Toby was collecting the dinner dishes when he found the strip of pictures. A pile of books Sophie had been using in her latest project for the museum sat between the plates on the kitchen table. Shifting them to one side to pick up a plate, two books about Colorado wildflowers slid off the top and revealed a thick paperback entitled Your Body, Your Baby. On the cover a woman rocked her infant to sleep, smiling serenely in a flowing white dress. Toby did not believe this version of motherhood, not for a minute. This was a fabrication constructed as much to sell babies as it was to sell books. He thumbed through it, and felt something slip out at Chapter Four: "Your Body at Four Months." He stooped to pick up what had fallen, thinking it was just another pressed flower. But it was a four panel photo booth picture strip. There was no way to tell its age against the age of the book, its last perusal, its position among the other books.

They were of a woman's naked torso—Sophie—from her shoulders to just below her belly button. He knew it was Sophie because of the mole, a small hard bump on her left breast. If the human heart really did lie over the left breast and not the center of the chest, this mole would point hers out. The marking was as familiar to him as the terrain of her face: the wings of her nose, the fine dark hairs before her earlobes, the scar just at her hairline inflicted trying to safely navigate a passage of barbed wire as a child.

The blinding instant between the warning light and flash found his wife exposed, her shirt lifted above her, covering her face at its remove. Her breasts floated in the overexposed whiteness of her torso. The second frame was a profile, exposing a glimpse of the nimble curve of her naked back. It seemed she was standing now, as she was headless. In the third square she was facing forward again, but her head still resisted the eye of the camera. In the last he could see her chin and mouth as she bit her bottom lip, the iceberg tip of one white tooth shining between two soft rose lips. In all four, her small breasts jutted out before her as she arched her back, her nipples tight knots contracted against a breeze blowing up from under the curtain.

In the next room Sophie sat watching television, twirling a lock of hair around her forefinger as she sang along to a jingle for a product he had never heard of. A storm outside had gathered steam at just that moment, the window above the sink had rattled against itself behind him like a warning against speaking.

As Toby clinked dishes together in the swift, slippery rush of rinse water, it began to snow. He didn't say anything about the pictures to Sophie, somehow knowing if he did he would never see them again. He dried his hands and tucked the pictures into the waistband of his shorts, calling to his wife, "I'm going back to bed. I've got to be at the airport by seven."

"Wait up. I'm just up with you. I don't like being in that bed alone," she said, fishing for the light switch under a lamp. In the dark, she stood on her tiptoes to kiss him, leaning all her weight against him. With one hand he pushed her away, while with the other he grabbed her long hair, bringing it to his lips.

"I miss you," he said.

"And you're not even gone yet," she smiled. He gave her hair a tender pull and let it fall back against her. He watched his wife squeeze her right hand tightly shut against his chest, her nails dug into the softest part of her palm. The knuckles spoiled for something, her skin stretched white against the bone.

The cabin was overly warm, the stale recirculated air heated to the point where it began to reveal old smells, meals from other flights, the ghostly perfume of passengers long arrived at their destinations. Toby's fingers were moist, leaving oily fingerprints on the surface of the pictures. He hunched over them in his window seat, studying them as he might a map—scanning them for anything familiar.

As they descended into Salt Lake City, Toby could see the low edges of the lake were already frozen, mud and ice strangely foreign, like the surface of the moon. As he waited for his bags he kept feeling the urge to check on the strip in his briefcase, just to ensure that he hadn't dropped it. Each time it struck him with a new trill of fear, the icy fingers of some inner storm. He swiped a hand across his sweaty brow and tried to get hold of himself. His hands were shaking.

He had used one of those booths with a girlfriend in high school, their faces pressed cheek to cheek, she sitting on his lap, the booth meant for just one. They invariably came out ruined—blurry, having flashed too soon, capturing the moment of preparation for the picture they had wanted. These were all perfect, however, a testament to his wife's uncanny sense of timing.

In these pictures, his wife was not pregnant. This seemed to him the most curious aspect of them. They had to be at least four or five months old. Where were they going, and to whom? Why hadn't he asked her what they were?

Fifteen minutes after he landed in Salt Lake it began to snow, the thick white fall of it like feathers. Everything was muffled and silent on the way to his hotel, and even as the rental car slipped and skidded on the surface streets he felt safe—there was no one to hit. It was as if the whole city had been warned about the oncoming storm, and he was the only person not notified.

In the late fall, after the first snowstorms, Fargo looked like St. Paul, looked like Salt Lake, looked like Spokane. Cold and gray, even the buildings huddled the ground, close together for warmth. For Toby these trips were one long presentation, the same industrially decorated hotel rooms, one greasy bad meal after another. It used to be fun, back before he was married—new people, new places. But he had been in the Chicago, New York, Los Angeles market then. The only way to be at home with his wife was to take the lesser Northern markets, and he hated every minute of it.

