The People in the Mirror

  The People in the Mirror

  by

  Thea Thomas

  Emerson & Tilman, Publishers

  Suite 55

  129 Pendleton Way

  Washougal, WA 98671

  www.EmersonandTilman.com/publishers

  © Emerson & Tilman /Thea Thomas

  All contents copyright © Emerson & Tilman /Thea Thomas

  Cover image copyright © Emerson & Tilman

  No part of this material may be reproduced in any medium without the written permission of the publisher and/or author.

  Chapter I

  I peered up into the drizzly sky at the tall, sad, gray front of the apartment building. It rose up into a sad, gray sky, and I thought... I cannot believe I have to call this place home.

  An irritating mist-rain-wetness fell into my eyes as I made out gargoyle faces halfway up the building. I looked farther up and saw wet, gray gargoyle bodies at the top of the building – up there in the shifting mists. So a person could tell where the gray building stopped and the gray sky took over, I guessed.

  “Isn’t it fabulous?” Dad asked, all cheery like he’d built the building himself and was really proud of his work. He moved the umbrella he was sort of holding over Mom and me around some more, shaking more water on us than if there was no umbrella.

  “It’s... really something,” Mom said.

  Good. At least she didn’t think it was “fabulous.”

  For some reason we continued to stand there, drinking in the view, I guess, Dad still beaming.

  “Kind of shades of Rosemary’s Baby though – don’t you think?” Mom finally ventured.

  “Nah!” Dad said, “not at all! Wait ’til you see the inside, it just doesn’t quit.”

  Oh boy, I thought, more and more of this. “Well, let’s go see it then,” I said, trying to resign myself to two things: one; I was actually going to have to live in an apartment building that two; came from some old horror movie.

  “Good idea,” Mom agreed. “Let’s go inside, we’re getting wet.”

  “Oh! Sorry!” Dad, all apologetic moved the umbrella around some more, which made sure we were good and wet. “Well, okay,” he said behind us. Mom and I had made a beeline for the front door.

  At the door was this “portly” doorman, tall and round, wearing a dark taupe uniform. Yeah. Taupe. That color that just... isn’t really gray, isn’t quite brown. He held the door open for us. Felt pretty weird. I can open doors myself, thank you very much.

  “Welcome, Mr. Francis!” The doorman said in a reserved jolly way. “This must be your lovely family.”

  “Right, Homer. My wife, Clarice and my daughter, Dominique, but we usually call her Nikki. Clarice, Nikki, our doorman, Homer.”

  I couldn’t believe it, he actually tipped his hat. No one had ever done that to me. But I’d never been introduced to a doorman before.

  Once inside, I saw another man in a different sort – but same color – uniform, on the phone, so Dad didn’t introduce us, thank goodness. But I could just feel him memorizing Mom and me as he nodded to Dad.

  “Security guard,” Dad whispered as we passed him.

  Why whisper? I wondered. We weren’t doing anything wrong.

  We stopped in front of elevator doors that were all shiny silver and brass, with artistic designs on it like Art Deco, which, actually, I like. Okay. So the elevator doors I can live with. Dad pushed the button and one of the elevator doors slid open. Then Dad pushed “7” once we were inside.

  “Well...” I said after the doors slid shut and I gently shook the rain from my hair with my finger tips, “I just wonder what all the paranoia’s about.”

  Mom and Dad turned and looked at me as if I’d just learned to speak, for pity’s sake. They both looked completely bemused.

  “What do you mean?” Dad finally asked.

  “Those men checking us out, seeing if we have a right to be here.”

  Neither of them said anything as the elevator door slid open. Dad led us down the hall to “717.” The carpet in the hall was so thick I felt like I was sinking in it up to my ankles. It had a heavy, scrolly, burgundy and gray Victorian print. Then I noticed the soft gray walls and the ornate, brass wall sconces every few feet that had these little pink-hued bulbs in them. I had to admit to myself that the whole effect gave the hall a cozy, warm light. So, all right, nice elevator doors, nice light in the hall. Not much to go on, but better than nothing.

  Dad waited until he let us in the apartment before he answered me.

  “It’s security, Nikki, not paranoia. They’re here for our protection.”

  “Yeah, well,” the irritation I felt when the “ security guard” checked me out rose up my throat again, “ no more casually having a bunch of friends over after school, huh?”

  Dad studied at me for a moment, a little frown working its way across his forehead like happens when he has to sort out something new. “I hadn’t thought about that, sweetheart. But it’ll all work out.”

  I nodded, thinking, I’m sure my friends – of course, I don’t have any friends here, so it’s completely moot – but, anyway, I’m sure if I had any friends, they’d all just love to come into a stuffy place like this. But I kept the thought to myself. Dad can’t help it he got transferred to Seattle. Just because I’m not happy I don’t suppose I have to go out of my way to make him feel miserable.

  Anyway, I finally looked around the apartment, and my jaw hit the floor – metaphorically. The place was beautiful! Walls a pale peach with solid cherry woodwork in the door and window frames – I took shop last semester and had gotten into learning about different types of wood. I knew you didn’t see cherry woodwork that often.

