Memory of Fire Page 4
The darkness wasn't right. She'd made a mistake, done something wrong. Brian was still calling to her, but she couldn't find him, and suddenly she realized Jake was gone, too; she'd left him in the house with the tornadoes bearing down on him. She'd abandoned him. But when she turned to go back to get him, the darkness trapped her. She could see no place to go, no doorway, and she began screaming Jake's name, and Brian's—
She woke, sat up in the bed with her heart racing, and in the back of her mind, the thunder still rumbled, nearer, ominous, and tornadoes still threatened. She looked out the bedroom window, but of course there were no thunderheads, no tornadoes. It was November, and light from the full moon sparkled on the frost-covered ground, and the stars glittered against the black-velvet backdrop of the sky. No thunder, except in her mind. No lightning.
She went down the hall to Jake's room and peeked in. He was sound asleep in his big-boy bed, arm around the giant white rabbit that had been an Easter present from Brian the year Jake was born. Jake seemed to know that it was special, though he couldn't remember Brian. That tragedy broke her heart—his father had loved him more than life itself. And Jake was a beautiful child; when she looked at him, she saw Brian—he was everything she had left of Brian.
She bit her lip and fought back tears. She'd been doing so much better lately. She didn't think she would survive Brian's death, but Jake had kept her going, and then she'd discovered her childhood home on the market at the same time that Brian's SGLI—Servicemen's Group Life Insurance—paid out, and it had seemed like a sign. Get away from Pope, from all the wives whose husbands still came home, from all the friends suddenly made awkward and distant by the widow in their midst, as if her widowhood might be a catching disease. Get away to someplace safe, familiar, to the last place in her life that had really made sense until Brian. Take Jake home—to the only home she had ever known that didn't include Brian.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Now? Now she didn't know.
But at least the nightmare hadn't been some subliminal distress signal about Jake. Reassured that he was fine, she carefully closed his door again and went down the hall. When she reached the door to her own room, though, she couldn't make herself go back in. That wall of tornadoes still bore down on her, backlit by the green fire of otherworldly lightning, the dream's intensity not fading even though she was awake. She wasn't going to be able to sleep. Not a chance.
And Brian's voice was still clear in her mind, telling her to go to the mirror.
She went down the front stairs, wondering what she was doing even as she did it. She was an adult woman and she had no reason to be afraid of the mirror, but neither did she have any reason to pay it a visit at three o'clock in the morning.
She tugged her bathrobe tight and for just an instant saw the woman in the white dress with the giant poppies again—she saw the way the sleeveless top zipped up the back, and how carefully fitted the bodice was, and how the skirt was full and held out by a crinoline slip, and how the poppies seemed so pure and wholesome. Pure sixties-housewife glamour, she thought. The woman was wearing nylons—and though it felt odd, Lauren was sure the term nylons was precisely right. Was wearing high heels, too, and her dark hair was short and curly and had about it the faintest scent of hair spray.
Then the memory vanished, and Lauren shook her head. So odd—she couldn't remember anyone who had a dress like that, and it was the sort of dress that would stick in a child's mind. Those huge red flowers…
She smiled faintly; moving into the home she'd lived in as a child, she should have anticipated the visitation of a few of the Spirits of Times Past. She could just be grateful the spirits were in the form of little snatches of memory, and not something really frightening, like Physically Manifesting Old Boyfriends. Cat Creek no doubt still had one or two of those tucked away; she hoped they were all happily married with dozens of children, wherever they might be.
And then she was face-to-face with the mirror again. In the dark, she couldn't see much of her own reflection. The moonlight outside lit up the beveled-glass sidelights and threw enough light down the hall that she became nothing more than a black form, shapeless in her bathrobe, without facial features or identifying detail. The mirror reflected the beveled glass, the silver world beyond the front door, the black-and-white film-noir interior of the entryway, with its scattered moonbeams and shadows. Not seeing herself clearly brought the nightmare closer. She shivered, and told herself the shiver was because the foyer was so cold.
It was just a mirror.
But even in the dark, even when she couldn't see her face, she could still feel the storm behind that old silvered glass. It called to her, as storms had always called to her, drawing her out to the front porch when she was a child to watch the wind whip through the trees and feel the rain slash against her bare legs as they dangled just within reach of the monster, to hear the dance of water on the tin roof—she had shivered with delight as the thunder roared just overhead, as the lightning slammed into the ground near enough that she could feel the earth tremble with the strike. She had sucked the storm air into her lungs with greedy intensity, though it was almost too wet to breathe and so close it seemed ready to swallow her; still, it was so fresh, so pure, so alive that she wondered how she would ever breathe again when it was gone; and then her poor mother, terrified of thunderstorms, saw her out there and raced outside shrieking to drag her protesting into the house, away from the wild beauty of the world that danced just at the edge of chaos.
Within the mirror, that storm waited for her.
What an odd conceit.
