The Mirror

by Millhiser, Marlys

  “You’re not married yet. Get up and help your mother.” His teeth were crooked, the lower ones brown-stained.

  “Leave her be, John. It’s all on. Where’s Elton?”

  “He went downtown to get the news.” John McCabe slipped his spectacles higher on his nose to read a long document with a colored seal showing through when he held it up. “Well, Strock gets Brandy and the Brandy Wine this morning.” He glanced at Shay with the look of longing she’d seen on Jerry Garrett’s face. But it quickly vanished. “What he wants with the last, I don’t know.”

  “There’s talk of opening the mines again. Eat your breakfast, Brandy.” Sophie slid an egg onto Shay’s plate.

  “Conger and his black iron,” John said with a snort. “Bunch of nonsense.”

  Ham slices, fried eggs, cornbread, pancakes, and something that resembled oatmeal. Brandy felt hungry but Shay didn’t know where to start.

  She wore the dress Sophie’d taken off her the night before. It was so tight she wondered if there’d be room for food. The egg was the best she’d ever tasted.

  When she poured herself a glass of milk, John and Sophie stopped eating to stare at her, Nora halted her fork on its way to stab a pancake.

  Creamy, warm, sweet. It probably came straight from the cow. She drank it all before taking another bite.

  “But you don’t like milk,” Sophie said in astonishment.

  “Oh.” In a fit of delayed rebellion, Shay refilled the glass and then wondered if it was cholera one got from unpasteurized milk, or … diphtheria? Brandy probably hadn’t had much in the way of shots.

  Sophie leaned toward her and whispered, “What’s happened to your corset?”

  Shay, who wasn’t wearing one, was saved by a flutter of chickens on the step as Elton McCabe walked in the back door.

  “Old Strock spent most of the night at Werely’s.” Elton winked at Shay and filled his plate. “Wagers are out he won’t make it to the wedding.”

  “He better had,” his father answered and swiped at a fly crawling across the oilcloth toward the white butter.

  “Bet he spent the rest of the night on Water Street,” Elton said through a mouthful.

  “Elton!” Sophie rose to get the coffeepot from an iron stove that poured too much heat into the room. “Coffee, Brandy?”

  “I don’t know.” Shay sucked a piece of food from the unfamiliar hole left by the absent molar. “Do I like it?”

  Brandy’s father gave her a hard look and turned to his son. “What news of the earthquake?”

  “Nobody but us felt or heard anything last night, Pa.”

  Shay slipped out the back door after breakfast. Fat black flies. The smell of dry grass and sweet-scented flowers. A dirt path led to an outhouse and the brick garage. The latter looked much as she remembered it except for the wooden chicken shed tacked to one end. Peering inside, she found a small carriage with its tongue resting on an earthen floor instead of her father’s Oldsmobile sitting on concrete.

  The panic knotting Brandy’s stomach belonged to Shay and it sent her running a few yards across a prairie that should have been city. The buildings of this Boulder were some distance away. She stopped. No help for her there. She couldn’t survive in a world she didn’t know. She needed shelter, food and, most of all, the mirror. If it had indeed performed the impossible, why couldn’t it reverse the process?

  The wedding mirror was her only hope and it was in the Gingerbread House.

  Shay walked slowly back. The horse in the pasture whinnied and she stroked his nose. He blew warm breath to tickle down her arm. He was real; so was the sun on her face.

  Drawing a hand over one of the barbs on the wire fence, Shay watched another woman’s blood ooze from the cut. No nightmare could be this genuine.

  “Brandy! Hurry, there’s not time to dawdle.” Sophie swooped down on her. “What are you doing without your bonnet, child?”

  Shay sagged against the fence, helpless to stop the tears.

  Brandy’s mother gathered her in her arms. “It’s going to be easier than you think, dear. Don’t cry. You’ll muss your face. You don’t want to be a spinster, do you? Or a schoolmarm? Even if your father had allowed you to enter the university, you’d have had to marry sometime. You will come to love Mr. Strock with the years.” But Sophie McCabe didn’t sound all that convinced.

  “Please?” Shay stood before the wedding mirror, tightly corseted, feet aching in tiny button shoes, Brandy’s body too warm in the white gown spread over scratchy, starched slips.

