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at the walls, and something about the way she said it told Rebecca that she had told her friends that she was living in Rebecca Winter’s apartment, that she had expected to point this out to guests: that? Yes, it’s a Rebecca Winter. From the Baby Boy series.
    Rebecca never hung her own work in her home. She felt it would be like talking to herself. Which she did a fair amount in the cottage these days. Otherwise she would never speak to anyone.
    Instead of walking along the winding roads she had settledon hiking, which she had discovered was both more difficult and more likely to yield photographic possibilities. She carried her cameras in a nylon backpack. There was a dry wall of stone that she had photographed from a number of angles and that she thought might have possibilities. There was an old paper wasp nest built around the limb of a pine tree that had galvanized her for an entire morning and then when she looked at the pictures afterward on the computer screen they’d amounted to nothing, nothing that made her feel or think or look twice or hard. They were photographs you had to explain, which meant they were a failure.
    The biggest revelation she’d had about her own work had come one night from a nice man, a sociologist—Rebecca knew his first name was Richard, couldn’t remember the last. But she would always remember the only time he’d been invited to dinner and had quoted a Supreme Court justice on pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Peter had waved his hand—“utter sophistry, and so American,” he had said. Everyone had fallen silent since Peter was considered to be the expert at the table, perhaps the world’s greatest expert on medieval erotica, called in the student newspaper Professor Porn. But Rebecca had found the man’s statement, like most very simple things, compelling, and she thought of it often afterward when she looked at her own photographs. She knew it when she saw it. And when she didn’t, she knew that, too.
    In July, on the hottest day of the year, she found the first cross. She had hiked straight up the mountain, winding around trees and outcroppings on the well-worn deer trail, disturbing a spotted fawn and its mother just beneath a stream that burst into a pool below a tumble of rocks. She still found the utter silence of the house at night disconcerting—one night she had awakened to the faraway harangue of an ambulance siren and found herself comforted by the city sound—but in the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds wereloud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and then swishing down and thump on the ground, the hiss of water coming off the mountain.
    She had become more sure-footed and harder in the two months she’d been here, her arms tanned to the shoulder, her long face freckled and leathery. Jeans hung loosely on her already narrow hips; her metabolism seemed to have shifted, too, the push-push of the city given way to something slower, softer. Most of the clothes she had brought with her were useless, the kinds of things she thought of as casual and utilitarian in New York which here seemed as grand as a gown. When she had gotten the clock and the watch at the Walmart, she’d bought two pairs of cheap jeans, some overalls, a six-pack of men’s T-shirts, and a pair of hiking boots. She’d run out of most of the unguents she’d brought from the city and used some cream on her face she’d found at the supermarket. She rarely looked in the mirror. She had never worn makeup except lipstick to parties, and lip balm protectively.
    “She can’t be bothered to make an effort,” her mother would say to one of the women who came to play bridge. That was how Rebecca’s mother always let her know what she thought, by telling other people while she was around as if she wasn’t there at all. It was as