Mirrors

Mirrors

Amanda woke up happy that morning. She had been looking forward to this Saturday as she had every other Saturday before it since she couldn’t remember when. It was the day her mother came to visit, and she always brought her candy. Boy! how she dreamt about the sugar treats, the translucent red hearts, the multicolor striped pops, the gumballs, the gummy bears, and the tooth snatching caramel. Their smell always took her back to the happiest moments of her childhood, to the dizzying effect of the web whirl spinner at the park, the high flights on the swings, the fantastic adventures she had with the fairies in the sandbox; and their taste! Oh, sweet heavens! It always felt like a party in her mouth. She especially loved the flowy explosion that tingled the sides of her tongue whenever sweet and sour, gooey liquids mixed, or the feel of melted chocolate sliding down into her belly, warming her up from inside.

It also made her think of Halloween, her favorite time of the year next to her mother’s visit every Saturday, that is. Dressing up had always been another of her passions. Transforming into an old, raggedy witch, walking on all fours as a hairless cat, prancing around the neighborhood like a mechanical puppet, and playing hide and seek in the woods, living the life of a ferny nymph; that was magic! Whenever October popped around the corner, she would start designing her costume the very first days of the month, and ask her mother for an extra allowance to spend on the materials required; she would get to work like nothing else mattered in the world, totally consumed in the construction of her design, and watch that year’s masterpiece slowly come into being. Then she would completely transform from a black-haired, thin, white, brown-eyed, freckled country girl, into whatever her disguise represented; if she was a monster she would growl and howl into the night, if she was an elf, she would skip and prance in and out of the bushes, if she was a doll she would walk using tiny steps, hardly separating her feet, holding her skirt and bowing to everyone that crossed her path. It was not only playing dress-up; it was playing the full role, total becoming!

Today marked the first Saturday of October of the year she would turn 35. She wasn’t allowed to dress up anymore because of her condition, but in any case, her mother was coming to visit, and that made all the difference.

Robert had been sent to fetch her for her bath today. She liked Robert; the tall, lean, kind-eyed male nurse reminded her of Robbie the brownie, a magical being and not a cake, that moved into the top shelf of her mother’s kitchen cupboard after two acres of trees were cut down from the local forest, when she was about 16 years old. What a mischievous oaf that one had been. It loved moving things around the house, making her mother feel like she was losing her mind or had an early onset of Alzheimer’s; it especially enjoyed watching the woman move to and fro like a confused chicken, dipping her beak into every handbag, basket, and drawer she usually kept her keys in, knowing well that they were in the tub or under the pillow where it had stashed them. Amanda kept the secret of the brownie’s existence quiet and had many laughs with Robbie, her tricky friend, but many a time its clumsiness got in the way of a perfect prank, exposing it momentarily before her mother, risking sure eviction from their home. Fortunately, mother never saw it.

Robert, the nurse, stood at her bedroom door waving hello with his right hand. He looked like a marshmallow in his pastel-green uniform and her favorite pink towel hanging over his left shoulder. She sat up, feeling her sweaty hair slurp off of the pillow, and for a moment the room spun around her as it usually did every morning after she had been subjected to an electrotherapy session. She had already gotten used to this sensation, and was even starting to enjoy it; a 3 second rollercoaster with its ups and downs and whoop-dee-arounds in the safety of her bed. Once she felt stable she stood up and waddled slowly towards Rob. He offered his thick right arm as a hook, and once she latched onto it they walked down the corridor to the bath chambers, the sound of her slippers shuffling on the floor like the lo-fi beat of an old jukebox jazz song. Every now and then Robert would extend the towel to her, helping her wipe the drool from her chin.

