by Michael Rowe
Feeling better for having vented a bit, I turned away to put on my pyjamas and get into bed. I thought I saw something flicker and shift in the depths of the mirror. There was a sudden impression of fluttering, as though a moth had trembled in front of a lamp, wings beating a frantic insectile tarantella in the air. But when I looked again, I was alone in the mirror with my empty bedroom reflected in the glass behind me.
Then suddenly I wasn’t alone. I knew I wasn’t alone as surely as I knew my own name, or that my beautiful red bike had been stolen that afternoon, or that I wanted it back at that moment more than I’d ever wanted anything in the world.
I touched the glass and tapped it lightly with my index finger. “Mirror Pal? Are you real?” Even at eight, I realized how ridiculous that question was, but I asked it anyway. I breathed on the glass, running the tip of my index finger through the condensation, bisecting the cloud of moisture with a jagged line of fingernail. “Mirror Pal?”
What happened next was something I felt in a way that almost precludes an adult ability to put it into words. As I opened my mouth to form Mirror Pal’s answer to my own question, the air inside my room became heavy with something like the weight of the electricity and ozone that presages a summer lightning storm. By reflex, I closed my eyes as though anticipating a thunderclap. There was the burst of the orange-red light that always accompanies a rapid opening and shutting of the eyelids.
An image rose in my mind—or, more accurately, appeared to impress itself on my mind from somewhere outside of my own reckoning—of a young girl of my age whom I had never seen before. She had long dark hair tied up in the sort of bow I had seen in pictures of my grandmother when she was my age. The girl wore some sort of dark-coloured dress rippling like black water caught in a shaft of moonlight. And her name came to me then: Amanda.
Amanda.
When I spoke, it was my voice, of course—Mirror Pal’s voice—but this time it was also not my voice at all. I had uttered the name without any conscious intent to do so, but I said it as reverently as if it were an invocation. The name seemed to pour out of me of its own volition, shaping and wrapping itself around my vocal cords and calling them to life. I heard it with my ears, but I also heard a double-voice say it in my mind, as though two record players were playing the same single at different speeds, causing a slight overlap.
With my eyes still closed, I reached over and switched off the light on my night table. Then I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror.
Something indefinable had changed in the reflection. It was still my room, but the edges now bled into a general murkiness, a blurring not dissimilar to that of the faded quality of an antique photograph: yellowing, age-burned and cracked at the edges. My reflection, too, had changed in a similarly impalpable way. My eyes were obscured by the shadows of the room, but my shoulders were hunched in a narrowing way that suggested somehow the fey mien of a young girl sitting on the edge of a large antiqued chair that was too big for her. When I instinctively relaxed my shoulders to dispel the illusion, my reflection followed suit, but it seemed to lag just a beat, as though it slyly wanted me to know that it was doing it on sufferance, not because the laws of physics had compelled it to do so because it was my reflection.
My. Mine.
Mine.
I said, “Mirror Pal? Is that you?”
Again, the unbidden response, the weird aural duotone of my own voice echoing in my head.
My name is Amanda.
I was entranced. I’d forgotten that I was speaking to myself, forgot that this illusion was impossible, forgot that I must be speaking in my own voice because there was no possible way my reflection could be addressing me independently. And yet, the name “Amanda” hadn’t come from me. I didn’t know anyone named Amanda.
Excitedly I asked my reflection, “Is this my imagination, or is this real?”
Maybe it’s both. Maybe I live in your head as well as in the mirror. I felt my shoulders involuntarily rise and fall in a mechanical-looking facsimile of a shrug. It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m here now.
“Who are you?”
I told you. My name is Amanda.
“Where did you come from?”
From your mirror.
“No, before that.”
There is no before, there’s only now.
“Where’s Mirror Pal?”
Mirror Pal has gone away. I’m here now.
“Why haven’t I ever seen you before?”
I don’t know why you haven’t seen me before. I’ve always been here.
I asked again, “Who are you?”
