I couldn’t seem to focus on anything.
“Three weeks before the wedding he bailed. I supposed it was only to be expected.”
“Oh, Marylee!” Johanna came over and hugged me.
I blinked rapidly to keep the tears at bay. A shiver danced across my skin and I wrapped my arms around myself. It didn’t help. I got up and turned up the thermostat. I glanced out the back window as I did so, and a truck rumbled down the back alley between the buildings on this rainy night.
Johanna took off her sweater. She was now down to a tank top in my warm kitchen, but bless her, she didn’t say anything about the place being too hot. Yet, I could not rid myself of the chill. I wondered if I would ever be warm again, whole again, like a real person.
I continued. “Since I’ve come here, I try to think back. I try to remember this place, but I can’t. I was too young. The first memory I have is of Aunt Rose driving. It was raining. I remember the sound of the windshield wipers, back and forth. For hours I watched them while my aunt kept driving and driving, not saying anything.”
Johanna pulled her legs up underneath her and was sitting yogi-style on my kitchen chair. She was listening intently.
“When I was growing up my aunt was always so jumpy, so jittery. Any time there was a phone call that hung up she’d go crazy, running around locking all the doors and windows. I think we were the first house in the entire country to get a home security system. She was so nervous, my aunt was.”
“Maybe she had a reason to be,” Johanna said.
That statement clouded the air like smoke. I thought of the shadow that had moved across the coffee shop window tonight. Had I seen something? Or had it been a product of my overactive imagination? Was I becoming like my aunt Rose after all?
Johanna got up and tucked a quilt around my shoulders. She asked, “Have you been back to the house you lived in when you were here?”
“I don’t even know where it is.” I paused and looked at the droplets of rain clinging to my balcony window. “When I was about fourteen I went through a sort of rebellious period. I sneaked into my aunt’s desk. She always kept it locked, but I knew where the key was. I was looking for something, anything, a picture, an address, a news clipping about the accident. But I found nothing. I had all her papers all over the bed, and that’s when my aunt came through the door.
“I looked up expecting her to be furious. But she came and sat beside me and held me in her arms for a long time. She just held me and held me. And when I looked up I saw that she was crying, too. I think that was the beginning of us being close.”
“You must miss her very much,” Johanna said.
“We sat there for a while and then she said, ‘I’m only trying to keep you safe. I’ve devoted my life to keeping you safe.’ And then she said, ‘Let’s go make paper instead.’ That was her answer to everything: Let’s make paper.”
“Paper?” Johanna looked at me, nearly spilling her tea.
I smiled, just a little. My aunt used to make paper. She had a special blender set aside just for her papermaking. We used to tear up old pieces of paper and then they would go in this blender with water. We had huge sinks in our basement and screens where we would lay out our pulp until it dried. She sold it by the sheet at markets and craft fairs. I told Johanna this, how my aunt was always saving bits and pieces of paper. She was into recycling before anybody else in the world was. “We would save old magazines and cut pictures out of them.” I stopped, a strange idea niggling its way into my thinking. Had she somehow found that magazine in the trash, somehow took a picture of it, had it developed and then told me it was my parents? Is that how she had done it? But why? And if these two aren’t my parents, then who are they and do they have any connection with me?
I picked up the photo and looked down at it. I had to admit that part of the attraction of this photo was the happiness this couple seemed to possess, the two of them, the way my mother looked into my father’s eyes, the way he gazed down at her. Was this kind of love even possible? When I was a little girl I would make up elaborate scenarios about my parents. I put the photo facedown on the table.
Johanna picked up the photo, seemed to consider it, then said, “The place to begin with all of this is Evan, of course.”
Despite myself I smiled. “We begin with Evan?”
“He’s a photographer, Marylee. You know that.” She leaned back and picked up her mug.
“A photographer’s not going to know.”
She leaned forward. “Sometimes he works with the police on forensics. Sometimes they get him to help them.”
I hated to tell Johanna, but going to see Evan was not in the plans. He’d taken my friend out twice and dropped her. Plus, Evan had been engaged before. Whenever I thought about Evan, I couldn’t help but think of Mark, my own ex-fiancé who’d dumped me when the going got too rough for him.
“He used to be an accountant,” Johanna said. “Did you know that? He dropped that to pursue his art, his photography.”
To me that was another strike against him; he can’t commit to a woman and can’t commit to a career. No, my friend could do a whole lot better than Evan Baxter.
“You should go see him.”
I told her no, emphatically no.
THREE
I had the mirrors dream again that night. I’ve dreamed the mirrors dream, or a variation thereof for as long as I can remember. Sometimes I’m in a fun house and strange mirror faces taunt me. Sometimes I see mirror after mirror, the same reflection of myself going on and on forever and ever into infinity. Sometimes there are broken pieces of mirror and every time I pick them up I cut my fingers and they bleed. Sometimes I stand in front of a mirror and instead of seeing my reflection I see nothing. When I was little, I used to awaken screaming until Aunt Rose came in and prayed with me.
In tonight’s dream, I was walking down a narrow hallway holding a piece of broken mirror. It belonged to one of the ladies in my evening class and I needed to catch up with her, tell her I had it. The edge of it had cut my hand and the blood left a trail behind me. I didn’t care. I needed to find her. In my haste, I walked into a mirror. I turned to go back and was met with another mirror. I was lost and frantic as I tried to find my way out of the maze of my own reflections going in all directions.
I woke up, hot and miserable in the middle of the night. I’d left my heat up and the place was as close as a sauna. I turned down the thermostat. Outside it was still raining and I stood by the front window for a while.
I live on Main Street in Burlington, a busy street of shops and old New England–style three-and four-story houses. Across the street from me is a mystery bookshop in the lower level of a four-story dwelling that once was someone’s grand residence, but was chopped into apartments and shops. Next to that is a consignment shop that features children’s clothing. Right beside me is a coffee shop, and on the other side is a high-end bicycle and ski shop, this area of the country being known for two things, teddy bears and snow.
I focused on the bookstore and the huge cat that always sits in the window. He was there now, a dark mound on the window seat. The cat stretched and I watched its shadow move across the glass. I looked at it.
