banker husband, was cool with funding the trip, but instead said, ‘I’ve tried for a long time not to be vain and now my face is falling off and I’ve just given into it. I can’t have my photo taken. Sorry.’
He shrugged. ‘That’s fine. I would have given you free copies, for having me to stay.’
‘Oh, there’s no need.’ A crestfallen moment. She’d been fishing, she discovered, for a compliment.
‘And you, Ruth said you’re a teacher?’
‘Yes. I was full-time in schools but the admin nearly broke me. The constant testing. Now I work at a home for pregnant teens, doing art classes. Sort of therapy.’
‘OK, I’m going for a run. Can you take this back into the house?’ He passed her the portfolio.
‘Now?’ They’d been drinking sparkling wine in the sun. The lawn smelled of the new high-nitrogen fertiliser. ‘Don’t go now.’
But already he was jamming his feet into his running shoes, screwing ear-buds into the side of his head, touching his toes a couple of times in the cursory way he said ‘et cetera et cetera’, and gone, taking the curve of the road like a piece of film running on double speed, swallowed by the corner. Dorothy pulled her knees up and tucked her skirt around her ankles to keep from being bitten, and thought about getting a cardigan from the house, and rubbed at the goosey flesh on her soft upper arms, and pushed her forehead into a knee to press the alcohol burn away, and looked at the pink cotton of her skirt in the dark shadow made by her head and the way it lost its colour and became grey. There was a touch to the nape of her neck, the line drawn by a single finger. She raised her head and looked around, but nobody was there. Shouting came from the house.
It had stopped by the time she got inside, then started again – a sound that she followed to the living room, where Ruth and Andrew sat in front of the set watching football. Dorothy recognised the All Whites, but not the other team.
‘Come on!’ Andrew yelled, his voice gravelly. Neither he nor Ruth looked up from the screen.
‘My girls play soccer,’ Ruth said. ‘At college.’
‘I’m just going to make dinner.’
Dorothy carried the portfolio through to Donald’s room. She knocked on the door, although she knew that Hank was running and Ruth was watching TV. In the pause after her knock, a feeling of dread beset her. Someone absent, returned silently. A clotted shadow. Sitting on the bed. She turned the handle and opened the door fast. The room, postered with ancient Communist propaganda, was empty. The stretcher at the foot of the double bed was neatly made up, looking like no one ever slept in it, and the novel she’d left out for Ruth splayed face downwards on the floor next to a spread treasure of discs without cases, tiny silver coins. She crossed the threshold to set the portfolio on the mattress; leaving it on the stretcher seemed somehow pointed. A red-and-white plastic wallet on the chest of drawers bore the words Travel Documents. The exit strategy, a plan to move on. Dorothy sat on the bed and reopened the portfolio. The dark-paper backing pages were thick between her finger pads and thumb. Her parents, in black-and-white, stared at the camera, airbrushed, their teeth neat, a page Hank had skipped over out in the garden. She last saw them – it must have been ten years, alive. After their accident, everyone agreed closed caskets were for the best. This handsome old man had been her father, with thinning white hair and Photoshop space where his wrinkles would be. Her mother’s high forehead.
With clumsy thumbs Dorothy turned the pages. Who were these people who had their hair set especially? What kind of project was this, portraits of the well-to-do? There were numbers in silvery graphite on the top of the pages. They might have been dates but her glasses were not strong enough to decipher them. Out the window the hedges cast a deep-angled shadow half the length of the garden. When she looked back at the folder there was another photo that Hank hadn’t shown her, and a fond, warm feeling suffused her. It was Daniel. She glanced at the doorway as if someone might come in, and carried the book closer to the window to get more light on his face, there, touched a finger to the digitally removed scar,