SHE WAITED A week, ten days. Then, as she was preparing to write a second time, a letter from Vera Murchison arrived.

Her agitation was such that she couldn’t open the envelope immediately. As if a dream secret and prized in her soul had blossomed outward, taking its place, asserting its integrity, in the world. . . . She placed the envelope carefully on a table and sat in front of it staring, smiling, a pulse beating in her forehead. How odd to see her name—Marya Knauer—her name—in a handwriting that belonged to her mother, a handwriting she did not recognize.

Marya, this is going to change your life, she thought, half in dread.

Marya, this is going to cut your life in two.

Finally she opened the envelope. She took out a sheet of white stationery with trembling fingers, and there was a color snapshot as well, she dropped it clumsily to the floor, stooped to pick it up, suddenly frightened, her heartbeat quick and suffocating. The snapshot showed a middle-aged woman with stiff gray hair, shadowed eyes, a taut suspicious expression, strong facial bones. Marya’s own cheekbones and nose. Her eyes. The woman’s mouth was tense but she might have been about to smile, summoning the strength to smile. She wore a dark dress with white trim, her shoulders were sloping and her bust rather heavy, her head defiant, erect. The print was just perceptibly blurred as if whoever had taken the picture had moved the camera at precisely the wrong moment.

Marya went to the window, holding the snapshot to the light, and stared and stared, waiting for the face to shift into perfect focus.

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.

Books by Joyce Carol Oates

BOOKS BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

With Shuddering Fall

A Garden of Earthly Delights

Expensive People

them

Wonderland

Do with Me What You Will

The Assassins

Childwold

Son of the Morning

Unholy Loves

Bellefleur

Angel of Light

A Bloodsmoor Romance

Mysteries of Winterthurn

Solstice

Marya: A Life

You Must Remember This

American Appetites

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

Black Water

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang