Stevie Dodd looked back just once. When our eyes met, his were full of a black dread that aged him beyond his years, far beyond childhood, maybe even further. Then they stepped into the elevator and the doors glided shut.
In the car on the way home, I told my father that I’d changed my mind about the mirror. I said there was nothing wrong with it after all, that I was just spooked last night by having my bike stolen and that I wanted to keep the mirror right where it was.
At first, he told me he didn’t know what I was talking about, but then he remembered what I had said the previous night before he tucked me in. He looked at me quizzically, but said he was glad that I’d come to my senses, and he’d never planned to get rid of it anyway. He said we’d already had more than enough disruption and carrying-on to last us quite a while, thank you very much.
When we arrived home after picking up my bicycle from the police station, my father took it out of the back seat and told me to put it in the garage, which I did. He said he was going to go across the street and check on Mrs. Alban’s eaves troughs, and that I should see if my mother needed any help in the house.
Mrs. Alban had been widowed earlier that year and my father had been doing the sort of odd jobs around the house that were formerly Mr. Alban’s bailiwick. Mrs. Alban always tried to pay him, but my father always refused, as gently as possible. My mother said Mrs. Alban had no sense of the value of money, but my father said she was trying to keep her dignity intact in her widowhood.
That first autumn of her bereavement, I’d caught sight of Mrs. Alban through our living room window trying clumsily to rake the leaves in her front yard in all the brittleness of her old age. It broke my heart to see her fragility. I wished I were old enough to do it for her. When I saw my father do it that first time, a sense that some sort of elemental justice and kindness had been returned to the universe came to me, and I loved my father a bit more for being the instrument of it.
Inside the house, I called out to my mother. There was no answer. I called out again. In the kitchen, there was a note on the table in her rounded, loopy scrawl:
Monica Birdwhistle stopped by for a coffee and some cake. We’re off to check out a sale at Ogilvy’s at the plaza. She’ll drop me home in a bit. There’s cold macaroni salad in the fridge for lunch. I will be home later this afternoon. Dinner will be at seven SHARP!
Love, MOM
xoxox
She always signed her notes “Mom,” even if they were intended for my father. Some days it seemed as though that was their agreed-upon nomenclature; the rest of the time it seemed calculated to head off the possibility of shocking me with marital familiarity in case I came upon one signed “Alice” by accident. In any case, she wouldn’t be home for hours, and for now the house was empty. Silence, general and complete, blanketed the rooms. I felt my heartbeat quicken in my chest.
Downstairs in my bedroom, I closed the door. There was a bolt lock that I had been forbidden to touch, on pain of both spanking and grounding. Neither of my parents believed young boys had any reason to lock their doors. I turned the bolt handle now, hearing the soft click as the door locked. Momentarily panicked at my own audacity in flouting this carved-in-stone prohibition, I turned it counterclockwise to make sure it unlocked. When it opened, I sighed with relief. Then I closed and locked it again.
My mother had made my bed while my father and I were at the hospital. The carpet had been freshly vacuumed. I sat down on the navy-blue coverlet and took the room’s measure. It was innocuous, full of early-afternoon sunshine. The mirror was still bolted to the wall adjacent to my bed. The glass was faintly streaked, and the ghost-scent of the vinegar she’d wiped it with hung in the air, mixing with the carpet deodorizer.
Briefly I wondered if my mother had caught a glimpse of anything in the glass other than her own reflection when she was cleaning it, but I already knew that Amanda—or whatever I had seen, or imagined I had seen, the night before—would never have shown herself, or itself, to my mother.
She’d been waiting for me, and no one else.
Standing in that mellow suburban sunlight, the rational side of my nature, the pre-adult side, told me that the first part of the dream I’d had about standing on the promontory over the lake had started hours earlier that evening, and that I’d very likely dozed off immediately when I came downstairs, then woken when my father entered to tuck me in. But the irrational side of my nature, the part of the nature that connects the open minds of children with magic things unseen and unheard by adults, things of beauty and of horror—what grownups indulgently call “having a vivid imagination”—realized that what I had seen last night had been real. I had seen a little girl named Amanda in the mirror. She had used my own voice to talk to me, but they had been her words, not mine. Of that I had not the slightest doubt.