  Dad had subleased the apartment from a man in his company who’d been sent to England for a year, so the place was completely furnished. All the furniture was big, solid antiques, mostly made of deep rich walnut, with a couple of cherry end tables. I liked it all on sight. Thank goodness the people hadn’t gone in for all that spindly Louis-the-Whatsit stuff.

  We went from the foyer into a huge living room, where Mom stopped in her tracks. She quietly breathed, “Wow!” An actual baby grand piano took up the entire corner. And it was “ wow.” I knew this made Mom happy. She’d told us both that she was going to get back to her piano playing if Dad dragged her away from teaching third grade for a year. Mom loved those kids.

  The baby grand must be the “ little surprise” Dad had been hinting and hinting at for the last couple weeks after he came back from Seattle from signing the lease on the apartment. Mom went straight to the piano, sat down and played a couple scales. The sound swelled in fat round notes right to the walls.

  “Beautiful quality,” she said, “ and doesn’t even need to be tuned.”

  We toured the rest of the apartment. Three bedrooms, two with private baths, a kitchen, a little breakfast nook, a formal dining room, and an actual greenhouse room on the corner of the building with two exterior glass walls, full of a riot of all kinds of plants. The whole place was like out of a Victorian movie. I hated to have to admit it, but it was, altogether, pretty cool.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Dad got just more and more proud of himself as Mom “oohed” and “ahhed” at everything, and I even let out a couple of “oohs.” It was that impressive. We came back to the living room and settled on facing sofas, covered in a soft, pale green and peach scrolly-patterned velvet.

  “This isn’t an apartment,” I finally said. “It’s a house – stuck up in a
building. I think it’s bigger than our house.”

  “I told you it was huge,” Dad said.

  “You said it was a huge apartment. I didn’t know apartments could be bigger than a house.”

  “You’re not in Laguna Beach anymore.”

  “Yeah, Dad. I got that part.” I shrugged, my depression returning. No. I was not at home. I was not with my friends. I was not going to hang out at the beach today. Or any day soon. I was not going to school on Monday at the school I pretended to hate, but now missed in a mega way. With my new driver’s license I’d just gotten a few weeks ago I would not be going anywhere. No movies with friends tonight. No shopping tomorrow.

  Yes. That old depression climbed right out of that gray sky and poured itself into me.

  Chapter II

  But then I pulled myself together somewhat, and tried to be philosophical. A few days later I thought about how there was bad and good in most things. This was something my grandmother told me when I was only three or four and I’d left my treasured picture book she’d given me at the playground – “Tootles Favorite, Funny Friends.” When we went back to get it, it was gone. I cried so hard I started hiccoughing. That’s the first time my grandmother said to me, “There’s bad and good in most things.”

  About a week after that my mom handed me a package and said, “This came for you in the mail.” I tore it open and there I held in my hands, “Tootles Favorite, Funny Friends!” I thought at the time it was magic, but now I guess my grandmother got another copy and sent it to me.

  Anyway, back to now and about living in this apartment. On the bad side was the security guard, but Homer, the doorman, had gone over to the good side just because he turned out to be such a nice guy. He talks to me like I’m a person, not a kid, which is excellent. On both the good side and the bad side was the new school. Good – only three blocks from home. Bad – after four days, no one has even said “hi” to me. Another bad – the non-stop drizzling sky. I always felt wet. And cold.

  Very definitely good – my room. As big as our living room at home, with a gigantic private bathroom the size of my entire bedroom at home.

  And, as I’m not entirely heartless and selfish, also on the good side – how much Dad loved his job here, which I know because practically every day he’s said, “I love my job here!” and how much Mom loved that baby grand piano. As I made up my “THE APARTMENT AND SEATTLE: GOOD–BAD” lists she was playing Beethoven’s Fifth. It floated on the air like sweet whipped butter.

  I wished I had something I loved so much I could completely lose myself in it. The only thing I loved like Dad loved his work and Mom loved playing the piano was reading – but that’s not a talent, it’s a hobby. You couldn’t make more of reading than just... reading. I was reading the “Horror in the Heights” series. The heroine in the pictures on the cover of the books looked exactly like I wished I looked.

  I put down the “Horror in the Heights, #6 – Working with Goblins, Pixies and Gnomes” I was reading and got up to study myself in the mirror inside the walk-in closet. This closet was the other incredibly great part about my room, huge closet, a room all by itself. It was next to my bathroom, and pretty much the same size as the bathroom, with a gigantous mirror on the back wall, big enough for me to practice ballet in front of it – if I took ballet.

  But it was the strangest mirror I’d ever seen, with a dark, smoky quality. I decided it was all dark and smoky because it was so old. Whatever the reason, I loved the way it made me look. Why? Because everyone always says I’m “cute” and I hate being called “cute.” There’s nothing special about “cute.”

  But the dark, smoky mirror faded my freckles, and made my pale blue eyes a shade darker, which looks so exotic. Everyone in my family has pale eyes, and it just seemed to me that people with dark eyes came from exciting places. The mirror made my hair a shade darker too. Now, finally, it had a color I could name besides “dishwater blonde.” What kind of a color was “dishwater blonde” anyway? Ugh!

