The Looking Glass

by Janet McNally

  Instead, Julia opened the book to its title page, pulled out a marker, and crossed out the title. I may have gasped. It seemed so wrong to write in a book, especially that one and in permanent marker. I leaned forward and breathed in the harsh, chemical smell of the Sharpie, a foreign scent in our room. Julia pressed her lips together as she wrote.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Giving it a new title. A secret one.” She held the book out to me. I looked at the words for the first time: Girls in Trouble. “This makes more sense,” Julia said.

  “But why?”

  She shrugged and stood up, crossed the room toward the door. “Because at least then the reader knows what she’s going to get.”

  She left then to take a shower, and I held the book in my hands for another minute, studying the words. Julia had talked about “the reader,” but the only readers of this book were her and me. Who was the message for?

  I could have asked her, I guess, could have waited outside the bathroom door for her to emerge in her bathrobe. But I didn’t. I put the book back on the shelf and tried not to think about what it meant, and the way the book felt different with its rewritten title. Heavier, like a thin layer of silver had been added to every page. Full of a specific, sparkling kind of pain I didn’t understand.

  Now, here on the sidewalk, I can hear the swishing sound of traffic and a jackhammer somewhere a few blocks away. I run my pointer finger across the words Julia wrote. The page is completely smooth. I can’t feel a thing.

  I flip through the pages, stopping to read the first line of each story.

  Once there was a man and a woman who had no children, and this made them impossibly sad.

  Once upon a time, a daughter was born to a mother who had wished for her.

  Once there was a girl who had to travel through the woods.

  A shiver moves through me like a current of electricity. The cars keep passing, sunlight reflecting off their hoods. It feels as if the world’s been run through an Instagram filter. It’s golden and high contrast and lovely, but it’s all hurting my eyes. (Once there was a girl who was overwhelmed by the absolute terror and beauty of everything.) I turn my head and that’s when I see her.

  Little Red Riding Hood is coming up the street.

  Or not Little Red Riding Hood, exactly, but a pale-skinned, dark-haired girl in a white dress, with a billowy red shawl draped over her head and shoulders. And a wolf—or what looks like a wolf—at the end of a leash.

  The wolf, dog, whatever it is, skims its nose along the curb, sniffing. He crosses the sidewalk and makes a beeline for the fence next to me. The girl smiles. She’s used to this.

  “He’s friendly,” she says.

  The dog bumps my hip with his nose. He is friendly, panting, his long pink tongue hanging from his mouth. His white teeth are impossibly sharp and long.

  “Sorry,” the girl says. She’s still smiling. “He doesn’t know how to respect people’s personal space.” She tilts her head. “But you look like a dog person, anyway.”

  “I am,” I say. “But mine’s about three percent of the size of yours.” I put my hand out and the dog sniffs it, then slides his head under my palm, determined to be petted. “What kind is he?”

  “Malamute,” she says. “It’s a little warm for him out here today. He’s built for the tundra.” She lifts one edge of her shawl with her non-leash hand. “And I’m trying not to get sunburned.”

  I smile. “Summer averse. You’re a good match.”

  The dog swings his enormous head down toward the pavement, starts sniffing again.

  “He looks like a wolf,” I say.

  She laughs, and it sounds like tinkling glass. Her eyes are violet, or at least they look it in this light. The color doesn’t quite seem real, or not normal, anyway.

  “Do you think so?” she asks.

  I nod. And, honestly, I’m mostly fine with the whole situation until the thing that happens next.

  “All right, dude,” the girl says to her dog. She’s smiling, ruffling the fur behind his ears with her fingers. Her nails are painted black. “We have to get to Grandma’s house.”

  “What?” I ask, but she’s already turning away, starting off down the street, her shawl fluttering like a cape behind her.

  Cellophane Girl

  HOW DO YOU COME BACK to the real world when you’ve fallen out for a bit? I have no idea. All I know is when I get to the restaurant, I’m breathless. This is probably because I ran the last few blocks, just took off as soon as the red-shawl girl was out of sight. The West Village didn’t know what to make of a sprinting girl with a hot pink dance bag slung over her shoulder (Nancy Drew #54: The Case of the Runaway Ballerina), so they mostly ignored me as I dashed by. Now I fling the restaurant door open and stand there in the swirling air-conditioned air. There’s a hostess at the podium across from me, wearing red lipstick and a green silk dress and an expression like she wishes she had a security guard standing by.

  “Hello,” she says, and it sounds like an accusation.

  “Um, hi,” I say. “I’m meeting my parents.” I crane my neck and peer around her, and there they are, at the back of the restaurant, sitting in front of a pearlescent rice-paper screen. My mother in a black dress with an asymmetrical neckline, my father in a gray suit and bloodred tie. They look like they’re onstage, an example of a Beautiful and Important Couple with No Real Problems in Their Lives. And maybe they are. We never talk about Julia at all, and my dad, at least, barely mentions my brother, Everett. I might as well be an only child.

  “Sylvie!” my mom calls. She puts her hand up in the air and waves like a beauty queen on a parade float. I wave back, and somehow, I make myself cross the restaurant toward them.