  Sophie’d brushed Brandy’s hair till it crackled, and piled it high in a configuration Shay would never be able to duplicate. Then Sophie’d read aloud from the Bible.

  Was Marek, in a future time, waiting for a bride who wouldn’t show? “What’s happened to my body?” she asked the mirror.

  Is this what happens when you die? Did I die last night and become reincarnated or something? Backwards? This house had always been in the family. McCabe was a family name. Brandy had to be an ancestress.

  What if she refused to go downstairs and wed someone else’s bridegroom? John McCabe would beat me, that’s what. And then he’d probably drag me downstairs anyway. There was no similarity between Brandy’s formidable father and the gentle Jerrold Garrett.

  Elton peered around the door. “Are you alone?” He slipped in, tall and handsome in his white suit. “Pa’ll be here soon. You look beautiful but you shouldn’t cry. Makes your face red.” He wiped tears from her cheeks with his handkerchief. “It won’t be so bad. But if Strock don’t treat you decently, send word to me in secret. You know I’ll do what I can for you, Bran.” He squeezed her hand and left as quickly as he’d come.

  Bran? Shay stared into the mirror. She tried to remember the face in the darkened wedding portrait that hung in the hall until … until the world had turned upside down. But it had been so lifeless, posed. Yes, there was a similarity.

  Shay’d always heard her grandmother referred to as Bran, or Grandma Bran … Short for Brandy. Oh, God.

  The veil had been her grandmother’s. Rachael’d worn it too. She wished she’d listened to some of her mother’s stories on the family’s past. But they’d been so many, and so boring.

  Footsteps on the stairs.

  “Do something, please! Let me go back before it’s too late.” Shay pummeled the wedding mirror.

  5

  Shay descended the curving stairs on John McCabe’s arm, in Grandma Bran’s veil and Grandma Bran’s body. Tears had given way to panic, panic to zero-hour logic. When the moment came to say “I do,” she’d say, “I don’t.”

  No buffet, no pink-and-red posies, no guests.

  She hesitated at the archway to the living room and John yanked her forward. Sophie’d changed her dress. She stood talking to Elton and two strange men.

  One of the men towered over even Elton, but Shay remembered Brandy’s body was considerably shorter than her own. That’s why the rooms seemed larger, the doorways higher.

  Through the veil, Shay recognized the bay windows, the wooden platform rocker, the fireplace.

  John McCabe handed her to the tall man in a black suit, a funny tie, a shiny black vest showing in pieces above the coat and below the white shirt … and the most unwelcoming eyes a groom ever turned on a bride.

  Shay forced Brandy’s throat to swallow. I can’t marry my own grandfather.

  The man beside her listened intently as the other man read from a book.

  Shay concentrated on not throwing up, remembering to say she didn’t when she was supposed to “do.” It would be easier without guests.

  “And do you, Corbin Strock …”

  “Corbin!” Shay stared at the groom. That was what her grandmother’d said just before …

  The minister cleared his throat and began again, “And do you …”

  Shay swayed on Corbin Strock’s arm and practically strangled the small bouquet in her other hand. A far-off buzzing in her ears.

  “And do
you, Brandy Harriet McCabe, take this man …”

  It was coming. The time to refuse. Shay cleared Brandy’s throat, took a deep breath.

  “… promise to obey …”

  Her heart drowned out his voice. The bay windows behind him slipped out of focus.

  “… until death do you part?”

  Now? The minister stared at her. Shay unglued Brandy’s dry tongue from the roof of her mouth and …

  “She does,” John McCabe said with finality.

  Sophie McCabe folded her daughter’s day dress, placed it in the trunk beside the embroidered sheets and pillowcases and dragged the trunk out of the closet.

  Brandy sat on the cedar chest, staring at the bronze mirror, an odd unbecoming slouch to her shoulders. Sophie’d grown up and married in more robust times, when talk was freer, manners less strict and formal. A new century, great conveniences, wonderful inventions … but still … Brandy’s girlhood had been so much more sheltered than her own.

