“No he didn’t,” she said. “You’re just saying that.”
I knew that if I continued to object to him, Del would insist I was only jealous. All of our arguments lately had been over Del’s desire for everything that was mine—the little ceramic box with its painted dragonfly, my favorite jeans. She’d been taking my things without asking and claiming them as her own. Just the other day we’d fought and our mother had stepped in. As usual, she sided with Del.
“You always want everything I have,” I’d told her then, bitterly.
That night she turned off the lamp. “He is my boyfriend,” she said. “I don’t know why you have to pretend I’ve stolen him.”
We lay quietly in the dark. I thought I could smell my dead grandfather’s tobacco rising from the porch below.
I was filled with an unaccountable desperation. “Stay away from him,” I said, and then because I’d said it I knew she would not, and it was too late to take it back.
23
New Year’s Eve arrived on a Thursday. Since the evening in William’s office, I’d kept my distance from him. I had become preoccupied with the photographs. In the back of my cedar closet I’d noticed a loose wood panel, and I slid it away from the wall. I’d taken the portfolio out of the box while he slept, and slipped it down behind the cedar panels and replaced the loose board. I wanted the chance to look at the photographs again when I had the opportunity. I had to admit they were beautiful, and I knew I should just confess to having seen them. But the locked drawer, the extent of his secrecy troubled me. Why hide them from me when I had already shown him my work? I vowed to keep my new images to myself. When he asked, I would counter with a request to see his sleep studies. It was only fair.
We were expected at Anne’s by two in the afternoon, which I found strange. It would be hours of visiting and drinking before we ushered in the New Year, and I wasn’t looking forward to another long day and night of the Miltons. I knew I couldn’t look at the girls who’d posed for William the same way again. It bothered me that Alice swore to hate him, when her nude body seemed to luxuriate under his lens.
I went downstairs to ask Del what to wear. The Milton girls usually went out with dates on New Year’s Eve, and Mary Rae had worn, in her last known photograph, a fancy dress. But when I showed Del what I was wearing, she asked me if I was going to the prince’s ball.
“Where are your white gloves?” she said.
She was lying on the couch in her old jeans and a sweater.
“What?” I said. “What are you wearing?”
“This,” she said, pushing herself up. “And a warm coat. Maybe I’ll put my hair in a bun.”
“What do you mean?” I said. My dress was a dark blue sheath with narrow straps. I had on black hose and high heels.
“For the hunting party,” Del said.
She left the couch, went into the bedroom, and emerged wearing her faux fur hat with the flaps. “Anne has a traditional New Year’s Eve hunt. For hares.”
“And you’re going to hunt?”
“The men are,” Del said. “And Anne, if she’s not too tired. The rest of us will just be the keepers of the flasks.”
Upstairs, I found William loading film into his camera. He whistled at me when I walked in. “Look at you,” he said.
“You like it?” I crossed the room, pivoted like a model on a runway, and walked back to the door. “It will be perfect for the hunt.”
He laughed. “I forgot about that. Do you want me to bag you a hare?”
“Is that how it works? The men kill a harmless creature as a token of their love?”
He held the camera, advancing the film with his thumb. “Marriage isn’t suiting you,” he said.
Where once I might have felt guilty, at fault for failing to be the wife he’d expected, I felt only anger. I unzipped my dress and let it fall to the floor. “I want a white one.”
“That’s a snowshoe,” he said, curious, unsure. “Given the foxes haven’t eaten them all, I’ll see what I can do.”
*
AT ANNE’S, THE men and Anne put on orange hats and vests and filed out the back sliding doors across the terrace, towing three of Joseph’s beagles, who lunged toward me on their leashes, their nails skittering across Anne’s wood floors. This hunting party fanned out across the backyard and headed into the woods. Randy and Joseph had brought their own .410s and Geoff and William borrowed two guns from Anne. Anne herself looked strong and capable in her bulky clothing. It was a bitterly cold day, the sky its usual shade of gray. Somewhere beneath the cloud cover the sun shone brightly on silver airplane bodies, on other states and continents, but its warmth and light begrudged Milton and the surrounding villages.
Del and the girls had filled flasks and thermoses with schnapps. When I mused on how hazardous it might be for the hunters to drink, Lucie laughed—a pretty, tinkling sound.
“How else will they stay warm?” she said.