The Mirror

by Marlys Millhiser

  She coughed. “What … was that?”

  “A sleeping pill.” Rachael swallowed one without water.

  “Sleeping … oh, no …”

  “Listen, darling, I know you don’t approve of them. But we all need help tonight.”

  Rachael pulled Brandy back down the hall, removed the robe and tucked her into Shay’s bed. “Sit tight. These are powerhouses.” She turned out the light with the button beside the door. “You won’t even dream, believe me.” Shay’s mother was gone.

  “I mustn’t sleep.” A sleeping compound was the last thing she needed this night. If it was anything like laudanum …

  I have to get to Denver. The body’d already been tired and Brandy already sleepy.

  The bed was eiderdown-soft, the sheets like silk. I must get to Aunt Harriet’s …

  Brandy woke to sunshine and birdsong, a heavy head and a swollen tongue. Shay’s tongue.

  I’ll miss the wedding.

  The mirror stood innocently in the center of the room, sunlight streaking mellow sheen along bronze finger ridges and clawlike nails. How long did it plan to keep her here? How long could she pretend to be Shay? No matter what happened, she was caught between the horse and the barn door.

  She took Shay down the hall to the linen closet and on her return met Jerry with a breakfast tray. “Morning, princess. How do you feel?”

  “Strange.”

  “It’s that sleeping pill.” He propped her up against the pillows and laid the tray across her lap. “Don’t remember ever serving you breakfast in bed before. Must be getting old.”

  His smile was so pleasant Brandy found Shay returning it.

  “That’s better. I was beginning to think your face’d gotten stuck.” He wore a snug-fitting suit and broad, patterned tie. “We’ve contacted the guests we didn’t get ahold of last night and managed to have the funeral services planned for tomorrow. So you and Marek can work from there about rescheduling the wedding. Well, I’m off to the mortuary and then a few hours at the office.”

  Brandy held Shay still as he kissed her forehead. He turned in the doorway. “There’s no rush, you know … about the wedding.”

  When he’d left she drank the fruit juice and the awful coffee to alleviate the dryness in her mouth, reflecting that her own father and this one certainly had opposing views when it came to marrying off their daughters.

  The toast was evenly browned but flavorless. The dry flakes sprinkled with sugar tasted like nothing at all. She added milk from the pitcher on the tray and then had a soggy mess that tasted like nothing at all. No wonder the people in this house were so thin.

  The telephone object rang. She stared at it as it rang again and then again. It would look suspicious if she didn’t answer.

  “Hello?” Nothing. Brandy turned the object end for end and tried again. “Hello?”

  “Shay? This is Marek.” He sounded sensual even over the telephone. “Did I catch you in the shower?”

  “Shower?” It wasn’t raining.

  “It took you so long to answer. Are you feeling better? You were so cool last night, I –”

  “Cool?” Actually she’d been overwarm in the stuffy house.

  “What are you, a parrot this morning?”

  “I’m not … fully awake.”

  “Well, will you tell your mother that I’ve notified my best man the wedding’s off for now? And, Shay, things went to hell with the computer about two o’clock this morning. If you don’t need me I think I’ll go on out to work today. See you tonight?”

  “Yes, that will be fine.” Surely I won’t still be here tonight.

  Rachael appeared in the doorway wearing pants. Brandy delivered Marek’s message.

  “Your dad says you’re still feeling strange this morning.” She sat on the bed and took the tray onto her lap. “Honey, Grandma had a full and a good life even before that stroke twenty years ago.” But tears came to her eyes. “I realize I must have scared you as much as she did last night and that explosion or earthquake or whatever – there wasn’t a thing about it on the news this morning, by the way – but you’re twenty years old, about to be married. We just can’t protect you from everything anymore. Now, you go take your shower and get your head straight. I need help. People are finding out about Grandma and calling. We’ll work through today together and take on tomorrow when it gets here. Okay?”

  “That sounds like a wise idea.”

  “Now, do you want to wear blue jeans or shorts or what? Some of your things are still down in the laundry room.”

  “Will you choose for me, please?”

