A Shade in the Mirror

by Tracey Lander-Garrett

  Maybe I was really into recycling?

  I brushed my hair, put on my key necklace and left the house early with my backpack slung across one shoulder.

  It was time to pay another visit to Derek.

  “Hey!” Derek said, looking up from the newspaper he was reading. He was in his characteristic perched pose on the stool behind the counter, in jeans and a plain white t-shirt.

  “Hi,” I said. “I was wondering if you had plans after work tonight.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do not.”

  Was he always free? “Do you even have friends?” I asked.

  He seemed insulted. “Friends? I? Why, yes, I do have friends. Loads of them.”

  “Yeah, right. I haven’t seen evidence of them. Should I make a flyer to add to your wall here?”

  I took a look at the bulletin board of occult want ads. One read “Team of Parapsychologists Seeks Volunteers” across the top. The fine print below mentioned a haunted estate in Sleepy Hollow. Someone had taken a red marker and written SATURDAY diagonally across it. I checked the date. It was this weekend.

  “Do you think I should sign up for one of these things? Do they pay?” I asked.

  I turned back to Derek. He was standing in profile with his arms crossed, frowning. “What?” I asked.

  “Do you really think I don’t have friends?” he asked in a dramatic voice, with one eyebrow raised. It was almost a Superman pose. I could practically see the cape hanging off his back.

  “I . . . don’t know,” I said with a laugh. “Do you have friends?”

  “Of course I have friends,” he intoned. “I am a bowler.” He made it sound like a sacred trust.

  “A bowler?” I asked. “I’d have thought basketball with your height.”

  He cracked a grin and dropped the pose. “I used to play. Even got a scholarship on it. Then I tore my ACL. No more basketball after that. Now I bowl every Sunday as part of a league. Got my own ball and everything.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. My team is called the Hand Cannons.”

  “Are you any good?”

  “They don’t call me Captain Hook for nothing,” he said, holding his hand in front of him and then flexing his arm and going through the motion of throwing an imaginary bowling ball with a twist of his wrist.

  “Captain Hook? Like from Peter Pan?”

  “No. For the bowling move.” He made the same flourishing motion with his wrist again. “Like that. On average I roll about a 180.” He looked at me expectantly.

  “I take it 180 is good?”

  “It’s above average,” he said, raising his chin.

  “Do I detect some false modesty there, Captain Hook?”

  “You might, Tinkerbell,” he said.

  I laughed. “So, what do you want to do tonight?” he asked.

  “We have a movie date, if I’m not mistaken,” I said.

  “We do,” he agreed.

  I told him when I got off and he said he’d see me then, and off to work I went. Along the way, I stopped at a kiosk to look up the number for the hospital where Kara was being treated. I called and the operator connected me to her room. She picked up immediately.

  “Hey, how are you feeling?” I asked. “It’s Madison.”

  “Hey! I’m pretty good,” she said.

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “Bean’s heartbeat was a little irregular,” she said, “but everything else seems fine. Just some breakthrough bleeding. It was all me, no fetal cells, nothing to worry about there.”

  “That’s good news,” I said. “Do you need anything from the apartment?”

  “No, that’s okay. My sister brought me some magazines and books to keep me occupied. Serge also brought some clean clothes I keep over at his place. That should last until they let me out in a couple of days. They have a few more tests they want to run.”

  A couple of days. That meant I had to solve our paranormal problem before then. I couldn’t let Kara come home to a haunted apartment. For the baby’s sake.

  “Okay—well, I’ll call and check in with you tomorrow, or the next day then?” I asked.

  “You don’t have to,” she said. No, I didn’t have to, but I wanted to. It was important to me that she was safe.

  “Has Serge been there a lot?”

  “Every day. He’s pampering the crap out of me. I’m seeing a whole new side of that man due to this pregnancy and now being in the hospital. Have you spoken to Julie, at all, by the way?”

  “No! You haven’t either?”

  A jittery guy in an old military jacket approached me and said, “I need the phone.”

  “There’s another one on 7th Ave. Just around the corner,” I said to the guy, and to Kara, “Sorry, some guy wants the phone.”

  The guy gave me a look of disgust and shuffled off towards 7th.

  “Oh, Maddy, get your own phone already,” Kara said.

  “I will, I will, I swear. Soon.” I said, crossing my fingers. “So you haven’t talked to Julie?”

  “Oh, no, I talked to her last night.”

  “Do you know when she’s coming home?”

  “Sunday night, I think? She said that Tad was taking her to a bed and breakfast in Connecticut for the weekend . . . must be nice. Hey, looks like you might have the whole place to yourself for a couple more days.”

  “Yeah, if it wasn’t kind of creepy, that’d be great.”

  “Has anything happened?” she asked, concerned.

  “No, it’s been fine,” I said. That was mostly true.

  “Well, that’s good. Just, um . . . don’t have any parties while we’re gone,” she said, and laughed. “I mean, I know you wouldn’t. It’s funny—you look young, but you don’t act at all like a teenager. I forget sometimes you aren’t my age.”