  Her daughter’d been perfectly normal until a couple of years ago, bright and pretty, her father’s darling. Sophie began to notice a change in Brandy about the time she’d refused to marry young Trevors. John had overlooked the occasional bouts of strange behavior since then. Until he’d decided Brandy was pretending to be touched to avoid marriage to Mr. Strock.

  Boulder had noticed it early, however. There’d been no more offers for Brandy’s hand until Corbin Strock.

  He seemed a quiet, severe sort of man, Sophie mused. Would he treat his new wife well? He could have rented a carriage to pick up his bride, but he’d come in a buckboard, of all things. There’d been no look of softness on his face for Brandy. What kind of a future would she have with him? Still … it would hardly be a future at all without a husband.

  Brandy startled Sophie out of her reverie by jumping up and pounding on the glass of the mirror.

  “Brandy, what is wrong?” Sophie took hold of her daughter’s arms from behind and tried to drag her away. “Stop this.”

  Finally she forced herself between the girl and the mirror. “I wish I could understand you.”

  Her daughter stared at her blankly.

  “Come along. Mr. Strock will be waiting.” Sophie hesitated in the doorway and looked back at the mirror. The wretched thing had come into the house about the time Sophie’d noticed the beginning of her daughter’s unusual behavior.

  Could a mirror …? No. And it’d been in the attic until yesterday. John brought it home as a wedding present and then in anger at Brandy’s refusal to marry two years ago banished it to the attic. A mirror, no matter how ugly, was just that – a mirror.

  “Your new hat is downstairs. Nora’s pressing the ribbons.” Sophie put an encouraging arm around Brandy’s shoulders and led her from the room. If her daughter were becoming gradually deranged, should she marry at all? What of any children? Sophie hoped they were doing right by Brandy. Not that it was much use trying to oppose John.…

  Shay, drained of fight and even fear, walked down the stairs beside Sophie.

  “Your father and Elton will bring your trunk. Here’s your hat.” She took a wide-brimmed bonnet with awful cloth flowers and a veil from Nora and tied it under Brandy’s chin.

  “Trunk? Am I going somewhere?”

  “Of course. You’re going to live with your husband. Don’t be a silly goose and don’t embarrass your father. He won’t stand for much more.”

  Numbly Shay digested the obvious, remembering how badly she’d wanted to leave the Gingerbread House when she was herself. But now this house was the only familiar thing this world had to offer … and the mirror. She clung to Brandy’s mother, sending the bonnet askew. “I can’t leave here.”

  “We’ve forgotten your bag. I’ll get it.” Sophie disengaged herself and walked back up the stairs as if Shay hadn’t spoken.

  Shay wandered into the dining room. Tingles like the bubbles in a Coke zinged under her skin, making her shiver in the heat. The mix-up in time happened here. Could the process be reversed if she left the house?

  The dining-room table was the same, the room less crowded than Rachael would decorate it.

  There was probably little use in protesting. Even Sophie was losing patience with her.

  She leaned down to gulp air from an open window. Dust coated the bottoms of lacy starched curtains.

  Corbin Strock stood on the front porch facing John McCabe.

  Brandy’s father pulled a folded paper from his pocket and handed it to Strock. He worked his tongue under his lower lip and spit brown juice over the porch railing while Corbin read the paper.

  “It’s drawn up legal. The Brandy Wine’s yours,” John said as Shay wrote with her finger in the dust on the windowsill, “John McCabe chews,” and thought of using another term, the humor of which had probably not yet been invented.

  “And so is my daughter.” He fished in his jacket for an envelope and slapped it against Corbin’s chest. “I want children from this match, Strock. We’ll prove to the county there’s nothing wrong with McCabe’s girl. And there isn’t. Nothing a strong man and hard work won’t cure.”

  “John,” Sophie called from the doorway. “Can you help Elton with Brandy’s things?”

  “In a minute, woman.” He turned back to Corbin. “My fault. I spoiled her terrible. Couldn’t help myself. I’m paying you good money and the Brandy Wine to straighten her out. It’s gotten beyond me.”

  While Corbin counted oversized bills, Shay wiped her writing from the windowsill. Brandy’s father loved his daughter. Enough to pay someone to marry her. In John McCabe’s world he was doing his best for Brandy. Shay knew she couldn’t exist in John McCabe’s world.