  “You stopped listening to my advice on what to wear at about the age of two. Oh, all right, I’ll bring something into the bathroom. But you can scrub yourself. Are you really feeling strange or just helpless this morning?”

  Brandy McCabe looked around the linen closet, at the sink, the commode and a door made of clouded glass in the back wall. Inside, a tiny room with slippery porcelainlike floor and walls. If she closed the door, would it be similar to a hip bath? She gave the knob on the wall an experimental turn and screeched as cold water cascaded onto her from a nozzle she hadn’t notice above her head. Shower … of course.

  The glass door opened and Rachael reached in to turn off the water, her face white.

  “Don’t you think you should take off your robe and pajamas before you shower?” The suspicion in Rachael’s eyes frightened Brandy.

  Brandy rubbed Shay’s hands along the bronze hands of the mirror. Help me!

  She’d never felt she was delicate in matters of taste or sensibility, had considered herself open to change and thus to self-improvement. Her curiosity alone would have prevented her from ignoring new ideas. But to go abroad dressed as she now was in tiny useless drawers beneath “blue jean” pants – the inner seams of which pressed so tightly up against the female parts they created odd and surely forbidden sensations.

  And no corset or corset cover. Merely a narrow strapped garment to cup the busts that Rachael’d called a bra and which was clearly outlined under the clinging shirt.

  The costume could not but be a siren call to the baser instincts of gentlemen.

  Please take me back. I promise to be vigilant against curiosity. Brandy shook the wedding mirror. It wobbled on its claw base. I don’t understand this world.

  The bronze hands grew hot and Brandy opened Shay’s mouth in a startled scream as she was flung backward.

  Transparent and dim, as an apparition, between her and the mirror – not in the glass itself – an image of her own body, dressed decently in her traveling suit and hat, standing beside the dining-room table, Sophie McCabe walking toward it with Brandy’s beaded handbag.

  She leaned forward. “Ma!”

  The image contorted … rippled … vanished, leaving Shay’s body sticky and struggling for breath.

  In the parlor, where she recognized some of the furniture, Brandy found the small figurine of the shepherdess Grandmother Euler had brought with her from Germany. It lay broken on the hearth.

  She fingered the demure face with the downcast eyes and sweet lips, lifted a piece of blue skirt with a ragged edge of milky pantaloon peeping from beneath it. She felt as shattered as the shepherdess.

  Holding back tears, she stood and squared Shay’s shoulders. Self-pity was never of use.

  She’d pretend to be at ease in the unfamiliar clothes and in this unfamiliar time to avert suspicion until she could return to her own. Brandy’d been taught that with proper strength of character and purpose one could achieve almost anything.

  In the kitchen, Shay’s mother set Brandy to peeling hardboiled eggs for lunch while she emptied an odd cupboard with slatted rubber shelves that pulled out into the room.

  Rachael’d carried a tray of goblets into the dining room when the telephone rang. It hung on a different wall now but looked to be the same boxlike affair Brandy’s father’d had installed.

  “Get that for me, will you, Shay?”

&nb
sp; Brandy took the wooden receiver off the hook and a touch of homesickness gripped her at the familiar feel of it. “Hello?” she said into the iron mouthpiece.

  No one answered and the ringing continued.

  “Hello …” She jiggled the hook and looked up to see Shay’s mother in the doorway. “It doesn’t seem to be working.”

  Again that hard suspicion in Rachael’s eyes as she took the receiver from Brandy, replaced it on the hook and opened the front of the telephone box. Inside was an oblong ear – and mouthpiece all in one like that on the bedside table in Shay’s room.

  Brandy slipped out the back door to discover the source of the roaring noise she’d heard all day and to get away from Rachael.

  She took two steps in Shay’s ugly canvas shoes and stopped.

  The outhouse and the hen house were gone. So was the prairie. Tall trees and buildings surrounded the Gingerbread House. Metal automobiles, as sleek as those the wedding mirror had shown her, roared by on the hard-surfaced road. The air was foul.

  Keeping close to the familiar house, Brandy walked around to the front. Across the street an unusual building with a paved yard and a sign, CONOCO.

