In Ithaca, I settled into a new routine—the walk to campus, the classes in historic houses named after university founders and benefactors, with open windows where gusts came through, occasionally dragging a leaf, flipping our notebook pages; the professors distant and oddly dressed, sporting clinking turquoise and silver bracelets, faded jeans, and the heavy shoes I understood would soon be needed to navigate the slush and snow. The area had been established in the late 1700s as the Military Tract, and its townships named by a clerk in the surveyor’s office who may have read John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Homer, Hector, Ulysses. Even a village called Dryden, and another after his contemporary, Milton, which was where Mary Rae Swindal, the missing girl, had lived.
A report about her came on the television news one morning in the little diner where I often got my coffee on my way to school. I stood with a small group of students watching—the boys in their skinny jeans, skateboards under their arms, the girls with their phones out, calling friends. Later, I saw a copy of the Ithaca Journal with the headline about how the search for her continued. I bought it and brought it back to my bedsit. I read about the absence of new developments, and how yet another vigil was being held the next evening. There was the photo of Mary Rae, and quotes from her friends, and one from her mother, whom I imagined as a gaunt woman, her eyes red from crying.
“We miss our girl so much,” the mother said. “We hope she will be home soon.”
I felt a pang of sympathy for the mother, knowing Mary Rae would never be home. I’d tried, out of curiosity, to retrace my steps from the night she’d led me along, but without much luck. In the daytime, things looked off, and I had a crippling inability to get my bearings. I was often lost, and trying to squelch my panic. I must have seemed, to anyone who met me during those first weeks, strange and standoffish. Awkward. Other than Mary Rae, who made an almost daily appearance beneath the elm, I had no consistent visitors. And while I was conscious of having gotten what I wanted with this move away from home, I was apprehensive of my good luck. I found myself confusing new faces with those already familiar. I would smile and wave at someone, and, confronted with a stare or a hostile look, I’d realize my mistake. I’d get my bearings soon. And then I’d be able to be myself—whoever that new person was, waiting to emerge.
My photography workshop was the focus of my studies, even though I was enrolled in other courses—Romantic Poets, Women and Grief, a horrible statistics course that I might withdraw from. We were a small group, assorted and equally strange, if in different ways. When one of the girls, Sally Crowder, made the observation that we were weirdos, a few others laughed, softly, almost proud.
“Artists,” Charles Wu said. He wore heavy-framed glasses and had dyed a white stripe in his hair, like a skunk. “We’re artists.”
I said little, preoccupied with my contact sheets. For me the work was less about art than about reassuring myself that what I saw existed in some form—just enough to assuage my fears about my sanity. Still, I was welcome in this group—we were all compelled to create images out of pieces of our own unique worlds. None of us saw things the same way as the other, and even if I wasn’t sure I entirely belonged, I was grateful to be there.
I didn’t bring any of my photography classmates home with me—even though Charles Wu kept inviting me places alone, then suggesting he walk me home afterward. I liked my privacy, and I often pictured living in the entire house alone, moving freely through all the rooms, enjoying a dining room and a kitchen at the back of the house, and this idea had taken hold so I’d almost forgotten that others living separate lives occupied these spaces—the elusive Professors Whitman and McCall downstairs, Geoff and Suzie upstairs in the room next to mine. Our lives did invade one another’s in unwanted, unacknowledged ways. The floors creaked, and I listened to Geoff’s slippered footfalls on nights I couldn’t sleep—they shushed across the oak flooring, back and forth. Sometimes, at a deliberate, thoughtful pacing. At others, in a slow, anguished dragging. Once in a while I’d hear his dog Suzie’s clacking nails trailing after. Each morning, though, Geoff emerged in the upstairs hall, boisterous and hearty.
“Come, Suze! Come on, girl,” he’d say.
He was from London, and a craftsman. One day I chanced to open my door at the same time he did, and he stepped up to my doorway and peered behind me, asking if the place was working out. “Do you have any tea?” he said. “I’m out.”
“I do,” I said. “Would you like to borrow some?”