The Mirror

by Millhiser, Marlys

  As if the wind sucked in its breath.

  Then a far-off murmur that grew to a growl as it approached. It swept by with a roar. Roof joists creaked in agony. Brandy could taste the dust on the air.

  Again stillness, muffling all.

  Ansel cleared his throat. “Drought wind. Better see to the animals.”

  Brandy rubbed Shay’s back when he’d gone. Standing was uncomfortable, sitting anguish, and lying down not much of a solution.

  The quiet lasted. Perhaps this wasn’t to be a storm after all, just a few stray gusts.

  Happy let out a long wailing howl and Shay’s teeth ground together.

  Brandy slid open the glass door to see if he’d become entangled in his chain.

  He bared his teeth and lunged at her, snapping.

  “Happy, what –” She lost her awkward balance and fell into the room on Shay’s backside.

  A twinge of pain from Shay’s private parts. An even stronger one from her posterior.

  Happy barked, snarled, tugged on his chain until he stood halfway over the doorsill.

  “Stop it, dog! I know we’re not the best of friends but we’ve managed nicely. I’ve even put food out for you.”

  Stina Mark pushed through the cat entrance and spat at him, arching her back and dancing on her toes in angry fear.

  A gust Brandy hadn’t heard coming hit the house and Happy snapped at her worn canvas shoe, teeth clicking shut inches from the toe.

  “You’ve gone mad, hound. Out with you.” She pushed a chair at him, rolling to her knees to slide the door closed, almost catching the end of his nose as he retreated.

  The room was filling with cats, not only Stina’s brood but several from the barn. They prowled the kitchen, mewing, sniffing.

  Brandy pushed and pulled herself to her feet, using a chair and the table. A small puddle glistened on the floor where she’d fallen, her skirt and legs were damp.

  Surely she’d have known if she’d wet herself.

  A sickening ache in Shay’s lower back.

  A barn cat sniffed at the puddle.

  Wind shrieked outside. Happy howled.

  Pain cramped around her middle, forcing her to bend over the table. The bread toaster fell off the corner and onto the floor. “Ma!”

  Brandy held her breath till the pain eased, then drew in so much air it made her dizzy. Shay’s legs felt weak.

  She half-sat and half-leaned on the sofa with the bed pillows she’d brought from Lottie’s room against the small of her back.

  Brandy knew nothing about childbirth, but instinct told her she was about to have a child she hadn’t conceived.

  “Dear Lord, please bring my granddaughter back before this happens.”

  She’d come to accept the apparent inevitable as this time approached, and, terrified and trapped, she’d refused to think about it.

  For the first time since the night she’d raced through the dark alleyways of Boulder, Brandy sensed she could lose control of this body. It seemed alert. Turned inward. Waiting for commands other than hers.

  Even the baby was still for once.

  Walls and rafters creaked. Windows clattered in their frames.

  A cracking snap and the floor shuddered as if some windblown thing had hit and broken against the old farmhouse.

  “Having a baby’s as natural as oatmeal and breathing,” Ansel St. John had said.

  In her world no one discussed the fact that a lady was to have a baby, particularly with the other children. Dresses grew voluminous and the lady added weight all around, not just out front as Shay had. The baby appeared suddenly to the great rejoicing of friends and relatives and the mother recovered quietly in bed.

  By the time Sophie McCabe miscarried her last baby Brandy was old enough and should have noticed, but she hadn’t known one was expected. She had, however, noted a great deal of water being put to boil before she was shunted off to bed. From this she’d deduced it was a messy business.

  Brandy filled Ansel’s two largest pots with water and lit the gas fire under them.

  In a lull in the wind she heard goats bleating and wondered if the old man was having trouble shutting them up.

  She walked carefully through the cold portion of the house to the back, thinking to call him in. When she finally forced the door open against the wind she was met with a frenzied hen who entered squawking before she could shut it out.

  Dark. But not so dark she couldn’t see that the largest of the old sheds, the one Ansel called a barn, had disappeared.