She reached out to touch the glass, and felt something thrum as her fingers neared its surface, and she hesitated, barely breathing. She could feel the rain on her legs, the stinging spray that the wind blew in gusts into her eyes and up her nose; she could smell the ozone in the air, and tannins and dust and wet earth.
My storm. My storm.
Her hand hovered, merest millimeters above the glass, and the thrumming grew stronger, and suddenly she knew—knew—that she'd feared the mirror for a reason. She'd been an imaginative kid, but not subject to unreasonable fears; she'd needed neither a night-light nor someone to check her closets for monsters. She'd been perfectly comfortable in enclosed spaces, loved heights, took to the water like a fish, and had no more than the usual anxieties upon starting school, and those she had alleviated by punching the first bully who thought she looked like an easy target. She'd had a reputation in grade school as a hellcat. A smart hellcat, but a girl, nonetheless, whose pigtails were not to be pulled. And yet throughout her childhood, she had come in the house through the kitchen door and used the back stairs rather than go anywhere near the mirror.
I was not a stupid kid, she thought.
She stared into the mirror's depths and again caught just that faintest, briefest flash of green fire. No wash of memories this time—no Brian, no voices, no lady in poppies. But the fire flickered far away, deep inside the mirror, and her hand moved closer, closer, feeling the pull, feeling an indescribable, eerie hunger for something her body remembered but her mind refused to acknowledge. Something to do with the mirror.
She pressed palm to glass, and the thrum intensified, and the lightning flickered faster, moved closer, and she could begin to make out shapes within the darkness—a horizon, trees, a single lonely house boarded shut and abandoned, its architecture oddly rounded and both too tall and too narrow, but somehow, she was certain, also right. The glass was warm—as warm as a living thing, as warm as a petted cat lying in a beam of sunlight—and in the part of her mind that still held on to here and now and how this is supposed to work, she knew that was wrong, that the glass should be cold. The hall was cold—her bare feet on the hardwood floor were freezing and her nose tingled with chill. The glass should have felt like ice. A separate part of her was saying, "I ought to be afraid now," but she wasn't afraid. And the knowledge that she wasn't afraid and should be was more unnerving than
what was happening with the mirror, because some part of her had known about the mirror.
The green fire reached her—kissed her palm and spread between her fingers and then rippled outward, and the entire surface of the mirror began to glow. She was staring into the fire and through it, and on the other side, she saw clearly, as if looking through green daylight, a massive hardwood forest covered by snow, the trees bare-branched and lacy; the clearing, starting to look overgrown, in which the lonely little house sat, with not a footstep in the snow to indicate that anyone ever gave it a thought anymore; and then she was looking inside the house at dusty floors and cobwebbed ceilings and windows boarded shut through which a little light nonetheless managed to leak, and she saw a round table in the center of the floor, and suddenly, impossibly, she remembered sitting beneath that table with a crayon, writing her name on the underside when her mother wasn't looking.
My storm. My storm.
And her hand slipped through the glass, all the way up to her elbow, and she could feel the pull of the place, calling her in. A single step—through the mirror. She had been there before, years before. Had been through the mirror, and had somehow forgotten, but now she was back. Almost back. This belonged to her; a forgotten birthright rediscovered, magic that had been stolen from her but was now nearly recovered, just within reach, almost hers again if she would just…step…through….
And she found something more there, too. She could feel Brian's hand close around hers, his fingers meshing with hers as they had when the two of them had walked through the North Carolina woods together. She could feel him—feel his warmth, his strength, the reassurance of his presence as surely as if he were alive, in the room. As surely as if he had never left her. She could not see him, but she could feel him.
If she stepped through, would she find him there? Was he whole, well, simply waiting for her on the other side of magic?
She almost stepped through then. She would have walked through hell to get to Brian again—she would step through a mirror without question.
But at that instant she remembered the other part of her nightmare—the part where she'd become separated from Jake. Her body went rigid, and the mirror lost part of its hold on her.
She might find Brian on the other side, but she might not. Probably would not. Almost certainly would not, no matter what. Nor did she know where that house was. She didn't know how she could get back to Cat Creek once she was there—and she knew wherever that other house was, it wasn't in Cat Creek. She couldn't leave Jake sleeping in the bed upstairs and go away to an unknown house in a strange forest.
She would step through the mirror. She had to go. She had to see if Brian still lived somewhere; she had to reclaim the part of herself that she just discovered she had been missing. This birthright of magic, this touch of wonder—she needed it, she knew. She hungered for it. It was the answer to the question that had driven her entire peripatetic, rootless life. But she would not go without Jake.
With her right arm pushed through thrumming glass into green fire, with her body telling her "Go on! Go on!" she stopped. It was like being nineteen again and half-naked in the backseat of a Chevy Nova, and saying, "Um, wait." In fact, in retrospect, the business in the Chevy had been more pleasant. But that was what being a grown-up was all about, wasn't it?
She withdrew her arm, and saw that the glass continued to glow. It was waiting for her.
Yes, she thought. It's supposed to do that. But how did she know?
