The Mirror

by Millhiser, Marlys

  “You want to wait just a few minutes and we’ll have this cleaned up? Probably safer than trying another street right now,” the man roared in his ear when Marek lowered his window. “Police and state patrol are asking everybody to stay home tonight till the wind calms down,” he added in a rather bored tone, maybe because he knew it would do little good.

  Boulderites tended to go about their business in these windstorms, much to the consternation of authorities.

  Marek turned off the engine to wait for the Public Service Company to clear his way.

  “Look for the good,” Louise Weir had taught her sons. “The bad happens anyway.”

  Marek decided the only good thing about a windstorm was that it gathered up all the wastepaper wrappers and cups around McDonald’s and blew them to Nebraska.

  On the ranch in Wyoming, when hail ruined the hay crop or heavy snow killed the spring calves, Louise shrugged it off as “just life.”

  One day before another Christmas, Bill Weir’s heart stopped forever on the back porch while the rest of the family was in town.

  When they arrived home hours too late, their arms filled with Christmas packages, to discover their father already stiffening, Marek’s older brother cried. And he was almost fully grown. “He died alone.”

  “That’s the way we all die, Arnold,” Louise had said cruelly. “Alone. Trick’s not to live that way.”

  When Louise Weir died, all three of her sons stood at her bedside. But she died alone, not even coming out of her coma long enough to know they were there. Had Shay died alone?

  “World owes you nothing but pain,” his mother’d told him. “If you want more, you have to go out and get it. And that’s easier than you think. Look at the clouds, son. Ever seen anything so beautiful?”

  Marek hadn’t appreciated the clouds that day. He couldn’t now. But he had in between, and he would again.

  A car honked behind him and then passed. Marek was startled to see the cherry picker and crew gone. He headed the Porsche home.

  His search for Shay was hopeless, busywork to keep from facing the fact he’d have to adjust to one of life’s little alterations.

  Marek pulled into his reserved parking area. Wind carried the sound of sirens to him as he shielded his face and ran for the door.

  He had an open invitation to several parties tonight. Singles tended to band together on holidays to pretend together they didn’t mind being alone. Maybe he should go to one. He fumbled for his key under the light in the hall and decided he’d go to all of them.

  Marek noted instantly the drapes pulled on the patio doors, the lights on. A thudding noise from the direction of the bedroom.

  He slipped out of his jacket, chiding himself for leaving the patio doors unlocked just in case she …

  He deserved to be burgled. He moved quietly on thick carpet toward the bedroom doorway, tense, thinking he was ready for anything.

  But he wasn’t.

  Streaming platinum hair with odd ripples … longer than he remembered.

  Marek choked in an effort to breathe. She turned at the sound, reaching for a corner of the dresser as if in astonishment.

  He was unwilling to believe that as often as he’d rehearsed this moment his first reaction should be anger. “All this time, God damn, and you’re alive. And you let me worry?”

  Leaning against the door frame, he felt it tremble with the windstorm blasting Boulder and the apartment building. Marek clasped one hand with the other because they wanted to shake her until her teeth fell out.

  Her hands moved to reddening cheeks. The ring finger on the left one still wore his diamond and she wore a shapeless thing with long sleeves that hung from the shoulders like a nightgown and extended to the floor. Beneath it she was huge.

  The baby. He’d forgotten the baby.

  Shay drew herself up and pointed her nose at the ceiling with an expression like an insulted librarian. “Mr. Weir, I did not expect this –”

  “What the hell did you expect?” Marek crossed the room in spite of himself. In spite of the baby.

  His approach and probably the look on his face took the starch from her. She crumpled. “Oh, how could he? This is awful.” She backed away.

  “How could who? What? Where have you been?” He reached for her.

  Shay dodged. “How could … you get your fiancée with child and leave me with the results? She must have been –”

  “She? She’s you. And she got that way – you got that way right there!” He gestured toward the bed behind her. She jerked away and fell onto it.