  “Mr. St. John?” The wind blew her words back into the house and tried to slam the door in her face.

  He’d been gone too long, might have been injured, or worse, if he was in the barn when it gave way.

  What would she do if she had to have the child without his help? As curious as she’d always been, why hadn’t she asked more questions on this subject? As long as most women had babies, why weren’t they trained on the details as they grew up?

  Sophie and Nora had a way of shutting themselves away from her when it came to delicate subjects. Just their expressions could put Brandy off.

  She slipped outside to look for Ansel. It seemed a foolish thing to do and yet it would be inhuman not to. He could be in as much need of her as she of him. Odd to have only one other person to depend upon in a crisis.

  Brandy tried to listen for the old man above the wind.

  The body listened to itself. The legs felt weighted. The grinding ache in the back made Brandy feel sick and dampened Shay’s skin.

  “Mr. St. John!” Her hair came loose and blew about her face. She grabbed a rusty metal hulk to steady herself. Frightened chickens huddled on its protected side.

  Arvid and Luvisa frolicked near a section of collapsed roofing.

  Praying that Ansel was not lying dead beneath the broken roof, Brandy made her way toward it, battling dirt-filled wind and Shay’s increasingly reluctant body.

  She was so intent on the broken roof she didn’t see him until she’d tripped over him, barely catching herself up on a fencepost.

  Ansel lay on his face, one arm stretched out. He felt warm when she turned him over. No sign of bleeding, his eyes closed. He looked alternately pale and dark in night shadows flickered by tossing skeleton weeds and debris.

  Brandy felt the cramp returning. She curled over his body, fighting pain and panic. It lasted longer than the first time and it hurt more.

  When it passed, Ansel hadn’t moved. But she could feel the vibration of his heart in his chest. She couldn’t stay out in this storm, and neither could he.

  “Only rabbits give up for fear,” John McCabe always said.

  Brandy crawled until she knelt above the old man’s head, then slipped a hand under each of his armpits and struggled to get her feet beneath her. Using his weight as ballast, she leaned backward and pushed with her legs until she was upright.

  She dragged him toward the house, his limp body pulling on her arms, easing the ache in Shay’s back. It was a slow business with her clumsiness and his inertia, with hair in her face and no free hand to sweep it away.

  She prayed another cramp wouldn’t force her to drop him, feared she couldn’t get either of them up again.

  A clicking of hoofs sounded in the quiet between gusts. A goat came to a halt at the corner of the house. A poised and alert satyr shadow …

  Hooligan. She’d forgotten that with the barn gone, he’d be on the loose.

  Fear of him gave her extra energy and she pulled harder at her burden, hoping to reach the door before he charged.

  Brandy was but five feet from her destination when Happy’s eerie howl sounded from the front of the house and wind screamed out of the west as if bent on making up for the lull.

  Hooligan reared on his hind legs and came down on the run, head lowered, little horns prodding the air.

  Brandy dropped Ansel and stumbled toward the house. She reached the door but hadn’t time to open it, tried to flatten Shay’s vast body into its
recess, felt Hooligan brush against her skirts as he passed.

  In the instant he turned for another charge, she pulled out the door and flung herself inside. The goat’s second lunge rammed the door shut.

  Brandy lay on the floor listening to Hooligan and the wind outside, the hen clucking nervously in the corner, the sizzle of water boiling over in the kitchen and then the involuntary sounds coming up Shay’s throat.

  The clutching pain that made her double over before stretched her out now.

  18

  Brandy McCabe lost track of how long the cramp lasted. When it released her, she lay breathing deeply, aware of tears on her granddaughter’s cheeks and the blessed absence of pain.

  She’d have liked to lie there forever but over the low moan of a quieted wind she heard another moan. Ansel.

  She drew herself up by the knob to a sitting position and eased the door open.

  Ansel was also sitting up, holding his head. No sign of the goat.

  “Mr. St. John, the baby –”

  “Help me, Shay Garrett.” His voice but a whine, a whisper. Behind it the wind gathered for another blow.

