The Hallway Mirror

Three days after we buried my sister, I saw her in the hallway mirror, and she was not doing what I was doing. I should explain about the mirror first, because the mirror matters. It is the big one at the bottom of the stairs, the one in the heavy dark frame that has hung in this house longer than I have been alive — longer than Edie and I had been alive, I should say, because for nineteen years there was no I without an Edie attached, we came as a pair, we were the kind of twins people couldn't tell apart and then felt clever for learning to. That mirror had reflected the two of us, side by side, every single day of those nineteen years. Coming down to breakfast. Leaving for school. Getting ready, the December before last, for the one and only formal dance our town ever bothered to throw, both of us in the mirror, both of us laughing. So when I came down the stairs that third evening after the funeral, in the empty quiet house, with my parents already gone to bed because grief had made them old overnight — when I came down the stairs and looked into that mirror, the way you look into a mirror you've passed ten thousand times, without deciding to, just to check the world was still there — I saw myself on the third stair from the bottom. And I saw Edie at the foot of it. I want to be careful here, because I have gone over this so many times that I no longer trust the easy version. The easy version is: I was grieving, I was exhausted, I saw my own reflection and my tired brain dressed it up as my sister, because that is what a brain does, a brain in mourning is a desperate animal and it will make you see the thing you cannot bear to have lost. I know that version. A counsellor gave me that version, gently, with a box of tissues between us, and I let her, because it was kinder than arguing. But here is what the easy version cannot hold. I was standing still on the third stair. My reflection — the figure that should have been my reflection, my exact face, my exact dark hair pulled back the exact tired way — that figure was not standing still. She was at the bottom of the stairs, and she had one hand on the bannister, and she was looking up. Up the stairs. At me. While I looked down at her. A reflection cannot do that. A reflection is a slave; it has no choices; it copies. If I look down, it looks up to meet me, yes, but it does so because I am looking down at it, the geometry forces it, there is no will in a reflection. What I saw in that mirror had will. It was looking at me the way a person looks at another person — with interest, with patience, with something behind the eyes that was deciding something — and her face, my face, Edie's face, the one face the three of those had always been, was very slightly, very gently, beginning to smile. I did not smile. I checked. I put my hand up to my own mouth, my real mouth, on the real third stair, and my mouth was a flat frightened line, and in the mirror her hand did not come up at all, her hands stayed exactly where they were, one on the bannister, one loose at her side, and the smile went on arriving on her face like sunrise. Then my mother's voice came down from the landing — "Wren? Is that you, love?" — small and cracked and half asleep, and I looked away from the mirror for one second, just one, to call back up that yes, it was me, go back to sleep. When I looked again the mirror held only me. Tired, on the third stair, hand at my mouth. A reflection. A slave. Copying. I stood there for a long time. The house ticked and settled around me. And then I made myself walk down the last three stairs and right up close to the glass, close enough to fog it with my breath, and I looked into my own eyes and I said, out loud, very quietly, the thing I had been refusing to think since the cemetery. "You didn't finish leaving." My reflection said it back to me, of course. Mouthed it exactly, the way reflections do. But I swear to you — and this is the last true thing I have, the thing the counsellor and the easy version can never take off me — I swear that my reflection finished saying it a half second before I did.