The Other Way Home

On a wet April evening when the city had dimmed itself to a bruise, Lina stepped into a mirror and met the life she hadn’t chosen.

It was not a sorcerer’s mirror, only the baked-crackle pane above the sink in the back of a café named Switchback, where the ceiling leaked in two persistent places and the barista had dyed his hair the color of moss. The mirror had a seam in it, a silvering crack like a river from corner to corner, go left, go right…and Lina stared because her face looked tired in it, and because a second face; her face was staring back with a tilt of the jaw she didn’t recognize.

“Do you live here?” the other Lina asked, as if they were both customers in a department store and only one of them belonged in this aisle. “I work a block away,” Lina said. “Gallery. You?”

“Second avenue, above a laundromat. Nurse.” The other Lina…Lina Two touched the seam with a fingertip. “God, this is ridiculous. But you are me.” The barista’s mop knocked a wet thud into a bucket. Both of them smelled the bitter steam off the cheap espresso machine and the rain in each other’s hair.

They had diverged eight years ago and both remembered it; both kept it like a coin at the bottom of their pocket. A night of rain like this, and a vibrating phone. In one world, Lina silenced the call and went up the subway stairs to her audition with her yellow umbrella blooming like the sun.

In the other, Lina answered“Mom?” turned back, missed the audition, and caught a train home to a mother who would have another year and a half to live. Nurses had taught her how to lift, how to keep a room quiet and how to braid hair for a woman whose hands shook endlessly. In the first world, gallery openings had taught her how to make people look, how to hold a glass of wine at the exact angle that said proximity without need and most importantly how to smile in photographs she was obliged to be in; because one of her installations a circle of VHS tapes arranged by the color of their labels had gone unapologetically viral.

The worlds had drifted like two boats on parallel rivers in the same rainstorm until tonight, when the seam in the mirror…not magic, not planned but found a way to make two rooms kiss. They stared until the barista said, “Bathroom’s for customers” and they bought two coffees that neither intended to finish.

“Do you think,” said gallery Lina, “we could try it? Switching?” “Why would you want mine?” said Nurse Lina, and then could not keep from asking, “Why would you want hers?” They agreed to meet the next night at the same time to test the seam. They agreed on rules as if rules would protect them. A month, no more, no theft, no crime; notes left where necessary but sparse, like a good stitch; if something terrible happened, they would come back to the mirror immediately.

“To see if one river is kinder,” one Lina said. “Rivers aren’t kind.” “Rivers flow.”

The first morning of the swap, Lina woke in the Nurse Lina’s overheated studio to the rasp of the radiator and a smell of detergent that had crawled up from the laundromat. Her borrowed phone had alarms set: 5:30 am , 5:45 am and 6:00 am. The last one reads “Shift start 7!”. She rolled her neck. The muscle remembered how to carry weight even if she did not. Beside the lamp, a postcard of a field of yellow flowers…beautiful dandelions at peak and on the back, a hand…her own had written “We started as wishes, you and I. Don’t forget.”

She read the note the Nurse Lina had left her

Key is in the mug with the chip.

Kenneth prefers orange juice with a straw and the cartoons from the 90s. If he has the blue hoodie on, you guessed wrong. Try dinosaurs.

There are three kinds of pain. Two you can carry. One you must put down. If you can’t tell the difference, ask for help. Ask the mother. She stands in doorways like a guard dog but she’s only tired.

“Okay,” she told the radiator, “okay.” She made herself drink a glass of water because the note had suggested it and because she had a day at the museum of other people’s bodies.

Down another river, the Nurse Lina woke in a two-room apartment with a thin rug from Morocco and a plant that had been kept barely, heroically, alive. She found herself in photographs on the mantle: holding, laughing, posing with a woman named Ari whose grin was the right amount of crooked. Post-it notes on the mirror in dry, precise script (her own, and not) read, Remember earplugs for the install. Smile with your eyes not your teeth. Don’t say “indeed.” On the table, a stack of programs from the gallery; on the top was a foldout rendering of a new exhibition “Seams & Seismographs” in which the artist had recorded subway vibrations on hanging glass plates. Beneath the programs, a letter with a return address she recognized without wanting to her mother’s old house and now her father’s alone. It had been forwarded twice. The postmark was from last year. It was unopened.

Nurse Lina did not touch it. She put on the gray trousers she found in the closet and a blouse that had to be smoothed with hands. She picked up the plan the other had left:

Meet Anthony at 10 for install.

Don’t let Quinn change the lighting plan. You hate shadows on glass.

Lunch: scallion pancakes, place on the corner. The owner calls you “Miss Tape Measure.”

After: donors from the foundation; the woman with the emerald ring will ask if you’re “still doing that VHS thing.” Say something gentle but firm.

They went into each other like a borrowed coat. They waited for the seams to chafe. They did not, not at first.

