Girl Before a Mirror

by Liza Palmer

  “No, I understand it completely, actually,” I say.

  Lincoln pulls the napkin from his lap and drops it on the tray of food. He crosses to the bed, tucking in next to me. He rests his head on my lap and as he speaks I wind his hair around my fingers. He sighs, settles in close, and continues, “So what came first. Unlike your brother, my younger brother was everything right with the world. He was exactly like my father. Which meant that there were now two monsters in my life. After university, I was to follow in my father’s footsteps and join his army regiment, where I would become just another Rupert who was biding his time before he took over the family’s estate.”

  “A Rupert?”

  “It’s what people call posho wankers like my younger brother and me . . .”

  “I can only listen to this story if I know for sure your brother survives,” I say.

  “Oh, he does. He’s far too dreadful to be any kind of war hero, I assure you.”

  “That’s a relief,” I say, and Lincoln laughs.

  “Thing is, I liked it . . . in Afghanistan. It was the first time I felt like I belonged. That what I was doing was important and I was actually good at it. The other lads in my regiment, once they realized I wasn’t a total—”

  “Rupert.”

  “Yes. They began to accept me. And then I had to go and get blown up.” My hand clutches back with his words, and I’m stunned and hesitant, even though I don’t mean to be. “Please don’t stop, Anna.” His voice sounds so soft in that moment. I wind a dark blond curl around my finger as he continues, “We were in a convoy. It was routine. There hadn’t been a strike or any kind of violence in days. We were talking about football. Arguing about football, really. And—” He shudders. Turns his head away from me. His entire body is tight. I can’t see his face. I don’t know what to do. So, I do what he asked. I keep going, twirling his hair in my fingers. And I feel him settle just enough. Soften. Another shake of the head. He clears his throat. “Only I survived.”

  “Oh, Lincoln,” I say.

  “And I shouldn’t have. The three others . . . they were better men. Kids. Married. Just better all around. I woke up in some hospital. They said I was out for almost three weeks . . . I had to be in this whole contraption to keep from getting infections . . . the burns and the skin grafts and the surgeries. And the whole time I’m thinking . . . why me? I’m a useless piece of rubbish and here I was. Alive. I didn’t deserve to be.” I feel a tear soak through my pajama bottoms. And another. And another. “So, I drank.” He sniffles a bit, wiping his face and sitting up next to me, his dark blue eyes rimmed in red, his face blotchy and creased in pain. It breaks my heart. I swipe a stream of tears away with my thumb, letting my hand linger on his face. He tilts his head into my hand, closing his eyes. A deep breath. “Your turn.” He manages a raised eyebrow and a smile through all the guilt and erupting grief.

  “That’s—”

  “Not fair? Maybe.” He tries to smile again, but I can see that he’s completely tormented with what he’s shared. I’m thinking he’s sick of telling people he’s fine about as much as I am. “I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours.”

  “It’s not anywhere near as heroic or . . .”

  “I’ve been laid bare before you, darling. Please,” he says. And then a little glint.

  “You’re so full of it.”

  “Oh, absolutely and yet . . .”

  “Fine.”

  A beat. He waits. I take a deep breath. And just start talking.

  “My father was a colonel in the army—never made general. Which was the perennial subject of our family dinner discussions. My mom is a painter. French Canadian—never had any interest in mastering English. To this day. Which meant that even within the nomadic military community we were weirdos. Which she never cared about, but—”

  “So, you’re fluent in French?”

  “Oui.”

  “You want to open with that next time,” Lincoln says, brightening up a bit. I smile, but then, just as it did in the shower that day, it disappears as quickly as it came. “Hey, come on. What could go wrong? We’re just two complete strangers sharing our deepest, darkest secrets in a hotel room in Phoenix mere hours before we both check out.” The tears are immediate and I crumple into sobs, hiding my face in my hands. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Lincoln pulls me into him, wrapping his arms around me, tight . . . tighter.

  “We’re doomed,” I say, drooling through my sobs.

