First Light

by Charles Baxter

  Now they are gone, having quickly disappeared into another corridor on the other side of the Tilted Room. Dorsey steps at a slant across the floor, feeling a tingle of cold and nausea, tilting herself to the left to compensate for the floor’s bias, and now she is in a straight, downward-sloping hallway, mostly dark but with some light seeping through the wall cracks. At the end of the hallway is a door that leads into another hall that she remembers from the last time she was in the Fun House last summer, the way out, the Hall of Mirrors. This hallway is almost completely dark, only enough light to suggest the shadows of the two boys, hooded and shapeless, ahead of her, to her right, and simultaneously to her left. In trying to catch up to her brother, Dorsey walks directly into a mirror, banging her nose and forehead against the glass, not forcefully enough to give her a bruise but enough to shock her and make her stand motionless, trying to see her brother here in the glass-framed dark. Turning to her right, where she thought she saw him, she looks down and tries to see the floor—the only way you can get out of a hall of mirrors, her father told her last summer, is to keep your eyes on the floor—and she bumps into another mirror. She’s caged. And now, looking around, she can’t see her brother at all or hear him. He’s gone. He’s escaped. “Hugh?” she says. Nothing.

  She stands trembling. Now she knows. They brought her here. That was the idea: to bring her here and leave her here in the Hall of Mirrors, in the cold winter dark, trapped. She feels a wave of fear starting at her stomach and rising to her shoulders and simultaneously descending to her knees, which are shaking. Her arms are shivering and her teeth are starting to chatter. She knows it’s snowing outside, getting dark, and she thinks she may die of shock and exposure right here in the Hall of Mirrors in the Five Oaks Amusement Park, and they’ll find her skeleton here in the spring inside her coat and her overshoes.

  She tries, one more time, to see where she is. The mirrors surround her, reflecting and breaking her image, and there she is, Dorsey, facing herself; and there she is in profile; and there she is in three-quarter profile. There are hundreds of her images here, joined together in glass. Everywhere she looks she is surrounded by herself: her face—its scared expression in front, and on both sides—and her coat (she can see the tear in the back) and all the rest of her. She is trapped by a wall of gray, cold, indistinct images of herself, fencing her in a circle. She can’t see any place where she isn’t. She can’t see a way out, through herself. She raises her arm and a hundred Dorseys, reflected backward into darkness, raise their arms, mocking her. For a moment she has the idea, which she knows is crazy, that the hundred Dorseys are going to come out of the mirrors and kill her. “Hugh!” she says, more loudly. And then she screams. “Hugh! Come get me!”

  Hugh rises from where he squats huddled with Tommy. Tommy grabs at his coat sleeve but Hugh pulls it away from him fast and reaches into his overcoat, feeling for the flashlight he has brought along, just in case. He’s been in the Hall of Mirrors so many times he knows exactly how it twists and turns. She’s not far away; she’s standing near the entrance, shaking all over, crying in a reaching-for-breath way, and when she sees him she lets out a long stringing sob of accusations. “Come on,” he says. “I was always here. We were just down the hall a little ways. And look what I brought.” He flicks on the flashlight. Hugh and Dorsey, Dorsey and Hugh, and Hugh and Dorsey clutch at each other, mirrored. Eighteen, twenty-eight, a hundred mirrored flashlights shine into and away from one another. She’s relieved, and she leans against him. “I want to go home,” she says. He feels her arm around his waist. She can see his breath in the mirrors.

  “We can’t get out this way,” he says. “We tried. It’s boarded up. We gotta go back the way we came.” Hugh sees Tommy Connell behind Dorsey, his mouth open in a metallic-breathing grin, the wires of his braces visible. “Let’s go,” Hugh says.

  He takes Dorsey’s hand, and they walk together up the sloping hallway into the Tilted Room, across its floor, and out the other side into the pitched hallway, now in the flashlight visibly painted a mad orange. Then they are back in the main section of the Fun House, and Hugh leads her toward the stalactite opening—Tommy still following them—and Hugh directs the light into the fetid opening and instructs Dorsey to follow him. He squeezes himself in by sections, lowers his head under the slide and finally gets down on all fours so that he can work his way through another squarish gap in the woodwork into the crawl space and then back out. He has the flashlight on, and its cone of light burns in a visible straight line through the dusty unused air, support beams above them, gravel below.

  When they’re all outside the Fun House again, the front of their overcoats marked with long straight lines of stains and gashes, they see that it’s snowing harder than before, now in late afternoon’s grayish-purple dusk. They run past the disassembled rides, the canvas-covered remnants piling up with snow and the spare metal parts looking like giant hibernating insects, and then they crawl under the fence and are out, silently, on the sidewalk on Lake Street. “Look at your coat,” Hugh says, pointing at Dorsey’s goose-down jacket, where the down is beginning to seep out of the tears. “Mom’s going to murder us.”

  “Come on,” Dorsey says. “Let’s just go.”

