Picture Perfect

Molly bounces into the car, holding the envelope up like a trophy. She glances at Finn briefly, happily, and pulls out the pictures. He reaches down and turns the key in the ignition. Then he hears her gasp.

"What's this? What's this?" Molly sucks in a long, jagged breath. Finn looks down. She clutches the stack of photos, and, as he bends closer, peering past her whitened knuckles to the pictures, the image of his ex-wife stares up at him. My God, he thinks, she's beautiful. The edge of his vision blurs. The image seems suddenly to shrink as the sound of his breathing merges with the noise of cars in the parking lot. The world rolls over him. His face feels thick and numb.

"How is this possible?" Molly wails. Finn glances up at her. She is white, stricken.

"Don't look," he says, snatching the photos away. "Where did you get these?"

"On my desk. I thought it was the film I'd lost."

"Impossible," he says. "How could this be on your desk, for God sake? It's years old. I didn't even know it existed. How could it just appear? It must have been in my desk, back in a drawer." He is talking too much, too fast, and he steals another quick look at the photo. His ears ring, but he can't look away. The woman in the picture is wearing a pair of earrings she'd just made. That dates the shot to the third year they were married—fifteen years ago. "You must have looked through my desk and found the canister, and thought it was yours."

"No. It was on my desk." She sobs once.

"How in hell could that happen?" He looks into the rearview mirror. The eyes of a fugitive stare back at him, and the eyes are ugly. He slams the car into gear and backs it up. "It wouldn't just appear," and he thinks, desperately, trying to remember if he stumbled on the canister himself, thought it was hers or something current, set it on her desk to be developed, and forgot about it. Or worse, done it unconsciously but somehow deliberately, forcing the darkness into the light—for this, he thinks, is the kind of terrible joke that we can only play upon ourselves. But he can't remember. He doesn't want to remember. No, surely to God not, he thinks. She must have stumbled on it, poking around in a fog, absent-minded as always.

"What was on your film? Where could it have gone?" he asks, forcing his voice to sound calm and concerned.

"I don't know."

The car feels cramped and floating. He stares out the window. The face of his ex-wife burns in the air. Oh God, oh God, he thinks. Morgan, Morgan, Morgan. He thinks back to the telephone call two years ago. When are you going to leave your wife? the woman beside him had asked. Why? he'd answered. So we can be together, she'd said. Finn is suddenly crushed by an enormity he cannot fathom, but he turns to face it.

Beside him, Molly leans forward in the seat and buries her face in her hands. Her shoulders shake. Finn looks at her now, and realizes in a searing rush that he sometimes hates her, hates the way she looks, the tiny burst veins in her cheeks, the creepy, translucent skin on her eyelids, teeth weakened by pregnancies, the crooked, generic nose, surgically remade and accidentally broken almost immediately afterwards by an old lover, all, all the doings of other times and other men. A history he wants no part of, and no part in. But here he is.

She sits in the seat, sobbing. You pathetic bonehead, he thinks, how can you do this to yourself?

She raises her head; her hands are collapsed in her lap. Finn looks at her fingers, spade-shaped, intertwined, defeated. "I look so old," she says.

"Sweetheart," he says, "you look lovely." Her fingers grope towards his, tentative, trembling. He takes them, and...