  “What?”

  “We’re doomed. You can feel it, too, right? You know it,” I say.

  “What I know is that you will go to any length not to talk about yourself,” he says, bringing my face up to meet his gaze. I laugh. Throw my head back and laugh. It feels . . . so good. Lincoln smiles . . . the furrowed brow giving away his worry or pain. Or both. I breathe. Try to regain control. Talking myself back to the relaxed place I return to when I get upset. Or feel lonely. Or have any emotion at all, really.

  “I was by myself a lot as a kid. I don’t even remember when I stopped . . . just stopped. Trusting, asking, loving . . . it just happened along the way somewhere. I don’t have some tragic story—I’m not a war hero like you. I was just a lonely little kid. And then I became this.” I shrug and can’t look at him. “A dead body waiting for some amateur detective to stumble over her.” I sit back from him a bit and really think about this. My hands whip up, and it’s as if I’m holding a ball of energy between us. “The idea of really letting go—whatever that even means? I don’t think I know what that is, because if I knew what that was, I’d have tried to do it.”

  “I don’t think it’s some kind of checklist, love,” Lincoln says.

  “Well, why not??”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “I’ve been to therapy. I’ve been on a yearlong hiatus from dating. I’ve cleaned house of faux friends. I’ve made smoothies with flax oil in them and started drinking green juice. What else do I have to do?” Lincoln can’t hold in his laughter. “I know. The green juice? Not as bad as you think it’s going to be. But you know what? There was this moment.” I lean into Lincoln, excited. “I was taking this pilates class. I know. Just stay with me. I tried everything over the last year to help fix myself. Everything. And I’m stretching out my back and the instructor takes his fingers and gives my spine a quick little massage. He gets down to my sacrum.”

  “Your what now?”

  “This. Your sacrum,” I twist him around and put my hand at the base of his spine. Lincoln nods. “And I howled out in pain. I turn around and the instructor says, ‘Ah, I was wondering where yours was.’ ‘My what?’ I ask. ‘Where you hold all your pain.’ Just like that. Where you hold all your pain. Like he was talking about where I keep my produce or my reusable bags for the grocery store.”

  “Sounds like a prat.”

  “Maybe, but what got me? I thought I’d grown out of it, that my adult brain knew how my parents acted—how icy they were and just . . .” I look away from Lincoln. “How they . . .” The tears. I stop. A breath. “How they didn’t love me. At all.” I look up at him. And he’s just there. He doesn’t look like he feels sorry for me or that I’m some sad little match girl. He’s just there. Listening. So I continue, “I understand—however abstractly—that that’s on them. So, I thought all that pain—I had it all figured out of course—would just evaporate. But apparently it doesn’t. It just sank down into my sacrum where it waited for some yahoo to knead his fingers into it and then smugly report that, you know, he knew it was there the whole time.” Lincoln laughs. “That’s what scares me. That this is just how I am. Like directions. If I don’t know how I got here, how am I going to know how to get back?” I bite the inside of my lip, hoping it’ll stem the tide of tears trying to push its way up and out. It doesn’t. Now I’m crying and the inside of my mouth is bleeding. Lincoln pulls me into him and I hold on to him. “How am I going to get back?” I ask again.

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t
know . . . ,” he says, rubbing my back. “And we’re not doomed.” I let out a strangled laugh and pull away from him. Looking straight at him.

  “Come on. We can barely handle three days in a hotel,” I say.

  “D.C. and Manhattan aren’t that far apart,” he says.

  “What are we going to do? Date?”

  “Sure.”

  “Uh-huh. So, you’re comfortable with this level of intimacy. Just, like . . . all the time.”

  “Are you?” he asks.

  “You’re answering a question with another question.”

  “Of course I’m not comfortable with this level of intimacy all of the time,” Lincoln says. He looks over at me and waits.

  “Neither am I.”

