One Cold Night

eight panes of wavy glass. The view was all forest, blurry and distorted, and she thought — No.

Chapter 21
    Wednesday, 4:00 p.m.
    The loft’s broad windows drank in a vast blue sky in which Brooklyn went on forever. Blue-blue without a streak of white. It was a hovering, drifting sky; the kind that made you dream, or on bad days saddened you. A chilly breeze sharpened the air. The skin on Susan’s arms stiffened with goose bumps, but she ignored it and turned another page of the photo album she had tucked away years ago.
    Carole sat on Susan’s left, warming her side. Marie sat on her right, separated by a three-inch gap. Bill prowled the creaking wooden floor behind the couch.
    “She was a pretty baby,” Marie said.
    “Wasn’t she?” Carole managed a faint smile.
    In the photo, a mature but younger Carole cradled infant Lisa, who in her striped cotton jumper could have been a little boy. Susan, as a baby, had been dressed in pink frilly jumpers with matching bonnets and booties. She wondered now if, raising Lisa, Carole had tried to correct earlier mistakes, making Lisa tougher from the start, hoping she would not turn outas vulnerable to charm as Susan had been. In the background of the picture, taken on the lawn in front of their new house, was half of a teenage Susan, sitting cross-legged on the grass, her long hair blown across her face by a sudden wind. She remembered that moment: twirling a spent dandelion between her fingers, watching her parents dote over the family’s new baby, feeling bewildered.
    Lisa arching up from a blanket on the floor with a big smile on her little face. Her peach-fuzz hair was so slight you couldn’t see it in the picture.
    Susan later that year, on a horse she remembered was called Last Laugh. Her right hand held the reins and her left grasped a gold trophy. First place for jumping.
    Susan holding sleeping Lisa, looking directly into the camera, smiling.
    Lisa as a toddler, kneeling on the grass, reaching a straightened forefinger at something invisible that floated in the air.
    A few years later, Carole and Bill holding Lisa’s hands, swinging her through the space between them. Susan remembered taking that picture herself, home on a visit from college.
    She hadn’t looked at this album for years; the memories were too bittersweet, too confusing. Now she felt as if the images were floating away from her, and she wished she could reach back in time. She could have kept Lisa as her own, stayed in Vernon and faced everyone’s judgment and wrath.
    As she turned the final page of the album, the paper end page crumbled and fell away from the spine, and a photograph Susan had forgotten about fell onto her lap.
    Without looking, she knew what it was, and hesitated a moment before turning it over. She had told Dave the truth before when she said she’d thrown away all the pictures of Peter; she had simply forgotten about this one, slipped behind the end page many years ago. She remembered now: She had taken the photo of Peter out of its sleeve to look at it closely, and then her mother walked into the room. It had been quicker to slide the photo under the end page than return it to its tight-fitting plastic sheath.
    She turned it over now and set it down on top of the last glossy page.
    “Peter.”
    Susan had taken the picture one Thanksgiving, in the late afternoon. Meals finished, they had left their family gatherings to be together. He wore a brown corduroy jacket, unbuttoned at the neck; his Adam’s apple was sharp under his skin. In the photo he looked directly at Susan with his clear eyes imploring her, and for the first time in years she remembered the question that came right after she took the shot.
    “Why can’t you?”
    “It’ll get too late. You know how Daddy is.”
    “It’s just a movie. If it goes long, I’ll call him myself.”
    “Maybe tomorrow afternoon.”
    “Then let’s take a walk.”
    They had walked a long way that afternoon, into dusk, which came early. The neat sidewalks of Susan’s suburban neighborhood blended into torn-up countryside being made into a new development. There, in a half-finished house, they lay together and made love with their jeans pulled down to their ankles. Afterward, they wiggled their pants back up and she lay in the crook of his shoulder, on the gritty floor, staring up into a darkening sky.
    “No stars out tonight,” she had said.
    “Supposed to rain tomorrow.”
    “A movie would be good, then.”
    He