Chapter 1
NO SNOW, NOT through the entire wretched month of December, nor into January this year, which has been unseasonably warm.
Awake before the alarm, Anna looked out at the trees that faced her bedroom window, tall, grim, gray specters.
When she was growing up in Massachusetts, she could depend on one thing in these cold, bare months, and it was the pleasure of waking up to unexpected snowfall.
Heart racing, she would turn on the television to watch the scrolling of town names, alphabetical, a crazy-making exercise.
Her town began with an N, Newburyport. It was always promising to see Essex County rival Amesbury closures up toward the top of the list. That meant mostly good news: a snow day, or at least a delayed start, with parents off to work and the exotic, silent, snowcapped world all to herself for the day.
But sometimes the South Shore towns got hit harder, or Newburyport’s coastal location created a sort of buffer of insulation.
You were sure to end up in school if it was six inches or less.
No magic in walking up the streets in boots over flared jeans, that was for sure.
What she would give, she sometimes thought, to relive those mornings.
Even a dusting would feel prophetic at this point, a sign of the mere existence of winter and not climate change and rot.
Anna’s house, which she shared with her son, daughter, husband, and dog, was perched high on a hill and looked down onto Hamilton’s busiest road, which was, in the quickening dawn, slicked by rain.
A kind of bruising sky, she noted, has started to emerge in the direction of Cutler’s Pond, where she once imagined her children would learn to ice skate, but she had put that vision away, along with other feeble notions of parenthood.
Sometimes, it was good enough just to survive.
“So early again,” she heard her husband, Denny, say, as she skipped the lights in the bedroom and attempted to tiptoe through the dark, making more noise than she meant to.
It did seem like each day the clock ticked back earlier and earlier, but what was she to do with all of those extra minutes—those extra hours—anyway?
This time, it was not useful. When we want things to slow down, she thought, we cannot, and when we want things to speed up, they only drag on, like heels through wet sand.
Only after she had closed the door to the dark primary bathroom did she turn on a sconce and study her face.
Forty-two years old. Fine lines just starting to crawl out from around her mouth, but otherwise—this she would confess—she wasn’t bad-looking.
She had not fallen even a little gray yet, only dyed her hair to get rid of the ordinary brown color her mother used to refer to as mousy.
(The first time: eighth grade, a semi-permanent dye called “Glints” by Clairol that turned her hair a shiny and forgiving auburn and that washed out in under three weeks.) Up it went now, into a loose ponytail, a honey-brown blond that looked like it had spent time in the sun, even in the Massachusetts winter.
Hazel eyes stared back at her from the long, flat mirror in the bathroom, where everything needed to be replaced, if they ever got around to it: the greige bathroom that they inherited from the Greek owners before them, the ones who preferred to keep their furniture large and at odd angles, who liked light fixtures encrusted with fake gems, who decorated in colors named after vegetables.
Aubergine. Bell Pepper. She and Denny had chipped away at the rooms one at a time, building a Farrow & Ball fantasy: high-gloss, wallpaper, brushed brass, their living, breathing masterpiece, part of the pretension of existing in this wealthy New England town, where you had to dress up to walk the damn dog, for Christ’s sake.
Downstairs, Anna enjoyed her favorite five minutes of the day, before Denny, before the dog, Hank, and his clawing at the slider, before the kids and the backpacks and the school lunches, and even before the hum of the very expensive automatic espresso maker that cost over $2,500 but leaked onto the counter every time they refilled the water canister.
The kitchen was silent, and a little bit dark, and a little bit cold, and Anna Plummer, a small, average mother, did the thing she did every single morning when she came down here into a room that she liked well enough: sighed deeply, looked around, and felt precisely nothing.
There was nothing wrong, and if she were the kind of person who measured out her life in spoons—good or bad, depending on how you read the metaphor—well, even she would agree that there was enough to be thankful for.
A sea of bluestone pavers extended out from beyond the sliding glass doors.
