Pictures of You Read online

  Praise for Pictures of You

  “Pictures of You is a magically written, heartbreakingly honest snapshot of the people we leave behind and those we can’t let go, a portrait of the full spectrum of the human heart. Caroline Leavitt is one of those fabulous, incisive writers you read and then ask yourself, Where has she been all my life?”

  —Jodi Picoult, author of House Rules

  “Riveting and poignant and deeply moving. Caroline Leavitt has given us a beautiful and hypnotic exploration of the ways we heal—and, yes, the ways we don’t.”

  —Chris Bohjalian, author of Secrets of Eden

  “Caroline Leavitt’s new novel is an achingly wise tale about how each of us tries to shape our deepest sense of self, challenged not only by other souls in a similar pursuit but by the very forces of life itself, be they happenstance or destiny. In Pictures of You, Caroline Leavitt is a splendid writer at the peak of her powers.”

  —Robert Olen Butler, author of Hell

  “I have long admired Caroline Leavitt’s probing insight into people, her wit and compassion, her ability to find humor in dark situations, and, conversely, her tenderness toward characters other writers might merely satirize. All these qualities are on display in Pictures of You.”

  —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

  “I was mesmerized from the opening pages. Caroline Leavitt is a masterful storyteller. Here, she has created an elegantly structured, emotionally resonant novel that begins with tragedy but quickly moves beyond it to the biggest questions in life: What do we do with what has been handed to us? How do we find redemption within loss? How do we open our hearts, knowing all that we know? This is a beautiful book.”

  —Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion: A Memoir

  “Pictures of You is a complicated and complex near-mystery of a novel … I found it impossible to put this book down. Leavitt is a writer who can be trusted absolutely, and she’s created a wonderful book that’s as complicated, crushing, and joyous as life itself.”

  —Robb Forman Dew, author of Being Polite to Hitler

  “Pictures of You is the story of two women, both running away, whose fates intertwine forever. Leavitt writes straight into the heart of each scene to find its rich, emotional nuances and undercurrents.”

  —Kate Christensen, author of Trouble

  “Heartbreaking, suspenseful, and moving, Pictures of You contains all the elements I long for in a great story. This irresistible novel of families betrayed and dreams come true is wise in the ways of the human heart, a manifestation of hope, tragedy, and beauty.”

  —Diana Abu-Jaber, author of The Language of Baklava

  “The extraordinary intersection of four lives sets the scene for this complex and deeply moving novel about love, loss, and letting go. In Pictures of You, Caroline Leavitt presents a deeply felt story you’ll be thinking about long after you’ve turned the last page.”

  —Michelle Richmond, author of Dream of the Blue Room

  “Pictures of You is an enthralling amalgamation of a literary mystery and the story of one woman’s search for self-fulfillment. A stunning coincidence results in a cruel fate, but the redemptive power of love offers the possibility of a second chance. Caroline Leavitt has written a page-turning novel; her characters spring from the heart.”

  —Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of The Scenic Route

  “Caroline Leavitt has been a book club favorite for years and her latest novel will be no exception … This domestic drama is compelling and moving.”

  —Book Group Buzz, Booklist Online

  PICTURES OF YOU

  NOVELS BY CAROLINE LEAVITT

  Girls in Trouble

  Coming Back to Me

  Living Other Lives

  Into Thin Air

  Family

  Jealousies

  Lifelines

  Meeting Rozzy Halfway

  Pictures of You

  A NOVEL

  CAROLINE LEAVITT

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2011 by Caroline Leavitt.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  Portions of Pictures of You, in slightly different form, appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review and The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leavitt, Caroline.

  Pictures of you : a novel / by Caroline Leavitt.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56512-631-2

  1. Women—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction.

  3. Domestic fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3562.E2617P53 2010

  813’.54—dc22 2010009362

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  FOR JEFF AND MAX,

  THE LOVES OF MY LIFE,

  FOR ALL OF MY LIFE

  PICTURES OF YOU

  ONE

  THERE’S A HORNET in the car. Isabelle hears a buzz and then feels a brush of wing against her cheek. A grape-size electric motor sings past her right ear. What’s it doing out in this weather? she wonders. It rumbles past her again, and she practically jumps. She tries to wave it outside, but instead it kamikazes to the back of the car, navigating among her cameras. Which is worse, she thinks, waiting for the sting, or the sting itself? She opens all the windows wider.

  September fog is rolling across the highway, westbound US-6. Isabelle’s windshield clouds. At first, she doesn’t panic. She’s been driving for twenty years already. She’s a good, careful driver, and right now all this cloudiness is just an unwanted surprise. A trick of weather.

  She switches on the headlights before she sees how much worse the lights make everything, how they reflect the fog. She tries the parking lights instead, which are a little better. They cut a small visual path on the road for her. Already, she feels a headache the size of a hard, shiny dime, forming behind her eyes.

