At eleven, when Dan and I sat drinking whisky in the living room, and the sun was still up, and the sky was red and the clouds feathered to gray, when we heard Elsa’s footsteps in the hall, heard the front door sliding open, my brother looked at me as he shouted, “Elsa?” And Elsa walked into the apartment, and through the dark space that we called the library. And she stood there at the edge of the room in the pool of light from a spotlight in the ceiling and said very simply, “Maybe you can manage to get Vee off her computer. I’m meeting Hedda.”

Dan looked at me, and I could tell he expected me to say something, so I said, “Sure,” because I didn’t know what else to say.

“Want to go with her, Cal?” said Dan. “I can hold the fort.”

I looked at Elsa.

“Better not,” she said.

As we watched, Elsa stepped out of the light and I saw her shadow move through the library and into the hall, and Dan was looking at me all the while.

“You okay with that?” he said, as the door swung shut.

And a part of me was running after Elsa, asking her not to go, but I said, “Price of a good marriage. Bit of give-and-take.”

“So your marriage is good?”

“Sure.”

“So you’re okay with bars and late nights? Wow.”

I said nothing.

He reached across, began to pour himself another whisky. “I don’t buy it, Cal.”

“Drop the concern. It’s what we do.”

“Elsa goes to bars while you sit at home, seething.”

“Do you see me seething?”

“And, I mean, these pictures of hers.” He gestured up at the print above the sofa. “All those huge swaths of Rothko red. All those purples. I’ve never known what they mean. I’m not even sure that I like them. But they express something, for fuck’s sake . . . Some kind of inner landscape . . .”

I looked up at Carmine 34. So young she had been when she had taken it. So full of confidence. So certain that this would be the picture that would make her name. And it did. For a time.

“They’re American crime scenes,” I said.

Dan laughed. “Aye, right.”

“No, they actually are,” I said. “Elsa had this agreement with the PD. She would travel out with the detectives, hang back until the crime scene technicians were done.”

My brother stopped laughing. “Okay.”

“Once the body was gone she would photograph what was left without a lens, using their lights.”

“Blood,” said Dan.

“And the other stuff. You know, transforming the viscera and the ooze and just the unbearable fucking cruelty of murder into something better, I guess.”

“She actually said that?”

“No, she said if she knew what her pictures were about, she wouldn’t have needed to make them.”