“What the hell am I supposed to think if you ain’t got proof?” Dad was still shouting. Mother sat on the sofa’s edge, her mouth open in a slant. She looked in agony.
“You don’t need proof,” I said quietly. “You’ve seen it. You’ve both seen it.”
Dad said I wouldn’t be happy until Shawn was rotting in prison, that I’d come back from Cambridge just to raise hell. I said I didn’t want Shawn in prison but that some type of intervention was needed. I turned to Mother, waiting for her to add her voice to mine, but she was silent. Her eyes were fixed on the floor as if Dad and I were not there.
There was a moment when I realized she would not speak, that she would sit there and say nothing, that I was alone. I tried to calm Dad but my voice trembled, cracked. Then I was wailing—sobs erupted from somewhere, some part of me I had not felt in years, that I had forgotten existed. I thought I might vomit.
I ran to the bathroom. I was shaking from my feet to my fingers.
I had to strangle the sobs quickly—Dad would never take me seriously if I couldn’t—so I stopped the bawling using the old methods: staring my face down in the mirror and scolding it for every tear. It was such a familiar process, that in doing it I shattered the illusion I’d been building so carefully for the past year. The fake past, the fake future, both gone.
I stared at the reflection. The mirror was mesmeric, with its triple panels trimmed with false oak. It was the same mirror I’d gazed into as a child, then as a girl, then as a youth, half woman, half girl. Behind me was the same toilet Shawn had put my head in, holding me there until I confessed I was a whore.
I had often locked myself in this bathroom after Shawn let me go. I would move the panels until they showed my face three times, then I would glare at each one, contemplating what Shawn had said and what he had made me say, until it all began to feel true instead of just something I had said to make the pain stop. And here I was still, and here was the mirror. The same face, repeated in the same three panels.
Except it wasn’t. This face was older, and floating above a soft cashmere sweater. But Dr. Kerry was right: it wasn’t the clothes that made this face, this woman, different. It was something behind her eyes, something in the set of her jaw—a hope or belief or conviction—that a life is not a thing unalterable. I don’t have a word for what it was I saw, but I suppose it was something like faith.
I had regained a fragile sense of calm, and I left the bathroom carrying that calmness delicately, as if it were a china plate balancing on my head. I walked slowly down the hall, taking small, even steps.
“I’m going to bed,” I said when I’d made it to the Chapel. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”
Dad was at his desk, holding a phone in his left hand. “We’ll talk about it now,” he said. “I told Shawn what you said. He is coming.”
* * *
—
I CONSIDERED MAKING A run for it. Could I get to my car before Shawn made it to the house? Where were the keys? I need my laptop, I thought, with my research. Leave it, the girl from the mirror said.
Dad told me to sit and I did. I don’t know how long I waited, paralyzed with indecision, but I was still wondering if there was time to escape when the French doors opened and Shawn walked in. Suddenly the vast room felt tiny. I looked at my hands. I couldn’t raise my eyes.
I heard footsteps. Shawn had crossed the room and was now sitting next to me on the sofa. He waited for me to look at him, and when I didn’t he reached out and took my hand. Gently, as if he were unfolding the petals of a rose, he peeled open my fingers and dropped something into them. I felt the cold of the blade before I saw it, and sensed the blood even before I glimpsed the red streak staining my palm.
The knife was small, only five or six inches long and very thin. The blade glowed crimson. I rubbed my thumb and index finger together, then brought them to my nose and inhaled. Metallic. It was definitely blood. Not mine—he’d merely handed me the knife—but whose?
“If you’re smart, Siddle Lister,” Shawn said, “you’ll use this on yourself. Because it will be better than what I’ll do to you if you don’t.”
“That’s uncalled for,” Mother said.
I gaped at Mother, then at Shawn. I must have seemed like an idiot to them, but I couldn’t grasp what was happening well enough to respond to it. I half-wondered if I should return to the bathroom and climb through the mirror, then send out the other girl, the one who was sixteen. She could handle this, I thought. She would not be afraid, like I was. She would not be hurt, like I was. She was a thing of stone, with no fleshy tenderness. I did not yet understand that it was this fact of being tender—of having lived some years of a life that allowed tenderness—that would, finally, save me.