  “You must help me. The baby … can you crawl on your hands and knees? At least tell me what to do.” But the wind shrieked in to close the door.

  “Oh, dear God, please …” Brandy clawed the door frame until she stood, leaning against it. Sickly stickiness coated Shay’s skin. A spreading sensation between her legs.

  As Brandy reached to open the door it tore from her grasp and the old man stepped in to lean against the other side of its frame.

  The sound of their combined breathing almost drowned out the wind.

  “Mr. St. John, what … what is the boiling water for?”

  He stared blankly, rubbing his head and wincing. “Boiling water?”

  “When a baby’s due, someone always boils water.”

  He laid the side of his face against the wall and closed his eyes. He looked ghastly. “To wash your hands with.”

  All that water for hands? Another pain came upon her. She took this one standing up, letting the air out of her lungs in grunts that ended in a tiny scream.

  “I think I’m having a baby.”

  “Don’t worry.” He held her arm and they moved toward the kitchen, he staggering and she waddling. “Nothing to it.”

  Steam filled the kitchen, coated the glass door to opaque. The water in the pots had boiled off by half.

  Brandy added cold from the faucet and washed Shay’s hands, finding neither sense nor reassurance in the act. “Now what do I do?”

  “See if there’s any bleeding here.” He showed her a swelling on the back of his head and she cleansed a trace of blood from the scratch on it.

  Ansel washed his hands and then sat on the sofa looking as if he could never rise again. “Clean sheets on the shelf in the bathroom. Get ’em on that bed over there and take off some of those clothes.”

  Brandy shooed a half-dozen cats off the bed before she could begin to make it up, and pain attacked again before she finished.

  It felt good to be rid of the sticky confining clothing and finally she lay naked between cool sheets not caring about propriety as the body writhed out of control.

  “I feel … light-headed –”

  “Stop breathing so deep then. You’re hyperventilatin’.”

  The pains came faster now, leaving her little time to relax between.

  “Is it … is it supposed … to hurt … this much?”

  “Mostly in your head.” He was washing his hands again. “Just relax.”

  “Shay’s body won’t obey … obey me. Help!” Shay’s hands clutched at the poles of the brass bedstead.

  “Women make such a fuss over a little hurtin’. Thought you was different. Animals got more sense.” He lifted the sheet from the bottom. “Looks like you ain’t going to take forever anyway.”

  Once he disappeared and she called out for him.

  “I’m here. Just sittin’ on the floor. I don’t feel so good either, you know.”

  Stina Mark’s yellow eyes glared at her from black fur. The cat stood next to her head, coldly appraising her agony, hissing when she cried out. Ansel stood again at the foot of the bed. “Now bring your knees up and push down, Shay Garrett.”

  Shay Garrett pushed down without Brandy’s help. Brandy was losing consciousness. She was in a strange room watching her own body slide off a chair to the floor. It wore a black dress.

  An untidy woman, with a loose look about her, knelt over the still form of the Brandy McCabe on the floor and began to slap her face.

  Wind shrieked in the background and a woman’s voice rose to join it, but they were from a different world, a different time.

  Cindy Wilson heard about the winds in Boulder over the radio on her desk. She looked up as the newscaster mentioned the town because in her hand was a list of stolen articles from a house in Boulder. A printed list circulated by the police. And on it, a standing bronze mirror framed with entwined hands. “It couldn’t be the same one. I bought it in Texas.”

  Cindy took the description and stepped out of her little office. Ned was on a buying trip and she’d decided to work late to catch up on paperwork. The store was empty, locked.

  The mirror hadn’t sold. No one had reported seeing anything other than themselves in it. Cindy’d begun to think she’d imagined that episode in the auction barn.

  She stood before it, checking it with the description. It had to be the same mirror.

  If she returned it, would she and Ned be suspected of stealing the other antiques from that house in Boulder as well? Who could be more suspect than an antique dealer?