The tap was already running, and the tub was almost ¾ to the top; the steam that filled the room made her feel like she was walking into a cloud, and she almost allowed herself to expect to see Galaliel, the angel that had comforted her in her most difficult times. The heavenly being had first come to her aid when Smooches, her gold-haired puppy labradoodle, died after getting hit by a car. The second time was right after Tobias, the only boyfriend she ever had, dumped her the very next day after sleeping with her for the first time and getting her pregnant; he said stupid, stupid words, and left her standing alone on the frozen Oneida lake for a whole afternoon and well into the night until the winged savior came to take her home. The third time the angel appeared was about seven years after; she was standing on the lake as well, she knew that, but she couldn’t recall exactly what had summoned him.

But she knew she deluded herself; this was no more than a bathroom full of steam, and there would be no clouds to be found. Her connection to the angel had been completely severed by the repeated high voltage sessions that were slowly but surely turning her brains into goo.

She bathed lengthily, enjoying every watery bubble, every floral scent, every soapy perfume she was given for the session. She made sure she was clean from head to toe before stepping out of the tub and then wrapped the towel around her upper chest, covering her nakedness. She stood in front of the mirror and slowly wiped it with her hand to remove the condensed steam in order to better see what she was doing as she combed her hair. The bathroom felt extremely and strangely cold, and it took a moment for her visage to become clear on the reflective surface. Her mind flew back to that dreadful day on the lake, the day Toby broke her heart, the day her world crumbled and all she wanted was to die. She cried desperately and sobbed so hard that she choked on her own breath as she fell to her knees, hardly feeling them burn against the ice. When all the despair had been cried out of her, she felt angry, a rage that bubbled like lava from her stomach overtook her, and it pushed her to strike at whatever was near her. She punched around her like a drunken boxer, slammed whatever she could find against the ice, using all of her strength, in an effort to break into the lake, aching for the freezing cold that promised to soothe her pain, until only small shreds of her gloves remained, and thick, red blood dripped from her hands. Then she blacked out and woke up in the hospital, handcuffed to a bed, with a doctor and policeman standing over her, keeping her mother away. –Please, please, just let me see my baby! - her mother screamed. –She didn’t mean to; she didn’t mean to! Let me see my baby! – And then nothing but darkness.

Her face slowly appeared in the mirror, but there was something different about it. Deep wrinkles marked her eyes and forehead; she was so thin that her cheekbones protruded forward and projected dark shadows all the way down to the sides of her mouth. Tiny fissures around her lips revealed scarred bite marks that looked like cracks in an arid desert. And her eyes… their color, their lack of light, of life; well they just didn’t seem to be hers at all. It was hard to recognize and understand she was that hag when the last image she had of herself was that of the seventeen-year-old whose heart was trampled on over a frozen lake.

She stared into the ghoulish face wondering how she could have come to be in such a state, and that is when she saw him. There, on the other side of the mirror stood Tobias staring back at her, opening the palm of his right hand and placing it against his side of the glass. The image was peculiar in and of itself, but she knew she had an overactive imagination, as the doctors had assessed, and finding her boyfriend in a mirror was, well, no big deal. The problem was that she was looking at a version of Tobias that had existed before they had even met; that is, the Tobias in the mirror was a child, no older than 7, and not the 20-year-old young man she had fallen in love with. But his face, and especially his eyes, were unmistakable; she would have recognized them on an old man or a newborn infant. That was her Tobias without a doubt, and he was looking straight at her, playfully, making funny, childish faces at her, blowing raspberries, crossing his eyes, pulling his ears, and pushing his nose up. The child was definitely engaging with her through the mirror.

She felt a deep sorrow fill her lungs, her breath became shallow, and soon she was gasping for air. Tears started running from her eyes but they barely made it past her cheekbones before turning into tiny frozen diamonds. Her heart withered and she fell to her knees, crushed by the past that was taken from her and the memories that could never be.

-Tobias! Come on honey, it’s time to go home now- the woman in the green jacket and pink, winter gloves called to the boy.

-Can we come back tomorrow Mrs. Carson, can we? –

-No baby, I’m sorry; tomorrow you go back to your grandma’s. The weather is already changing and the forecast said that this was the last safe day to be at the lake. It will probably start melting tomorrow and we wouldn’t want to fall into its dark waters, now would we? We’ll be back next year when it is safely frozen again.