  Isabelle strains to see the road, checks her gas gauge, which shows half empty. She slows down. She wants to keep driving but might have to get off at an exit in Connecticut to fill up her tank.

  Isabelle rubs at the window. She can still see. In the backseat, she’s got money she took from the bank to help get her resettled until she can find work. All her cameras are here, and one small suitcase stuffed with clothes. Let Luke toss the rest. Let him give them to Goodwill or his new girlfriend.

  Or his new baby.

  She knows this is crazy, but right now she’s capable of anything. She could reinvent herself. She could blot out her past.

  A green sign, LEAVING CAPE COD, flashes by, and she starts to breathe. People sit in traffic for hours just to get here. They come from Boston and New York to spend two weeks in a tiny cottage and bread their bodies with beach sand and tanning lotion and absorb more sun than is healthy. Tourists collect the beach glass like it was diamonds instead of chipped pieces of soft drink bottles, and though everyone always tells her how lucky she is to live here, she’s never wanted anything more than to leave. Every time a visiting friend gets ready to leave, she’s had to stop herself from begging them to take her with them
.

  This isn’t the first time she’s run away, but the first time was a lifetime ago, back when she was sixteen and God knows that doesn’t count. Now she has a little money, a profession, and a dirt-cheap illegal sublet in New York City that’s available for as long as she wants it, courtesy of her friend Michelle. She yearns for cities where people don’t make you feel there is something wrong with you because you live there year ’round.

  She tugs at her thin necklace, lapis on a gold chain that was a gift from Luke for her last birthday, and in a flare of despair she yanks it off in one brief rip. She throws it out the window and lets the fog swallow it up. She tugs off the wedding ring he gave her, too, a broad gold band wide enough to have her name scratched on the inside, and bounces it onto the highway. She checks her rear-view mirror, wondering if Luke will come after her.

  She squints at the sky. Maybe the fog will lift. There’re still rays of sun out there, shooting through breaks in the clouds. God startling people into paying him some attention. That’s what her mother used to say. A sign.

  Isabelle glances up at the sky again. If you want to talk about signs, talk about how the sky had looked just this way the first time Isabelle had brought Luke home. She was just fifteen and he was twenty-five and working at the local gas station, a job that didn’t exactly go over big with her mother. Of course, Luke’s age made it even worse. She was so in love it was like being insane. She couldn’t breathe when she was near him, couldn’t eat or sleep, and her brain felt rewired.

  Luke was the one who cleaned her mother’s windshield without leaving a single smear, who put gas in the car and checked the tires and the shocks. She knew his name because it was embroidered in red on his pocket. He had a green bandana that he wore like a headband in his long, glossy hair, and he always rolled up his sleeves, so Isabelle could see his muscles. When he smiled at Isabelle, his eyes were full of light. He looked at her like she was the most interesting thing he had ever seen.

  When her mother was paying inside, he told Isabelle that he wanted to go live on the Cape, right by the ocean, and he almost had enough money to do it. He had asked Isabelle for her phone number and suggested they go to a movie.

  “Not on your life,” her mother said, coming up behind him. “She’s way too young for you and way too smart and she’s going to college to be somebody.”

  Keeping her eyes fixed on the road, Isabelle opens the glove compartment and takes out the Saint Christopher medal her mother gave her, needing its reassurance. Impulsively, she loops it around her neck. Nora, her mother, would be stunned to know that Isabelle had kept it, that, in fact, this necklace is something she truly treasures. Everything had seemed like a wide open road back then, and of course that was before she knew that everything she had ever hoped for was impossible. “Safe travels,” her mother had told her, fastening the chain about Isabelle’s neck, even though Christopher’s sainthood was stripped a long time ago, even though Isabelle no longer believes in saints.

  Isabelle and Luke came home one evening, when Nora was supposed to be at work at the library. They had been seeing each other a year then. It was a summer evening, and Isabelle wanted to pick up money so they could go to dinner. But as they pulled up, her heart sank, because there was Nora’s little red sedan in the driveway. “Cheeze it, the cops,” she said, trying to stay light, and then, as they got closer, she saw all these bright bolts of color scattered across the front lawn. “What the fuck?” Luke said. He started to laugh. “Is this her way of spring cleaning?” he said, but Isabelle gripped his arm.

  “They’re my clothes.” Her voice was a rasp. There was her favorite blue dress, her winter coat, and all her junk jewelry sparkling among the dandelions. Her shoes were thrown on the bushes, her straw hat on the walk, her Saint Christopher medal gleaming on the lip of the lawn. The yard was a Jackson Pollock of clothes. Then the door banged open, and there was Nora, tall and beautiful back then, in the sleek green suit she had worn to work at her job in the library, her hair caught in a pin. Her arms were full of clothes and she stared hard at Isabelle and Luke, then opened her arms so the clothes tumbled out onto the front steps.