  The water bed rolled and heaved beneath her and she grabbed for the board frame. “John McCabe would have killed you for this.”

  “Who?”

  “I want you to leave me be. Do you understand?”

  “Then why did you come here?”

  “I don’t know. I mean I do know.” She struggled off the bed. “I came because … well …” Shay bit her lip, looking every bit as furious as he felt. “Because I want you to stop searching for me.”

  “I’d already decided to do just that.”

  “You did? That’s … good to hear.” But she looked disappointed.

  “Shay, does someone want money for you? Is this a setup? Are you being held somewhere against your will?” Was someone hiding behind the bathroom door with a gun to be sure she said the right thing?

  “No. I’m perfectly safe and … I know I must seem a silly goose to you but –”

  “Silly goose?” He hadn’t heard that expression since his grandmother died.

  “I’m happy and well cared for and wish to be left in peace.”

  “Cared for by another man?” Why would anyone take on the trouble of a pregnant woman half the country was searching for?

  “Certainly not!” Shay drew in her breath and blinked. “Another man … yes. Yes, that’s it. So you see you must forget all about me.” She posed again with her nose in the air and started to walk past him.

  He had her by the shoulders, fighting the urge to violence. “And the baby. I’m supposed to forget about him too?”

  “It will probably be a girl and no great loss to you. I assure you I’ll do everything in my power to care for her.”

  “And your parents? Their lives have been ruined by your stupidity.” An odd smell had crept into the room. “What do I tell them?”

  She gave a little scream as he tightened his grip and she looked over his shoulder.

  Just as he realized the import of the direction of her glance and before he could turn to defend himself, something thick and dark came down over him, tightened quickly around his arms before he could move. That smell overwhelmed him now even as he recognized it and did exactly the wrong thing….

  Marek drew in a choking breath, instinctively planning to let it out in a roar of fury at this final insult in an evening filled with them.

  The roar never came. He stared down and someone gently lowered him to the rug.

  “You mustn’t hurt him.” Shay’s worried voice, far away.

  “… just sleep awhile. Looked like he was going to get rough.” A harsh whisper. “Thought you needed help.”

  When Marek came back to the light in the room nothing covered his face or bound his arms.

  He had a staggering hangover.

  Rolling, he pushed on carpet until he was on his knees. His head and stomach shuddered together, his vision slid in and out of focus.

  “Shay?”

  Marek pulled himself to his feet, holding onto the dresser, and made for the door across a tilting floor.

  “Shay?”

  Wind swirled red drapes into the room, howled derision.

  A patch of white on the drapes. He stumbled over to find a piece of paper pinned to them.

  Dear Mr. Weir,

  I am truly sorry for the inconvenience and discomfort I have caused you. I would have returned your engagement ring but my fingers have swollen and it cannot be removed. Please forgive me and please do not try to f
ollow or search for me any longer. Nothing useful can come of it.

  It was unsigned and neither in Shay’s words nor her handwriting. But in the same flowery script as the message on his blackboard.

  He found the blanket he kept on his closet shelf on the patio. It smelled of ether.

  The gate was open.

  Shay was gone. Again.

  Marek crumpled the note and leaned his face against the brick wall, wind screeching a cover for the groans his voice made as he forced himself not to cry.

  17

  The wind stopped suddenly, as it had begun. A warm Chinook wind, it’d taken the snow with it, brought the nighttime temperature to an unseasonable sixty degrees.

  It left nerves frazzled, piles of fine dirt on the insides of windowsills, tree branches hanging broken over roofs and sidewalks, Christmas decorations stripped from street lights on the downtown mall, shingles lifted and torn, a few houses under construction flattened, and a fire raging in a mobile-home park where a trailer had been torn from its gas connection.

  Now that it was gone, the city seemed inert and bizarrely silent. A line had gone down somewhere and the Gingerbread House was without power. The stove was a gas range, the hot dishes had kept warm and Rachael broiled the steaks.