In the back of her mind, her father's voice. "Once you open a gate, it stays open until one of two things happens. Either something will cross through it—either from here to there or from there to here—or it will crash. Never, never leave a gate standing open."
Another shiver—this one hard and teeth-rattling. She looked through at that snowy vista, at the boarded-up house, and thought perhaps she shouldn't go through in bare feet and pajamas, either. Warm clothes. Boots. Hat. Gloves. Be a grown-up, Lauren.
But if she really wanted to act like an adult, maybe she shouldn't go through at all. Certainly the sensible thing to do would be to go upstairs to bed and hire somebody to come in and take the mirror away first thing tomorrow morning. It would be tough to move, but not impossible, she thought. And she bet she could get good money for a ten-foot-tall antique mirror.
But being an adult did not mean eliminating sudden magic from one's life. It meant taking reasoned risks, using fail-safes where possible, thinking things through before jumping to find the best way to jump. It did not mean avoiding risk altogether—that was the definition for being dead. And parts of her life that she hadn't even suspected were linked to that mirror, and to whatever lay beyond it. She was going to have to go through. But she was going to do it with warm clothes and a packed hamper of food, and she was going to have to decide what to do about Jake, too. Leave him with a safe sitter? Take him through the mirror?
Two schools of thought existed on what parents in uncertain situations were supposed to do with kids. She'd had years to hear both. Her mother's sister Caroline and Caroline's husband, Ed, had gotten Jesus in a big way—so big they'd decided what they really needed to do was move into a series of third-world hell-holes to convince the people living in squalor and semistarvation there that starving with Je sus was better than starving without him. When they did their jaunt for Jesus, they took their kids.
Lauren got to watch the slides every time they came back on furlough. "Here we are being attacked by a water buffalo; Jimmy, you remember that big water buffalo? And here we are with the guerrillas who held us up in the mountains—they only agreed not to shoot us after we told them we were reporters for Rolling Stone. Thank God Katie had a copy of Rolling Stone with her. Didn't you save that magazine, honey? Oh, that's right, it got burned with the rest of the things in the house. Here we are during the native insurrection, when they were burning the houses of foreigners. That was our house right there on the right—the really tall flames. Yep, that one. My, that was exciting. Here's the new house we built. It is pretty, isn't it? And here's a picture of it just after the earthquake—Dad had to pull Jimmy out of the wreckage from that one—his bedroom fell in on top of him. Remember, Jimmy?"
Those slide shows had held Lauren transfixed. She lived in Cat Creek and never went anywhere or did anything (and in the back of her mind, something whispered, "Even when you were little, you knew better than that.") and her cousins were facing down water buffaloes and guerrillas with machine guns and earthquakes and God alone knew what else. Lauren's parents had been supportive of Caroline and Ed—"Whatever you do, keep the kids with you. The worst thing I can think of would be to have them separated from you with no way to get back together."
Her parents' friends had been appalled. "Why don't they send those poor children to boarding school? All those terrible things will scar them for life."
Lauren thought about it. She'd had plenty of time to see how her aunt and uncle's experiment with including their children in their adventures had turned out. Jim was a freelance photographer—he did a lot of work for National Geographic and Rolling Stone, actually. Wild animals, guys with machine guns in third-world countries, disasters. If he'd been scarred, he'd managed to turn it into a nice living. Kate was a multilingual fashion buyer for Sak's Fifth Avenue, traveling around the world in search of the perfect cocktail dress. Different set of wild animals, Lauren supposed, not so many guys with guns, disasters of an entirely different scope and nature—but she'd seemed happy, too. Neither of them had followed the path of Jesus, which left their parents bent out of shape, but as far as Lauren knew, neither Jim nor Kate had turned into psychopaths or serial killers.
And in the back of her mind, her mother's soft voice talking to Caroline—"Whatever you do, keep the kids with you. The worst thing I can think of would be to have them separated from you with no way to get back together." And Lauren thought, How true, Mom. To be in that giant forest and to not be able to get back—to have me there and Jake here…No.
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So Jake would go with her. It would be…educational. Yes. That's what Caroline and Ed always said—they'd given their kids an education that money couldn't buy. And, years later, it looked like they'd been right.
Which left the matter of the opened gate to be decided, and quickly. "Never, never leave a gate standing open," her father had said, and—easygoing mailman, civil servant questing for a pension—he hadn't been particularly emphatic about most things in his life.
She couldn't remember when he'd said that, actually, or why he might have said it to her. She couldn't remember anything, really, and the more she tried, the stranger the blank spaces in her past began to feel. But she did know he'd said it. And though she didn't know what she had to fear, she knew she didn't want to find out.
She got a chair from the living room, since it was the closest to the hall, carried it into the foyer, and, without thinking too hard about what she was doing, shoved the chair through the surface of the mirror. It vanished with a soft, sucking pop, and the green fire flickered and shimmered and swirled in on itself, spiraling tighter and smaller and dimmer, like glowing water going down a drain.