by Karen Frost
~*~
The next morning, Mr. and Mrs. Shenstone kissed their children goodbye before they left for school. When they returned, their parents would be gone and Mrs. Peters would be there in their place. Mrs. Shenstone fixed the big, pink bow on Maude’s white hat and brushed her daughter's black hair back behind her ears, then fussed with the lapels of Jack’s blue corduroy jacket. Mrs. Shenstone said to her children, “Don’t fret now, it’s only for three days. Do be good for Mrs. Peters.”
Mary Jane frowned sourly, but her mother did not see, and just then the school bus arrived. The children shuffled dismally into it and arranged themselves on a single seat, Maude at the window. They watched their mother waving to them as the bus pulled away from the curb, and that was the last they saw of her. When they came home from school, Mrs. Peters was waiting for them at the door. She handed Mary Jane a bucket of soapy water and a rag, and Jack a straw broom. To Maude she handed a feather duster so old that it was missing more feathers than it still had.
Mrs. Peters bellowed in her thunderous voice, the skin under her chin shaking, “You will clean this house until it sparkles. I want to see my reflection in every window. Jack, you will sweep the floors and use the broom to knock down cobwebs from the corners of rooms. Maude, dear, you will dust each room. You know I'm allergic to dust. Dinner will be at six sharp and I want you all washed up and clean before then.”
"Yes, Mrs. Peters," the children said obediently.
Mrs. Peters turned on her heel and marched away without further ado. She listed as she walked, like a Spanish galleon at sea during a storm, or a drunken elephant crashing through an Indian forest. Mary Jane looked at Jack, who looked at Maude, who looked back at Mary Jane. Their expressions were grave. Jack shrugged, and wordlessly put his broom to the floor and began sweeping. Mary Jane threw her stained yellow rag into the bucket and dropped the bucket to the floor rebelliously.
“I won't do it,” she announced, stomping her foot against the ground dramatically. “It’s our house, not hers.”
“She won’t let you have dinner if you don’t do what she says,” Maude warned.
“I don’t care. I’ll starve if I have to. Come on, Maude, let’s go do something else. Anything else.”
She grabbed Maude’s hand and began dragging her younger sister toward the stairs. Jack grabbed Maude’s other hand to stop Mary Jane from taking her and Maude was momentarily pulled in two directions at once like a rag doll.
Jack growled, “You can get yourself in trouble if you want, but I won't let you drag Maude into it.”
“You can be Mrs. Peters' slave if you like, but I won’t and I won’t let Maude be either,” Mary Jane snarled back.
With a hard yank, she pulled Maude out of Jack’s grasp and dragged her up the stairs behind her. Jack watched them go for a moment and then looked around for Mrs. Peters. When he didn't see or hear her, he dropped his broom and followed them. He called after Mary Jane softly, “You had better not go to your room; she’ll find you there. Maybe we can hide in the attic. I don't think she'll walk up both sets of stairs, even if it is to scold us.”
Mary Jane paused, then nodded silently in agreement and kept walking up to the attic as quietly as she could. The light coming into the attic from the small round window on the north wall was weak, but it allowed the children to see more of the room than they had the day before. Mary Jane looked more closely at the battered old trunks scattered about the attic; some were covered by foreign stickers from exotic places in Africa and Asia.
“These must have belonged to Mr. Lewis,” she said, her voice rising with excitement. “I’m sure Mother and Father have never traveled so far away.”
She ran her fingers over the worn edges of the trunks lovingly and played with their ancient locks, then began to throw back the lids of some of the trunks that were not locked. Jack followed her and began opening trunks as well. They found shimmering silk kimonos in red and orange, ornate drinking horns carved from the horns of sheep and oxen, fierce wooden tribal masks, and colorful cotton saris in every color of the rainbow. The cloth was old, however, and in some places moths had eaten through the beautiful fabric. Mary Jane held a fine white kimono against her skin and sighed. It was several inches too long for her.
“Perhaps Mother could shorten it…” she murmured wistfully to herself.
Jack picked a pipe up from the same green trunk from which Mary Jane had withdrawn the kimono and turned it over.