And even if any doubt had remained, the black dread in Stevie Dodd’s face at the hospital had told its own story, told it in a language in which both he and I were fluent. I doubted very much that I had been the only dreamer of terrible things last night. Perhaps Stevie had even dreamed of the wasps themselves, dreamed of the swarm of terrible arthropod bodies moving like a yellow-and-black cloud with murderous purpose, stinging Terry’s face and mouth over and over till he passed out from the pain of the venom coursing through his bully’s body, finally screaming the way I knew he’d made other children scream, while the wasps stung him again and again. He’d finally shut up, all right.
The irrational, magical child I was smiled at that. Good, I thought. He stole my bike. He deserved it.
Then I touched the glass and called softly, “Amanda? I got my bike back, just like you said I would.”
After a while, she came out and we spent the afternoon behind that locked bedroom door until I heard the front door open and the sound of my father’s footsteps on the floor above.
That year, I spoke with Amanda mostly at night, when the light in my bedroom was dim, or when I switched off my bedside lamp altogether and pulled out and lit the candle that I’d hidden under my bed so my mother couldn’t find it. I used the candle mostly when my parents were asleep, because my mother could smell a lit match or candle practically through a wall.
The next summer, my parents thought it would be good for me to get out of the house and interact with some boys my own age.
Their solution was Camp Manitou, which my older cousin Timothy had attended years ago. My aunt Grace told my mother it had done him “a world of good,” and that it might help me “learn to fit in a bit.”
I pleaded with my mother. “But Mom, why can’t I just stay here? Why can’t I just spend the summer playing with Hank? Why do I have to go away?”
“Jameson, stop whining,” she said. “I don’t want you underfoot. It’s time you started meeting some normal boys your age. Maybe it’ll rub off on you. I’ve already told you, I don’t like you spending so much time with that strange girl. Honestly, what sort of girl calls herself ‘Hank’? It’s not natural.”
“Mom, she’s my best friend.”
“Well, you need to make a new best friend. For heaven’s sake. A boy shouldn’t have a girl as a best friend. When you’re older you can date, then someday you’ll marry some nice girl who’ll become your wife. But boys and girls aren’t supposed to be friends. Aunt Grace says Camp Manitou is full of wonderful fellows. You’ll have a new best friend in three shakes of a lamb’s tail. When you come home, you won’t even be thinking about Hank. Lucinda,” she corrected herself. “Lucinda.”
I called Hank on the telephone to tell her that I was going away for the summer.
“I wish it was just going to be you and me for the whole summer,” I said miserably.
“Your mom would hate that,” Hank replied. “You know she wishes you and I weren’t best friends.” She sighed. “I wish I could go away to camp. I hate it here. There’s nothing to do. Boys always get to do the best stuff. You’re lucky you get to go
. I wish I could go instead of you. I’d love to go away to camp.”
“It’s a boys’ camp, Hank,” I said. “It’s not for girls.” I was utterly baffled by her nonchalance. To me it was the theft of our summer together at the hands of my parents. My mother didn’t even like her. I briefly considered sharing that dislike with Hank as a way to bring her more in line with my thinking on the injustice of the matter, but I reasoned that it would be unnecessarily cruel.
“So what? I’m more like a boy than you are. You couldn’t even climb a tree till I showed you how to do it, Jamie. I’d probably have more fun than you would. I get all that stuff. Don’t be mad, but you’re way more like a girl than I am.”
I thought for a moment. There was no malice in Hank’s voice. She was simply stating a fact both of us were aware of, one that didn’t really bother either of us. She was right—we were an odd pair in our reversals.
