But then a commission had dropped into her lap—a commission from a New England magazine to shoot a series of family farms in Maine, in New Hampshire and Vermont.

She took it because she was desperate to work, because she needed the money, but it turned out that she loved it, driving around back roads by herself, stopping at farm stands, at old houses that overlooked apple orchards or grazing cows. Knocking on doors, talking to people and then shooting their lives. She’d begun to use color some time before this, and she loved working with it in this project, playing digitally with tones and light in the shots of people in their worn clothes standing in front of the deep red barns, or in the lush early green of hayfields.

And for her own composing pleasure, she shot a series of photographs with no one in them—empty fields edged by the outlines of trees, the light falling across them in different ways over the course of several days. She shot the sagging outbuildings, the worn wooden fences, the tumbled stone fences running through the woods that had grown up around them. She took some pictures of the interior spaces she’d looked at too. She found herself focusing a lot of attention on these images, on the hard-used homes, the old-fashioned kitchens, the tired furniture.

Of course, she sent only the peopled shots to the magazine. They paid her the modest fee, and the article came out some months later, a kind of Norman Rockwell presentation of the sturdy folk who still lived off the land in rural New England. It seemed entirely trite to Annie, though she had liked the people in the photos, and the photos themselves, she knew, were fine for their purpose.

Left over were the shots she had taken of the barns, the collapsed sheds, the houses, outside and in, everything worn and tired looking, slightly begrimed in some cases. Occasionally a figure was almost visible, usually just at the edge of the frame—someone glimpsed passing by an open doorway, someone turned to do something at a stove, someone leaving a room, having completed a chore—the back of a pants leg, the sole of a shoe, a hand, a blur. But just as often, there was no sign of anyone.

Annie found she liked them, these odd pictures. More than liked them. Even in the completely unpeopled shots, she felt the sense of a presence in the absence, the sense of someone having just departed.

And taking them had been a relief, she realized. The relief of not thinking about herself at all while she shot them. Of not thinking about how the people she was looking at would also be looking at her. Of not thinking about how she would need to explain herself to them. About what it was she wanted from them.

It made her remember the pictures she had taken of her mother. The use she’d made of her. The power she’d had over her. The power you always had, you always exerted, when you photographed someone. Even if they had consented to it.

The innocence of consent! she thought. And the way it was so often wrong to ask it, in one way or another.

At a party at their house, she had taken a picture of a friend of hers, Edith Hodges, standing with her husband Mike—Mike, the publisher who had done her first book and Graham’s memoir; Mike, who had moved only months before out of the large house on Avon Hill he’d shared with Edith and their four children to live with the man he’d fallen in love with.

She’d invited both of them, Mike and Edith, to a party she and Graham were throwing, after checking with each of them ahead of time to be sure this would be all right.

She had spent a part of that evening moving around, taking pictures, as she often did at these gatherings. She’d spotted the two of them standing together in the wide opening between the living room and the kitchen area, so concentrated on each other, so yearning toward each other, that they canceled out everything around them. Edith’s eyes were glittery with unspilled tears. Her hand was on Mike’s sleeve, gripping it so tightly that the fabric was pulled into a kind of knot under her fingers; and he was leaning slightly toward her, as if to shelter her from view.

As she was developing it, Annie could see the power of what she’d captured: the anguished impossibility of their deeply felt bond made visible.

“Of course, if you think it belongs,” Edith had said when Annie showed it to her and asked if she could include it in the Couples show.

Then, because she suddenly understood how wrong she was to have asked this, Annie said, “You don’t have to.”

Edith had tilted her head and smiled tolerantly at Annie, as if to say, Once you’ve asked, of course I have to.

In that moment, Annie had known that she wouldn’t—that she couldn’t—use it. Not without regret, of course.

What she wanted now, she realized, was to give up on people. Or more accurately, to see them differently, to imagine them differently through their absence. To make images that said something about the people who weren’t there. She thought of some of the paintings of Vuillard, or Bonnard—the figures half seen, the rooms themselves often more the subject than the people in them. But rooms suffused with the feeling of a liminal presence. Or with the feeling of an absence—but an absence full of implication, of mystery.

Images that worked like memory, she thought. The way memory is triggered by objects. The way objects, spaces, the arrangements of things, can call up those who aren’t there, can give life to them again. Of course, not the literal life that direct images give, but the sense of the living presence. She thought of the Danish painter Hammershoi—she’d seen several of his paintings in a museum show in New York. She’d liked best the ones that had no people at all in them, gray and clean and infinitely suggestive.

So she started up once more, started up with the feeling she had thought she might have lost forever. The feeling that she knew what she was looking for, what she wanted to make.

And these were the photographs she’d be packing up today, the selection from the hundreds she’d taken. The selection that would be made public, as of Sunday.

Driving through the crowded, sun-dazed streets of triple-deckers to her studio, she was thinking now of Sunday: of the party at the gallery, the wine, the friends and possible collectors she would move around among, make nice with. The exciting pleasure of being at the center of attention in the crowd. The pleasant nervousness as people bent to look closely at what she’d seen, at what she’d made of what she’d seen. The wait after that for sales, for reviews. And then, if the show was a success, maybe the other kind of pleasure, the deeper, rarer kind.

Between now and then, though, she had a few hurdles to leap. Self-constructed hurdles, she reminded herself, but still, hurdles. Hurdles that she’d chosen to distract herself from all her fears around the show.

First, of course, she had to schlep the chosen photographs over to the gallery. And then on Friday—tomorrow!—there was the dinner at the house after Jamie’s reading, the dinner for eleven. Twelve if John Norris could come.

When she’d woken this morning to the light in the bedroom, it had seemed, momentarily, like too much.

“But you’re used to that,” she told herself, speaking aloud now in the car.

And of course she was. Over the years, Graham had come to rely on her to provide for the many gatherings he liked to have in connection with events at the bookstore. The gatherings that she liked to have too. She enjoyed it, almost all of it. The preparation, the cooking itself, the old friends who sat around the big kitchen table in the candlelight, the long, meandering conversations, the comfort, the pleasure of it all.

And always, Graham would stand up at some point in the meal and offer a toast to her. Always he—and sometimes friends who’d stayed on late—helped with the cleanup. And often in the old days—less now—if they hadn’t drunk too much, if she wasn’t too exhausted, she and Graham made love after everyone had gone home.

If she had to pick a central element to their marriage, it might be this. More than their general compatibility, more than their child or their shared sense of humor—this. This nexus, this web: the parties, the bookstore, the food, the friends. Occasionally still, the sex. As she pulled into her parking space in the lot behind the studio building, she was thinking of all this, hoping that tomorrow it would work its usual magic—that Graham would come back to her from wherever it was he’d been.

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