My dad turned in his sleep, spoke a muffled word against his pillow, and was still. I slipped from the room.
My panic was cooling, that first jolt of fear drifting away. I could still observe the shock of it, the impossibility, but I’d run out of the energy to feel them. Caught in this state of unnatural calm, I stepped into the bathroom and flicked the wall switch.
I stood off-center in the mirror, sickly beneath the white light. It was scalding, surreal, it flooded every silent corner. The photo was a little crumpled now, but I held it up. In case Sharon was right, and mirrors were dangerous; in case they were a conduit through which I could reach this girl. Maybe yesterday I’d have been self-conscious doing it, but now I looked straight at my reflection and spoke.
“I need to talk to you.”
There was no ripple, no mist, just an exhausted bleach blonde holding a creased photograph.
“I’m coming to find you.”
* * *
I took my dad’s keys from his bedside table and pulled on a T-shirt dress and didn’t realize I’d forgotten shoes until my bare foot was bending around the brake pedal.
The girl could be anywhere. Just the knowledge of her transformed the night, fermenting its air like drifting bacteria. All the cars on the road seemed to be following me, all the shadows clotted like black cream. Lifeguard stands became alien monoliths, looming over the sinister mirror of the public pool. I passed the tinny lights of the Denny’s, the white bubble of the Amoco, the dying mall lording over its empty lots. Slow through downtown Woodbine, where the bars had long since closed and the quaint pools of lamplight were no match for the dark.
She could be anywhere; she could be gone. But I doubted it. The space between us yawned like an open line. I braked to a soft stop in front of the train tracks. Before I could drive on, the passenger door opened.
The girl climbed in.
She was realer than I remembered. Jawline peppered with zits, hair tangled and greasy at the scalp. She might’ve been plain if not for the intensity of those pale wolf’s eyes. I could smell her, a layered accretion of body odor and dirty hair and the bergamot undertow of my mother’s perfume.
“Drive,” she said.
I thought I was too resolute to feel afraid, but my body knew better. My foot was jumpy on the pedal and my limbs quivered like plucked strings. Her presence was a constant scratch, her regard a spotlight that singed my skin. She’d known my mother once. Been young with her. And if my mother really was in trouble, I’d bet this time traveler knew something about it.
The radio was keening about a pink, pink moon. I switched it off. The girl’s silence made its own kind of noise, a bass pulse of hereness that thudded in time with my heart. At the last stop sign before the forest preserve, she pointed left.
“That way.”
When she lifted her arm I caught another breath of my mother’s perfume. The image of this stranger standing at my parents’ vanity, drained face smiling as she sprayed it over her pulse points, raked over my neck like a fingernail. It seemed a greater violation than her teeth in my cookies, her hands in the closet safe.
We could be on our way to my mother now. My breath quickened with anticipation, edged with bitterness. Maybe she and the stranger had been together all this time. We were driving along the suburb’s unincorporated edge, a realm of sprawling houses and overgrown backyards with a reputation for lawlessness akin to that of international waters. For every kid who got arrested out here, there were five more who insisted you couldn’t legally get arrested out here.
“There,” she said.
There was an unlit turnoff cut between the trees. Alone, I wouldn’t have seen it. I went slowly, tires chewing over gravel, until she pressed a hand to the dash.
“Stop. Turn off the car.”
With the headlights out the road in front of us flattened to a gray sea. But the moon was high, the gravel pale, and its contours rebounded. I made out the place where the path veered right and out of sight.
“Where are we?”
She didn’t reply. She was going through some silent deliberation, her breaths shallow as an animal’s. “I don’t know if you’re ready,” she whispered.
“Ready,” I said, and bit my lip. It felt too intimate, our voices meeting in the dark. “Ready for what?”
The girl looked down. I had the sense that she was gathering herself, like the thing she needed to communicate was bigger than she could hold.
“There are fairy tales,” she began, “in which girls trade pieces of themselves away for the things they want. Love, riches.” She looked at me. “Information.”