“I’m going to hate it. I’m going to really hate it.”
“Don’t be such a baby,” Hank commanded, ever the pragmatist. “You’ll probably have a great time. And when it’s over, you can come home.”
I had one last, terrible, burning question. “Hank?”
“What?”
“You won’t find a new best friend while I’m away, will you? We’ll still be, you know, best friends when I get back?”
“Don’t be such a baby,” she repeated, but kindly this time.
“Come on, swear?”
“I swear.”
“Pinkie-swear?”
“We have to be face-to-face for pinkie swear, dummy.”
“Okay, let’s just pretend we pinkie-sweared, then.”
Hank sighed. “Okay, Jamie, pretend-pinkie-swear.”
“Promise?”
“I promise, Jamie. We’ll be best friends till the day we die.”
Late that night, after I was sure my parents had gone to bed, I lit the candle in front of the mirror and tried to call Amanda so I could tell her what I had told Hank—that I was going away, even though I wanted to stay home that summer. I wanted to beg her to come with me, to find a mirror somewhere in the camp where I could see her.
“Amanda, it’s me. It’s Jamie. I have to talk to you.” I closed my eyes and relaxed my throat and willed her to speak to me, through me. But no words suggested themselves. I tried again, concentrating harder this time. I squeezed my eyes so tightly shut that I saw purple supernovas exploding behind my eyelids and my head throbbed with the sheer effort of my concentration. I tried again. “Amanda, please come out. Don’t be mad. I have to go. I don’t have any choice. They’re making me go.”
The candle flickered, and then went out.
In the dark, I whispered, “Amanda . . . ? Is that you? Don’t be mad . . . please? It’s not my fault.” But when I switched on my bedside lamp, I was alone in the mirror.
I lit the candle every night for seven nights, but she never came.
A week later, I left for summer camp. In all that time it was as though Amanda had never even existed, as though she had been nothing but a flittering enchantment I had conjured up from the depths of my imagination.
I spent three long, horrible weeks at Manitou as one of the camp’s two untouchables. I was in a cabin with five other boys, all of whom had been to Camp Manitou before, and all of whom seemed to be friends already. Worse still, they were friends in that way young boys have of being friends not based necessarily on shared experiences but simply on shared gender. They all spoke the same language, a language with which I had never been naturally fluent. Boys can smell difference at five hundred paces, and whatever they smelled in me, they hated everything about it on sight.
The ringleader was a boy named John Prince. He was a big ugly kid with a forest fire of red hair and a face that was prone to flushing just as hot. He had small, cold fish eyes and fists like hams and, based on my last name, he nicknamed me Brown Nose that first night.
The next night, I was short-sheeted and spent half an hour trying to unmake my bed while the five other boys laughed in the dark at my fumbling because I was too terrified to turn on the light. Finally, in despair, I ripped the rough red blanket off the bed and cried myself to sleep as quietly as possible on the crude pine floor beside the bunk. Two nights later, one of them put a dead squirrel at the foot of my bunk, under the blanket. When I shrieked, they broke into applause and crude laughter.
That night, after everyone else was asleep, I snuck out. I lay in my sleeping bag under a pine tree behind the cabin. After I’d cried all the tears I had to spare, I fell asleep watching a thick cloud of ghostly white moths spin and whirl around the rear exterior light of the cabin. The trembling movement of their beating wings acted as a hypnotic, summoning sleep.
The next morning, when I told one of our cabin counsellors about the dead squirrel, he laughed and said he thought it was a fine prank in the old Manitou spirit. He told me to stop complaining or I’d never make any friends.
The only boy who had it worse than I did was a fat blond boy named Olivier. He had a high, warbling voice and sad eyes set in his face like pale blue poached eggs. He seemed perpetually on the verge of tears. Had we been smarter about it, we might have formed an alliance of sorts, but we despised each other, for each saw in the other some reflection of his own loathsomeness, and we ate alone at opposite ends of the mess hall to avoid attracting the negative attention we would doubtless have attracted sitting together.