  Jerry sat between his wife and brother-in-law, a Christmas candle lighting their dinner. And yet this was not a festive meal. The silence outside seeped into the kitchen. The grating of a knife cutting through meat against the surface of a plate seemed to scrape on the nerves.

  Rachael insisted they eat before she reveal her surprise, the reason for their visit to Columbia Cemetery.

  Remy watched her with open concern.

  She kept her eyes on her plate. Candlelight added to her pallor. She seemed too intent in her concentration on cutting her food, directing it to her mouth.

  “Bran would have had a snit once about the cholesterol in this meal,” Jerry said, trying to find a common and safe topic to lighten the mood.

  Rachael lowered her fork to her plate, the broccoli still on it, her eyes wide with an expression suggesting hysteria. “Remember the fuss Mom made about all the bacon and eggs you used to eat for breakfast, Jerry?”

  “Yeah. And that was years before I even heard the word ‘cholesterol.’”

  “And, Remy, remember on the ranch when she’d make us scrape up and down between our teeth with pieces of thread?”

  “It kept breaking or fraying and getting stuck. Sure was glad when dental floss became available.”

  “Did you ever know anyone else whose mother insisted on that … then?”

  “No, not that I’d remember anyway.” Remy refilled their wineglasses. “But Mom was always ahead of her time. It was uncanny the way she –”

  “I’ll make some coffee.” Rachael’s silverware rattled as she took her half-eaten dinner to the sink.

  When the table was cleared and the coffee poured, she handed Remy their mother’s diary and lit more candles.

  “I want you to read this aloud, Rem. I don’t believe a word of it, you understand, but …”

  “Do you think we should? This is a private thing.”

  “She meant for it to be read by … someone.”

  “Rachael, I know you’re troubled. Can’t we just talk it out?” Jerry asked. “I can’t stay all night to hear your mother’s diary.”

  “You’ll change your mind when you’ve heard some of it,” Rachael said too calmly.

  “‘Dear Brandy.’” Remy began reading an odd account of Brandy telling herself what had happened to her as if she hadn’t been there, using words no lady would have used in 1900 – the date of the first entry. It dealt with her first marriage and the death of her father.

  “‘He died in my arms, Brandy, thinking I was you.’“ Remy looked up. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Go on to the next entry.” Rachael turned to Jerry. “It’s dated 1946 and it’s after our dad died.”

  Remy lifted his reading glasses to rub his eyes and then continued.

  As you can see by the date, the mirror didn’t reverse us and I think I should tell you of your life that I led. It looks like you will live out my life and I can’t fill in all the gaps in your knowledge to deal with that but I can explain something of the family and times you missed. I can’t imagine how you’ll deal with being Shay Garrett but –

  “Shay Garrett didn’t exist in 1946,” Jerry interrupted.

  The diary related eventually how, when she was seven, Rachael brought home a little boy named Jerry Garrett and Brandy dropped a bowl of potatoes because she recognized the name if not the face of the man who would be her father for twenty years.

  “Rachael, this is one of your stories written up like a diary or something. That mirror couldn’t have switched Shay and Bran …” Jerry had a quick memory vision of Shay in the mirror, dressed as a gypsy, and the young Brandy watching the mirror being unloaded from a wagon. “No. I still don’t believe it.”

  “Of course not. It’s obviously impossible.” Rachael laughed. “The funniest thing about it is how well it would explain the sudden change in Shay.”

  “And how my mother knew things she couldn’t have known.” Remy stared at the cupboards. “Like what professions we’d get into.”

  “And that I’d marry Jerry. And that I’d be a writer. She even told me the title of my first book before I wrote it.”

  “Rachael, this is some kind of hoax.” Jerry’s dinner wasn’t sitting well.

  “You read for a while.” Remy handed him the diary. He was as pale as his sister.

  Jerry tried to ignore the fact that the handwriting bore a close resemblance to Shay’s. He’d been reading about ten minutes when the phone rang.