  The irrigation ditch was no more than a grassy depression outside the wrought-iron fence.

  A young girl, dressed much like Shay’s body, approached on a thin, clicking bicycle. Without pausing or glancing at Brandy, the girl pulled something from a bag and threw it. It struck Shay’s chest and fell to the grass inside the fence.

  When Brandy bent to pick it up, it unfolded into a newspaper. Boulder Daily Camera. It was dated June 16, 1978.

  As changed as things were in this world, she would have thought she’d been transported to the year 2000 at least.

  Rachael Garrett watched her daughter from the dining-room window.

  Shay’d walked around the house as if she were in a trance, had looked about the neighborhood as if she’d never seen it. Now she stood staring at the evening newspaper, her lovely hair rolled into that ridiculous bun at the back of her head.

  Rachael could stand it no longer and went out onto the porch to call Shay inside. Again that slow stiff walk, the other-world expression in her eyes as Shay came toward her.

  A sick feeling moved from Rachael’s stomach to her chest.

  Inside, they poured coffee and sat down with the Camera. “Let’s see if they got Grandma’s obit right. Here it is. I’ll read it to you. ‘Brandy Maddon’ … that’s the headline. What’s the matter?”

  “Brandy?”

  “You knew Grandma Bran’s name was Brandy, didn’t you? Oh, you must have. You just never listened when I talked family. ‘Brandy Maddon,’” Rachael began again …

  Brandy Harriet (McCabe) Maddon died yesterday at the historic Gingerbread House on Spruce Street, which is now the home of her daughter, Mrs. Jerrold Garrett. Mrs. Maddon had been living for many years at the Eternal Care Nursing Home here in Boulder and was visiting her daughter at the time of her death. She was 98.

  She was born on August 7, 1880, at the Gingerbread House to John and Sophie McCabe. Her grandfather was James Elton McCabe, prominent Boulder pioneer who built the Gingerbread House in 1867. She graduated from Boulder Preparatory School in 1898 and married Hutchison Maddon of Nederland in 1902.

  The Maddons lived near or in Nederland for the next forty years and most of that time on the Bar Double M Ranch, where Mr. Maddon raised cattle and horses. After his death in 1944, Mrs. Maddon traveled extensively and was the subject of an article in Time magazine entitled “The Fantastic Traveling Grandmother.”

  Mrs. Maddon is survived by two sons, Remy and Dan, who have recently retired in Boulder; a daughter, Rachael Garrett, also of Boulder; four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

  Private services will be held at Rowe Mortuary. Interment will be in Columbia Cemetery.

  “Seems so short for such a long life, doesn’t it?” Rachael looked up into the shocked eyes of a stranger.

  “But… I am Brandy Harriet McCabe,” her daughter said.

  4

  “That,” Rachael whispered slowly and carefully, “is Brandy … Harriet … McCabe … Maddon.”

  Brandy stood between Shay’s parents beside the casket holding the ancient body. Jerry supported her with an arm around her waist.

  “You are Shay Catherine Garrett. Repeat that.”

  “I am Shay Catherine Garrett,” Brandy lied obediently. Why had the obituary not mentioned Mr. Strock?

  The woman next to her was her daughter. The aging twins behind her, her sons. She’d never heard of the man named Hutchison Maddon, whom she would marry, and she was inhabiting the body of her granddaughter.

  When I go home I will know my own obituary.

  Brandy searched her memory for Bible references to explain this phenomenon she was living. She could think of none. But then her mind had always wandered during Bible readings in church and at home. “One pays for such transgressions,” Sophie McCabe had warned.

  The coffin looked too large for the tiny Brandy. The eyes were closed to staring death now. What is this nursing home where I will spend the last twenty years of my life? Twenty years … that was all the life she’d known.

  She couldn’t relate the dead Brandy Maddon to herself. The thin white hair. The still, empty face. The spotted hands folded across – it was inconceivable that she should be looking at herself in her own satin-lined coffin seventy-eight years after yesterday.…

  Brandy had no warning of the vision that appeared suddenly, superimposed over the dead body. A vision of herself, still dressed in her traveling suit, lying on a rough plank floor. And kneeling beside her, a woman with a topknot made of her hair and … Corbin Strock.

