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At first, Sylvie threw out that possibility—people didn’t do that. But she wondered what would hurt worse—knowing that Scott had abetted in something or realizing that Scott just wanted nothing to do with them anymore. The first option carried disappointment and shame, but the second carried personal guilt. There might have been more she could have done to keep him here. It startled her when she realized which option she preferred to believe.
R esigning from the board stopped her life abruptly. Suddenly there were no meetings. No obligatory parties. Other things halted, too—they decided not to go on a family vacation to Cape May, and Charles and Joanna began tentatively planning a trip of their own to St Lucia. Charles had put down a deposit on a six-night stay in a seaside bungalow there; he would be able to write off some of it as expenses, he explained, because he was working on a story for the Philadelphia Inquirer about a Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s vacation home also on the island. It’s a start, he said. At least it’s a writing clip. After he quit his job—he didn’t get into why, only that he wasn’t cut out for advertising—Charles followed an Inquirer editor around until he paid attention to him, even crashing an office party he knew the editor was attending. It could have been a disaster, Charles told Sylvie, but I think the guy was kind of proud of me. I think it showed him I was serious.
When Charles came over for dinner, Joanna sometimes called in the middle—she was often in Maryland, visiting her recuperating mother and her mother’s new boyfriend, Robert. Charles and Joanna had decided to move back to Philadelphia, putting their house up for sale. While they waited for it to sell, they met with Philadelphia Realtors, looking at different apartments, comparing square footage, pet policies, and twenty-four-hour doormen.
One weekend in mid-June, Charles decided to join Joanna in Maryland. Before he left, he kept asking Sylvie if she’d be all right. Did she need anything from the store? Should he bring her some DVDs to watch? Could she call a neighbor if something happened? Stop it, Sylvie kept telling him. I’ll be fine. I’m used to being alone.
She drove to his house and saw him off, needlessly helping him pack his car and lock up his house. Before Charles got into his car, he gave her a long, contemplative look. “There’s something we need to talk about one of these days. ”
“What?” she asked. He rattled the keys in his hand. “It’s nothing I want to get into right now. It’s just … we need to have a long talk. ”
She watched as he backed out of the driveway and started down the street. Was it a reference to the girl? Did Charles know? If he did, did she want to know? It seemed better just to let it go.
As his car disappeared around the corner, a fist formed in her chest. A weekend was forty-eight hours long, which seemed like an eternity. But there were plenty of things to do. Cleaning and organizing, preparing elaborate dinners, re-reading her grandfather’s markedup copy of Anna Karenina. Dismantling that tent in the yard—it was still there from when Charles had built it a few months ago. Sometimes she peered inside the tent, searching out James’s initials on the canvas. She kept telling herself she’d sleep in it on a warm night, but so far she hadn’t.
She got back into her car. First she drove to Swithin. There it was, still standing without her. The flag flapped from the flagpole, no longer half-mast. One of the landscapers was hunched over the bushes, pruning. Another was on a riding mower. Sometimes they had camps here in the summer, but she didn’t see any children in the fields. Sylvie had tried her best not to inquire about how the school had weathered the MRSA news, but she could guess the repercussions. Parents had very likely thrown a fit, horrified that an institution they paid so much money to send their children to could be so negligent. It was possible some had pulled their kids out. It was possible other students had contracted little MRSA pustules on their skin, too—it was highly contagious, the article said—and that their parents had demanded the school pay for their medical treatment. Enrollment might be down for next year. In the fall certain colleges might overlook Swithin applicants. The board would have to answer a lot of questions, for they’d recorded every meeting, the software on Martha’s husband’s computer translating their conversations verbatim, the tapes immediately going into the school’s files. An investigation would uncover that there was even discussion about purchasing new sports equipment at the last meeting—Sylvie remembered it well—and the board had laughingly glossed over it.
Sylvie thought she’d feel some satisfaction that Tayson and the others were under the microscope, but her insides just felt scooped out and raw. She felt sorry for the school, festering with so many germs, cruelly neglected. It had happened under her watch, after all. This was the only thing she was responsible for, and she had blown it. She felt sorry for Scott having to go through this for something that had nothing to do with him, too. She even felt a little sorry for herself. She couldn’t help it.
She could only idle at the school for a few minutes before it became too much to bear. After that, because she didn’t want to go home yet, she drove out to Kimberton, which was above the turnpike. It was simply somewhere to go, a place that had no emotional ties to any part of her life. The houses there were small and crooked, many with green carpet on the porch steps and lacy curtains in the windows. There were still corner bars and a tiny, family-run grocery store, though a Wal-Mart also loomed on the hill just outside the town. She’d brought her camera, and she walked around a little park taking pictures of kids on swings, people’s dogs, a couple sitting on a park bench. No one told her to stop or insisted she was being intrusive. What a sweet, lonely lady, their smiles said. Maybe they even threw in old—Sylvie suddenly felt the weight of her years. She wore a string of pearls around her neck, which probably made her look older than fifty-eight. And she wore nylons under her skirt even though they made her legs and crotch sweat. She’d dressed this way for years, but suddenly it seemed so burdensome. Ducking into the park’s public restroom, she unclasped the pearls from her neck and dropped them in her purse. She peeled off the nylons and stuffed them into the trash can.
