Girl in the Mirror

by Mary Alice Monroe

  “No,” she blurted. “That’s impossible.”

  “I implore you,” Dr. Harmon urged, “at the very least, delay your trip for a week. Come to the University Hospital and we’ll run some tests. We’ll get the information we need to make a definitive diagnosis.”

  “No, no, we don’t have time,” Freddy argued with impatience. “After that bomb Mondragon dropped on TV today, we’re better off getting out of here.” He glanced over at Vicki Ray, who was listening intently to every word being spoken. “Come on, babe. We don’t have much time. Our plane leaves in a few hours.”

  Michael stepped squarely in front of him, blocking his path to Charlotte.

  “If you think I’m going to let her get on that plane…”

  “Who’s going to stop us?” Freddy snarled back. He pushed Michael’s shoulder to pass him. Michael deliberately blocked him again.

  Michael was several inches taller than Freddy, younger and more muscular. Charlotte knew by Michael’s rising color that he wouldn’t be able to hold in his temper for long.

  He was, in fact, spoiling for a fight. “Stay away from her….”

  “Who the hell are you?” Freddy retorted. “She’s my fiancée, bandito, not yours.”

  “No!”

  The throaty, heart-wrenching cry soared from the doorway. Everyone froze and swung their gazes back to where a tall, stoop-shouldered woman with gray hair and a modest dress stood as though paralyzed, finger pointing outward.

  Charlotte gasped and felt her heart beat double time. “Mother,” she said, her voice a whisper in her clenched throat. She stared at her, slack jawed, wildly wondering what Helena was doing here now, after years of refusing to even speak to her on the phone.

  But what was more odd was that Helena wasn’t looking at her. Her blue eyes were rounded, stupefied, and she was pointing a shaky finger at someone to the right. Charlotte turned her head and saw that it was Freddy she was staring at so intently. He was looking back at Helena, his face scrunched with the look of someone trying to remember where he’d seen that woman before.

  Helena seemed oblivious to the tense silence and gaping faces staring at her. Her eyes were fixed on Freddy, shining with a strange madness. Her cheeks were suffused with color.

  “It is you,” she exclaimed.

  Charlotte looked from Helena to Freddy. He was squinting his eyes, leaning forward.

  “Frederic, don’t you know me? It’s me—Helena. Helena Godowski. From Poland.”

  Freddy’s face drained of all color as his shoulders rose. He shook his head. “No, no, that’s not possible.”

  “It is. It’s me! I’ve searched for you…for twenty-five years, Frederic.” She took several steps closer to him, her hand still outstretched, as though unsure whether he was a ghost or an illusion. When she was very near, she halted her hand before his chest, wanting to touch him but not daring the intimacy. Instead she clasped it to her breast.

  “Searched for me? Why?” Freddy asked. “How did you find me now?”

  “Mr. Mondragon. He wanted me to come. I said no, but then I saw you. On the television. I was watching Charlotte.” At the mention of Charlotte’s name, Helena’s doughy face sagged and she blinked several times. “Yes, yes…Charlotte,” she said, agitated, bringing her fingertips to her cheek. “That’s why I have come.” Her eyes were wild again and she glanced over at her daughter. “You cannot marry Charlotte. It would be a great sin!”

  Charlotte felt herself tense up and held her breath.

  “What are you talking about?” Freddy asked.

  “Charlotte, she is your daughter!”

  Charlotte felt as though the floor had risen up under her, then opened up like a large mouth, swallowing her whole. She slumped down onto the sofa. Freddy her father? Impossible. It was too crazy to believe.

  Even while she denied it, from somewhere deep inside she sensed it might be true. Like one fighting her way through a dense fog, she tried to make some sense of this absurdity. After all, she knew she was born out of wedlock. She’d never seen a photograph of her father. And it would make sense of so many unexplainable things. Like why she and Freddy felt this strange connection with each other. Why he felt so possessive. Freddy’s words came back to her: I love you in my own way. Like a father?