  When I get to the table, my father stands up to hug me. His watch snags on a lock of my hair.

  “Hi, Dad,” I say, pressing my face into his shoulder.

  “Birthday girl,” he says, and lets me go.

  Before I sit, my mother takes my face in both her hands and pulls me down so she can kiss me on my forehead. She smells like gardenias and amber, the way she always does. So many other things changed in the last few years, but that didn’t.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say.

  “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” she says. Her blond hair is twisted neatly behind her head. She looks perfectly chic, as always, and here I am with after-dance-class hair and a wrinkled dress. And, oh yeah, wondering whether I just hallucinated.

  “Sixteen,” my father says, as if that’s a proper sentence and not just a number. He clears his throat.

  “Yep,” I say. This is the kind of one- or two-word conversation we have all the time. (Really, I should be happy that it doesn’t have to do with the weather. It’s raining/Cold today/Look at that wind.) I know my father loves me, but it often feels like his powers of speech are rescinded when I’m around.

  “We have tea,” my mother says, “but we haven’t ordered our food yet.”

  She pours some of the jewel-green liquid into my blue handleless cup, and I lift it to my mouth without waiting for it to cool. It burns my tongue and tastes like fresh-cut grass.

  We sit, looking at our menus. Or rather, my parents look at their menus and I look at my parents, because I’m not really hungry anymore and I can never figure them out. They love each other, I know, but sometimes their love feels like theater. My mother is the faculty wife, the gracious counterpart to my father’s intense economics professor. She shakes hands firmly yet gently and remembers everyone’s name. She throws parties with kick-ass crudités and serves on the boards of three nonprofits. But she barely uses her own master’s degree, which is in French literature. Well, she speaks French with the Haitian doctors trained by one of those nonprofits, but that’s about it.

  “How was the last class?” my mother asks.

  “Fine.” I try to wrap the whole experience up in that one word, but it comes out sounding flat. She doesn’t notice.

  “On to Level Seven,�
� she says, her eyes shining. I nod.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  The server comes back to the table then, bearing a tray of appetizers. He sets down brown ceramic bowls of steaming miso soup and white porcelain spoons, then a big bowl of edamame still in their pods. I must just look confused in general, because when he catches my eye he smiles and tells me what they are.

  “Magic beans,” he says. I flash to Grimm’s, to Jack and his beanstalk, the cranky, murderous giant up at the top. My mind keeps spinning.

  “What?” My voice is sharp, and the server looks a little startled.

  “Green soybeans,” he says. He looks down at the table. “They’re . . . green soybeans.”

  “Oh,” I say. I fully know what edamame are, but I don’t see how it would help at this point to tell him that. “Fantastic.” I pick one up, then put it back into the bowl.

  The whole time we’re eating miso soup and, later, tempura and avocado rolls, my brain keeps thinking, Julia Julia Julia. Of course I don’t say my sister’s name out loud, but I worry that my mother can hear it echoing around anyway. My father doesn’t hear half the things I say with my actual voice, so I’m less worried about him.

  My mother takes a sip of her tea, watching me.

  “I thought you liked edamame,” she says.

  “I do.”

  Her forehead crinkles. “Then why aren’t you eating them?”

  Because stories about magic beans never end well for the characters in them, I think.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  She looks at me and nods slowly. “Okay.”

  I slip the Grimm’s from my pocket and pass it across the table to her. The gold letters on the cover glint in the rice-paper light.

  “Do you remember this book?” I say. She smiles.

  “I do.” She looks up at me. “I remember you lost it when we were in Montreal.” She flips it to look at the back cover. “But this can’t be the same one.”

  “No,” I say, though it is. At least, I think so. “I can’t believe you remember that.”

  “How could I forget?” Her eyes are sparkling. “We were in Quebec City by the time you figured out you’d left it. You fell apart, just dissolved into pieces on the floor.”

  I remember how upset I’d been, how I couldn’t express why it bothered me so much to lose the book. Part of it was that I was convinced that the next guests in the room had it, and that, somewhere, some other kid was being read my stories before she went to bed. The other part of it was that Julia was in that book. She had defaced it, or renamed it, anyway.

  She’d done it, I thought, for me.

  “Your dad drove back,” my mother says. “Do you remember that?” She looks over at him now but he’s scrolling through his phone flat on the table, his eyes glued to the screen. He doesn’t hear her.

  “He did?” I ask. I don’t remember this. I remember the whole city strung with fairy lights, dusted with snow like powdered sugar. At night, all that white snow reflecting the light back into a pinkish-gold sky. I remember cross-country skiing until my nose was frozen. I remember my despair when I lost the book. That’s all.

  She nods. “Hours. He never found it.” She smiles. “Though I don’t think he minded being alone on the road in the Canadian countryside.” She hands the book back to me. “Where did you get this one?”

  Anonymous package from your long-gone daughter, I think. Though who knows how she got the book back in the first place.

  “I told Tommy about it once,” I lie. “He found a copy for me.”

  “That’s so sweet of him,” she says.

  I want her to be suspicious, to know Julia sent it, the way I do, but her tone is too easy. And anyway this is when my father zones back into our conversation, like he’s just now found the right frequency to pick up the transmission.