  “Let’s get her out of here, I think she’s fainting,” Shay’s father said.

  She stumbled beside him through the door to the lobby and then outside.

  Jerry Garrett watched Marek Weir drive off with Shay and let the curtain fall back. God, I hope I did the right thing.

  “I don’t think we should have let her go out with him tonight,” Rachael said.

  “Let her? We had to make her. Maybe an evening at a disco will snap her out of it.”

  “I had to choose her clothes for her again. You know that pink top she loves and you hate? She was going to wear a bra under it.” Rachael straightened a picture with trembling hands. “Can you imagine Shay Garrett being caught dead at a discotheque wearing a bra? Did you talk to Gale?”

  “He’s out of town for a week.”

  “There are other doctors.”

  “Not one I’d trust with my only daughter.” He hated to think of Shay going to see any shrink at all.

  “And yet you let her go off with Marek while she’s in a half-crazed condition.”

  “Rachael, that’s the man she’d be married to right now if –”

  “He’s a walking sperm count and you know it.”

  “She’s twenty years old and for all we’d like to think otherwise, no innocent.” And just who are we kidding besides ourselves? Marek Weir had a good job and a future. He was a lot better than most of the punks she’d brought home. Nobody would ever be good enough for their Shay.

  “He’s years older than she is and she hardly knows him.”

  And when he takes her away, he’ll take our last excuse to stay together. You’ll be left with your house and your books and I’ll have nothing. “She can take care of herself.”

  “Can she? Did you see her try to cut up her artichoke with a knife and fork at dinner tonight? Our slouchy daughter is suddenly sitting ramrod straight, doesn’t like milk, wears her hair in an old-lady bun, calls me Ma instead of Mother and tries to answer the kitchen phone through the antique mouthpiece.” Rachael stubbed out her cigarette and flopped down into the platform rocker. “She decides she’s Brandy McCabe and you say she can take care of herself.”

  “Rachael, she isn’t suddenly crazy. Just upset and vague right now. People don’t act normally all their lives and then go o
ff the deep end in one night. She was probably preoccupied this morning when she turned the shower on herself with her clothes on and –”

  “This afternoon I asked her to do up the lunch dishes. She did them in the sink. Not two feet away from the dishwasher.”

  “Maybe she was trying to conserve water.”

  “Now who’s hiding his head in the sand? Jerry, she took the bar of hand soap and shaved slivers off it with a butcher knife. Tried to dissolve them in water. And when she’d washed them and dried them, mind you, then she put them in the dishwasher.”

  Jerry knew his wife was strung tight. Bran’s death, Shay’s worrisome behavior – who could blame her? It was just that Jerry couldn’t help her anymore. Things had gone too far. “Well, take her into Haffenbach then.”

  “He’s an M.D.”

  “Maybe the shock was physical in some way too. At least ask him what he thinks. He’s been her doctor for years.” Jerry pushed up the knot on his tie and slipped into his jacket. “I have a few things to do at the office if I’m going to the funeral tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Rachael emptied the ashtray into the fireplace.

  “I’ll be home before the kids get back from the disco.”

  The intensity of the silence throbbed in the room. He made it to the doorway before she spoke.

  “Jerry, I know you plan to leave me.” Her voice strained under her attempt to control it.

  “Hell, I’m just going to the office.”

  “I mean … when Shay’s gone.” Rachael came up behind him. “And I know what’s been going on up at the cabin in Nederland.”

  He leaned into the side of the archway and rested his hand on Thora K.’s old buffet in the hall.

  “Jerry, it’s not that I’ve blocked out what you’ve been doing because I couldn’t face it, like you think I do with everything. It’s just that … just that I haven’t known how to talk about it.”

  The familiar ache clamped the air from his chest. “Rachael –”

  “Let me finish. I won’t be unpleasant or try … try to hold you. All I ask is that you stick with me until we’re sure Shay’s all right.”