Five minutes? About that. When she came back, Carole walked slower than usual, and unsure, like her feet weren’t quite touching the ground and she had to watch the earth for every step. Owen started to ask how it went, but she stopped him without even a glance his way, raising a palm to him, and glided on by to go sit by herself.
“Your turn,” Micah said. Both he and Leo seemed to defer to him for, what, no better reason than the grubby white of his skin? Like it was his right when he hadn’t earned a thing? He didn’t like the feel of that, either.
“Why don’t you go on. I ain’t ready yet.”
Leo, then. Leo had been ready since Kansas.
Micah watched him leave. “Little earlier, I asked that old man where it come from. Near as he knows, it was just some big old mirror, used to be fancy, that somebody hauled in from the town dump. Got it all this way, then they dropped it.”
“That don’t sound very charmed.”
“No, sure don’t. But, I tell you, sometimes it’s the sweetest music that comes out of the most busted-down-looking pianos. No sense to it.”
“I gave up looking for sense a long time ago.” Owen cocked his head. “Something I was thinking on earlier. They probably got all the pianos you could want up in San Francisco. Something to look for at the tree, anyhow. In case nothing comes of the cowboying.”
Micah mused it over. “Know soon enough, won’t I?”
“If you’re lucky.”
Micah stuttered a choppy laugh. “Now you sunk it.”
As the air cooled and the sky grew deeper and richer, Leo drifted past with a bewildered little smile on his face, trudging for the flicker and crackle of the cookfires. Micah went for his turn, and when he came back Owen knew better than to ask.
By now he understood why it felt earlier like waiting for someone to die. Hopes died the same as people, hard and gasping, and when it was their time to go, there was nothing you could do for them. He had hopes. He just didn’t know if they were worth anything. As long as he didn’t, they could still feel like they were kicking.
He cursed himself for a coward, then marched off to find out.
***
He didn’t know what he’d expected. Something grander, though, than this. At first glance, it looked like no more than what it was: shards of a shattered mirror, dangling from branches and brush. But instead of one or two, for shaving and combing your hair, they numbered over twenty.
Someone had taken every piece big enough to salvage, irregular shapes and skewed triangles, wrapped them corner-to-corner with wire to make frames, then suspended them with twine. They hung within easy reach, some at head level, the rest a bit higher or lower, like the low-hanging fruit you hoped to find at the end of a long, sweaty day in the orchards.
At first when Owen looked into one, all he saw reflected was himself, staring back with yearning too great to bear. Then he reached out and set them moving, and the breezes helped. Some spun around to show him their backs, nothing to see. Others caught the slanting rays of the sun to set in motion a dazzling dance of light spots.
It was when shards spun around to face each other just right, their reflections locking and seeming to open up tunnels between, that he saw it was true, all true. But there was not just one path before him, he realized. They were as numerous as the thin and supple branches of the tree.
Pick one. Just pick one.
He saw himself at the bedside of his mother, soothing her brow with a damp cloth as she hacked her tubercular cough, and if he read her red-flecked lips right, she called him a good son.
Pick another.
He saw himself in the clearing of a pine forest beneath a vast blue sky, in the company of several young joes like himself. None of them he recognized, but they all looked content as they wielded shovels and saws and hammers.
He saw himself miserable and alone with crack-lined cheeks and hair going gray, gazing hollow-eyed across desolate plains from atop a boxcar clattering along rails that could’ve led anywhere.
For a moment that nearly stopped his heart, he saw himself little different than he was this moment, writhing on ground littered with rocks and coal, both hands clutched at his throat as he tried to hold in the blood. As quickly as the vision appeared, it twirled away, but when he clawed to get it back—where, when, how?—it was already lost to him, irretrievable.
He saw himself in a jungle, a real one, thick and close, beside a concrete bunker with flames curling up out of a narrow horizontal port. He wore a helmet and fatigues, and was running forward with a rifle, to shove its bayonet through the belly of a half-burned man with slanted eyes. The sight shook him even more than the notion of ending up with his throat cut.
The languid mirrors spun and flashed, revealing scenarios good and bad. Some might have fit together, but they all couldn’t have lain along the same road. He had to get off the rails, though. That was the main thing. Get off the rails, keep away from the jungles. Despite their warnings, he still began to wish he’d never stepped up and set the mirrors in motion. Some sights repelled him, but none lured him, made him want to go there . . .
Until, with a slowing spin that let him watch with a lingering joy that made it seem truer than the rest, one pair of mirrors at last showed him the only thing he’d hoped to see. There was a future with Carole in it, far from the dust and desperation. He looked heavier, but not bad, it just meant they’d been getting enough to eat. Maybe it was an apartment, or maybe a house, but either way they had a roof and a radio, and it looked like he had a job, because why else would he have a lunch pail? Yet for all he appeared to possess, none of it mattered as much as what he saw in Carole’s eyes, when he knew he had her love and trust and respect.
This one. I pick this one.
And it did him a world of good.
Around the fire that night, they ate beans, simmered with salt pork and onions and molasses, a feast. Over their tin plates he smiled at Carole, and she smiled back. He thought of the jungle buzzard warning them not to rush it, to not spook anything, and figured the old man knew a trick or two.