  She looked up at him, standing white-faced with shock, staring down at her mother. My God, she thought. His nose. She’d never noticed it before, never had reason to, but his nose was like hers used to be. The nose her mother never forgave her for changing. She had Freddy’s nose—her father’s nose.

  Freddy stepped back, far away from Helena. “You’re nuts, lady. I don’t have any children. I can’t have children.”

  “You didn’t know!” Helena exclaimed, frantic that he believe her. “I didn’t know I was with child until after you left Poland. After the explosion. My family, they scorned me. The priest, he brought me to Warsaw. But they wanted me to give away my baby. I could never do that. I looked for your mother. It is she who told me you had fled to America. To escape the authorities. She helped me, Frederic. She bought me a plane ticket to find you.” Her eyes filled with tears. “But I couldn’t find you. I looked and looked, and then Charlotte was born. I couldn’t look for you anymore. I had to find work to survive. Always, though, I hoped I would find you. But not like this!”

  She reared up, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “This is a sin that you are doing. You cannot take your own daughter as your wife.”

  “God, no,” Freddy replied quickly, white-faced and clearly shaken by the news. “I won’t marry her. Shit, no, I mean—I didn’t know—Nothing happened.” He was backpedaling now, fast, trying desperately to dispel the mud and murk that was swimming in everyone’s minds at that moment.

  Charlotte almost groaned aloud with what might have happened. She wrapped her arms around her stomach.

  “We weren’t even really going to get married.” Freddy was blabbering on. “It was all a hoax, an excuse to get us to South America for the surgery without the press hounding us at the hospital. I mean, Christ—” he wiped his brow “—I never guessed….”

  Freddy turned to look at Charlotte. Their eyes met and held, each exploring, each wondering, each finally coming to the same truth.

  Michael’s eyes were narrowed, and he was studying Freddy with an air of distrust and doubt. He might have accepted the story, but he didn’t have a change of heart about Freddy. He moved farther back into the room, taking a position as observer now in what had developed into a private family matter.

  “Charlotte Godfrey,” Freddy murmured, shaking his head as he calmed down, speaking more to himself. “Charlotte Godowski. Of course. You changed it.” He raised his hand as if to touch her, then dropped it. “If you’da told me your real name, I’d have figured it out. I always knew there was something. Especially when I looked into your eyes. It’s your eyes, you understand. They’re so much like your mother’s.”

  He turned to Helena, allowing his gaze to sweep over the big, shabby-appearing woman with her short, straight gray hair, her pale, deeply lined face, her legs lined with varicose veins. Charlotte thought her mother seemed so stooped from the weight of hard times, so well past her prime. How would Freddy see her now, after all these years?

  Charlotte was wondering this when she saw his lip turn up slightly in a sneer. She knew with a sick certainty that he was wondering what had happened to Helena over the years to change her so much. Charlotte’s temper flared in defense of her mother. Helena had changed because she’d worked her fingers to the bone to take care of me, she thought. Because she’d been abandoned by her lover, by my father—by you, Freddy. He’d had his bit of fun, then run away, leaving the woman to pay the price. How dare he lift his nose at her now that she was old and tired, not the pretty young girl he’d ruined years before.

  “So,” he said, turning to her with a short, pleased laugh.

  “What do you know? I have a kid after all.”

  Charlotte felt very li
ttle tenderness toward him. That she was his daughter was still too fresh, too raw, to consider. Those emotions she’d have to deal with later. She was grateful for all he’d done for her, but that was not love. Certainly not love.

  “I guess this changes everything,” Dr. Harmon said in a solemn voice. “Surely, if you’re her father, you won’t want to do anything to jeopardize her health.”

  “No, Frederic,” Helena said. “You cannot take her away from her doctor when she is sick.”

  “Of course I can.” He seemed almost flippant. “I’m her father. I’ve got more right than ever now to see that she’s taken care of. And I know what’s best for my girl.”

  Michael pushed himself from the wall.