The only thing that kept him going on this trip was a strip of pictures, four moments of frozen succession, in which his wife's body undulated: cool, white, distant. He took her with him to the new product orientations, the marketing meetings, the lunches and drinks and dinners that he could never seem to taste. Usually he swallowed them in much the same way he churned out his presentations. It was a lot like what he imagined acting to be—external, rote, and unreal. But on this trip, everything was different. He noticed himself eating more and with relish, ordering things he would normally never try, like curry and shark and even a buffalo steak. And he began to notice chinks in his presentations, whole blocks he would blank out on and have to look at his notes. Whole seconds where he would begin to sweat while he chanted in his head: Think, Think, Think.

Because of the blizzard he was delayed a day in getting to Fargo, so for the next three days he was too busy playing catch-up to do more than study the photo strip briefly before falling into bed.

On Friday, Sophie called. "Where have you been?"

"Right here. Why?" There was an anger in her voice that surprised him. He had, in those few days, forgotten the intricacies of her temper.

"Not on Tuesday, you weren't."

"I was stuck in Salt Lake. Have you been watching the weather?"

"You're such a liar. I'll bet you were hiding out with some blond you keep there." He could hear a playful shift in her voice as if she had switched the phone from one ear to the other. It was the easiest thing for him to follow.

"No, she's in St. Paul. And actually, she has dark hair."

"Like mine?"

"A lot like yours, actually. She has this habit—she does this thing that drives me crazy. She twists it into this rope—"

"Sounds kinky."

"Shhh. I'm trying to tell you." Toby was whispering, without knowing when he had started. "She twists it into a rope and then tosses it over her shoulder. Unbelievable."

"I don't know if I like this girl."

"There's more." Toby picks up the pictures of his wife's torso, floating, seeming to swell in the whiteness that he isn't sure is the background, or still her body. "Can you handle it?"

"Maybe." Sophie is smiling, he can hear it in her voice. It is as if he is talking to the woman in this picture, this woman that he doesn't know.

"She has this mole over her heart, that's almost heart shaped. Maybe someday it will be."

"She should get that looked at."

"Oh, she does. It gets looked at all the time." It's time to stop this odd, playful conversation, but he can't. "Her skin is the color of new snowfall. It looks like the shadow of a bird flying over a field of deep snow."

"It's snowing here. Did you know that?" He had gone somewhere she didn't recognize, and the sound of her voice was overly bright, forcing a change of subject while she tried to figure out what had happened.

"No."

"I had to ask Mr. Chambers to come and light the pilot light. It got down to fifty here the other night."

"Was it much trouble?"

"No. I know how to do it now, though."

"Well, good." Just then he pictured Sophie, wearing one of his shirts and a pair of pajama pants, one hand on her belly, absently rubbing herself as she leaned against the doorjamb in the kitchen. The image was so strong he dropped the pictures, unsure they were his wife after all. The next day, he could not remember any more of what they had talked about. He could not even remember if he told her that he loved her when he said goodbye.

It wasn't until a week and a half into his trip that he began to make connections between his performance on the trip and his seemingly addictive need to examine Sophie's photo strip. In Spokane, he picked up a copy of the book he had found the pictures in, feeling all the while as if its purchase announced facts about him he wasn't prepared for anyone to know. In a section entitled: "Nine Months and Counting" each month contained a sketch of what this stage of pregnancy should look like. The drawings, cross-sections of the womb with ever-enlarging fetuses worried him in a way that he couldn't quite discern.

He was conducting a new product orientation the next day when the book spilled out of his briefcase with a batch of marketing reports and lay on the table, obvious and large. He did not explain it—he could not find the words at all—instead scooping it up and continuing, his cheeks warmer than he would have liked. It was as if he had no control over his body this entire week away from Sophie.

And then, somewhere between the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport and his hotel room, he lost them. He'd placed them in the pregnancy book for safekeeping, but somewhere, in juggling and sifting through the contents of his briefcase looking for tickets and confirmation numbers, it vanished.

Toby sat on his hotel room floor and dumped its well-organized contents in a pile and began sifting through his paperwork, combing through his appointment book, and swearing softly under his breath. Next his suitcase came apart, and for a brief moment he thought he had found it in the breast pocket of his blue suit, but it was just a receipt. Then he was pacing the room, cursing louder and swiping his hands through his hair. Perhaps he had left it out on the dresser in the hotel in Spokane and the maid had taken it. Or perhaps it had fallen out of the book where he sat reading in the terminal while he waited for his flight to be called. At any rate, he was too embarrassed to go looking for it, or to ask anyone if they had seen it.

