All day Marlise had watched a bruised sky lower over the fields until the snow began to fall, the house quiet except for the clank of the radiators, the distant grumbling from the cellar furnace far below. As the daylight failed, she felt herself fading also. Utterly unsupervised these past weeks, battered by Silas’s letters, she had begun to let go. What had she last put into her mouth? And when?
For days she’d played games with herself to stay awake. She tried to remember everything she could, starting with her childhood and all the way up through Silas. She remembered someone’s freckled arms holding her. It was more a smell than anything. The young nun at school who called her Marvelisa. A drawing she’d done of a horse. “Spirited,” her teacher had written on the back. “Keep drawing!” How Silas said he saw her in all her ages. Daughter. Mother. Lover. She imagined kissing Silas. How she longed to do that; why had she not? She imagined doing more with Silas. She remembered pulling him, shirtless and bleeding from the ward laundry sink. She ached for him. She worried. Who would protect him now. Was he still fucking Nina? She thought about poor Nina, whom she hardly knew. What it must be like to be out of control like that. But of course she herself was wildly out of control, despite the uneaten soup, the unopened boxes of crackers, the refusals that had once made her feel alive. Books, birds, even the shield of hunger had withdrawn its power. She was too exhausted to decline the loss.
She looked out the window at the blue snow. Why had she never left this house? Why hadn’t she tried to find a phone? Could she reach the ward even if she knew the number? Was Silas even there?
She tried doing her times tables, but got stuck in the 8s. She recited the alphabet backwards. With a pencil from her purse, she wrote “phone is in shed” on the back of Dr. Lance’s card in case she forgot what Ida had told her and she could make her way out. After the snow. In case of emergency. She got out her books—the children’s books she’d found, the bird guide, her Mother’s copy of Jane Eyre. She traced her fingers over her mother’s signature, set down years ago inside the front cover before she, Marlise, had even been born or thought of.
Out fell the photograph, Beatrice with her umbrella. Marlise fingered its white, scalloped border and stared into her mother’s heart face. One corner of the picture felt off, uneven. With her fingernail, she jimmied the edge until she realized it was stuck to another photograph. Two pictures, stuck together, back to front. Carefully, with the fingernail of her thumb, she pried the two apart. How had she not noticed this before? In one hand, she held her beautiful mother. In the other, a man naked from the waist up looked back at her. He was standing in what appeared to be a barn or shed, a loft, back-lit by an open window, bent slightly, as though to pick up something from the floor, smiling over his shoulder out of the kindest eyes she had ever seen.