  “Brandy? Oh, here you are.” Sophie carried a beaded purse with drawstrings. “Your gloves are in your bag. You don’t want your hands to freckle.”

  Through the dining-room archway and over Sophie’s shoulder Shay saw Elton and John inching their way down the staircase with the wedding mirror on its side between them …

  And then Shay saw her own face, not in the mirror, which was turned with its backside to her, but interposed on the room and the form of Sophie … her own face … straight blond hair flying about it, eyes wide and blank, mouth rounded in a silent scream.

  The image warped … wavered … vanished, leaving Shay sticky with sweat. Her breathing struggled against the corset.

  “You’re shaking.” Sophie led her from the room. “Is there something about the mirror that disturbs you?”

  If you only knew.

  On the porch, Corbin and John lifted a trunk and carried it down the steps. The mirror stood alone and Shay watched Brandy’s image, hoping the vision in the dining room meant she was to return to herself. But the mirror remained passive.

  “Strock says he can’t take the mirror, Ma. He needs the space for supplies.”

  Sophie gave Shay an odd look. “Perhaps it’s for the best.”

  Shay floated trancelike between them down steps which were wooden instead of concrete, along pink stepping-stones instead of sidewalk, through a familiar gate which now had an unbroken latch, across wooden planks that spanned a narrow ditch running full with water, and to a dirt road.

  “Elton, we must open the sluices when they’ve gone. It’s our time for water and we’ve missed half of it.”

  The trees in the parking were little more than saplings.

  “And, Brandy, send letters down by coach. I’ve put writing paper in your trunk.”

  The trunk sat in a wooden wagon behind two horses.

  “Put down your veil when the road becomes dusty, and give my regards to Mrs. Strock.” Brandy’s mother hugged Shay, stifled a sob and whispered, “Be brave, dearest.”

  Then Shay was crushed in the arms of Brandy’s father. “Sorry about the mirror. We’ll send it up. You work at being a good wife now, little one, and put to rest all these rumors about McCabe’s daughter having a tile loose.” He kissed her cheek, his breath strong with tobacco. Turning his back, he dre
w a handkerchief from a pocket under his coattail. “Take her away, Strock.”

  Brandy’s brother lifted Shay to a hard wooden seat beside Corbin. “Goodbye, Bran. I’ll be up to see you when I can.”

  Corbin slapped long reins down on the horses’ rumps. The wagon moved forward.

  In a state of shock, Shay looked back at Sophie crying on her husband’s shoulder, at Elton standing forlornly by the ditch of running water … at the mirror without its crack sitting on the porch.

  Elton raised his hand in a halfhearted wave.

  6

  Shay watched the Gingerbread House grow smaller. The sad grouping of Brandy’s family still had not moved from the street.

  Finally she turned to face Boulder, Colorado – most of which wasn’t there.

  Locked in Brandy’s body, she felt horribly afloat now, away from the house and the mirror.

  The wide brim of Corbin Strock’s hat hid the upper portion of his face. But the set of his jaw below was grim.

  “This doesn’t make much sense, you know,” she heard herself say in a small voice. “My mother’s maiden name wasn’t Strock.” Her uncles, Remy and Dan, weren’t named Strock either. Shay peered under Corbin’s hat brim. “And you aren’t the man in the wedding picture in the hall.”

  “That’s because Mrs. McCabe’s name was Euler before she married, and we didn’t take a wedding picture.” He turned the horses to start down the hill. Corbin had the same lazy but careful way of speaking as the McCabes. It wasn’t a Southern drawl, nor was it the speech affected by TV cowboys. It was just unhurried, the vowels drawn out, the consonants distinct.

  He thinks Brandy’s crazy too. Whatever Shay said would be chalked up to that. And there was no place to run. The occupants of the Gingerbread House would refuse to take her back – for her own good.

  Over rooftops and low trees she could see the hill on which sat two or three buildings of the University of Colorado, out on barren prairie, alone and aloof. It bore little resemblance to the campus, crowded with buildings and trees, surrounded by city, that she’d attended until a few weeks ago.

  This slip in time couldn’t last. Shay would go back to Marek and to school. It had been a freak thing.