  Mom and Dad had forbidden me to “put any permanent or semi-permanent chemistry” on my hair “for the time being,” whatever that meant – because Mom had read some article about how hair color damaged your brain, or something. That didn’t mean I didn’t fantasize about having hair that was lighter or darker. The mirror clinched it – I’d definitely go darker!

  “Enough primping, your highness,” I told my reflection. “Time to get at your home work.” Since nothing else was going on in my life, I might as well get good grades. Look to the future, Dad always said. Yeah, especially when nothing was happening in the present.

  But – and here’s where the weird stuff began – Just as I turned from the mirror, I saw movement in it.

  I turned back to the mirror and peered into it....

  Then I shrieked and jumped. There were a man and a woman in the mirror talking to each other in a faded light. I could not make out exactly what they looked like, but they were definitely there! I wondered if I could hear what they were saying if Mom’s piano playing would only, please!, stop. Which was why Mom hadn’t heard me shriek, thank goodness. But before the music stopped, the light in the mirror shifted and the people in the mirror disappeared.

  I continued standing there, looking into the mirror, sort of stupefied. I finally left the walk-in closet, pulled the closet door shut behind me and went to stand by one of the long, skinny windows on either side of my four-poster bed. I looked down the seven stories through the gray fog – it was like living in the clouds – and tried to puzzle out an explanation of seeing people in the mirror.

  Then I tried to imagine telling Mom what I’d just seen and realized I couldn’t. Mom and Dad knew I was unhappy with being here, with living in an apartment, with the new school where no one talked to me, and pretty much everything. It was certain-sure that Mom would cart me off to a shrink before I could finish the sentence, “I’m seeing people in my mirror.”

  But what if my mind didn’t make up those people. What if they were, somehow, there? Whoa – that was scary, too!

  I tried to get myself to go look in the mirror again, but I could not screw up the courage. In fact, the thought of going in there every day to get my clothes gave me the willies.

  I went to my jewelry box and took out the huge antique emerald dinner ring Grandmother had willed to me, which is what I do whenever I have a problem. And that means, I talk to this ring quite a lot.

  Mom and Dad were always telling me I ought to put the ring in the bank safe with their other valuables because I was too young to wear it. But I flatly refused.

  “What’s the point of having something beautiful if you can’t ever look at it?” I’d say, and Mom would say, “Beautiful? Dear, it’s ostentatious.” Then Mom would turn to Dad and say, “She’s got more of your Mother in her than just her hands and her nose.” And Dad would say nothing, but nod proudly.

  I could have passed on having my grammy’s silly little pug nose, and I would rather have Mom’s slender, long-fingered, piano-playing hands, more than anything. But I was super-pleased to have any part of Grammy’s character. And I couldn’t imagine parting with her emerald. Before Grammy left forever, I’d tell her the fairy tales that seemed to rise up from the depths of the deep green stone.

  When Grammy passed away two years ago, I could not be consoled. In fact, I still missed her so much sometimes that I couldn’t think straight. The thing was, Grammy understood me like nobody else – ever. She absolutely kept every single one of my secrets. Not that I had so many, and not that they were so important. But she honored them just the same.

  Like the time my Dad brought me a no-doubt expensive clown doll from some business trip. I was only seven at the time and something about that clown face scared me. I didn’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings, so I told Grammy about how the doll kept me awake, and she made a bea
utiful tiny little beaded mask that just covered the clown’s spooky, too-alive eyes. My Dad thought it was the most wonderful thing his mom had ever done in her life.

  “I can’t believe you even noticed I gave that doll to Nikki, let alone actually taking the time to make this gorgeous mask,” he said. Grammy just nodded and said, “ it seemed like that’s the only thing he was missing,” and winked at me.

  Or like the time I had a crush on Jimmy at school when I was nine. One day, for no apparent reason, he came up on the playground and slapped me, hard! I was so shocked, but even worse, he broke my heart. When I told Grammy, she said, “people hurt people when they are hurting. Don’t let the way he feels touch your life.”

  The very next week he came to school with a black eye and a big red welt on his arm. Our teacher looked like she was going to cry. She took him to Miss Sharon, our principle. A little while later, from where I sat at my desk I saw a state car pull up. And then a few minutes after that, Jimmy walked out with two women. They all got in the state car and I never saw Jimmy again.

  Anyway, Grammy never said, “you need to be different in such and such a way,” like it seemed my parents always did. And when I couldn’t make sense of a problem, I’d take it to Grammy – she’d ask me a couple questions and I’d suddenly know the answers to my own problems. I always felt better. Plus Grammy had great stories about herself when she was young. She said she was kind of wild “in her day.”

  So when Grammy very suddenly and unexpectedly dropped of a heart attack, my world stopped making sense. I hadn’t realized how often I had conversations in my mind with her that helped me sort things out. I got so crazy angry when she died that Mom took me to a shrink, who saw me exactly twice. He told Mom there was nothing wrong with me, and that I was processing grief in a healthy way.