Sanctuary

pushed herself away from the door. She couldn’t and wouldn’t live this way. She would ignore it, put it aside. Bury it deep. God knew she was an expert at burying traumas, small and large. This was just one more.
    She was going to drink her coffee and go to work.
     
    BY eight she had come full circle—sliding through fatigue, arcing through nervous energy, creative calm, then back to fatigue.
    She couldn’t work mechanically, not even on the most basic aspect of darkroom chores. She insisted on giving every step her full attention. To do so, she’d had to calm down, ditch both the anger and the fear. Over her first cup of coffee, she’d convinced herself she had figured out the reasoning behind the photos she’d been receiving. Someone admired her work and was trying to get her attention, engage her influence for their own.
    That made sense.
    Occasionally she lectured or gave workshops. In addition, she’d had three major shows in the last three years. It wasn’t that difficult or that extraordinary for someone to have taken her picture—several pictures, for that matter.
    That was certainly reasonable.
    Whoever it was had gotten creative, that was all. They’d enlarged the eye area, cropped it, and were sending the photos to her in a kind of series. Though the photos appeared to have been printed recently, there was no telling when or where they’d been taken. The negatives might be a year old. Or two. Or five.
    They had certainly gotten her attention, but she’d overreacted, taken it too personally.
    Over the last couple of years, she had received samples of work from admirers of hers. Usually there was a letter attached, praising her own photographs before the sender went into a pitch about wanting her advice or her help, or in a few cases, suggesting that they collaborate on a project.
    The success she was enjoying professionally was still relatively new. She wasn’t yet used to the pressures that went along with commercial success, or the expectations, which could become burdensome.
    And, Jo admitted as she ignored her unsteady stomach and sipped coffee that had gone stone cold, she wasn’t handling that success as well as she might.
    She would handle it better, she thought, rolling her aching head on her aching shoulders, if everyone would just leave her alone to do what she did best.
    Completed prints hung drying on the wet side of her darkroom. Her last batch of negatives had been developed and, sitting on a stool at her work counter, she slid a contact sheet onto her light board, then studied it, frame by frame, through her loupe.
    For a moment she felt a flash of panic and despair. Every print she looked at was out of focus, blurry. Goddamn it, goddamn it, how could that be? Was it the whole roll? She shifted, blinked, and watched the magnified image of rising dunes and oat grass pop clear.
    With a sound somewhere between a grunt and a laugh she sat back, rolled her tensed shoulders. “It’s not the prints that are blurry and out of focus, you idiot,” she muttered aloud. “It’s you.”
    She set the loupe aside and closed her eyes to rest them. She lacked the energy to get up and make more coffee. She knew she should go eat, get something solid into her system. And she knew she should sleep. Stretch out on the bed, close everything off and crash.
    But she was afraid to. In sleep she would lose even this shaky control.
    She was beginning to think she should see a doctor, get something for her nerves before they frayed beyond repair. But that idea made her think of psychiatrists. Undoubtedly they would want to poke and pry inside her brain and dig up matters she was determined to forget.
    She would handle it. She was good at handling herself. Or, as Brian had always said, she was good at elbowing everyone out of her way so she could handle everything herself.
    What choice had she had—had any of them had when they’d been left alone to flounder on that damned spit of land miles from nowhere?
    The rage that erupted inside her jolted her, it was so sudden, so powerful. She trembled with it, clenched her fists in her lap, and had to bite back the hot words she wanted to spit out at the brother who wasn’t even there.
    Tired, she told herself. She was just tired, that was all. She needed to put work aside, take one of those over-the-counter sleeping aids she’d bought and had yet to try, turn off the phone and get some sleep. She would be steadier then, stronger.
    When a hand fell on