The respectful approach would be to let her sleep on it before asking Carole what she saw.
***
He rose ahead of the dawn, before the songbirds found their voices. He’d never opened his eyes on a day he was more eager to see begin. The ground wanted him off it, and his bedroll urged him out. Owen was up a good ten minutes before he realized Carole was gone.
At first bewildered, then frightened, then dumbfounded, he searched. In vain, he searched. She wasn’t waiting by the cold ashes of the cookfires, wasn’t at the mirror tree. She never came hiking back from the outhouse, and her cap and bindle were nowhere to be found. Carole was gone, and despite the rising light of daybreak, she had taken the sun with her.
The same could be said of Micah.
When he roused Leo, all he got was the same bleary-eyed confusion he himself had felt when Carole had roused him the afternoon before.
“Ain’t nothing I can tell you but sorry,” Leo muttered. “Micah never said nothing to me.”
By ones and twos, the people of the encampment arose, and though he was still among them, he no longer felt of them. If they spoke to him, he didn’t hear a word. He ate a breakfast of cornmeal mush, but had no recollection of its taste. When he looked at faces, at trees, at log seats and the earth underfoot, everything was a mocking blur that dimmed and reeled around him.
All he could see clearly were the rails to the north. He had pointed them in that direction himself, toward San Francisco and pianos.
Owen cursed himself for a fool and began putting together his bindle.
He should let it go, he knew that. If Carole had seen a future he’d never guessed at, and Micah too, and they’d made their choice to seek it, then he should let it go.
But that was the cruelty of the mirror tree, wrapped within its wonder. It showed destinations, but not how to get there. It revealed endpoints without connecting the steps and missteps of the path.<
br />
He should let them go.
Instead, he followed. Along a rugged path of steel rails and creosote-blackened ties, littered with rocks and coal, he followed.
Somewhere up ahead, amid the tangle of tomorrows, was a future with her in it. Somewhere in between, there was another where his throat spilled everything he had.
Today, he could live with finding either.
THE WAKEFUL
Kristi DeMeester
“How long until there’s nothing there anymore. In the ground?” Edith looks up at me and blinks. The sun is too bright. A white, indifferent star. She covers her eyes but doesn’t look away.
“Things don’t disappear when we plant them. They just change. Into something else.”
She nods, all solemn, serious eyes and lips pressed tight. She looks over her shoulder, her eyes passing over the small garden beds the fourth graders planted in the courtyard this past Monday, and mumbles something. “Disappeared,” I think she says, but I can’t be sure.
The other children have gone home for the day, their parents pulling through the car pick up line in their cross overs and their mini-vans, and now it’s only Edith and me sitting on the old bench in front of the gymnasium. Her feet scrape against the pavement, her black shoes scuffing, and I want to grab her shoulders and shake her and yell at her to stop it, but I keep my hands folded in my lap and focus on how my head feels like it’s filled with air. Everything swollen and tight.
It’s the third time this week Edith’s mother has been late. I’ve thought about calling to remind her of the school’s policy, but Cameron thinks it isn’t necessary. Not yet.
“Cut the woman some slack, Charlotte. It’s not as if she’s done this before. Could just be a tough week,” he said when I brought it up.
But now, sitting next to Edith with the sun slipping away in a fury of pink and purple, I envision what I’ll say to Edith’s mother when she finally arrives. She can’t leave her child here so late. If she can’t pick her up at a normal time, she could enroll her in after school care or have a friend or a relative pick her up. It isn’t my responsibility to sit and wait.
“She won’t be much longer, Ms. Pratchett. She’s almost finished,” Edith says and pats my hand. Her skin is fever-hot and sticky despite the chill of early October, and I shift away from her. Slow. Casual. So she won’t see it as a rejection. That’s what they said in all of my education courses. To never let children think you are put off by them or made uncomfortable by their presence.
Edith glances again at the garden beds, and it’s almost like she shivers, like the air has shifted into something it’s not, and then she’s hopping off the bench and gathering her backpack.
“Good night, Ms. Pratchett,” she says. Before I can move, she slides into the dark car that’s appeared in front of us.
“Good night,” I say because it’s what I’m supposed to say.
I sit on the bench until the dark drops around me heavy as a cloak. I dare myself to turn around and look at that freshly turned earth, but I can’t.
I’m too afraid.
***
“It’s been a few days. Not a big deal. I don’t understand why you’re getting so worked up over this.” Cameron stands next to the bed, his pants still unzipped, his dress shirt still piled on the floor. Wrinkling. He won’t like that.
“It’s just weird. That’s all.”
He sighs and rests his hand against my thigh, but it’s an absentminded touch. Light. Airy. Nothing to tie him here to this bed. There’s another bed, across town, with another woman, her wakeful eyes trained on the ceiling as she traces the shadows with her fingertips, the taste of something bitter on her tongue.
Cameron pauses, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiles, and I resist the urge to draw him back, to press my teeth to his throat and take the smell of his skin into my mouth.
He’s never stayed. Never. Tonight is no different.