One afternoon, during free swim at the pool, Prince purposely jumped off the diving board and landed on my head, driving me underwater, almost to the bottom. My two front teeth buried themselves in the meat of my lower lip as the impact of his feet on my head caused my jaws to snap shut.
Underwater, I almost lost consciousness, but before I passed out, I managed to paddle to the surface, my head full of light and exploding stars. The corner of the pool was red with the blood that gushed from my mouth. The lifeguard took me to the infirmary where the nurse pressed a cold washcloth against my lip to stop the bleeding but deemed stitches unnecessary.
“Just hold the washcloth against your lip,” she said. “The blood will clot and it’ll stop. Everybody gets war wounds at camp sooner or later. Welcome to Camp Manitou! You’re an old warrior now. You’ve earned it.” To denote campers who had passed all the unofficial initiations and were on their second year at Manitou, the camp used the term “old warrior.” The nurse beamed at me like she was bestowing a knighthood.
By that evening, my swollen mouth looked like a clown’s makeup and almost every movement of my face threatened to open my lip again. When I tried to take a bite of salad and the vinegar in the dressing seared the raw flesh, I nearly screamed in pain and everyone laughed. And no one laughed louder than John Prince and my five cabin-mates.
The upside was that I was excused from most of the camp’s outdoor activities for the next two days, which meant that while Prince and the others were out learning to be old warriors, I was left alone to explore the fields and marshes beyond the camp. There was also the camp chapel, which was dark and smelled pleasantly of age and dry wood. It had a piano, which was only slightly out of tune. I played chopsticks for hours, and made up songs that made ample use of the few chords I could play, amplified by the sustaining pedal, which made it sound very symphonic and serious to my ears.
Several times I entered the communal bathroom when I knew it would be empty and stared into the mirrors over the row of sinks, hoping against vain hope that I might catch a glimpse of Amanda. The mirrors were dirty and cracked, and they held no secrets. If Amanda was hiding in their depths, she was well hidden.
But of course, those two days came and went too quickly, and before long I was back in all the camp activities.
I put on a brave face on the one Parents’ Day the camp allowed midway through the summer session. I’d shown my father and mother how my diving skills had improved, played the piano for them in the camp’s chapel,
and introduced them to my counsellors. The counsellors put on convivial faces in front of my parents, even though by then most of them despised me and considered me lazy. That said, I think the counsellors were more worried about my injury reflecting badly on their leadership than they let on, which is why they told my parents what a terrific camper I was and what a great asset I was to Camp Manitou.
For my part, I spoke glowingly about my counsellors in front of my parents, too, even though I feared them and considered them bullies and sadists who exploited my physical weaknesses and pitted the other boys against me till the halfway point had seemed to stretch out like a life sentence of short-sheeting, dunking, and being the one everyone screamed at to hurry up, asshole! during those endless hikes under the blazing July sun.
While my mother stood just far enough apart from a group of mothers who were admiring their sons’ artwork to let them know that she considered herself a cut above the company, my father asked me to go for a walk with him, to show him where the tuck shop was so he could restock me with “supplies,” chocolate bars and the like. Even as he said it, I suspected he wanted to talk, and that it had nothing to do with replenishing my supply of chocolate.
We walked behind the arts and crafts cabin and up the hill overlooking the camp, and sat down on one of the logs that formed the seating boundary at the edge of the campfire pit.
My father reached for my hand, to hold it. I pulled it away sharply. I was horrified at the thought of anyone seeing me walking hand in hand with my father. In light of everything I had already endured, if any of the other campers caught me holding my father’s hand, they would see to it that it would be the end of me. I could see that my reaction had hurt him, which hurt me in turn. I didn’t like to see my father in pain so when he tried to put his arm around my shoulder instead, I didn’t pull away. Instead, I leaned into him. For a moment it felt as though I might burst into tears, but I held it in.
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