  They run down Lake Street, Dorsey beginning to pant very hard as she crosses the no-U-turn corner in front of the Muni Liquor Store, and they rush through Five Oaks Park and head up the path into the woods. After five minutes of fast walking, Hugh hears his sister behind him telling him to wait. He stops and turns around, shining the flashlight on his sister’s face, and what he sees gives him straight hairs on the back of his neck: Dorsey’s skin looks cold-creamed, it’s so white with fatigue. “I got to stop,” she says, “I’m too tired.” Tommy tells Hugh to leave her there, but he won’t. “Go on home,” Hugh says to Tommy. “You can find the way.” Tommy shrugs and leaves Hugh and Dorsey together on the path; as he runs off, leaving them there, he whistles.

  “I can’t walk any further,” Dorsey says. “I’m too pooped.”

  “You gotta admit it was different, what we did,” Hugh says, not sure how he’s going to get his sister back home and not certain that he wants to think about it. “You don’t have an afternoon like this every day, right?”

  “I guess not.”

  They walk on the path together for another few minutes, Dorsey stumbling and making crying sounds behind Hugh.

  “Could you carry me a little ways?” she asks. “I’m not so big.”

  “I don’t know,” Hugh says. “I guess we could try it. Here, get up on my back.”

  After he squats down, she climbs on so that her legs are around his waist and her arms are over his shoulders. Hugh tests his balance and hunches forward to compensate for his sister’s weight, feeling like a fireman. “You’re not so—” he begins to say, and he feels Dorsey’s head nod against the back of his neck. Trying to keep himself upright, he removes by mental force all the tiredness from his legs and chest as he totters and tips his way up the hill until they emerge onto Washington Street. To compensate for the burning ache in his legs, he tells himself that this is a muscle-strengthening exercise that Coach has given him for hockey practice to toughen him up, make him rocky. “You want to do this tomorrow?” Dorsey’s head is on his left shoulder. Trying to lift his head, Hugh sees the snow falling in steady thickening flurries underneath the streetlight.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t want to do this tomorrow.”

  All the way to the front door of their house, Hugh tells himself that he’s carrying this girl out of a burning building, and if he didn’t transport her himself, she’d be left behind in the flames. At their stoop, he lets her down on the front mat. “Don’t tell, okay?” he asks. She doesn’t say anything, which is as good as an agreement, this time of day, before dinner. They open the door and walk together into the front hallway, trying to do this in secret, hanging up their coats so no one will notice.

  “Dorsey? Hugh?”

  They walk togethe
r into the furnace blast of heat and light of the living room. Off in the corner, their father is sitting in his chair reading a book, his cup of coffee and his pack of cigarettes to his left; he waves to them, then goes back to his reading, as if everything were normal and always had been and always will be; ahead and to their right, through the dining room, they can see their mother in the kitchen fixing dinner. She calls out, “Where’d you kids go? Did you have a good time?”

  “Fine, great,” Hugh says. “The park.” Hugh looks over at Dorsey and sees that in the sudden comfort of this house she is going to cry unless he stops her. “But we got a little cold. I think Cass wants to take a shower,” he says, pushing her toward the stairs.

  “Well, be quick,” Mrs. Welch says. “Supper’ll be ready soon.”

  Hugh puts his hand on his sister’s back and guides her up the stairs to her room, where he pulls the cord switch on the light next to her bed. “You really should take a shower,” he says. “You look like the Bride of Frankenstein.” It’s true: her face is pasty white and her hair is sticking up at weird angles. She’s snow- and mirror-shocked. Hugh backs out of her room and closes the door softly behind him. After walking into his own room across the hallway from Dorsey’s, he shuts the door but leaves the light off. He sits down on his bed. He does not snap the light on or stop whispering the foulest words against himself that he knows until he hears his sister pad into the bathroom and turn on the hot water.

  25

  Hugh stands in his sister’s doorway. He has helped Dorsey bring a stepladder up to her bedroom and now watches her as she perches near the ladder’s top, attaching black construction paper to the ceiling with transparent tape. She is careful to make the edges of the paper overlap, so that the off-white paint of her ceiling doesn’t show through. As soon as she has successfully taped up another sheet of paper, blacking out another rectangular area, she lowers herself to the floor. Then, after some calculations punctuated by sighs and quiet groans, she moves the ladder. In this way she has so far covered over three-quarters of the blank white space over her head.

  Dorsey’s mother walks by in the upstairs hall, looks in, and with a tone of pleased unsurprise says, “Look who we’ve got here. Miss Michelangelo. Or just plain old Cassiopeia in her famous chair.” She disappears downstairs with a load of dirty laundry.

  “Come on, Dorsey,” Hugh says. “What’s the big secret? Tell me what you’re doing. I helped you bring the ladder up here. Gimme a break.”

  “No secret,” she says. “I’m just making my ceiling dark. That’s all.”

  Something else is definitely going on here, but Dorsey won’t tell Hugh what it is until it’s either finished or dismantled. Whenever she has a project, she won’t tell him or anyone else what its purpose is until the project is ready to be shown. If it meets with failure, as was the case with what seemed to be an alarm system in her closet a few weeks ago, she won’t explain what she had in mind. She trusts no one.

  Hugh walks back into his own room to listen to the Top-Forty countdown and to work on a model airplane, a Messerschmitt, which he is making with balsa-wood sticks and tissue paper. Every few minutes he hears his sister groan, girlish groans he would do anything to stop.

