Ruth grabbed the mirror, shaking it. “I’ve seen you before. I’ve seen you . . .”
“Who have you seen, Ruth?” I asked.
“The demon inside me,” she answered, her voice wavering in and out like a radio signal. “It won’t let me go. It’s been with me since I was sixteen.”
“Let it go now,” Hop urged her. “Leave it in the mirror.”
“It’s too clever.” Ruth shook her head, and her shoulders trembled as she clung to the mirror’s frame. “I had my first daughter when I was sixteen. That’s the first time I saw it, laughing and clinging to my back when I was giving birth to her. I was high on heroin and in the worst pain of my life. When I was nineteen, I had my second daughter. I lost both of them. For fifteen years, I’ve promised them I’d get them back and be a mother. But the demon always gets me. Heroin always wins.”
I looked sideways at Ruth. “I have two daughters, too.”
Her jaw muscles were tight as she returned a glance. “Hold them tight.”
“This is me, who I am,” said Harrington. “No more or less. Everything bad I’ve ever done, I see it staring back at me. There’s me as a kid, locking our dog in a dark cupboard because I was being bullied at school. I can still hear him whimpering. Man, that’s confronting . . .”
“I hear you,” said Duncan. “I was bullied all the way through school. Why they chose me to pick on, I’ll never know.”
“We think we’re gods,” said Hop in a hushed voice. “That’s what this challenge is telling us. Like the symbols of gods pointing to the mirrors. We think we’re masters of our own destinies. But we’re not. We don’t even know ourselves. We’re not in control.”
“It’s in the numbers,” I breathed. The image before me seemed to suck inward, as if it were breathing, trying to draw me in. I began feeling disassociated from my own image, the gaping mouth turning into a mocking smile. When I turned away, the reflection of my face remained in the mirror, watching me.
Above me in the mirror, I saw a light change colour. I turned. The bulb below the clock had changed to green.
I could hear the breaths of relief around the room, but those breaths were ragged, conflict etched deep on everyone’s faces.
This challenge had wiped me, confused me, picking me up and dumping me in a dark place. I was repulsed by myself, wanting to peel my own skin off and destroy the image in the mirror.
There had been nothing to solve in this challenge. The challenge had been to see inside yourself.
I felt unsettled, as if the ground beneath my feet were no longer solid.
33. Constance
MY PLANE TO LONDON TOUCHED DOWN in the early hours, just before dawn. Five in the morning. I dragged myself through the airport feeling lost and dazed—I was a terrible long distance passenger. The long span of airport windows showed a bleak, rain-soaked day. Not the English summer I’d pictured.
I wished James was here. He’d deal with everything while I got myself together. He’d tell me what I needed to do. But I didn’t have time to get myself together.
Here in the gloom and darkness of a strange country, sitting on the cold seat of a cab, I finally admitted to myself what I’d never been able to admit before. James was a father figure to me. That was what he’d always been. I had nothing else in the way between myself and that truth now. There was nothing here to hide behind—no charity dinners to attend with James, no shopping trips with Kara, no contractors to direct in maintaining our house and grounds, no useless knickknacks to buy.
Yes, James was a father figure. He directed me. That sounded odd, but it was comforting. My own father had never been a real father. There’d been no comfort in him. He’d been—still was—a bitter alcoholic prone to rages. James never raged.
Otto had been a bit like my father. Except that it was drugs instead of alcohol that made him so unstable, and I’d always felt that he loved me. Otto, with his long hair and swagger and motorcycle, had been a complete separation from college life—one that I’d run towards. Everything with Otto had been a frenzy, even the simplest trip to a river for a swim. Because he’d insist on us swimming in that river naked at midnight. One night, we’d stolen a boat, jumped off overhanging tree branches into the black water and had sex on the river bank with willow leaves lapping our bodies. At the time, it’d seemed like we did things no one else did.
In a way, Otto had directed me, too. Everything had been so spontaneous, I hadn’t noticed. But it had been Otto’s wild imaginings I’d been swept up in, never my own.