  “Are you dating Tommy?” he asks. His brow is furrowed. I don’t know what bothers him about the idea—if it’s that he suspects Tommy isn’t straight or that he has another plan in mind for me. Maybe one of his colleagues’ kids. Because Julia’s relationship with Thatcher turned out so well.

  My mother rolls her eyes at me and grins.

  “Tommy’s gay, Dad,” I say. “We’re friends.”

  “All right,” he says. He clears his throat.

  “How thoughtful of Tommy,” says my mother. “Really.” She turns the book over in her hands again, but she doesn’t open it. I want her to. I want her to see the title page with its Girls in Trouble and help me figure out what it means. Why did Julia send this? Does she want me to know she’s okay? Or is this her way of telling me that she’s the one in trouble, that she’s trapped in the tower and the dragon is closing in?

  It was my mother who first bought the fairy tale book for Julia before I was born. She should know. Instinct should tell her where this came from. Why it’s here.

  But she doesn’t say anything else about it.

  Here’s the problem: half the time when she looks in my direction she sees right through me—as if I’m made of cellophane. She never looked at my sister like that. My mother always seemed to see her. Now she looks at me and sees . . . I don’t know. Julia, Version 2.0? (New and Improved, Now Without Painkiller Addiction!)

  A few months before Julia got hurt for the first time, she was profiled in a New York Times article about standout members of the National Ballet Theatre corps. She posed for a picture with six of her fellow dancers, including Grace, who had been her best ballet friend since she was five. I can still call up that photo in my mind: Julia in white tights and a scarlet leotard and sheer skirt, leaning on her friend Henry’s shoulder. Grace in the center with her gorgeous half smile.

  My mother cut the picture out and put it in the middle of the fridge. She had half a dozen other copies that she stored in a box in her closet. This is what she always wanted: a beautiful, talented daughter who ends up in the New York Times for all the right reasons. If I can do the same, maybe it’ll make up for that whole thing going so spectacularly wrong.

  Now my mother sets down her chopsticks. They’re dark blue and glossy, not like the disposable bamboo ones in the paper packets that Tommy and I use when we get takeout. The chopsticks at this restaurant look like weapons.

  “I wish I could drive you to camp,” my mother says. “It’s too bad we have to leave before you. Though if I’m honest, I don’t mind going to Paris.” She looks at my father and he smiles back. “Good thing your dad has that conference.”

  “That’s okay,” I say. I wonder if my mother wants to go to Paris because that way she can actually use her French. She can walk into a bookstore and read any book on the shelf. I half-heartedly took French lessons when I was younger, but the ability to speak another language still seems miraculous to me. It’s my mother’s superpower.

  “Dessert?” My mother holds the slim menu toward me.

  “Sadie baked me a cake,” I say. “I should probably wait.”

  “Okay,” she says. She sets the menu back down on the table. She looks disappointed.

  “I’m sure they’ll have dessert at your party.” A party with a bunch of economics professors and banker types, where my mother will pretend she’s just someone’s wife.

  “But not special birthday dessert. It won’t have candles.” She shakes her head mock-sadly.

  “I’ll bring you home a piece of Sadie’s cake, if it’s edible,” I say. “No promises on that last part.”

  My mother smiles and her face goes half-happy (mouth) and half-sad (eyes). Same as usual.

  I wonder if she’s remembering my birthday last year, when we had chocolate cake on the roof of our building, but Julia didn’t eat any of it. She was still in withdrawal and too sick. She just leaned against the terra-cotta pots that held our neighbor’s tomato plants, the leaves a green cloud behind her head. She stretched her long legs out in front of her and tried to smile. Her collarbone poked against her moon-pale skin; her thin wrists looked like they’d snap if she leaned on them wrong. My
parents and Everett were there on the picnic blanket too, the five of us sitting together in a lopsided star shape. But I was the only one who could bear to look at Julia. And then, a few hours later, she left for good.

  I slip the book back into my bag and button the flap.

  Let Down Your Hair

  OUT ON THE STREET, MY father puts fifty dollars into my hand. I didn’t even see him pull out his wallet, so I’m actually considering whether he keeps folded bills in his sleeve or maybe loose in his pockets. He’s a mystery.

  “Take a taxi,” he says, embracing me. “And be safe.”

  What does “safe” mean to my father, I wonder?

  Possibilities:

  Don’t drop out of college to become a comic-book artist. (Everett.)

  Don’t get hooked on painkillers. (Julia.)

  Don’t get run over by a bus. (Someone, probably.)

  Don’t date any of his colleagues’ asshole sons. (Julia again.)

  “Okay,” I say.

  My mother pulls me into a hug so tight it hurts.

  “Happy birthday,” she whispers, and then she lets me go.

  I stand on the corner and wave as the town car pulls away from the curb, heading crosstown. When I see it disappear around the corner, I pocket the fifty and head in the direction of the subway. Julia taught me to do that a long time ago, and I’ve always followed her advice. That first time was my thirteenth birthday, and we were on our way to the Museum of Natural History. “Never take a cab,” Jules said, pulling me in the direction of the subway. “We can spend Dad’s money better than that.”