Still he could not deny that the moment he realized they were missing there was a great relief that began trickling through him, too. He suddenly seemed able to breathe deeply again. A tightness in his chest he had not even been aware of suddenly lifted. And most telling of all, he began to slip into his presentations again with the hypnotic power of a warm bath. Food began to loose its pull, and he no longer felt the need to order the special. He was himself again, more or less, but for reasons he couldn't quite apprehend it made him nervous.

For the next three days Toby was incredibly thirsty. He couldn't seem to drink enough water. It sloshed in his stomach all day like a half-full canteen he was carrying on his chest. On his last night in St. Paul he had that dream again, the one where his grandfather removed his eye, the glass one, and offered it to him. Holding out his arm he pushed it at Toby, smiling gently, his right eye somehow at the same time clearly in his head. A gouge like the groove a tear might make was the only proof that this was his grandfather. The same one whose car had fallen on him while he was working on it, the jack slipping loose at just the wrong moment. But in the dream he was whole again, and seemed to be passing the glass eye on to his grandson. If he believed in omens, he might have understood it, but he couldn't bring himself to think about what it might mean.

Still he was frightened by it, and he lay there listening to their breathing, his heart beating short staccato taps like Morse code on his rib cage. He could see the gray suggestion of dawn through the gap between the thick hotel curtains, and he waited for it. It seemed a certainty he could use just then.

Toby thought again about area rugs and the pilot light, all those ways he should be helping. But nowhere he was: married to this woman he had known less than a year, living in a house he had sunk all his savings into, working harder than he wanted to just so he didn't have to travel as much—none of it made sense to him. And now there was this new brick on the pile, and he could feel the earth beneath them shifting, upsetting their precariously arranged life. This new thing threatened to break them. He did not know how the missing pictures might play into the rest of it, but he knew his only hope was that she hadn't missed them. Loving Sophie was the hardest thing he had ever had to do, because it was never the same thing twice, and he could never predict what might happen next. He saw her in their bed curled up one side, her head buried between the pillows. It was still night in Denver, would still be for an hour. She's sleeping like a baby, he thought. She doesn't even know I'm not meant for this.

Sophie had not mentioned the missing photos on the phone to him, so Toby could hope that she might think she had misplaced them, they had simply slipped out of the book someplace besides the kitchen table. Still, he began to feel sick to his stomach on the flight home. As they touched down, the fleeting thought of a crash bannered through his mind, only to leave just as quickly. But no, they were pulling up to the terminal. A woman was singing the connecting gates over the PA system. He was up and moving towards the terminal against his will, one foot moving in front of the other.

Sophie was waiting for him in the passenger seat of the Explorer, parked in the white zone. She had parked right up near the doors so he wouldn't miss her, and she was curled up as tight as she could get. Her face was pressed against the glass, her eyes closed, and she was gray, almost the color of oatmeal against the white afternoon light. Toby knocked lightly against the window to get her attention, and she jerked upright.

She rolled down the window and rubbed her eyes with one hand like a child, her face wrinkled to a pout.

"You're late," she said. "I've been waiting here for an hour."

"Sorry," he said. "There's a storm coming. I guess it's screwed up everything." She nodded and rolled up the window, settling back into her version of the fetal position. Toby threw his bags in the back and bounced into the driver's seat, suddenly and without reason cheerful.

He started the car. "You don't look so great."

"Whoever called this morning sickness did not have me in mind." Sophie shook her head slowly. She was supposed to be done with morning sickness at this point, but so far it hadn't happened. She said it felt like a sucker punch, a wave of nausea washing over her when she least expected it.

"My poor, sweet Sophie," he said. He ran a hand over her hair and held her cheek briefly. Then turned the key and put the car in gear. Toby headed home, feeling safe behind the wheel. He felt, for the first time in two weeks, in control of himself.

They both chewed on silence for a few miles, and Toby thought, this is the way it should be—we don't have to say anything.

"I think you have something of mine," Sophie said carefully just as Toby merged onto I-25 and headed towards downtown. "And I want it back."

It seemed, after everything, that there was nothing to say, and so Toby drove on, the only sound the squeak of the windshield wipers as they brushed away snow.

Finally, without looking up or opening her eyes, Sophie said, "Did you hear me?"

He wanted to say yes, or even no, just something, anything. But there was nothing to say that wouldn't hurt him, and it was as if his mouth, his lips wouldn't betray him no matter how much he knew that he should speak.

"They might have been for you anyway," she said. There was a sadness in her small voice, but it was possible for Toby to ignore it over the loud rush of the heater. "But now there's no way you'll ever know."