Marie

We'd all been warned about Mr. Duncan. We were told that he was a dangerous man, violent and unpredictable: an alcoholic. He was one of thirteen children, and they'd all been raised in a sod house built into the side of a hill somewhere in Tennessee. He'd joined the military to get away, and it was in the military that he met his wife. After completing their tours of duty they settled in Saratoga Springs, New York. They had three children: first Amy, then Henry, and years later when Mrs. Duncan was forty-six years old, Marie.

Mr. Duncan's drinking was a constant throughout their lives, and over time it only grew more extreme. With that began the physical abuse of his children as well as his wife. Marie was still a young girl when the marriage fell apart and Mr. Duncan disappeared.

His absence was randomly punctuated by terrifying evidence of attempts to return. A broken window in the kitchen door, blood smeared on the handle and leaked in steady drips throughout the house, or another broken window, but this time the glass shards laid out on Marie's bed beneath her sheets. He never left notes, entreating or threatening, and no obvious evidence connected him to any of the break-ins. But it couldn't have been anyone else.

The two oldest kids were out of the house before Marie was a teenager. When they left, Mrs. Duncan moved to another house, and she and Marie lived in it like roommates.

Mrs. Duncan was gentle and soft-spoken, with shoulder-length gray hair, small features, and glasses that framed her sensitive eyes. She'd been exhausted and drained by violence, by the ways in which her marriage had disintegrated, and the knowledge that this was known and discussed, without malice, in the neighborhood. In her early sixties with a teenage daughter, she didn't have much fight left in her. Marie, exceptionally bright, ambitious, and self-directed, was no trouble and as a result was practically free to come and go as she pleased, with the implicit trust of her mother.

This couldn't have suited Marie or my sister, Michelle, better. Our families had drifted apart during the five years after we'd moved from Saratoga to Schenectady, but one afternoon when I was fourteen and Michelle was about fifteen, Michelle announced that she wanted to go back to Saratoga to visit Marie. That was all it took. For the first year of their revived friendship, Michelle was at Marie's or Marie was at our house nearly every other weekend. On the Sunday afternoons when Michelle came home from Marie's, she was disappointed to be back but cloaked in a dreamy, inspired state. Another life had opened up for her.

There was the modest Victorian house that Marie lived in with its cavernous rooms, dark walls, and vaulted ceilings. There were Marie's friends, laid-back, sophisticated kids with cool, artistic parents. And there was Marie, with her intellect and intensity, her insistence on staying up until dawn to track down and talk about everything, everyone, every feeling and idea.

And there was the love Michelle and Marie had for each other—preeminent and entirely their own.

Michelle had pictures to prove it all. Black and white photos, the more artistic the better. Marie, staring out a bay window into mottled, overexposed leaves and silvery shadows, a tea mug held in her hand with the handle turned away from her: a gesture that spoke to me of her impatience with the obvious. Marie lying on her bed, her hair, darkened and wet from the shower, tossed back and cascading out of the frame, the planes of her exposed cheek and forehead as soft as burnished pewter.

There were pictures taken during aimless walks around Saratoga. Spontaneous pictures of nothing; a moment caught, a mood in a wedge of light on the floor, a picture of the song that was playing.

I eventually found myself captured by that same camera, my image dialed down to black and white. Scrutinizing my own face was a...