  “That’s nice to hear. But just to reassure you, I promise not to have any parties,” I said. Not that I’d have anyone to invite anyway.

  “I’ll check in with you tomorrow or the next day, okay? Say hi to Little Bean for me.” We exchanged goodbyes and hung up.

  Whew.

  No roommates for the weekend.

  Baby steps. Or no baby steps.

  It gave me time. I hoped it was enough.

  It was a fairly busy night at Christopher Street, but customer traffic slowed down considerably when it started raining again. Around half an hour from closing we were all bored and practically nodding off. Mac had spent the night training the new guy, Trendon. I was behind the cash register and Celeste was working bag check, rocking a cute pink t-shirt that matched her hair, along with neon pink fishnet stockings, low pink boots, and a short pink and black plaid skirt. The t-shirt featured an iron-on image of a white kitten surrounded by sparkles. It read CUTIE PATOOTIE.

  “How the hell do you have so many clothes that you can match them to whatever color your hair is and not wear the same thing every day?” I finally asked. It had been bugging me for weeks.

  “I borrow clothes from other girls on my floor or I pick things up at Village Vintage,” she said. “Like, the skirt belongs to a girl down the hall, the t-shirt I got from ViVi, but the stockings and boots are mine.”

  “So there is at least one good thing about living in the dorms,” I said. Celeste was not a fan of her living space.

  “The only good thing,” she replied, handing a customer’s messenger bag back to him.

  I rang up the customer’s purchase and put his comics into a bag. “Enjoy,” I told him brightly. He smiled and left.

  “You’re in a good mood,” Celeste said.

  “I am?”

  “Seems like it,” she said. “You working tomorrow?”

  “Nope, day off.”

  “That’s why you’re in a good mood.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Do you want to work?” she asked, tightening her pink ponytail.

  “Why? Are you looking for someone to cover your shift?”

  “Noon to six,” she said.
<
br />   “Ah, I can’t,” I said. “I have a thing at noon. An appointment. Otherwise I would.”

  “MAC?” Celeste yelled to the back of the store. It was just us four, no customers left.

  “WHAT?” he yelled back.

  “Ugh, stop yelling and go back there and talk to him,” I said.

  Celeste went skipping back and conferred with Mac for a few minutes, then returned.

  “If you’ll come in from three to nine, Mac says it would be okay. Billy will be here to open, and Trendon will come in from noon to four.”

  “Okay for you,” I said. “For me, that’s working six days in a row without a day off.”

  “What’s your Saturday schedule?” she asked. I told her and she offered to take my hours. “I’ll even take your Sunday hours too, if you want a real weekend. That way you get time off, and I don’t have to worry about tomorrow.”

  “What’s tomorrow?” I asked.

  “You’re asking the wrong question,” she said in a sing-song voice.

  “What question should I be asking?” I asked.

  “What’s tonight?” she said with a grin. She waited for me to ask. When I didn’t, she pouted. “Oh fine, I’ll just tell you then. A bunch of my friends got some Mollie and we’re going to Roseland to see Paul Perone.”

  I had no idea what most of those words meant, but I assumed they were important.

  Catching movement out of the corner of my eye, I looked down the long counter of various comic book paraphernalia and saw Mac coming out of the back with the new hire.

  “Everything okay up there?” Mac asked.

  “Quiet as a mouse,” I replied, looking through the window at the rain. “A very wet mouse.”

  “I’m showing Trendon the basement,” he said.

  “Good luck,” Celeste said. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  Trendon made an alarmed face. “Don’t listen to her,” Mac said, rolling up the sleeves of his immaculate dress shirt. He went down the steps to the basement, with Trendon following.

  “Anyhow,” Celeste began again, this time in a conspiratorial tone, “I’m a little worried about making it to work with the comedown and this way I don’t have to.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “You’ve never heard of Paul Perone?”

  “Nope.”

  “I guess you don’t like EDM or drum and bass, then.”

  “I guess not,” I said. She might as well have been speaking Italian.

  “No way,” Celeste said, her eyes looking a bit like Trendon’s had moments ago. “Tell me you know what Mollie is.”

  “I know what Mollie is?” I said, uncertainly.

  “What are you, a Mormon or something?”

  “Amish, actually,” I said. Amish, amnesia, fugue. Whatever.

  Her brow furrowed as she tried to determine if I was telling the truth. “You liar. You totally know,” she said.

  I let her think what she wanted.

  I wished I knew what she was talking about. Her Friday plans sounded a lot more fun than mine.

  Chapter Seven

  Charlie the Not-Tuna was still in residence on Derek’s living room wall. “Hey, Charlie,” I said.

  “I do that too,” Derek said. “It’s like, I can’t help but talk to it like it’s alive.”

  “I get it. I talk to all kinds of things that aren’t alive.”

  “So, what do you want to watch? The pizza should be here soon.” He’d placed the order while I was still taking my jacket off in his kitchen.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I’ve never even heard of most of your movies.”

  “Right!” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, really. I was just trying to come up with a system we could use.”

  “A system we could use for what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know, maybe help provide some clues about your memory loss? Maybe?”

  “Well, how about you just throw some titles at me?”

