by Lois Duncan
“It’s gorgeous!”
In the years since we had moved to the island, I’d come to take our home more or less for granted. Now, however, I found myself seeing it as though for the first time, through the eyes of a newcomer—the high, weathered beams running the width of the ceiling; the massive stone fireplace flanked by two of Mom’s haunting seascapes; the expanse of picture window facing out over the sea.
“Mom’s upstairs working,” I said to explain the lack of inhabitants. “My brother, Neal, is too; he takes painting lessons from her on Saturday mornings. Dad sleeps in because he writes nights, and my sister—”
“Is right here!” Megan announced loudly, popping up from the far side of the sofa. “I’ve been teaching school, and it’s snack-time. My students are starving.”
I introduced her to Helen, and the three of us went down to the kitchen, where Meg went through the ritual of juice-and-crackering herself and a menagerie of stuffed animals, while Helen and I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and loaded them into a backpack.
Dad came downstairs before we were finished, greeted Helen pleasantly if sleepily, and got his eggs out of the refrigerator.
“Are you girls off on a picnic?” he asked.
“I thought we’d take the bikes the length of the island,” I told him.
“Fine—fine. Sounds like a good plan. I’ll see the two of you at dinner, then.” His mind was already slipping away to focus on his world of aliens.
I slid my arms through the straps of the pack, hoisted it to my shoulders, and led Helen down to the storage shed where we kept our bicycles. I let her have my ten-speed and took Neal’s smaller bike for myself, and we set off.
We covered the island that day, from Cliff House at the northern point to the vacated summer cottages at the southern end. The sun burned down on our heads, and I could practically see new freckles popping out on Helen’s face and arms as we pedaled along. We stopped several times to pick wild grapes and some last remaining blueberries, and for Helen to examine fishnets drying in the sun. We ate our lunch in a hollow between the dunes on the east side of the island and, leaving our shoes with the bikes, walked along the beach at the water’s edge where the icy surf lapped up to attack our toes.
Later we lay sprawled in the sand and talked, and I began to discover what it was like to have a nonjudgmental friend to confide in, someone with whom I could be myself, and not just “Gordon Ahearn’s girlfriend.”
We talked about school, our families, and—of course—boys. I told Helen how shy and unattractive I had felt when I was younger, and how much my life had changed when Gordon started dating me.
Helen told me about a boy named Luis Nez.
“That was the name he used at school,” she said. “I wasn’t allowed to know his Navajo name. The Navajos are a private people. Luis was my boyfriend, but there was so much he couldn’t share with me.” She paused, and then raised her hand to touch the tiny turquoise carving at her throat. “When I left, he gave me this.”
“What is it?” I asked, hoisting myself up on one elbow so as to see better.
“A fetish—an object that’s believed to have magical power,” Helen said. “It’s an eagle, predator of the air. When Luis found out we were coming east by plane, he carved it for me. Turquoise is the Navajo good-luck stone. A turquoise eagle protects the wearer against evil spirits from the skies.”
“It must have been hard for you to move away,” I said.
“Yeah, it was. But I know it was for the best. I was starting to care too much, and it never could’ve worked out. It was fun living on the reservation when I was little. The differences didn’t matter so much then. Later—well, do you remember that first day we ate lunch together, and I said to you that there are cliques everywhere?”
“I remember,” I said.
“It’s even worse when cliques are all about culture. You can’t break through.”
“You didn’t have girlfriends?”
“Not ones I could talk to.”
“I’ve never had friends like that either,” I said, realizing it fully for the first time. Darlene and Mary Beth and Natalie were surface friends. They had permitted me to become part of their world because of Gordon, but if and when Gordon decided he was tired of me, I would be out of it again.
“Nat’s had her claws out for Gordon since before I started going out with him,” I told Helen. “Just a few weeks ago she threw a party. I was sick and couldn’t go, and the minute my back was turned—” And there I was, spilling out the whole story—Nat and Gordon on the beach—the “couple of kisses” Gordon had confessed to—and then, because it followed naturally and was so much a part of my thoughts these days, I told her about the girl they had thought was me.
“But it wasn’t,” I said. “I was home in bed the whole time.”
“You weren’t using astral projection, were you?” Helen asked.
“Using what?” I said in bewilderment.
“You know—sending your mind out from your body? Luis’s father used to be able to do it.” She paused. “But if you had, you’d have known it. It’s something you have to work at.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “What did Luis’s father do?”
“I’m not sure exactly,” Helen said. “Luis didn’t talk much about it. He seemed to take it for granted. The medicine men could do it whenever they wanted, I think, and some of the others too. The way Luis described it, the person has to will himself out of his body. It takes tremendous concentration.”
“I still don’t understand,” I said.
“Well, think of it this way. It’s like the soul leaving the body when you die. It lifts and goes, right? Except that with astral projection you’re not dead. The soul or mind or whatever you want to call it—the identity part of you—is focused away, just for a short while, and then comes back.”
“Where does it go?”