I already told you who I am. I’m just a girl. Stop asking me that. A pause. Where’s your bike?
“How do you know about my bike?”
I just know. Where is it?
“A kid stole it. In the park. I was out with Hank and he came and . . . and . . .”
Don’t cry. You’ll get it back, I promise.
“How do you know?”
I just know. You’ll see. You and your dad are going to go driving tomorrow to the place where you lost it. You’re going to look around the neighbourhood and see if the kid is there. Or if his brother is there. He has a younger brother, remember? He told you about him. He’s going to give his brother your bike as a present, and the brother is going to ride it all around. He’ll probably break it, then throw it away. Your bike. Yours.
I felt my fury rise again. “It’s my bike! I want it back. My dad gave it to me for my birthday!”
What do you want to have happen to him? The kid who took your bike?
“What do you mean, what do I want to have happen to him? I want him to give my bike back! That’s what I want. I . . . I want him to shut up! I want him to shut up and stop being so mean to little kids that are smaller than him. I want him to shut his mouth and give me back my bike.”
When Amanda spoke again, her voice—for I was now entirely thinking of it as her voice, the words choosing me, rather than me choosing them—had chilled perceptibly. But underneath the new frost I thought I heard a cruel sort of excitement, as though she was about to propose her own version of an adventure.
He will. We’ll make him shut up, I promise. And we’ll get your bike back.
Then the image in the mirror seemed to shimmer and sway. I tried to stand up, but stumbled and fell backward onto the bed. Hank had showed me a trick once: she told me to pinch my nose shut and hold my breath as long as I could. As the oxygen was depleted from my brain my head was full of giddy black stars and I’d felt like I was floating. It was like that now on the bed, except I could breathe easily. And my head wasn’t full of black stars, this time, it was full of gold ones, and there was a mighty hum in my brain as though I was lying on the grass beneath a tree alive with a swarm of furious bees hidden by thick branches. The hum rose in crescendo until there was simply nothing else. Near to losing consciousness, I reached for the switch and turned my nightlight on.
With the sudden light came sudden clarity, and with the clarity came silence and the realization that I was quite alone. There was no humming in my head. There was no Amanda. In the mirror I saw myself and no one else. The only room reflected in it was my own—my own, from wall to wall, every corner present and accounted for, every border distinct, impermeable, linear and real.
I felt something wet against my legs and looked down. The front of my pyjama bottoms were soaked with urine. A line of piss tracked down along the inside of my right leg all the way to the ankle.
I pulled my pyjama pants off and wadded them into a ball. After I had used them to blot myself dry, I put them inside a plastic bag on the floor near my closet door. I tied the bag closed and stuffed it under my bed. From the bottom drawer of my dresser, I took out a pair of clean pyjamas and put them on. Then I jumped onto the bed, crawled under the covers, and pulled the sheets and blanket over my head. I listened to the silence of my bedroom on the other
side of the blanket, praying I wouldn’t suddenly hear that strange double voice, or feel a little girl’s icy hand pull the blanket away from my face.
Fifteen minutes later, I heard the sound of my father’s footsteps on the stairs and my bedroom door opened. He walked in and came over to the edge of the bed, smiled down at me. Very gently, he tousled my hair.
“Everything all right in here, Jamie? You ready for bed?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
He wrinkled his nose. “You smell anything funny, Jamie? You have any accidents you want to tell me about?”
“No, Daddy.” Normally, lying to my father would have been unthinkable, even impossible. But tonight, all I wanted was normalcy, ease and light. “I don’t smell anything funny.”
He shrugged. “Probably just my imagination, never mind.”
I took a deep breath. “Daddy?”
“Yes, son?”
“Daddy, I don’t like my mirror. Can we get rid of it?”
“What do you mean, get rid of it?” He peered over at the mirror on the wall. “Is it cracked?” He sighed. “You didn’t crack it, did you, Jamie? Your mother is going to be furious if you did.”