“It’ll probably be back to normal next week,” he says and bends to drop a dry kiss against my cheek. His lips are chapped; the memory of them against my thighs still burning like the blood threading under my skin. “See you tomorrow,” he says, and then he’s gone.
I listen for the soft click of the front door and wait until I can’t hear the gentle hum of his car before forcing myself out of these sheets that still hold his smell. I’ll have to wash them. If I don’t, I’ll spend the rest of the night caught up in the tangle of everything I cannot have.
After I know Cameron isn’t coming back, I creep through the apartment, turning off the lamps one by one until my own hands are pale shadows swooping through the dark.
I don’t sleep.
***
Edith isn’t at school for the next two days. I should call and ask if she’s all right and offer to send home the work she’s missed, but I don’t. The other children don’t seem to notice she’s gone, and I avoid looking at her empty desk.
I see Cameron at lunch, and I smile, but he looks the other way, and I spend the period picking at the salad I packed before throwing it in the trash.
That afternoon, I sit on the bench and watch the children climbing into their parents’ cars. Some of the moms wave as they pass by, and I lift my hand and bare my teeth in a smile. Everything a learned routine. A pattern.
The air still smells of earth and water. Of bright green things growing in the dark. The other teachers nod as they pass me, their faces masks of happiness, and I wait for everything to be quiet. Empty.
When everyone has gone home, I walk through the little garden, my feet pressing against the dirt, my fingers trailing through sprouted things, but there’s nothing here. Nothing strange.
“Disappeared,” I say, and the word lies heavy and damp in my mouth.
I drive home and wait for Cameron to call. He doesn’t.
I try to sleep but the room is hot. The dark a looming palpable thing that expands and contracts.
I think of Edith’s face as she watched the garden, her question about how long it takes for the things buried there to disappear. I spend the night drifting in and out of nightmares. Each time I wake, I can taste hard grit between my teeth.
At four a.m., I get up and shower, but no matter how hard I scrub, I can still feel the dirt on my skin.
***
Cameron’s left a note for me in my mailbox. His handwriting loops over the scrap of paper: the number 7 with a heart scrawled around it. His initials at the bottom. I fold the note into tinier and tinier squares and hide it in the center of my palm. I think about putting the paper on my tongue, of swallowing down all those sharp, hard edges. Maybe it will bloom into something else. Something like love.
Edith is back in class. She spends the day watching the window, her eyes faraway and dreamy. I stumble through the day’s lessons, end too early so the kids start to get restless despite my telling them they should use the extra time to do their homework quietly.
Edith is already on the bench when I come out to the pick-up area, and she scoots to the far corner. I stay at the opposite end of the line, but one by one, the children disappear until, again, it’s only Edith and me, alone in the falling night.
“I was sick,” she says. I can’t pretend I haven’t heard her.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” I keep the distance between us, and Edith twitches, an almost imperceptible movement. Insect like.
She falls quiet again, and we wait, the minutes stretching on and on into something I can’t find the end of.
“How much longer?” I say because I can’t bear this suffocating quiet.
“She’s not finished yet.”
“Who’s not finished yet? Is your mother on her way? She can’t be late like this all of the time.” My voice pitches higher, and my hands are shaking.
“It’s not time yet. To disappear,” Edith says, and again, her body seems to vibrate, her skin a pale smear against the bench, but then everything goes still, and she hops off the bench. “I’ll show you.”
; She kicks off her shoes, leaves them next to the bench, and walks barefoot into the little garden.
“Come and see,” she says, and I don’t want to follow her into that damp, green space, but my legs are moving and then I’m standing with her in the dirt.
“Here,” she says and points to the ground, but there’s nothing to see.
“Edith, where’s your mother?”
She doesn’t answer.
***
I wake up to the sound of someone knocking. It’s soft. Insistent.
“Charlotte?” Cameron’s voice. Cameron at the door. Knocking. Asking to come in.
I roll over, and my body feels light. Incorporeal. My mouth tastes foul. The fecund, stale flavor of something dead. I push myself onto my elbows and glance at the clock. Seven-fifteen. Cameron. His note told me he’d be here at seven.
Swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, I pitch forward, my knees burning against the carpet. “Hold on,” I say, but my voice is paper-thin and scrapes out from my throat. Cameron didn’t hear.
When I open the door, he rushes forward, his hands grasping my shoulders, my forearms, and he’s flushed, his cheeks and forehead burning scarlet.
“What the fuck, Charlotte? I’ve been standing out there for ten minutes. You don’t come to the door. You don’t answer your phone. I mean, Jesus Christ, I thought you were hurt or dead. Jesus.”
“No.”
“No? That’s all you can say? What happened to you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Fell asleep. That’s all,” I say, but I don’t remember coming here. Don’t remember anything past this afternoon. Past Edith.
“I didn’t want to freak your neighbors out, but I was getting ready to break your door down if you didn’t answer.”
I nod and move to the kitchen and grab a glass from the dishwasher. Turn on the tap and fill the glass and then drain it. Fill it again. Water dribbles down my chin and neck. I don’t bother to wipe it away.
He moves behind me, his breath falling hot on my neck, and presses himself to me, and he’s already hard, and all I can taste despite the water on my tongue is dirt.
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