“Wherever you want to be. Distance doesn’t make any difference. Luis told me that when his little brother was born, their father was away on a hunting trip. The baby wasn’t expected for another month. When his mother was in labor, she looked up and saw her husband standing at the end of the bed, smiling down at her.”
“That’s wishful thinking,” I said. “She must have wanted him there so much she dreamed him up. There’s nothing so unusual about that.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Helen insisted. “When Luis’s father came home two days later, he knew all about the baby—exactly when it had been born and that it was a boy—everything. He had been there!”
“He couldn’t have been,” I said. “There has to be some other explanation.”
“I know it’s hard to accept, but a lot of Christian beliefs are, too, if you haven’t been raised with them. The Virgin birth, for instance, and water turning into wine. I told my parents what Luis said. Dad’s the one who gave me that term, ‘astral projection.’ Luis didn’t call it that. Dad says there are people doing scientific studies on it, so it can’t be all that crazy.”
“Maybe not,” I conceded. “Still, it has nothing to do with me. I wasn’t ‘projecting’ anywhere that night. I was wiped out.”
“Okay, I believe you,” Helen said. She looked at the sun in the sky. “Do you think we should start back pretty soon now? I’d really like to see the village.”
“It’s right on the way back,” I told her. “Most of the tourist shops are still open, and there’s even an art gallery. Mom has some of her work there—the paintings she hasn’t sent to New York.”
We got to our feet, brushing off the sand as well as we could, and wheeled the bikes back to the Beach Road. Helen was right; it was later than I had thought it was. I’d lost track of time, and the sun had been sliding steadily down the sky as we had talked.
On the outskirts of the village we passed the Rankin cottage. Jeff was out in the front yard, slapping blue paint on the shutters. He had a visored cap pulled down over his forehead to protect his fac
e from the sun.
I waved casually, and Helen called, “Hi!”
Jeff turned toward us, surprised, and raised the paintbrush in greeting.
“What are you doing here?”
“Visiting Laurie,” Helen called back. “I came over on the ferry.”
“Good thing you explained that. I was thinking you swam over!”
“Yeah, right!” Helen said, laughing.
“How do you know him?” I asked her as we pedaled on. “I’ve never seem him be so friendly.”
“He sits in front of me in second period. Rankin—Tuttle—you know, alphabetically. We joke around. Is that place over there a hotel?”
“It’s the Brighton Inn,” I said. “Natalie’s dad owns it. You’ve got to see the inside. The ocean water runs right through like a creek, and they’ve got a little bridge built over. That building across the street is the gallery. The painting in the window is one of Mom’s.”
By the time I had finished giving Helen a guided tour of the village it was really late, and we headed back to Cliff House, pedaling as fast as we could to beat the descending darkness. We put the bikes away and entered the house through the kitchen. Dad was seated at the table, getting ready to pour wine, and Mom was burning a chicken under the broiler. Both of them were in good spirits—their work had gone well—and Mom had a painting of Neal’s to show us. It was a strange, fantasy thing of rocks that were shaped like dragons.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” she said with satisfaction.
“He’s our kid, all right,” Dad acknowledged, “half artist, half SF nut.”
“S, F?” Helen asked, mystified.
“That’s short for science fiction,” Mom told her. “The other term is ‘sci-fi,’ but don’t use that around here unless you want a fight on your hands. It’s an insult unless it’s used by another writer, apparently.”
Dad came back at her with some reference to artists, and the kids heard us laughing and came rushing down the stairs to see what they were missing. Mom flipped the chicken to blacken it on the other side, and everything settled into an evening a regular family might have.
My parents liked Helen. I could tell by the way they joked around with her.
“So you’re from Arizona, are you?” Dad said. “The state of tumbleweeds and dust storms. We took a trip out that way once and dried out and wrinkled up like a couple of prunes.”
“Speak for yourself, Jim,” Mom said. “I really liked it. We almost moved there, remember? If we had, I’d be painting mesas and mountains instead of the ocean.”
“You almost moved to Arizona?” I asked in surprise. “You never told me that.”
“It wasn’t Arizona,” Mom said. “It was New Mexico. It was back before you came along, in Dad’s and my starvation days. We got this idea that we might build a hogan or something and live there on beans and chiles while we were waiting for the world to appreciate us.”
“You had starvation days?” Helen asked incredulously. I guess she thought Cliff House had always been ours.
“All creative people do their share of starving,” Dad said. “When Shelly and I were first married we lived in a studio walk-up in Greenwich Village and survived on peanut butter. That’s how we came to be the cooks we are today. By the time my wife hit the big time and we could afford to eat something better, it was too late for us to learn how to manage an oven.”
“When I hit the big time!” Mom exclaimed, tossing a chicken bone across the table at him in mock anger. “It was when your book Walk to the Stars got developed into a TV show that things started changing for us. They got Brittany Mahrer for the lead role—”
“Just about the same time your work was getting recognized.” Dad grinned, frankly delighted for both of them. “It all seemed to come at once, Helen, like ketchup out of a bottle. You shake and shake, and it seems like nothing’s ever going to happen, and then—blurp!—it’s all there. Money started coming in, and we knew right away what we wanted to do with it. We had a dream: To live on an island. To be together, away from disturbances—to work—to raise our kids.”