“No, it’s not broken, I just . . . well, I don’t need it.”
“Jameson,” my father said. The switch to my full name wasn’t lost on me. “Your mirror is fine. I don’t know what this is about, but—”
I cut him off, reaching for his hand and squeezing his fingers tightly enough for him to look back at me with an expression of mild surprise. “Daddy, would you stay here with me for a little while? Until I fall asleep? I’m scared.”
His face softened. “Jamie, what’s wrong? There’s nothing to be scared of. Are you upset about the bike? We’ll get it back. You shouldn’t have gone out of our neighbourhood, but what happened wasn’t your fault. Is that what this is about?”
I glanced over at the darkened mirror hanging innocuous and now empty on the wall. “Daddy, just stay with me. Please?”
“All right. But just for a little bit.” My father lay down beside me on the bed and put his arm around my shoulders, pulling me in close.
I pressed my face into his shirt and inhaled deeply. I felt my heartbeat slowing as I relaxed into the bulwark of his warm body and his warm scent. In time, I fell asleep safely against my father’s chest. He must have left the room at some point when he saw that I was asleep, turning off my bedside lamp and leaving me in the dark.
I dreamed I was astride my red Schwinn on a promontory of land overlooking a vast, dark lake.
From the centre of the black water rose an island encircled with a wild coronet of grey rock and black-green pine trees. On the island was a castle whose turrets rose above the blackened pines. The sky was streaked with thin sunset stripes of hard red, luminous orange, and bright celadon blue.
The vista was a familiar one: I knew every wave, every jutting rock, every arching pine bough stretching up to gouge the bleeding red sky. The landscape was as familiar to me as my street, but even in the dream I knew it was somewhere I had never been.
The air was raw and northern, but wondrously fresh. I was cognizant that it was late because the sun was going down and the temperature was plummeting as I sat there staring at the island. I knew I was a long, long way from my house—much farther than I had ever been before. I felt the comforting solidity of my Schwinn between my legs and I knew I needed to get pedalling or I was going to be in a lot of trouble.
There was someone standing directly behind me, but I didn’t turn my head to see who it was. I already knew who it was. Instead I just stared at the darkening twilight lake and said, “It’s late. I need to get home.”
I felt tiny fingers settle on my shoulder, and I heard a voice like glacier water whisper in my ear.
You are home, Amanda said. This is home.
If I woke screaming, there were no echoes of it in my bedroom when my eyes snapped open in the dark and it disturbed no one in the silent house. There were no footsteps on the floors above—either the living room directly above my bedroom, or my parents’ bedroom above the living room—no heavy adult tread taking the stairs two at a time to save me from any monster that had followed me out of my dreams and into the world.
Instead I woke to broad planks of moonlight on my bedroom floor from the open window on the other side of the room, and to the dreadful silence every child who wakes from a nightmare alone in his bedroom knows. As I lay tangled up in the maze of sweaty sheets and trapped under the suffocating blankets, the only sound in all that quiet was my own heart in my chest, and the pounding of blood in my temples.
Next to my bed, the mirror was black and opaque, as though even the moon was afraid of what it might call to life from the depths of the glass by shining on it.
I lay awake for what seemed like hours. Eventually, the sky began to turn to flush pink. When there was enough light outside to at least bring the contours of my bedroom back into the realm of the safe and the real, I slept, blissfully dreamless this time.
The next morning at breakfast, the phone in the hallway rang. My father looked at the clock and frowned. My mother shrugged and lit her second cigarette of the morning, blowing another plume of smoke into the shimmering blue cloud already hanging over the breakfast table.
My father said, “It’s a bit early for callers, isn’t it, Alice?”
“Well, it’s ringing,” my mother replied tautly. “Either answer it or don’t answer it. I don’t care. But it’s ringing.” She took another sip of her black coffee. My mother wasn’t generally much of a conversationalist at breakfast, at least until she’d had her very own particular breakfast of caffeine and nicotine. All three of us knew it, and neither my father nor I attempted to engage her seriously until after the breakfast dishes were done, preferably by him, preferably with no audible clattering of crockery and silverware in the sink.