  Dr. Harmon straightened his glasses, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

  Charlotte opened her mouth to reply when she heard her mother shout.

  “No!” Helena’s voice was imperious. It was the tone Charlotte knew so well, the one that sent her shivering at attention as a child, the one that brooked no disobedience. Even Freddy stiffened when confronted with a full dose of Helena’s righteous indignation.

  “You are the same now as ever,” she said, glaring at Freddy. “I see that now. I am not the young girl I once was. Life has hardened me, but it has also made me wiser. I see you now as you really are. You are the same,” she hissed through clenched teeth, her hands bunched before her. “Selfish, uncaring, self-indulgent. You hurt me, but I will not allow you to hurt my child.”

  She turned to meet Charlotte, face-to-face. Charlotte’s breath caught in her throat as Helena neared, feeling the enormity of the moment bear down on her in the form of this powerful woman. This was her first confrontation with her mother since that terrible night in the kitchen, the night before she left Chicago. They’d said terrible things to each other, unforgivable things. It all seemed so long ago, so meaningless now, in light of all that had passed since then.

  “I’m sorry,” Charlotte blurted out. Her pride no longer mattered. She simply wanted to stop the silent, hateful feud. This woman, for all her strengths and faults, was still her mother, and she loved her as only a child could.

  “No,” Helena said, bringing her strong, hard fingers up to gently cup Charlotte’s tender face. She studied it, made peace with it. Charlotte was caught off guard to find repentance, not anger, in her mother’s eyes.

  “I was wrong,” Helena insisted. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.” She gathered herself up and cleared her throat, falling back on her rigid competence to get her through this unusual display of emotion. “I should have told you about your father. And how you were born. I made it dirty. It wasn’t. It happened. Too long I spent wishing I had Frederic, when all that time I should have been happy to have you. I said you were my punishment. No, that is not true. You were a gift.” She drew herself up and clasped Charlotte’s long, slender fingers in her large, thick ones. “It is I who ask you to forgive me.”

  Charlotte gave a muffled cry. Her mother had asked for her forgiveness? Never had she heard those words from her, nor did she ever dream she would. She longed to wrap her arms around her mother, but she held back, remembering how her mother preferred not to be touched.

  And then it was her mother’s arms around her, clasping her tight. Charlotte felt herself slipping back in time. She was a child nestling her head on Helena’s shoulder, smelling not the sterile scent of Lysol but the sweet perfume of soap and dusting powder deep in the soft folds of her neck.

  Except—she wasn’t a little girl. It was time to grow up and to make a woman’s decision. She straightened and wiped the girlish tears from her eyes.

  Then she turned and sought out Michael. He was standing in the shadows, eyes on her. When she looked at him, he straightened and walked toward her. For a flashing moment she was transported back to the Mondragon nursery, feeling again the same love well up in her heart as when she’d stood on the cabin’s porch, watching as he walked up the hill toward her, toward home, at the end of the day.

  He was walking toward her now, she realized, after working to bring her mother and Dr. Harmon here, after orchestrating this unveiling. Might he love her, after all? Her—the woman behind the mask. She felt the fluttering of hope. She had to know. She didn’t want any more lies now, either.

  “Why did you come back?” she asked him, staring into eyes the color of the earth. “The truth.”

  He was standing very close to her. He knew what she was asking. She could tell by the muscle working in his jaw and the way his fingers twitched along his thigh.

  “Because I love you,” he replied.

  “Even without this face?”

  He moved forward, placing his hands on her shoulders. “I said I loved you. I might have been attracted to the face, but I fell in love with the person. So if your face changes, Charlotte, I know that my love will not.”

  She refused to be swept off her feet. She nodded, accepting this statement as she would a precious gold coin given by someone she cared about deeply but didn’t completely trust. She studied the declaration in her heart, flipping it back and forth, her doubt biting down on it, to see if it was real.

  “Don’t believe him,” Freddy said, closing the distance. He was red-faced, worried that he might lose everything.