“‘Kid’ then,” Mom reminded him.
“Right. Laurie then, and we thought there’d never be another. And then, out of the blue, blown in from Saturn—”
“Oh, Dad, cool it,” Neal said, blushing. He never liked to be the subject of a conversation.
Dad reached over and ruffled his fine blond hair.
“It was a good wind that blew us you and Megan,” he told him fondly.
After dinner we sat in the living room and played poker, which was one of my mother’s favorite card games. I was never able to understand why, because she played so badly. Helen proved to be even worse, her animated face giving away every draw, so all you had to do was look at her to know exactly what was in her hand. The children found this so hilarious they were overcome by giggles, and Neal finally ended up falling out of his chair with his pile of poker chips flying in all directions.
“It’s not always this wild around here,” I told Helen as we were preparing for bed.
“I enjoyed it,” she assured me. “I’m an only child, and things can be pretty boring around our house. You’re lucky to have a brother and sister.” She paused and then added thoughtfully, “They don’t resemble you at all, do they? They’re both so fair.”
“Like Dad and Mom,” I said. “Heredity’s a funny thing, isn’t it?”
Dad had set up the air mattress with a pile of blankets and pillows. Even so, it didn’t look too comfortable, so I decided to take it myself and give Helen the bed. She argued a little but gave in without too much pressure; we were both so tired after our long bike ride that we were ready to settle anywhere.
Once in bed with the light off, we exchanged a few mumbled sentences. Helen commented about the roar of the surf—“It sounds like it’s coming right in through the front door”—and I laughed and told her, “I’m so used to it, I never hear it.” Once I’d said that, though, I did begin to hear it—the rush and the crash and the soft sucking sound as the waves moved in and out against the rocks.
Somewhere once I had read a description of eternity—
If there were a mile-high mountain of granite, and once every ten thousand years a bird flew past and brushed it with a feather, by the time that mountain was worn away, a fraction of a second would have passed in the context of Eternity.
That had stuck in my mind, and it came back to me now as I listened drowsily to the waves dragging upon the great black rocks at the base of Cliff House. How many eons would pass before those rocks were gone? Cliff House itself, along with the people who had lived there, would by then be long forgotten. The whole of Brighton Island would probably have been swept away by winds and tides. Would there still be a mainland with people on it—and, if so, what sort of people? Humans like us, or a whole new civilization straight out of the pages of one of Dad’s novels? “A fraction of a second . . . in the context of Eternity . . .”
My mind rocked slowly back and forth at the edge of sleep, and I was just beginning to slip over and sink beneath the waves when Helen spoke my name.
“Laurie,” she said, “what are you doing?”
My eyes flew open and I blinked hard into the darkness.
“What?”
“Please, get back! Don’t look at me that way! What is it?”
“Helen,” I said, “wake up! You’re having a dream.”
I reached over and groped for the bedside lamp and then realized that I was on the far side of the room, so I got up and went to the door and flicked on the overhead. Helen was sitting bolt upright in bed. She raised her arm automatically to shield her eyes from the influx of light, and then lowered it again as she focused on me.
“You’re over there,” she said.
“I had to get up to reach the light switch.”
“You were on the air mattress?”
“Of course. Where did you think I was?” I crossed over to the bed and sat down on the side of it and re
ached for her hand. It was trembling. “You were having a nightmare.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Helen said. “I was wide awake. I had dozed off, and then I felt something brush against my cheek. I opened my eyes, and you were here, standing next to the bed. You were looking down at me, and you had the strangest expression—not like yourself at all.”
“I never moved from the floor,” I said. “Not until you called my name.”
“But I saw you!”
“How could you?” I asked, trying to be reasonable. I fought to keep my voice steady. “There’s no moon tonight. It was totally dark.”
“But there was a light—some sort—there had to have been. It was like—like it was coming from inside—but that’s impossible, isn’t it?” Helen’s hand gripped mine tightly. “It wasn’t you, Laurie. There was a girl here, and she looked like you. On the surface she did. She had your features, your hair—but her eyes—” She broke off the sentence and started to shake her head frantically from side to side. Her red hair flew back and forth. “It wasn’t you—it was somebody else.”
“A nightmare,” I said again, tentatively, but we both knew that was not true. The mirror girl had been there, and Helen had seen her, not as a shadow, a formless voice in the darkness, but in my shape and form.
“Her eyes?” I whispered. “What about her eyes?”
“That’s what scared me,” Helen said in a choking voice. “I wouldn’t have been scared to wake up in your house and find you by the bed. That would have been normal enough. People get up in the night, stumble around, try to find the bathroom, come back half-asleep to the bed they’re used to. What scared me were the eyes. They were evil eyes, Laurie, just plain evil! When she stood looking down at me, all I could think was—this person is going to kill me!”
We talked about it during the weeks that followed, first in that shaky, self-conscious way people do when they are afraid of a subject, and later, when we had some distance, more objectively. Who could the girl have been? How could she have gotten into the room and left it so quickly? What did it all mean?
