Black Mirror

by Nancy Werlin

  “Frances, just one minute,” said James.

  I turned back and, astonishingly, he reached over and took my left hand. His hand was warm, dry. It enfolded mine, and I felt my entire body go still. I looked at him warily. I wanted to run. I wanted—wanted—things I couldn’t ever have—

  He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it once, gently, in the very center of my palm. Then he folded my fingers around the kiss and let go. “Good-bye,” he said. “Be good. And, Frances?”

  I was feeling as if I’d been kicked, hard, in the stomach, and it wasn’t the cramps. I could barely breathe. “What?” I said. The word was almost inaudible.

  “I meant what I said a few minutes ago. I meant every word of it.”

  I felt my shoulders shift uneasily. I could feel the intensity of his gaze. Even in the dark I knew what it said. You. A lie? Or not?

  I got out of the car. My whole hand seemed to throb. I had just been kissed, sort of, even if it was farewell. The world was black. It was gray. It was unknowable.

  I stood on the steps of the dorm. James was still there, in the car, waiting.

  With my other hand, the hand he hadn’t touched, I waved once and saw James lift his hand in return. I saw his head move in a nod.

  I didn’t watch James drive away forever. I let my feet take me, automatically, to meet Andy for dinner.

  CHAPTER 35

  After dinner I returned to my room. I knew I should go to bed early; Andy and I were catching the 6:30 a.m. bus to Boston. Carefully I put the maps of Boston, the bus and subway schedules, and the “Debbie” notebook that I’d started with Andy into my backpack. I planned to take notes tomorrow on everything we did and everyone we talked to. I would also get a list of all the women’s shelters in Boston so that we could call them, one by one.

  Andy was hopeful, almost ebullient, about our search plans. Being with him at dinner, watching his face as he talked about Debbie, had made me feel a tiny bit less numb. I took the notebook back out and looked at the picture of Debbie that Andy had taped there. She looked like an ordinary, plump, middle-aged woman, but she’d ducked her head a little and hunched into her shoulders as if she feared the camera might attack her. We will try, I told the picture silently. I will try my very best to find you and help you.

  I put the notebook away again. I set the alarm clock. It wouldn’t hurt if I went to bed now. But I didn’t know if I could sleep. Behind the barriers I’d set up I could feel my brain shaking, my pulse pounding. If I turned out the light, if I lay still in bed, would I be attacked by all I’d learned today?

  It might take you years, James had said.

  I was overwhelmingly aware all at once of the mirror in the corner, on the wall, still draped in black. I ought to take it down now, I thought. Its purpose was over. It and its black mourning cover should come down. The Frances who had put them there was gone. Gone forever—even if I didn’t quite know who she—who I—had become.

  Was becoming.

  Still, I didn’t take the mirror and the fabric down. Instead I got undressed and into my pajamas. I carefully put away the new white cashmere sweater, unable to resist giving it one gentle stroke before closing the drawer on it. I went to the bathroom, Mr. Monkey in hand, and briskly flushed away the remains of Daniel’s marijuana. As I came out of the toilet stall, I was surprised to run into Tonia Mack, also in pajamas, brushing her teeth. We smiled shyly at each other and she murmured something about not knowing I was another person who liked to go to bed early sometimes. Then we both scurried back to our rooms. I set the empty Mr. Monkey on top of my bookcase.

  The mirror looked at me again, and this time I looked straight back at it. I crossed the room and stood before it. Slowly I drew off its black silk covering. Then, without having planned to do so, I went back for my new white sweater. White, the color of mourning for Buddhists.

  I put it over my shoulders. Then I took a deep breath and murmured aloud the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Yit-gadal V’yit-kadash sh’mey raba …

  I said the entire prayer, astonished at myself because I hadn’t realized I knew it by heart. When the last words fell from my lips, I hunched my shoulders beneath the white sweater, put the black silk to my face, and wept.

  I cried, not for the little boy I’d loved, but for the adolescent boy I hadn’t known at all. The one who had tried to convince me that he knew everything there was to know about serving others, about love, about humanity, about giving. But Daniel had known nothing about any of it. He had been an illusion. My illusion.

  You are so naïve, Frances.

  I cried until I was empty.

  Then I looked into the uncovered mirror, at the face that now seemed a little less unfamiliar. I examined her—my—tear-marked face, runny nose, and swollen eyes. I looked at the cloud of hair. I thought of the woman’s body that was mine; that I could feel under my hands …

  I remembered the years of wishing that I had a face and body like Saskia’s. What did Saskia see, I wondered now, when she looked into a mirror? It was so odd to understand, fully and completely, that it wasn’t and never had been what I had thought.

  At some point, I knew, there were going to be tears in me for her as well. I could feel them deep within me. Had James known that somehow? Was it why he had said to me that she would need a friend?

  James. Gently I closed the fingers of my left hand around the ghost of his kiss. I drew air deeply into my lungs, and let myself hear his words again. Intriguing. Attractive. Unique. I looked again into the mirror. Did I dare believe him?

  The mirror was of course too small to use to see myself full-length. I was a little relieved; the thought still frightened me.

  I remembered my broken promise to myself, seven years ago in Bubbe’s bathroom, to climb up on a stepstool and look at my naked body in the mirror above the sink. Maybe it was, after all, a good thing that I hadn’t looked then. Ms. Wiles—even if she wasn’t really an art teacher, even if she had betrayed me with lies—had told the truth about one thing. If you think you already know what you’re looking at, you might not see what’s really there.

  I had been blind for a long time.

  Freak. Dwarf.

  Intriguing. Attractive. Unique.

  I looked into the mirror and I saw Frances Leventhal. She gravely looked back out at me.

  Soon I would fulfill that seven-year-old promise. I would look straight on, fully and truly and completely, at myself. Like an artist, like a grown-up, like a woman. I would see what was really there. Who was really there. Not tonight, but soon. Soon.

  And maybe—maybe I would even dare a self-portrait. Maybe that way I could begin to learn who I was, and what I believed.

  I was tired, I realized abruptly. So overwhelmingly tired. Too tired to think; too tired to move. I put both the black fabric and the white sweater away in a drawer. I couldn’t stay upright another second.

  It was such a relief to be in bed in the dark … to be warm beneath the covers … to have plans for tomorrow … to know suddenly that I was going to sleep deeply tonight. And, just as I was drifting off, a voice in the back of my head whispered that if I asked my father to help Andy and me find Debbie, he would. He would try to help if I asked.

  I curled my hand around James’s kiss. Then, dreamless, I slept.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Most of Daniel’s Buddhist quotes are from “The Dhammapada,” a popular and frequently translated anthology of 423 verses from the Theravada Pali Canon.

  I would like to thank Kathleen Sweeney, Franny Billingsley, Deborah Wiles, Dr. John Leventhal, and especially Richard Pettengill for allowing me to purloin parts of their names.

  Joanne Stanbridge talked to me about practicing art and what the ideal studio should smell like. Victoria Lord and Jennifer Jacobson provided expert help with sticky points of information.

  Thanks go to Kimi Weart for sharing some of her memories of growing up with a family background like Frances Leventhal’s.

 
; I owe much gratitude to Conrad O’Donnell for his detailed reading of and comments on the first draft, and for helping figure out the details of the thriller plot.

  Finally I’d like to thank my editor, Lauri Hornik, for her support, trust, probing questions, advice, and guidance throughout the process of writing this novel.