  Rachael pulled the receiver into the hall by its overlong cord to talk and Jerry wondered if there was a man on the other end.

  When she came back, she lit a cigarette off a candle and smiled without humor. “That was Marek. He’s coming over.”

  Jerry groaned. “Why do we have to have that –”

  “Shay was at his apartment tonight. Or Brandy. Whoever. She’s alive.”

  By morning the four of them had exchanged stories, compared countless details on how the diary explained both Shay and Brandy and how the note left in Marek’s apartment came to be in an unfamiliar handwriting. They all agreed at one time or another that the whole thing was preposterous.

  “We’re too tired to make sense of this nonsense,” Jerry said.

  “I don’t think we should say anything to Dan. At least not yet,” Remy said. “He’s hotheaded and –”

  “He won’t believe it anyway,” Rachael said. “That the mother who bore and raised him was born his niece.”

  “There’s no scientific basis or … or any basis to account for a mirror that could …” Marek gave up and shook his head.

  “I think we should keep Gale and the police out of this.”

  “Yeah, or we’ll all end up in padded cells.”

  The conversation dwindled to stares, nervous gestures fed on coffee nerves, fatigue and shock.

  “Have you ever had the feeling of lifting up out of yourself and looking down on you and … everyone?” Rachael pulled her eyes from the green leather book. Her expression blank. “Does it ever happen to anyone else?”

  “You’re just exhausted, Puss. And you’ve been through so much.”

  “Rachael, you don’t really believe this?” Jerry picked up the diary.

  “Of course not. It’s impossible. But … what do you do … how do you cope if the impossible happens anyway?” Her face looked serene. Her entire body trembled.

  The men sat watching her until Jerry whispered, “I’ll stay with her. You two go on home.”

  Thirty miles away, the wedding mirror reflected a black coffee grinder and part of the oak pedestal table on which it sat.

  Wilson Antiques, Ltd., closed for the holiday, stood barred and darkened.

  Tiny dust particles floated in the air, many coming t
o rest on antique chairs and cabinets. But when they drifted onto the wedding mirror, they slid off, fell to the carpet below, collected in faint ridges that ringed the mirror’s base.

  In January, a cold snap hit Colorado and temperatures fell below zero at night. The weather warmed enough to snow and then turned frigid again.

  The combination made the search for Shay unpleasant and difficult. Remy Maddon divided the map of Boulder County with Marek and they started all over again in a race to find her before the baby was born.

  Jerry didn’t offer to help. He felt ambivalent about finding his daughter now. Not, of course, that he believed the diary. And then he was too busy with Rachael.

  He moved back into the Gingerbread House, buying twin beds for the ransacked master bedroom and hiring a retired nurse to stay when he had to be at the office. He couldn’t possibly leave his wife now, not in the state she was in.

  Rachael sat all day and stared at the wall, lay awake at night after her sleeping pill wore off and stared at the ceiling. She answered when spoken to and took an interest in nothing. She was beginning to put on weight, a thing she’d never allowed herself to do before.

  One day the nurse found Rachael in the bathroom holding a razor blade to her wrist.

  Jerry gave up and took her in to Gale Sampson, worried she might spill the fantastic story of the diary but not knowing what else to do. If she told him about the wedding mirror, Gale didn’t mention it. He put Rachael on antidepressants.

  Now Rachael didn’t feel bad anymore. Rachael didn’t feel anything. The nurse, at least, was relieved.

  In Denver, the wedding mirror stood, unsold, in Wilson Antiques, Ltd. The store was located one block and around a corner from the Brown Palace Hotel.

  In early February, it warmed up. The snow melted. And one night the wind returned.…

  Brandy heard the first gust rolling in off the mountain range to the west, felt it slam into the house as she reached over Shay’s stomach to wring out the dishrag. The rim of the sink vibrated against the baby. The baby moved sluggishly.

  Ansel looked up from his newspaper, listening.

  Silence.