Nurse Lina’s day was crowded with beeping and breath. Kenneth liked the dinosaur hoodie. His mother stood in the doorway like a guard dog and softened when Lina said, “We started as wishes.” Kenneth was six and he would not die, not soon; but some days the world felt like a high wire and all the mother’s heartbeats made a net. Lina watched vitals blink and remembered installing projectors. the way a steady light could make a room feel like a promise, the way a flicker could make people lean forward and hold their breath. She listened to a woman on the bus cry in soft hiccups into the heel of her hand, and she wanted to reach, but she was learning to measure silence in centimeters and she did not. I read enough books and Nurse Lina’s mini classes over the years to pass this through shift but perhaps I should call out just to get adjusted to this realm.

Meanwhile, the gallery was a different hospital, its own conditions. The glass plates hummed with underground tremor. Donors purred. The woman with the emerald ring did ask about the VHS circle and Nurse Lina surprised herself by saying, softly, “It’s still the same body underneath. The skin keeps changing.” Quinn tried to move four lights and she did not let him. Anthony laughed, which was a clean, uncomplicated sound, and in that sound there was a little world in which indicated she had made every right choice.

At night, each of them returned to their borrowed beds and set the other’s alarms, and in the mirror at Switchback on their second week they compared bruises like swimmers after different races. They drank the coffees they did not need and drew maps on napkins. Two apartments, two routes to work, one seam between them and the kind of promise neither had believed in since they were twenty.

“You have a person,” the Gallery Lina said, pointing to Ari’s grin on the mantle.

“She’s more a question,” Nurse Lina said, and smiled with her eyes and not her teeth.

“You have a mother.”

“I have a house with her things in it.”

“You have people saying your name in rooms I can’t afford to walk into.”

“You have people who breathe easier when you enter the door.”

They were tender with each other as if tenderness could keep this from breaking.

On the seventeenth day, both rivers hit rocks.

In the studio, Gallery Lina woke to a text from the agency Kenneth had turned blue the night before when a tube kinked; the mother had found it and the night nurse had been fired. Lina felt her body involuntarily stock on inventory of blame; If I had been there…but she went anyway to pay respects. At the apartment door, the mother’s face was not a guard dog; it was a storm. “I need to trust who comes here,” she said, and Lina said, with someone else’s earnestness in her mouth, “You can,” and meant it with an ache she had never used to bend light.

In the other apartment, Nurse Lina finally opened the letter with her father’s handwriting, which was tidy to the point of apology; it said “I found this among your mother’s things and thought you should have it, though I see your name everywhere and I am proud in the way a person can be proud like a river; I stand on the bank and point with pride”. Tucked inside was a folded page in her mother’s hand.

I am sorry for the days I made the room small when you needed it big. You chose something I could not see, and that was my failure, not yours. Do you remember the yellow umbrella? You think you left me to stand in the rain. I think you taught me to look up and open something bright. I am learning that your leaving was not an abandonment but a form of faith: that I would be here when you turned back. I am. I will be. Live at the scale that makes your lungs work.

Nurse Lina sat with the letter in her lap long enough that she missed the noon meeting and the first donor’s call. When she returned to the world, she had to explain tears to a board chair who did not like or care. She went into the bathroom and washed her face and whispered, “Three kinds of pain,” and could not tell which she was carrying and which she needed to put down.

That night they both went to the café as if to a safehouse. “I think I stole from you,” Nurse Lina said, throat tight. “I opened something…” “that was always mine,” Gallery Lina said. “You didn’t steal it. You delivered it.” “I am bad at stillness,” she said, “and your world asks for it.” “And I am bad at not performing,” the other answered, “and your world sees through it.”

They considered ending the month early. The barista, who had begun to recognize the way they held their cups like coordinates, said, “My friend’s band has a show here Thursday. Come be dual and drink cider.” They did not because Thursday was the fundraiser in one river and the first day back after the tube kink in the other.

Two days later, a small mercy and a big cost arrived together. At the fundraiser, the emerald ring woman pressed a palm to Nurse Lina’s forearm, the light from the glass plates trembling on her wrist. “Do you ever miss it?” she asked. “The thing you didn’t choose?”

Every day, she could have said. Instead, she said, “My life collects seams,” and watched the other woman nod like a metronome, wishing to be ordinary in the moment she was most split.

At the apartment over the laundromat, Ari stood at the door with a bag of groceries and the kind of wariness that means love is still inside the room but pacing. “You’ve been…different,” Ari said. “Softer in places I didn’t know you had and sharp where you used to round off. I like both. But you keep looking into corners like you’re expecting a door to open.”

“I am,” Gallery Lina said, before she could suture her mouth. It wasn’t her mouth. It was both their mouths. It was a problem. Ari set apples on the counter. “If this is about leaving,” she said, “do it quickly. Slow exits are cruel.” “It isn’t,” Lina said and thought; but it is about exiting. Because the month was cresting. Because the seam would not be there forever. Because kindness was a kind of hurry when two worlds were tethered.