  Cindy Wilson was not a thief. But she was a businesswoman.

  She tore the description into tiny pieces, put them in her sweater pocket and decided she would not tell Ned of this. Inching the heavy mirror along by lifting its weight onto one of the hand-claws of its base and shifting the other, over and over, she had it about a yard from the storeroom when she paused to rest. She’d defy anyone to find something in the mess in there.

  The mirror seemed to grow warm in her hands. She let go, stepping back as that odd but familiar humming began. Gray clouds formed on the glass.

  Cindy Wilson sat on the rug to watch.

  “You sure don’t do things by half measures, do you?” Ansel St. John said. “Here, hold this.”

  The sheet had slipped off Shay’s body and he laid something slimy across her chest.

  “What … is it?” Brandy managed to ask between moans.

  “A baby. And here comes another one right behind it. What do you think of that?”

  When the second baby had been delivered, he added. “See? Told you so. Nothing to it.”

  “Nothing to it …” Brandy stared at him through a blur of sweat and tears. Then she passed out.

  Lottie sat behind her new boyfriend, Roger, on his motorcycle and pointed to her grandfather’s house.

  As Roger turned into the drive, she stretched up to his ear. “Go around back.” Happy would probably take his leg off if given the chance.

  It was a warm day in March and the clothesline was full of gently fluttering clothes.

  Lottie stared. Roger turned off the motor and waited for her to dismount.

  “That fries it!” Lottie said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I thought you wanted to see your grandpa.”

  “Look at that clothesline. Diapers. Rows of them. The old shithead – should of known I couldn’t trust him. Come on. We got another stop to make.”

  Jerry Garrett was leaving the Gingerbread House to go back to his office after lunching with Rachael and the nurse. A motorcycle stopped on the street in front and a girl got off the back before the guy driving could get the kick stand down. She ran to meet him at the gate.

  “Mr. Garrett? I’m Lottie Ralston. And I want to talk to you about your daughter.”

  By her appearance Jerry sized her up as one of the idle young, the vo
luntary poor who infested the area.

  “She’s had her baby and she’s living with my grandfather. I don’t want to get him in trouble and I don’t want the reward, but –”

  “What do you want, Lottie Ralston?” Jerry asked suspiciously.

  “I want you to get her and that kid out of there. He can’t afford them and you can. She’s sponged off him long enough.”

  Jerry turned the Oldsmobile into the drive and stared at the dilapidated house, the litter of junk automobiles and ancient farm machinery. How could she have been this close to town and gone undiscovered?

  A fat dog barked on the end of a chain.

  Jerry swallowed back the acid taste coming up from his stomach.

  He didn’t want to face what was in that house. If the diary were true … if she wasn’t Shay … he didn’t want her back.

  “Selfish bastard,” he muttered at himself and got out of the car.

  The dog made it obvious he wouldn’t allow Jerry near the front door. So he followed the drive around the house, where more junk sat rusting and rows of diapers flapped on a clothesline.

  A black cat with yellow eyes sat in the sun on a crumpled car hood.

  And his daughter bolted from the back door, dressed like a destitute hippie and carrying a plastic clothes basket.

  “Shay?” It came out choked but loud enough for her to hear over the protesting cries from the clothes basket.

  She threw him a terrified look over her shoulder and kept running.

  He started after her and then stopped. “Brandy?”

  She paused at a gate in a board fence to stare at him.

  “Brandy McCabe?” He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. She slipped through the gate as he approached. “We know about the wedding mirror, Brandy McCabe.”

  The intruder in his daughter’s body watched him warily. Unfamiliar expressions played across a familiar face.

  “We know. There’s no need to run anymore. We …” Jerry Garrett felt suddenly tired. “I want to help you.”

  Bruised shadows around her eyes. Reddened hands clutching the basket so tightly the soft plastic folded inward. He tried to feel sympathy for this stranger … but his own loss was too great.

  “I will kill you,” she whispered, still poised as if to run if he should startle her, “before I let you harm these children.”