myself free, desperate to put space between us, to remove myself from her touch. “You’re lying,” I said, heading toward the door, the words strangled in my throat.
In the hallway, I found the pay phone and called Tom. Afterward, I struggled to recall what it was that I had told him, my voice low and urgent, words tumbling from my mouth before I could consider them. But I remembered, always, what he had said in return—that he would come, that it didn’t matter about the blizzard. That he would come and get me, that he wouldn’t leave me alone, he promised.
I headed outside, into the freezing cold, the snow falling to the ground at a faster rate than I had seen in all my years in the Green Mountains, and Lucy followed, at first placating, then arguing and then begging—for me to stay, for me to forget the photograph. I did not relent, only stood, waiting until Tom eventually arrived, his face distorted from the melting ice on the car. I had turned to go then, when a hand, hard and unyielding, forced me to pause.
“Don’t get in the car, Alice.”
“Let me go, Lucy,” I commanded, wrenching free of her grasp.
“Alice,” she said, her voice desperate now, I thought. “You can’t just go.”
I spun around. “Why not?” I didn’t need a response, I could have simply gotten in the car and left, but I wanted to know, in that instance, what she would say, what words she would find to extract herself from this as well. She was silent, and I shook my head. “I want you to leave me alone,” I shouted then, the wind burning my cheeks, stealing my words. “I want you to disappear and never come back.”
Then I turned and got into the car.
TOM WAS QUIET AS WE DROVE AWAY, perhaps sensing that I did not want to speak, that I did not want to discuss what had happened. I thought instead about where we would go—town, perhaps, to our favorite little diner, on US Route 7. We would sit and drink good, strong coffee and it would steady my hands, which now trembled in my lap. I shook my head, trying to dislodge whatever was left of Lucy there. No more, I promised myself. Instead I would concentrate on the future, on Tom. And once we reached that diner, perhaps I would finally tell him what I had once told Lucy, about the months after my parents’ death, the shadows, the asylum—and then, even those things I had not.
I would tell him, I had decided, about the real reason for the bouts of anxiety—about the accident that had killed my parents and how I worried, still, even then, that I was the one to blame. After all, I had been the last one to use that wretched paraffin heater. I could still picture it in my mind: the little black contraption my father had brought home one day. He had been so proud, showing me how to carefully lift the lid in order to fill it with the paraffin, and from there, how to press the wick into the liquid on one end and light it on the other. It would keep us warm during the winter, he had promised. And what was better, it would save money, since the heater was portable and could be picked up and carried from room to room. But you must always be careful, he had warned me, the paraffin is highly inflammable. I still remembered my childish response: Inflammable? Does that mean it won’t catch fire? He had laughed at that, at his silly little Alice in Wonderland. He had pulled me into a tight embrace—the last I could ever remember receiving from him.
That was what I had been thinking about—the ghosts of my past that I could never quite manage to dispel, along with the simple nagging question: had it been my fault, had I been the last one to use the heater that claimed my parents’ lives?—when it happened.
We had reached the top of the hill and begun the descent down the drive, on the long twisting road that would lead us out of the college’s property and into the town, when Tom turned to me, panic flooding his eyes, and said, “They aren’t working.”
“What aren’t working?” I asked, my voice lazy as I peered out of the car and into the darkness. It wasn’t yet six o’clock, but already the winter darkness had fallen, making it nearly impossible to see anything within a few feet without a light. I lifted my hand in front of me, wondering whether I would be able to make out all of its features. I exhaled, watching my breath emerge in a tiny cloud before dissipating into the air.
“The brakes.”
I dropped my hand. I took in Tom’s stricken face, which I could still make out, even in the darkness. That was what struck me first, in that strange little moment. But then I heard his foot, pumping away at the useless pedal and something inside me stilled. “What do you mean?” I whispered.
“I mean they won’t work,” he said, his voice rising in panic.