  In another ten minutes he has part of the left wing set in a clamp, and he stretches his legs by standing in his sister’s doorway. She has finished covering over the ceiling with black paper and is looking up proudly at what she has accomplished. In her right hand is a white crayon.

  “What’re you going to do now?” Hugh asks.

  “Just watch.”

  She tugs and pulls at the ladder so that it stands in the center of the room, and once again she climbs up. She raises the crayon and quickly puts on the black paper a pattern of dots.

  “Stars,” Hugh says. “Whyn’t you put them on the papers before you put the papers up?”

  “Because,” Dorsey tells him.

  Hugh returns to his room and the model plane. The plane, at least, is real: it looks like something, and has wings and a fuselage and a stabilizer, things you can touch and repair. The radio’s DJ, Sandy Beach, shouts out two commercials and then plays three in a row, the Coasters and Buddy Knox and the Everly Brothers. Minutes pass in the pleasingly empty way time has of flowing past whenever he’s in his room with the radio on, and when Hugh accidentally squeezes out a thin line of airplane glue on his finger, he wipes his hand on the rag he swiped from his mother and decides to see how far his sister has gotten in her sky project.

  From the doorway, he can see a spattering of newly applied white dots in no pattern all over her freshly taped up black-paper ceiling, and she is still adding new dots in the northwest corner.

  “Looks like a snowstorm,” Hugh tells her.

  She doesn’t turn around. She has the air of a dedicated engineer who knows she is working on a project that will someday aid humankind. “Well, it isn’t.”

  “It’s a made-up sky, right?” he asks. “You’re making up all these stars and you’re putting them on the ceiling. Pretty smart. Dorsey’s new constellations. Wait till I tell Mom.”

  “You’re so dumb, Hugh. So ignorant. You don’t know anything.”

  “Smile when you say that,” he says, a very popular line among his friends at school. “Okay, Doctor IQ, if this sky isn’t all made up, what is it? I don’t see the Big Dipper anywhere, and I’ve been looking.”

  “Think,” she says.

  “Think?”

  “Yeah, think.”

  “I give up,” he says.

  “They’re the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, stupid. Look straight up. All right, that triangle there? It’s Octans. And over there? That’s Tucana, which is a Toucan, which is a bird, for your information. And below that? Those stars there? That’s Hydrus, which is a sea serpent. And over here, right above me, is the Southern Cross. Maybe you’ve heard of that. Or you would have, if you read anything except those dumb comic books.”

  “How would you know how dumb they are? You’ve never read one.”

  “I don’t have to.” She taps out a few more stars, then looks down at her brother. “See how high I am?” she asks. “I’m way up here, looking down at you, and you’re way down there.”

  Hugh understands that he is being insulted. Where did she learn how to do that?

  “These aren’t real stars,” he says. “They’re all made up.”

  “Well, some of them are real,” she says, in a child’s tone of stubbornness. “I put up a few on my own, by myself. But that’s what I wanted to see, the stars in the Southern Hemisphere.”

  “How come you wanted that?”

  “Because anyone can go outside and see the stars that you can see. I wanted the ones you can’t see. The stars you can’t see are the ones you’ve got to draw for yourself,” she says, in her most maddening Little Miss Perfect voice.

  It makes Hugh cringe, this snotty superior tone his sister sometimes takes on, and he leaves her up there, installed on her ladder like a tinsel princess with her brand-new sky taped to her bedroom ceiling, and he slams the door to his own room, just so she gets the point of how angry he is about her Queen-of-the-World problem attitude.

  The transparent tape holds for almost three weeks. Then, corner by corner, the black sections of the Southern Hemisphere’s night sky begin to loosen, and during the day, while Dorsey is at school, they flutter down to the floor, so that when she gets home and drops her books in her room, she finds pieces of the sky not over her head, but on the rug, on top of her bedspread, over the dirty clothes, scattered everywhere at her feet. And at night, a week before she finally removes the paper sky she has made herself, she can sometimes hear the hushed floating fall of paper as the stars give way to gravity and come easing down.

  26

  Morning—summer—and Dorsey has twisted the shutoff valve on the toilet tank, so no water can flow in, flushed the standing water out, and is now taking the tank assembly apart, piece by piece, setting the pieces out on the bathroom floor. T
here on the floor, near her left knee, is the floater; and just above it, underneath the bathroom window, is the connecting rod; and over here, by her mother’s laundry hamper, is the (slightly rusty) intake valve; and close by her right knee, dripping on the bathroom’s yellow rug, is the trip lever, along with the lift chain and rubber stopper plug. As she takes these pieces into her hands and holds them up to the hard sunlight, Dorsey coos and mutters explanations to herself concerning their shape and design. With the metal pieces standing in the light, the light itself glitters off the water that is still dripping down into her lap and casts momentary irregular reflections on the bathroom wall, quick jagged traces. It takes less time to put the assembly back together, but it is a process unsweetened by discovery and it leaves an ache in her legs and back. Once she knows how the toilet works she does not sing; she’s made a mess, and now she has to clean it up.