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By Root 1209 0

and then the shadow took shape and she relaxed. This was no stranger but only Al, home early from his travels, puttering through the house. She was surprised and strangely gladdened; Al had been taking more jobs and was often gone two weeks at a time. But here he was; he had come home. He had opened the blinds, giving her this moment to savor, this glimpse of her life, contained within these brick walls, framed by the buffet she had refinished, the ficus tree she had not yet managed to kill off, the layers of glass and paint she’d washed so lovingly all these years. Phoebe glanced up from her work, staring unseeing out the window at the dark wet lawn, running her hand along the cat’s soft back. Al walked through the room, holding a cup of coffee in one hand. He stood beside her and gestured to the rug she was weaving with his cup.

It was raining harder now, her hair was soaked, but Caroline didn’t move. What had been an emptiness outside the tavern window, a bleak vacancy real enough and fearful, was banished by the sight of her family. Rain hit her cheeks and streaked down the windows, beaded on her good wool coat. She took off her gloves and fumbled in her purse for her keys, then realized that the door would be unlocked. In the darkness of the lawn, as the eternal cars swooshed past on the freeway, their headlights catching in the dense lilac bushes she’d planted as a screen so many years ago, Caroline stood still a moment longer. This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.

She shut her purse, then. She climbed the steps. She pushed the back door open and went home.

II

SHE WAS A PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY AT CARNEGIE MELLON and she was asking him about form. What is beauty? she wanted to know, her hand on his arm, guiding him across the gleaming oak floors, between the white walls on which his photos hung. Is beauty to be found in form? Is meaning? She turned, and her hair swung back; she swept it behind her ear with one hand.

He stared down at her, at the white part in her hair, at her smooth pale face.

“Intersections,” he said mildly, glancing back to where Caroline lingered by a photo of Norah on the beach, relieved to see her still there. With an effort, he turned back to the professor. “Convergence. That’s what I’m after. I don’t take a theoretical approach. I photograph what moves me.”

“No one lives outside of theory!” she exclaimed. But she paused in her questions then, eyes narrowing, lightly biting the edge of her lip. He couldn’t see her teeth but he imagined them, straight and white and even. The room swirled around him, voices rose and fell; in an instant of silence he became aware that his heart was pounding, that he still held the envelope Caroline had given him. He glanced across the room again—yes, good, she was still there—and tucked it carefully into his shirt pocket; his hands were trembling faintly.

Her name was Lee, the dark-haired woman was saying now. She was the visiting critic-in-residence. David nodded, only half listening. Did Caroline live in Pittsburgh, or had she seen the show advertised and come from somewhere else, from Morgantown or Columbus or Philadelphia? She had mailed letters to him from all these places, and then she had stepped forward out of this anonymous audience, looking so much the same yet older, tauter and tougher somehow, the softness of her youth long gone. David, don’t you know me? And he had, even when he hadn’t let that knowledge in.

He scanned the room for her again and did not see her, and the first threads of panic began, tiny, pervasive, like the filaments of mushrooms hidden in a log. She had come all this way; she had said she would stay; surely she would not leave. Someone passed with a tray of champagne glasses and he took one. The curator was there again, introducing him to the sponsors of the show. David pulled himself together enough to speak intelligently,