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though she had eavesdropped her way invisibly through her formative years. Her mother had a knack for lowering her voice in a way that nevertheless made her words completely audible, like an actress miming discretion: “She’s going to Holyoke. She wasn’t accepted at Radcliffe but apparently at Holyoke you can keep a horse.”
    “Does she ride?”
    “Rebecca? Certainly not.”
    Below the stream there was an open space where a tree had fallen, the trunk splintering and then disintegrating into paledust. A blanket of low plants with knife-shaped leaves grew around it, and where the plants thinned there was a white cross about three feet high. At its foot was something glittering on the ground, and as Rebecca drew near she saw that it was a small trophy of some kind, with a faux marble base and a girl atop, garishly golden, hoisting what looked to Rebecca like a basketball.
    (It was a volleyball. Rebecca had studied at the Art Students League after school instead of playing team sports.)
    At first she had the angle wrong, looking for the light and losing the image. But after a few minutes she had maneuvered herself to one side, kneeling, squatting, leaning forward. It was as it had been many times before: she could not have said precisely what made the juxtaposition of the simple white cross and the cheap trophy amid the foliage an image that spoke to her. It simply did. Just for a moment it was pure, fine, not about the fact that she had been up in the middle of the night doing the arithmetic, running the numbers, wondering again how she could get to year’s end with something left in her account and a cushion for the year to come. She knew it when she saw it, and she saw it, and her heart sped.
    She considered for a moment whether the image might be more telling if the trophy was standing up—she had no way of knowing that the trophy had originally been placed standing up and had fallen over soon after—but she had never liked what she secretly thought of as messing about with things, though she always described it in lectures as “manipulating reality” because that sounded smarter, more like what people expected to hear. It had become part of her story, what critics called her aesthetic, that she photographed what was there without moving, rearranging, interfering. The cross would have to be photographed the way she had found it, the trophy in whatever fashion it had fallen.
    When she got to her feet she saw that the fawn and its motherwere looking at her through the trees, their ears fanned to catch the sound, their nostrils flared to catch the scent. She didn’t even bother to raise her camera. Nature was not her milieu. She looked down at the cross and the trophy. Maybe, she thought. Maybe not. Maybe. Yes.

KNEW IT WHEN HE SAW IT
    Two days later Jim Bates came through the same clearing. There was a fresh cut on his hand just below the knuckles; it was taped up like a boxer’s before the gloves went on. He cut his hands so often that he could minister to himself one-handed, although he sometimes had to hold adhesive tape between his teeth. He kept a first aid kit in the back of the truck.
    He was looking up, looking for birds, and so he was almost in front of the cross when he finally saw it. A few stray poplar leaves had fallen on the base of the trophy. The cross was leaning the least little bit because a mole had begun to dig a tunnel beneath: probably no one would notice unless they had seen Rebecca’s photographs, and Jim hadn’t. That was later.
    He looked down and saw what Rebecca hadn’t really noticed until she looked at the photographs on her computer: that invery faint pencil the letters “RIP” had been written at the center of the cross, where the two pieces of wood were crudely nailed together.
    “Ah, hell,” Jim said. “Ah, hell.” He pulled the cross loose from the ground, put it under one arm, picked up the trophy, and reopened the cut on his hand, so that it began to bleed a bit