The Clairvoyants(80)

“Mary Rae and I had a get-together after she and William broke it off,” Anne said. “We’d grown so close. She was an absolute mess.”

Anne blew smoke to the ceiling. What would she make of the news that William and Mary Rae had reconnected more recently? Was she assessing me—trying to gauge my own level of despair?

“He made his choice,” I said, leaning back into the couch cushion. “I have to accept it.”

Anne reached for her drink and took a sip. “He’s had a difficult life.”

I tried not to correct her usage of the present tense. It unhinged me. Contrary to the last, threatening physical contact I’d had with him, William’s spectral presence was benign, and I’d grown used to imagining him tormented by his love for me.

“He told me about his mother,” I said.

Anne raised her eyebrows. “Did he tell you that his father abused her? That rather than let her divorce him he had her committed to the hospital in Binghamton? I knew his mother. She had a drinking problem.” Anne tipped back her glass and finished her drink. “But honestly, who doesn’t?”

“Why did he drop Mary Rae?” I asked.

She refreshed our glasses and stood with the shaker. “I’m going to check on the Wellington,” she said. “And make more of these. Come with me.”

We went back into the kitchen, and Anne mixed another shaker and poured us new drinks. I told her I’d had enough, and she smiled.

“One martini is never enough.”

I didn’t protest, I simply took another sip, and another. The kitchen grew warm from the stove. I understood why the Milton girls gathered at Anne’s. It felt lovely to be taken care of, to have Anne’s attention, all of it tinged bittersweet. Each moment with her was special, and there wouldn’t be many more times like this, you told yourself. She asked me about my classes, about my own work. We talked for a while in the kitchen. Anne grew tipsy, laughing. She leaned over the stove and the ends of her scarf caught fire and she batted it out expertly with a damp dish towel, as if this kind of thing happened all the time.

My bag with William’s portfolio sat on a chair nearby, and I wondered why Mary Rae’s images were separate from the others, why he hadn’t chosen to print one as a sample.

“Did they have an argument?” I asked. “William and Mary Rae?”

Anne put on oven mitts and leaned over to take out the roast. She stood, took off the mitts, and busied herself with a pot on the stove.

“They had a misunderstanding,” Anne said. “It had to do with his work.”

“The sleeping women.” I tipped the shaker over my glass but it was empty.

I expected Anne to seem curious, to ask what I meant, but she did not. Her face flushed from the heat of the oven. “Yes,” she said, simply.

The series wasn’t a secret to her at all.

“You haven’t heard from him?” she asked me. “Not a word, after all this time?”

We were finally getting to the point. “Have you heard from him?”

Anne faltered. “No, I have not. But I’d only been seeing him with you. He’d stopped coming by. I thought it was too hard for him, with my illness.”

“He told me we were through and not to contact him. I’m not going to crawl after him.”

Anne swung the refrigerator open and then closed it without taking anything out. She did the same to a cabinet door, as if hiding her expression from me. I must have seemed the most horrible person in the world. Finally, she placed her hands on the counter in front of me. “He truly loves you,” Anne said. “I believe that.”

How much I wanted this to be true. “I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken.”

Anne reached for the shaker. I watched her tip it over her empty glass, then bang it down on the counter.

“What do you really want from me, Anne?”

She fiddled with her scarf. “Before he disappeared from our lives William mentioned some prints he’d made. He’d said you had them.”

“He mentioned them?” I sat down in the chair at the counter bar.

“Yes. It was months ago. He told me about the argument you had, how you’d seen the photographs, how he thought you might have, well, taken them.”

I knew Anne, upset about Mary Rae’s disappearance and her death, had wanted her journals. I didn’t think her interest in the photographs was in any way related to William’s. I believed we might have a common interest.

“I do have them,” I said. “With me, actually.”

I went to my bag and pulled out the portfolio and brought it back to the kitchen island. Anne grabbed her glasses and came to stand beside me. She went through the prints slowly, looking closely at each one. She was unsteady, and my head spun from the martinis. The glass doors leading out to the backyard were black, and the cold seeped through. They were big, glass sliding doors and my gaze was drawn to them, waiting for someone to appear. Anne looked up at me, her eyes magnified behind the lenses of her glasses.

“Where did you get this?” Anne seemed disappointed in me, as if she knew I’d stolen them.

“It’s all of them—Alice, Lucie, Kitty, and Jeanette.” I pulled the portfolio over and leafed through the prints so Anne would see, but she wasn’t even looking.