  “Right.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know.” Another look over at me and then he lets his head fall into his hands. “I don’t know, love.” He drags his fingers through his hair and finally looks up. “I’d like to say that I’ve been . . . careful? Is that the right word? No. Shut down. That I’ve been shut down since the accident, but that’s not true. The accident just slammed the door shut. Tight. Maybe I thought I could handle you . . . this . . . us? Because I knew or rationalized that it was only going to be temporary, if I even thought about it at all, which I’m really good at not doing.”

  “Why am I relieved?” I say, almost in a whisper.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think it’s good. I mean, in the way that everything with you is terrifying and whatever it is that you just said made me relieved.”

  “And that’s not good?”

  “No, because that means I think I’m off the hook.”

  “Off the—”

  “Right. That—”

  “No, I know.” Lincoln looks away from me. He shakes his head. “I’d screw it up.” He manages a smile. Pain. A shrug. Another shake of the head and then an ironic laugh as he finally settles. In the end he can only get up from the bed in shame. I stop him. “Any relationship—I mean, if you can call anything that I’ve had a relationship—doesn’t last more than . . . a few weeks? Maybe a month?” he says.

  “See now that’s where I’ve got you beat. I, at least, had the ability to shut down and endure a loveless marriage for eleven years. And you call yourself dysfunctional.”

  “Are you trying to beat me at being emotionally unavailable?”

  “What?”

  “You are, aren’t you? You are actively competing with me to be more hopeless.”

  “I’m just . . .” I can’t help but laugh. “I mean, can you blame me for wanting something good to come of it?” He laughs.

  We are silent. He takes a few steps toward the bathroom, his hand falling out of mine. Something about it feels . . . intentional. A chill runs through my body. He doesn’t turn around as he begins speaking.

  “I can’t have you hate me.” He turns around. The night-light from the bathroom illuminates him like a low moon. He lets his head fall. His arms akimbo. He shakes his head. “I don’t think I could survive that.”

  “What are you on about?” I say, and he laughs.

  “You’ve been hanging out with me too long.”

  “Aye, matey!”

  “And now you’re a pirate,” he says. I begin inexplicably singing a confused, rambling medley of songs from Mary Poppins that were almost ruined by Dick Van Dyke’s terrible cockney accent. And somewhere around “Step in Time” I notice that Lincoln isn’t laughing anymore.

  “The other women. Every woman, really. I’ve disappointed. Why couldn’t they understand that it’s because I like them that I had to stop dating them?” He laughs. “What was that quote . . . one of the Marx brothers?”

  “Groucho.” He nods and I can tell it hurts him that I know exactly what he’s talking about.

  “Groucho,” he repeats. “That he’d never want to belong to a club that would have him as a member.”

  “Right.”

  “I never wanted to date someone who would have the poor judgment of falling for me. I mean, I know exactly how worthless I am; why didn’t they?” A mean little laugh crumbles into a layer of him that breaks me open.

  “Fools. Every last one of them,” I say. Lincoln laughs. “Thank God I had the sense to steer clear.” I reach for a glass on the nightstand and gulp the stale water, hoping it will mask the wobble in my voice as I try valiantly to keep from crying.

  “This has to stay temporary. It has to. Or else you’ll end up hating me.”

  “I hate you now, so . . .” Only half true.

  “Good.”

  “Good.” I want to scream. I want to . . . well, anything else except have Lincoln Mallory telling me we only have mere hours left together. Instead, I walk over to him in the dim light of that hallway. Up close, I now see the tears streaming down his face. I am calm. Eerily calm. I take his face in my hands, brushing his golden curls back.

  “I think we should just look at the next however many hours we have together as the only thing that’s for sure. I know I want to spend the entire day in bed with you. I know I’m tired of talking about sad things. You make me happy—so happy,” I say, and then I kiss him. “Happier than I’ve ever been. Right here and right now and . . . I don’t want to think about what happens when we have to leave this bed.”

  “I feel the same.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Anna, I—”

  “Don’t. Just don’t,” I say, stopping him with a kiss.

  12

  And that’s exactly what we do.