“Mr. Lewis certainly was a traveler,” he commented as several dried flakes of tobacco fell from the bowl of the pipe and onto the floor. He wrinkled his nose at it and kicked it with the toe of his shoe.
“Where’s Maude?” Mary Jane asked suddenly. “Have we lost her again?”
“She’s probably looking at the old mirror again," Jack said. "Maybe we could carry it down to your room for her. I think she would like that.”
"And," he added with quiet distaste, “then we wouldn't have to come back to the attic anymore.”
He replaced the pipe in the trunk gently and he and Mary Jane waded further into the attic. As expected, they found Maude sitting on the ground staring at the mirror.
Jack tapped her gently on the shoulder and said, “Maude?”
Neither he nor Mary Jane paid attention to the mirror before them. Maude said quietly, “I was watching.”
Mary Jane frowned, her mouth quirked down. It was the same expression her mother often made.
“Watching what, Maude?” She asked.
Maude pointed her small index finger at the mirror.
“The bunny in the mirror,” she replied.
Jack and Mary Jane's eyes automatically followed Maude’s finger to the mirror. When they looked, however, rather than seeing three children peering back at them from a dimly lit room full of boxes and trunks, they saw trees, and under one of the trees a small brown bunny was nibbling a leaf. The detail was so accurate that they could see the individual brown hairs on the rabbit's body and every blade of grass. Having chewed for a moment at the leaf, the bunny began to hop away, its pink nose twitching. The grass was pushed down as the rabbit passed over it, and the branches of the trees above swayed gently and their leaves rustled as a gust of wind passed through them.
"But it's a mirror," Mary Jane said. " I don't understand."
“It must be some sort of trick,” Jack replied, although his voice was uncertain. "The mirror must actually be something else."
"Well of course it's a trick," Mary Jane said, her voice equally uncertain.
Jack stepped forward and felt around the mirror with his hands. Surely there was some hidden mechanism within it that allowed it to project what they were seeing. And yet, what they saw in the mirror was impossibly lifelike. Looking into the mirror was like looking through a window, with the bunny just a few feet away on the other side. Jack felt nothing, only the flat wooden back of the mirror; behind that was the attic wall and nothing else. Nor did the thick wooden legs of the mirror hold secret wires or any way to bring electricity to the mirror. Jack tapped the legs to see if they were hollow, but heard only the dull thud of solid wood in response.
"It's not a trick," Maude told him calmly.
Jack and Mary Jane looked at their sister in surprise.
"What do you mean, Maude?" Mary Jane asked.
Mary Jane smoothed her shirt nervously. The mirror made her nervous, although she did not know why. She watched it out of the corner of her eye, unable to look at it directly. Maude picked up a piece of paper off the floor. It was a pocket map of France. Mary Jane thought she most likely had pulled it from a trunk and thrown it toward Maude when she was rummaging through the trunks a few minutes earlier. The map was only as thick as a piece of paper, but Maude held it in her fist so that it stood up straight. Then she moved her hand so that the map was directly in front of the mirror. As the children watched, the map fluttered. It fluttered in the unmistakable way that paper does when struck by wind.
"You see?" Maude whisp
ered gently.
It was then that Jack noticed Maude's hair drifting. It was being carried subtly away from the direction of the mirror by the same invisible wind. Jack stood on shaky legs and stepped closer. The rabbit in the mirror hopped completely out of view and only the trees, waving in the breeze, remained.
He muttered desperately, “I'm certain there must be some explanation for it. It’s simply not possible…”
“These things don’t really happen,” Mary Jane babbled. “Only in books…”
Mary Jane remembered her words to Maude the day before about Alice in Wonderland and she was prompted to glance down at her younger sister, who she had momentarily forgotten in her panic over the discovery of the strange properties of the mirror. Maude had been silent while her siblings tried to solve the mystery of the mirror because being only five years old, she still saw the world as being naturally full of wonderful and magical things, both of which the mirror was. Now she moved closer to it, her eyes fixed upon what she saw inside. She stretched her arm out towards the mirror, leaning forward on the balls of her feet with an expression of awe and excitement. Then something unexpected happened. Her hand went through.
