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.
I stared at the blade. Dad began a lecture, pausing often so Mother could
ratify his remarks. I heard voices, among them my own, chanting harmonies
in an ancient hall. I heard laughter, the slosh of wine being poured from a
bottle, the tinkle of butter knives tapping porcelain. I heard little of my
father’s speech, but I remember exactly, as if it were happening now, being
transported over an ocean and back through three sunsets, to the night I had