The others returned to the hexagonal box to continue debating God and numbers.
I stood gazing into the dark surface of the mirror. I realised then that I could see a vague illustration of the same painting we’d seen on the other side of the sixth mirror.
Why was it there?
As I angled the mirror to gain a better view, the lamp below the mirror cast a harsh light across my face, and I caught sight of my features. The illustration of the mountains and caves formed a face that merged with mine. The caves of the paintings made hollow places of my eyes, and the tumble of boulders into the water made my mouth look like it was hanging open in a silent scream.
Revulsion washed through me, and my stomach twisted.
But I couldn’t look away.
I’d suddenly been confronted by the real and raw me. The addict.
All my pain, and the pain I’d caused others, was here. I wasn’t the wife Gray needed. I wasn’t the mother my girls needed. I hadn’t been the child that my mother wanted. My whole life, my mother had told me about all the things I was lacking. I was never enough. I could see it all, here, now.
“This is it,” I said, my voice hoarse. “This is it.”
I heard Ruth call from across the room. “What’s it?”
“They just want us to look into the mirrors,” I told her as I watched her reflection. “If you angle the mirror, your face . . . changes.”
“Well, I’m not doing it,” she stated firmly. “That’s not a challenge. That’s a—”
“Who are we to question what the challenges are?” said Duncan. He surprised me by walking up to the mirror adjacent to mine and adjusting it. Within a second, Duncan’s body began trembling. “Oh, I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.”
Hop stepped up to a mirror next, moving it until he saw what Duncan and I were seeing. “I look like my father. In one of his black moods, telling me I need to do better. Study harder. Put in more hours.”
“He sounds like a charmer,” Ruth remarked.
“That’s the last thing he was,” said Hop, his voice different, almost raspy. “He hung himself in the kitchen of our home. Every time we sit down to dinner, my family has that reminder of him.”
We all fell silent for a moment.
“That’s awful,” I whispered to Hop. Twisting around, I cast a pleading glance at Ruth and Harrington. “Let’s get this over and done with.”
“How do we even know this is what they want?” Ruth gave a rigid, unconvincing shrug. “Maybe the mirrors are just there to distract us.”
“This is plain ridiculous,” agreed Harrington.
I wanted Duncan to do his usual and remind them to be team players, but he’d plunged into silence, absorbed by whatever his mind was conjuring from the image in front of him.
“Maybe,” I said, wrenching myself away and marching over to them. “But we have to try it. Get over there before I have to drag you there myself.”
Inwardly, I was jelly. I never ordered people to do anything. Even with Willow and Lilly, I was too soft and patient.
Ruth swung her head around to view one of the cameras up high on the ceiling. “Is this really what you mentors want? This? It’s insanity.”
She walked up to a vacant spot in front of a mirror. Angling the mirror, she stared down into it, muttering darkly. “Okay. This is it? Really? The mentors will have to try harder. They can’t get me with this. I already confronted my demons, years ago. And you know what? My demons can go to hell.”
But she fell into a sudden silence.
I returned to my own spot in front of a mirror. The skull-like sight of myself wasn’t any easier the second time.
Harrington begrudgingly took a place by the last mirror. “It’s a trick. I’ve heard of an experiment where a psychologist had fifty people stare at their own image in a dark room until they imagined they saw their faces change into different things. All fifty of them got weirded out. Half of them saw some kind of monsters. Here, they’re just speeding up the effect with this stupid illustration. Because we don’t have very long.”
I heard soft sobs. Hop and Duncan.
“If I saw him again in another life,” said Hop, “I’d kill him with my own hands.” I knew he was talking about his father.
Duncan made strange, discordant humming noises, like he was on the edge and trying to stop himself from completely breaking down. “Amelia never loved me. She doesn’t love me. She married me because she didn’t have a better option. Do you know what it feels like to look at your wife and see only loathing in her eyes?”