  “Alriiiiight,” he said, scanning his shelf. “How about we start with something easy. Jaws?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of Jaws.”

  “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

  “Duh.”

  “Star Wars.”

  “Double duh.”

  “E.T.?” he asked.

  “Are you messing with me?”

  “Well, it looks like your classic sci-fi knowledge is up to specs. How about something more recent? Have you seen Titanic?”

  “About the ship?” I asked.

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “No. Just a poster somewhere.”

  “I thought every girl had seen Titanic.”

  “Not me.”

  “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. What about Jurassic Park?” he asked.

  “That’s about . . . dinosaurs?” I asked, taking an educated guess. “Never heard of it.”

  He made a puzzled face at that. “Hmm. Interesting.” From the small table next to the futon he picked up brick-sized paperback book with dogeared pages and began flipping through it.

  “Why’s that interesting?”

  “I loved Jurassic Park when I was a kid,” he said. “Couldn’t get enough of it.”

  “Yeah,” I shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing comes to mind.”

  “Very interesting. Okay, I’m just going to read you a long list of movies. If you hear anything you recognize, that you know you’ve seen, stop me.”

  I said okay, and he began.

  “Star Wars Episode Three,” he said.

  “I know that one. With the little furry guys in the forest. Ewoks, right?”

  “Episode Three?” he asked. “Or Return of the Jedi?”

  “There’s a difference?” I asked.

  He shook his head and started again. I hadn’t heard of the next one, or the one after it. He probably read off two dozen movies until he got to Fatal Attraction.

  “Stop.”

  “You’ve seen Fatal Attraction?”

  “Yes. Psycho mistress boils bunny. Yuck.”

  “You saw Fatal Attraction but you never saw Roger Rabbit? You’re sure of that?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “That is weird.”

  “What’s weird about it?”

  He came and sat next to me with the book and turned pages for me to see. “First, I was just going by classics, of . . . popular culture, basically. Those you know, but only up to a point. Based on your age—you’re a little younger than me, but only by a few years—we should have seen some of the same ‘90s movies. But you haven’t seen any of them. And looking at this,” he pointed to the dog-eared book and opened to one page, “your knowledge of movies seems to stop . . . there.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, it’s less a where and more a when. 1987.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t seem to know any movies that were made after 1987.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Take a look for yourself,” he said. I took the book from his hand as the intercom made an alarming squawk from the other room. “Pizza,” he said, getting up. “I’ll be right back.”

  As he left the room, I gazed at the list of movies on the page he’d handed me. “Top-grossing Films of 1988” read the top of the page. I hadn’t heard of a single one of them.

  I flipped through the pages. From 1988 to 2014 (the last year the book covered) while there were plenty of comic book movies I had seen for sale in the store, from Batman to Spider-Man and X-Men, none of them were movies I knew. Not the way I knew that Jaws was about a killer shark, or that E.T. was a little beanbag alien hiding in a kid’s house, or how Fatal Attraction was about a crazy stalker lady.

  Why hadn’t it occurred to me before?

  Had I just assumed that they were movies that other people saw, but not me? Or that my fugue state had wiped my memory of them?

  The sound of
the front door closing was accompanied by the smell of garlic and cheese as Derek entered the room. My stomach growled.

  “Any luck?” Derek asked, pulling paper plates out of a plastic bag.

  “No,” I said, and pursed my lips. I didn’t know what to make of it.

  He opened the box and offered me a slice.

  After we’d each burned our mouths with piping hot cheese and put our slices down to let them cool, Derek said, “The thing that really gets me? You weren’t even born yet.”

  “What?”

  “When the movies you saw came out. I mean, sure, they’ve all played on TV a million times, so that’s not a big deal, but . . . it’s just weird.”

  That was one way of putting it.

  Chapter Eight

  Derek decided it was a crime against nature that I hadn’t seen Jurassic Park, so that was what we watched. My favorite part was the roar of the T-Rex. It sounded like a subway train fighting an elephant. But every now and then during the movie I’d find myself distracted.

  Why did I have this huge block in my mind? And why did it have such an arbitrary cut-off point?

  By the end of the movie, the kids made it out without getting eaten somehow, and the jackass lawyer and jerk programmer had both died, which they maybe probably deserved. You’d think that with all of the assholes in movies always getting killed, less people in the world would be assholes, but I guess nobody watches and thinks, “Hey! That asshole is just like me!”

  Everybody thinks they’re the hero. Even the assholes.

  As the credits rolled, Derek offered to let me stay at his place again. I’d hoped he would, since I wasn’t too eager to go back to my apartment. For a moment, I hoped he’d say I could sleep with him, but the minute I thought it I regretted it and hoped he wouldn’t. Had I jinxed myself? It was hard to tell.

  He brought out the same pile of sheets for the futon and wished me an awkward goodnight without trying to kiss me again. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or disappointed.

  The next morning, we both slept late, and he had to run downstairs to open the store. He wished me luck with my day.

  I changed clothes from my backpack, the ones I’d thrown in hoping I could stay at Derek’s, then let myself out and walked to the F train.