My father pushed his chair away from the table and stood up. “So it is,” he said. “It is ringing. Excuse me, my dear.”
Out in the hallway, his voice rose and fell. There was a long pause, then another soft volley of words. Then I heard him hang up the phone. When he returned to the table, his face was ashen. He sat down heavily and rubbed his chin the way he did when he was thinking about how, or whether, to say something painful or difficult.
I put my spoon back in my bowl of Froot Loops. “Who was it, Daddy?”
My father took a deep breath. “Well, Jamie, the police found your bike. We can go over and pick it up after breakfast.”
My mother perked up. “Really? Really, Peter? They found Jamie’s bike? Where? Did they catch the thief?” She seemed genuinely shocked, as though the prospect of my Schwinn coming home wasn’t anything she’d ever seriously entertained. It occurred to me that she sounded disappointed that the long, punitive lesson she’d hoped to teach me about responsibility was now lost to her forever, or at least until my next major cock-up.
My father delicately ignored her question, turning to me instead. “Jamie, you said you don’t know the name of the boy who took your bike, right? You’d never seen him before yesterday?”
“Right, Daddy. Was that him on the phone?”
“No, Jamie,” my father said slowly. “That was a policeman. I called them yesterday and told them what happened and gave them a description of the bike. The boy . . . well, his name is Terry Dodds. Damnedest thing. His kid brother brought the bike in to the police station this morning and told them Terry had stolen it and he wanted to give it back.” Something indefinable in my father’s face stayed my euphoria. I waited for him to continue, but my mother cut in before he could.
“His brother brought it in?” She exhaled smoke into the air above her. “And he just waltzed into the police station and confessed that his brother stole it from Jamie? What on earth would prompt him to do something like that? Not that I’m complaining, but it seems very unlikely.”
“His bro
ther is in the hospital, Alice,” my father said. “In the intensive care unit. He had some sort of an accident this morning, apparently.”
Reflexively she stubbed the cigarette into the saucer of her coffee cup. “A car accident?” She lit another cigarette. “Good Lord. Is he all right?”
“No, not a car. Something . . . well, something else. According to the policeman, this boy was riding the bike around in the field where he stole it from Jamie. They think he must have run over a nest of wasps. Maybe it fell out of a tree or something. In any case, they swarmed. It’s pretty bad, apparently. He can’t speak.”
It was as though all the air was suddenly sucked out of the room. I felt dizzy and the kitchen swayed and dimmed around me. For a moment I thought I might faint. I steadied my hands on the edge of the kitchen table for balance.
We’ll make him shut up, I promise. And we’ll get your bike back.
When the vertiginous moment passed, my father was still speaking to me. He hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong. “The constable asked me if I wanted to press charges,” he was saying. “Of course, under the circumstances I said no, of course not.” He cleared his throat. “Jamie, the boy’s aunt would like to meet you at the hospital. She’d like to have her nephew—the thief’s brother—apologize to you on behalf of the family. Her sister, Mrs. Dodd, is with Terry in the ICU. Apparently some of the family is with her. The aunt and the younger boy want to speak with you. How do you feel about that? Shall we go down to the hospital after we pick up your bicycle at the station?”
In a very small voice I said, “Okay.”
“Are you sure, Jamie? You’re not nervous, are you? They just want to say they’re sorry. Apparently the police really gave the young fellow a good what-for about his brother stealing the bike from you. Told him it was your first bike and everything, and that you’d just gotten it for your birthday.”
“No, it’s okay, Dad. I just feel bad for the kid, even if he did steal my bike.”
“You’re going to be nice to them, aren’t you, Jamie? Even if the boy’s brother did take your bike?” My father looked at me hopefully. “They’re pretty upset, and it’s a hard time for their family, especially the boy’s mother. This would be a good time to be kind.”