There was a little pavilion at the bottom of the hill decorated with white bunting and streamers. A Madonna song was playing, and a couple of guys in suits loitered under the awning. At first she thought it was just a party, but then she saw a girl in a long, lacy white dress fidgeting with flowers. The inside of the pavilion was lined with chairs. All the men were tattooed up and down their arms, and all the women wore strappy dresses and lots of necklaces. Makeup prevailed on both sexes. A few people had brought dogs, fat golden retrievers with bandannas around their necks, a little papillon with feather-duster ears. The Madonna song continued, and finally the girl in the lacy white dress looped her arm around an older, hippie-ish man with a white beard—her father, Sylvie presumed. They started wedding marching down the aisle.
Sylvie took a picture. She couldn’t help it. The groom was sitting on a picnic table at the front of the pavilion. There was an officiant in a long, tie-dyed gown, reading from a ragged piece of lined paper. Sylvie took a picture of a baby in only a diaper, sitting next to his long-haired parents. She took another picture of the beaming father, giving the bride a big kiss. The newly married couple proceeded out to another Madonna song—that peppy one during that phase where she was into yoga—pumping their fists and grinning. Everyone clapped. When the couple saw Sylvie and her camera, they walked right up to her. She backed away, feeling like an invader.
“Can we see?” the groom asked. He was more lithe than his new wife, with thinning brown hair and square glasses. “We didn’t hire a photographer. ”
Both leaned over the viewfinder. The bride nodded, pleased. “I’m Samara. ” She thrust her hand out. Her nails were painted blue.
“Sylvie. ”
“Do you want to come to our reception?”
Sylvie shook her head fast. “I’m not really a photographer. ”
“No, as a guest. You don’t have to take pictures if you d
on’t want to. ”
Sylvie fluttered her hands, scrambling for some excuse.
“His mom’s a chef,” the girl insisted, pointing to her new husband. “She did all the food. We have a bluegrass band coming. And there are cupcakes. ”
The reception was in a barn even farther out in the country. Early-summer crickets were chirping, and there were a few goats and chickens wandering around. Most of the guests took off their shoes and walked around in the dirt. One old man didn’t leave the dance floor once. In the middle of a polka, he suddenly dropped to his knees, crawling around on the floor. Sylvie tensed, wondering if he’d had a stroke. Then the news rippled through the barn—Paul had lost his teeth again. Soon everyone was crawling on the dance floor, looking for Paul’s teeth. The polka kept playing. People laughed. No one seemed concerned about germs. Dangers like MRSA seemed very far away. A little girl found the dentures under a table, apparently kicked there by some overzealous dancer. She raised them above her head, running into the middle of the dance floor. The toothless man picked her up and spun her around. He wiped off the teeth and popped them back into his mouth. Sylvie found herself smiling, laughing along with everyone else. And then in the next second, she became very aware of what she was doing. It was as though as soon as she’d peeled those nylons off her legs, something had altered in her. Here she was taking pictures of Paul and his newly found teeth. Here she was eating an extra cupcake and drinking a third glass of wine.
When Charles arrived home from Maryland, Sylvie told him her weekend had been quiet and without incident. Later she asked a boy who lived down the road to show her how to upload the photos to a server so that Samara and her new husband, Chris, could view them. A few days after she e-mailed them off, her phone rang. A woman introduced herself as Tabitha Wyler, a wedding photographer. “I’m an acquaintance of Samara Johnson,” she explained. “Samara showed me the pictures you took of their wedding. ”
“It was just for fun,” Sylvie said quickly. She wondered if she’d broken some sort of photographer code—maybe they had unions and she’d stolen a legitimate worker’s business. Then Tabitha cleared her throat and asked if Sylvie wanted to do it for more than fun. “You’re good,” she said. “Maybe you’d like to work for me. ”
She needed an assistant, she explained, someone to help with the set-up shots, an extra pair of hands at the receptions. Most of the jobs were smaller affairs in Phoenixville and Elverson, Spring City and Gap and even Lancaster. “Most aren’t high-end,” Tabitha added. “I won’t be able to pay you much. ”
“That’s fine,” Sylvie said fast.
The day before her first job, Sylvie was so nervous she sweated profusely through two T-shirts and kept dropping things. She fretted over her equipment. What if her camera stopped working? What if every picture she took turned out black and overexposed?
“They’re digital,” Charles reminded her when he came over—she’d told him by then about this increasingly foolish-sounding endeavor she’d gotten herself into. He pointed at the back of the camera. “You’ll be able to see exactly what you do in the little screen. But you knew that already. ”