  After I get word that Audrey has returned to D.C., I can only think that coming to Phoenix was merely a portion of her plan. She’ll go back to the agency and Sasha and I will brace ourselves for whatever the next wave is. Helen Brubaker is attending the giant signing with all the authors and Sasha is still hungover and dead to the world—I have nothing to do but languish in Lincoln’s hotel room until the pageant that night.

  We sleep soundly in each other’s arms as the sun comes up, and then I wake up just long enough to find that I’m curled up and facing away from him, my arms hugging the pillow. Lincoln is snoring away on his side, his fist notched into the crook in his neck, thumb tucked into his hand like a baby. The morning rolls into lunchtime and Lincoln is up and telling housekeeping to skip us, but he’s taking the mints they offer him as a consolation prize. He presents me with one in a low morning growl, flipping it to me as he flops back into bed, pulling the covers over him. As the heat and bright sun of high noon break through the drapes, I shuffle over and pull them closed, falling back into bed and into Lincoln for what are fast becoming more and more desperate sessions with each other. We can feel the countdown getting louder.

  “I’m bloody starving,” he says, crouching down next to me by the bed. “I’m going to get something from the machines. Any requests?” He cinches his bathrobe around him, his flips of dark blond hair everywhere. I grab my glasses from the nightstand and hitch myself up.

  “Something from the machines?” I ask, still blinking myself awake.

  “Yes, darling,” he says.

  “What time is it?”

  “We’re going to need to prioritize in these last hours, my love.” He kisses me. “Food. What do you reckon?” he asks, taking money out of his wallet on the nightstand.

  “Everything,” I say.

  “Good. Kettle’s on,” he says and he’s out the door.

  A beat.

  The silence settles in around me as the chill of . . . the void begins to creep in. I swing my legs over the side of the bed, find my pajama bottoms, and lace my arms through the spaghetti straps of my tank top. I scrape my hair up into a ponytail, wrapping the tie around and around my tangle of hair. I check my phone. Nothing from Ferdie. I let my head fall into my hands as I realize how completely exhausted I am. From everything. Exactly how long have I been in Phoenix—a month? Month and a half? A decade?

  But this is how it’s going to be when he’s go
ne. And not just at the machines for food. Isn’t this why I decided to marry a man like Patrick—to avoid this exact moment? A moment that feels like I’m on a speeding train and can only watch as the blown-up bridge in front of us gets ever closer. Utterly helpless. How do I go back to my life after experiencing what I have with Lincoln over the last few days? Is the training montage over? Is that what this is? Me stepping into the ring? Even now the pangs of loss begin to tighten their grip around my heart.

  I will drink tea. I stand and pour myself a cup, laughing that Lincoln Mallory actually travels with an electric kettle. I remember my own words:

  I want to be happy and not feel guilty about it. I want to be curious without being called indulgent. I want to be accepted regardless of what I look like, what I do for a living, my marital status, whether I have kids, or whether you think I’m nice enough, hospitable enough, or humble enough to measure up to your impossible standards. I want purpose. I want contentment. I want to be loved and give love unreservedly in return. I want to be seen. I want to matter. I want freedom. I want to be . . . I want to just be.

  Ninety percent of that list has nothing to do with Lincoln and everything to do with me. So why does it feel exactly the opposite? Maybe I just already miss him.

  I think about Helen Brubaker and her question about what would happen if I made an entire playlist with just the songs I enjoyed. Even if I’d previously labeled them fluff. Why did I believe I had to ration out the good stuff to myself into bite-sized nuggets, apologizing to those who caught me indulging as if what I was doing was so wholly shameful? Of course I know. I dig into the deeper recesses of my mind to uncover a childhood with very little good. So I rationed it like it was sugar during wartime. Always careful. Always mindful. Never reckless.

  Until now.

  What do women want? Let’s start with what I want. I want to feel like I deserve greatness. To demand the best all the time. I lift my head up and grab the hotel pen and pad of paper on the bedside table and write.

  JUST. BE.

  Lumineux:

  Because luxury should be something