Past the pavers was grass that had seen better days, the edge to the cleared property, where oak trees rose up from the soft and fallow ground.
The January rains had made everything wet and tender, springy and covered in mud.
She had a job. Boring, yes, but it paid okay, and it was predictable.
Copywriting, some might say, even used the part of her brain that mothers in wealthy towns felt went dormant after too many years spent rearing children. Driving carpool. That sort of thing.
Anna twisted the oval engagement ring around her finger again and again.
Force of habit—she never actually took it off.
She glanced at the clock on the stove. Not quite six.
Would Di be awake, she wondered? Should she chance it?
It wasn’t really like she had anything all that important to say.
More like she wanted company in this desolate skeleton hour, and Di, with two kids and a cold and achy house of her own, might be awake, too, watching the steam rise off her coffee, thinking about the time that seemed to go nowhere at this hour of the morning.
Did you watch? she texted, meaning the latest episode of a Real Housewives franchise that they’re extremely into right now.
No, and no spoilers. I mean it. I know how u are.
Not even a pause between texts. Anna did feel gratitude that she was not the only one up in these dark hours, driving her husband so crazy, even if her best friend of thirty years wouldn’t let her gossip about television strangers.
Ok, ok, but what else am I supposed to talk about
Idk. Your annoying husband. Your annoying kids. Whatever ppl talk about when they’re not talking about tv
Fine Louisa threatened to cut her hair yesterday and I told her over my dead body and I think she considered it
My turn. Henry is so bad at soccer that the coach suggested he switch to t-ball.
Ok that’s genuinely embarrassing Di I’m sorry
Three dots lingered for a minute—Di was writing something or thinking about it and erasing it—but then the text chain went still.
Truth was, Anna didn’t have much to say, either.
She was just killing time, waiting for the dawn, for something wild and interesting to happen, and it felt like it was mostly like that these days, on the precipice of a story that was about to be written, if only someone could figure out how to start writing it.
When she was young, Anna wanted to be an artist. It wasn’t that she possessed any more or less talent than the average student.
She hadn’t mastered perspective particularly early, nor was she adept with a pencil.
But there was something romantic about distilling life into an oil painting.
And it was oil that drew her—not the cheap paints known as egg tempera.
Tempera could be washed out. There was a reason that the classic artists all painted in oil, that the resounding and resilient art that lasted for centuries—that was painted upon frescoes and that was painstakingly studied by art historians—was produced in oil pigment, powders from nature’s original colors mixed with, yes, oil.
Anna had experimented with all kinds of art: fan brushes, palette knives, pointillism, collage, even a phase where she just threw paint at the canvas like Jackson Pollock.
That phase had been inspired by his 1998 retrospective at MoMA, but if she was being honest, she had never heard of Pollock before, had just read about him in the paper and had followed the trail of hopeful academics, and had been just as enthralled as the glamorous then-couple Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke as she had been by the art itself.
It was a little different, years later, when the Gerhard Richter exhibit came up.
By then, MoMA had been renovated, she was deep into an unofficial minor in art history, and halfway through a class on German Expressionism that threatened to turn her off art altogether, something about Richter’s candle painting—the one from Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation—arrested her.
Some artists see a master in real life and chase the high forever.
The actual thing—the painting—reignites their passion.
For Anna, it was a recognition that she would never paint like that.
She could never make a candle look like it was absolutely glowing on canvas.
That kind of talent was like a haunting, supernatural spirit.
Eventually, she packed up her oils. Art was just another old and abandoned dream.
There was no reason to consider the abandonment of childhood ambition in this specific moment, although Anna had spied a tangle of art on the kitchen island, her son’s.
He had a natural fluidity, an ease with a pencil.
He could see a thing and translate it without looking down, a trick she remembered hearing that Picasso used to train his own eye: Put the pencil to paper, stare at an object, and don’t look down at the paper itself.
Make the line do the work and live with the results.