  She sensed Michael tensing up.

  “Wait,” she said to Freddy, then turned back to Michael. “I know of only one way that will prove to me if you could really love me, no matter what.”

  She turned and went to her purse, digging into it till she found her wallet. Then, opening it up, she took from behind her driver’s license a photograph of herself that she always carried with her, to remind her of where she came from, of who she was.

  “This,” she said, holding the picture up like a banner, “is a photo of myself before the surgery.” She turned her hand and looked at the photo for a moment, feeling a fondness for the poor unfortunate girl with a chin that looked like a mud slide. Girding herself for whatever might come, she walked toward Michael. Her stomach was roiling, but she’d had enough of lies and fairy tales.

  “Take a good look. For both our sakes, be honest. I wouldn’t blame you if you walked away.” She held out the photograph. “Could you love this girl?”

  Michael didn’t take the photograph. Instead, he smiled. “I told you, I already do.”

  “No, I mean the girl in the photograph.”

  “I’ve seen a photograph already. In your mother’s apartment.”

  Charlotte made a strangled sound in her throat, and she covered her mouth with her hand. She wanted to believe him, so desperately.

  “I knew I’d seen that girl somewhere before,” he continued. “It stuck with me, but I couldn’t place it until I saw you on the stage today, besieged by Vicki Ray’s questions. You had this stoic expression in your eyes, this endurance. And I suddenly remembered where I’d seen that expression before. It was that girl I met in an elevator one cold night. It was the eyes I remembered, not the face. I asked you if you needed help. And you said no.”

  “I did need your help,” she exclaimed. “I should have said yes.”

  “Say yes now,” he said, his emotion trembling in his voice. “I let that girl down once before. I’ll never let her down again.”

  “Let me look at it,” Freddy said, shouldering his way closer. He took the photograph from Charlotte’s hand and stared at it.

  She watched as his jaw slackened, then he raised his eyes to look at her, then back at the picture in disbelief.

  “Are you kidding me?” Freddy asked. “And you have any question whether or not to go to Brazil? One look at this picture should be enough. Harmon, you’re a frigging genius.”

  “Shut up,” Helena snapped. “My Charlotte was always beautiful. I told her that then and I tell her that now. She has a beautiful soul.”

  Suddenly the room erupted with shouts. Everyone was telling her what to do, pulling her in several directions. She shifted her gaze toward Michael, instinctively going there
for support. He waited silently for her to make the decision. Her memories—her life—had come full circle.

  She turned on her heel and faced down the others as the circle tightened around her. “Back off!” she shouted, her hand held out in an arresting gesture.

  Everyone stopped talking at once.

  “I don’t want to hear what any of you want me to do,” she said. “This is about me. My face. My life. Go on out. All of you. I need time alone. I have to make this decision on my own.”

  There was a stunned silence and no one moved. Freddy was clenching and unclenching his fist. Then Helena nodded her head and said with her heavy Polish accent, “You heard what she said. Out!”

  “No,” Freddy said, digging in. “You’ve got to understand one thing. If you lose your beauty, you lose everything. Your career will be over.”

  “Better her career than her life,” Michael retorted.

  “Michael, please. Let me handle this myself,” she said, holding out her hand. She faced Freddy.

  “I said out there on stage that I’d do anything for beauty. I was wrong. What I should have said is that I’d do anything for love.”

  Freddy’s face contorted with rage. “You want to throw it all away? All that we’ve worked for? For what? So you can be a nobody? So you can get married, have kids, grow old and worn-out like your mother?” He tightened his lips and for a moment she thought he was going to cry. Instead, he exploded in anger, pointing his finger at her accusingly. “When we started this thing, you swore that you’d do what I told you to do.”

  “You had no right to ask that of me, nor should I have agreed to it. I’m sorry. My first responsibility is to myself.”

  “I made you who you are!” he cried, his hand raised in an angry fist. “You owe me. You belong to me.”

  Michael stepped forward.