That night, after the shift in which Kenneth slept around a recovery room’s worth of machines and the mother did not, Gallery Lina took a pen and wrote a letter to herself. “Dear Lina”, she wrote, and paused as if she were forging a signature.

“You do not owe anything to anyone you became by not answering the phone. But you hold her, because she is also you. Your mother would have loved the glass plates.” She would have said, “It sounds like plates in the cupboard during a truck passing and then she would have told you about the time she danced because the dishes sang.”

She left the letter under the mantle plant. She did not sign it. She didn’t have to.

The thirty-first day rose like a curtain.

They met to return what they had borrowed and to give back what they could not keep. The mirror’s seam glittered like a road seen from a plane. The barista had stepped outside to smoke.

“Don’t,” Ari had said at the door that morning, not a command, a prayer. “Don’t be someone else because you think she knows how to be you better.” “I won’t,” Nurse Lina had promised.

“Don’t let my work make you small,” Anthony had said to the other. “You’re the person who told Quinn no three times and kept the lights where the glass could sing.”

“I won’t,” Gallery Lina had promised.

They stood in front of each other and took inventory, fluently now, like two harpists tuning the same instrument. “Your mother sent you forgiveness,” one said and put a finger to the other’s heart as if fastening a brooch. “You found a kind of work that doesn’t end when the room empties,” the other said, and put a hand on the first’s shoulder as if checking for fever.

“You were braver with my donors than I am.” Nurse Lina said

“You were braver with my mother than I was.” Gallery Lina said.

The seam in the glass shivered. River wanted what rivers want.

“Do you still want to switch?” Nurse Lina asked. She had meant this as a ritual, a rewind. She heard it in her mouth, a thin thing that had once been longing.

“We don’t,” Gallery Lina said. “We only wanted to know.”

“And we do?”

“We know enough to be dangerous,” Gallery Lina said, and smiled with her eyes, and for once with her teeth as well.

They reached out and touched the seam together. It was not magic. It was maintenance. It was how a room tells you it has more than one door. They stepped through at the same time and into the right rooms, the original ones, the ones they would now have to call by their actual names.

After things did not turn to gold. Rivers kept their banks.

The patient had good days and days that scraped Gallery Lina thin; the mother learned to nap in chairs with a blanket she called the boat. While Nurse Lina learned that three kinds of pain was not wisdom so much as a practice. She gave herself new rules: drink water, stretch your hands, text Ari “Hi. I am thinking of you”. I have a string around my finger with your name on it. When the shift permitted, she took her break outside the hospital, under the yellow of an awning of a taxi stand “Little suns”. She held her phone and did not answer calls that could wait.

At the gallery, donors turned again and again to the light, as if it could absolve them of a body. Lina experimented with tiny changes…a light an inch to the left so the glass sang at a lower pitch, a speaker tucked beneath a bench so the city’s tremor was inside the wood and watched people press their hands to their own chests to feel the echo. She wrote a note to her father and walked it to the mailbox. She did not write about the mirror. She wrote instead “I am learning to open something bright even when the rain is loud. Sometimes the room is big enough for both versions. Sometimes I have to choose.”

Ari watched her like a person watches a weather pattern and brought home scallion pancakes and asked about nurses and mothers and donors and glass, and Lina said, “There are two Linas” without saying how many there really were. Ari kissed her like a seam from corner to corner.

On a spare Sunday, each Lina went to Switchback at the same hour and stared into the cracked mirror and saw only herself. The barista had shaved off the moss and looked ordinary. “Bathroom’s for customers,” he said like an incantation or a habit and they each bought coffee.

They did not see each other. But they did something better. Each reached for the seam and left a thumbprint on the glass and on the other side a thumbprint bloomed at the same height.

Same hands. Same wanting.

On a day in late summer when the trees along the avenue looked like they were holding up their own green applause, Nurse Lina took the train downtown to the gallery. She stood in the room with the hanging glass and the benches and the hum of the city caught in the plates, and she did what people did she pressed her palm to her own chest to feel the echo.

Gallery Lina saw her then, how a nurse stands ready to carry, ready to put downand she did not rush. They glided toward each other like two boats allowed to drift closer by a gentle wind.

“I found the letter,” Nurse Lina said, the first thing and the truest.

“I found a way to keep the light from making shadows on glass,” Gallery Lina said, a smaller thing that was also true.

“You’re you,” one said.

“So are you,” the other returned.

They didn’t talk about swapping. They didn’t talk about staying. They walked the room once, twice, like people in a museum of their own life. When they stepped back into sunlight, a taxi went by the color of a childhood object and somewhere above them a child laughed as if he had just discovered a way to be quiet that still counted as speaking.

On the corner, the scallion pancake place had set a table outside. They bought two and sat, knees bumping. They ate and did not say the rest aloud that every version of them was still reaching for the same thing not fame, not goodness, not even forgiveness, though there were days when that burned like a mark left by jewelry in summer.

They were reaching for a room big enough.

They were building it with the light at hand.