  Isabelle leaped from the car. “Mom!” she cried.

  “You don’t follow my rules, you don’t live under my roof,” Nora shouted, slamming the door shut so fiercely that Isabelle began to cry. “Mom!” she wailed.

  She made her way to the front door, grabbing up the Saint Christopher medal, picking up her sweaters, her skirts, bunching them in her arms. Her heart was racing so fast she was dizzy. She banged on the front door, rang the bell, but there was no response.

  She dug out her key and then she saw the new, shiny lock. “Mom!” she cried, slamming her hands against the door. “Mom!”

  She was banging on the door when she felt Luke touching her. “Shhh,” he said. He led her away, and when she bent down to get her clothes, he said, roughly, “Leave them. We’ll get you new ones. Better ones.” He guided her back to the car and then there was nowhere else for Isabelle to go even if she had wanted to, except with Luke.

  All she had with her were her cameras. “Drive slow,” she told him. She said it was because the cops around here were such hard-asses, but it was really because she wanted to give Nora a chance. She kept expecting her to run from the house, to call Isabelle, Isabelle, to stop Isabelle before she did something that couldn’t be undone.

  Isabelle and Luke drove to the Cape, landing in a tiny town named Oakrose, a place right outside Yarmouth, that all the signs said was famous for its sunny beaches and fried oysters. The beaches, though, were small and crowded, and Isabelle didn’t like oysters. Almost immediately Luke got a job at a local bar/café called Josie’s. Isabelle got a job taking pictures at You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby, a cut-rate child photography place where no one cared if the shots were artistic or you had a degree, as long as you were fast and could focus a camera. No one had come looking for Isabelle. Her mother had never called. Then the owner of Josie’s died, and Luke took all the money he had saved and got a loan to buy it, renaming it Luke’s. In that moment Isabelle somehow knew her mother would never come for her and Luke would never leave.

  She wore the Saint Christopher medal all through her new high school, forging her mother’s name on the paperwork, getting her records transferred, not really making friends because who else at sixteen lived with their boyfriend and not their parents. Who else worked every shift she could at the Leaning Tower of Pizza in order to save some money for film instead of going out and having fun? She wore it through the times she’d called home and gotten no answer, gripping it for comfort and hope. She’d worn it while she worked at the photo studio, loving the feel of it against her skin, the slide and flash, as she adjusted a child’s hair or repositioned her light meter. She swore the medal made her customers behave better because they thought she was a believer, when really, she had no idea what she believed in.

  And now here she is, thirty-six and married, and no longer a child, with no child of her own. There was never enough money for her to get the college degree she thought she’d have. Though she works at her photography, she’s never sold a photo or had a show. The necklace brings her bright, glimmery hope, and ridiculous as it is, it comforts her to feel it around her neck. It still makes her feel that things can change.

  She rolls up the windows and turns on the air conditioner. The car clicks and knocks. Luke had spent the last few years trying to get her to buy a better car, a little compact in a bright color instead of this black box that was always breaking down.

  “How can you love something that never runs right?” Luke always said. And her joke response was always, “Well, I love you, don’t I?”

  Three hours later and she’s still driving. She knows she has to stop for gas, so she gets off 1-95 South and heads deeper into Connecticut. The weather is muggy and strange, as if it doesn’t know what it wants, can’t decide if it’s going to rain or turn sunny.

  She’s in a white summery dress
, but still, sweat beads on her back. With one hand, she tries to gather up her hair, so long she’s practically sitting on it. Sometimes at the photo studio, the kids stare at her and ask her if she’s a witch with all that black hair, if she can do magic. “A good witch,” she says, smiling, but today, she’s not so sure. The wire-rimmed glasses she needs to drive slide heavily on her nose; when she takes them off, there’s a red mark on the bridge, like someone’s underlined her for emphasis. “You’re too sensitive for your own good,” Luke had always told her.

  And well, she is, isn’t she? She feels the cold more than Luke does, bundling in sweaters as soon as the fall chill hits. The heat makes her wilt. She feels hurts more, too. The way, even after all this time, the cards she sends her mother always come back in the mail, scribbled across them in her mother’s hand: addressee unknown. The way Luke sometimes looks at her when she surprises him at his bar. Though he says he is happy to see her, his blue eyes go cloudy, like an approaching storm.

  People comment on her sensitivity at work, too. Sometimes people say that she actually sees things that aren’t quite there yet. She’ll capture a serious, thoughtful look in a usually sunny child. Or make a delicate little girl look steely. Some people say that Isabelle captures the very spirit of a child, that it’s downright unearthly how you could look at one of Isabelle’s images and somehow see a child’s future. Years later, parents come back to the studio just to tell Isabelle how the serious and lawyerly looking baby she had photographed now wanted to be an actuary. How the delicately posed baby had signed with the Joffrey Ballet. How did you know? parents would ask. How could you know?