Lie Still

17

The key turned a little too easily in the front lock, which should have been my first clue. But I was tired and distracted, my belly rebelling against the Butt-Kicker’s jalapeños and my unsettling lunch with Misty.

Two feet inside the door, I almost stepped on it. A mirror. Mike’s grandmother’s mirror. The same mirror that scared me to death the other night by reflecting the ghostly specter of my face.

I wondered when Mike had moved it from the bedroom to the front alcove of the house. Why he’d laid it flat on the entryway floor where I might trip on it. I stared down at my image in the antique glass. Slightly cloudy, as if one of me was imprisoned in another dimension.

Not a bad idea to hang it on this wall. It would open up the tiny space. Had Mike come home for lunch with a fit of decorating inspiration? Maybe he figured I was using the back door these days.

I gazed down at my reflection, wondering whether to try to move the massive mirror by myself. At least lean it against the wall. I lamented what a crappy housekeeper I’d become. The mirror was dirty. Smeared.

Kneeling, I realized the dirt spelled something. Three words. A love note from Mike? A wry comment on my seriously declining domestic skills?

The first word was see. At least that was definitely an s. The last word, her. I knelt to get a grip on the heavy frame and tilted the mirror up into the light so I could see better. The s vanished. The message was disintegrating.

Heavy gray dust. I was a worse housekeeper than I thought. The mirror smelled dank, like my great-grandfather’s sweater when I used to hug him.

Like cigarettes.

Or cigars.

My breath, coming faster, blew the first word away. It tickled my nose.

This wasn’t dust.

This wasn’t a message from Mike.

But it was a message from someone. Someone deranged.

I knew I should run, but my eyes were glued to the damn mirror.

Concentrate, Emily. Hold your breath. The second word, before it disappears. Or was it two words glued together?

The first letter? A? F? T? Seven letters? Eight letters?

The second word was though. I was pretty sure.

No, through.

First word, see. Second word, through. Third word, her.

See through her.

I jumped back and the mirror fell from my hands, violently hitting the floor. The glass that had shone with the faces of Mike’s ancestors for almost two centuries now lay at my feet in pieces, like hundreds of tiny knives.

I backed out of the door, my hands fumbling inside my purse for my phone. I needed to call Mike. A dark curtain in my brain began to draw closed.

I clutched the outside of the doorframe, one foot on the porch.

See through her.

Was the message a warning?

About Misty? About Caroline? Any one of the women in the club?

Who hates me this much?

My enemy, as always, was baffling. Inscrutable.

I slid down, the curtains on the stage swirling shut, the show over.

I woke up on my front porch with my head in the lap of a stranger.

“Are you all right, ma’am?”

A man with his hands near my throat. I wanted to scream, but I’d lost my voice. Maybe stolen by the spirits I felt whoosh out of that mirror when it shattered. “Your husband and an ambulance are on the way, ma’am. I took the liberty of checking the emergency numbers in your cell phone. That’s a helpful little thing Verizon’s got in the contacts list, letting you put it right at the top. I got my kids’ phones all set up. And mine. I’ve got the diabetes.”

I heard the faint wail of a siren in the distance. I pressed a hand to my chest, as if that would slow the irregular flutter of my heart. Could this man be telling the truth? I’d seen a UPS van parked on the street when I pulled in to the driveway. The man gingerly holding my head was wearing a brown uniform shirt. But it was always the man in the van.

“I didn’t do CPR because your husband told me not to after I checked your breathing. The baby and all. By the way, I watched you go down from my truck across the street, and you landed pretty good. On your butt. Then you kind of keeled over real gentle. Just like an angel laid you down. So you’re married to our police chief?”

It didn’t seem like a question he expected a response to. Even in the bizarreness of the moment, with this stranger’s sunburned, porous face peering down at me, I was reminded how Texans are the most natural people with the simile that I’d ever met.

Like an angel laid me down.

“I’m going to close my eyes,” I announced.

“No, ma’am, I’m sorry, I can’t let you do that. Your husband made it real clear that if you woke up to keep you wide awake.”

Vehicles screeched up to the curb, sirens on mute. Blue and red lights flashed in the living room window like a patriotic Christmas display.

Footsteps, crunching up the walk. Mike’s voice saying, “I’ll take her.” Familiar tree-trunk arms lifted me up.

“You OK, baby?” His breath was warm in my ear.

“Which one of us are you referring to?” I put my arms around his neck. I breathed in his minty aftershave.

“Both.” He carried me down the walk to the ambulance while a cop I’d last seen this morning on a computer screen kept pace beside us. Two black-and-whites were parked at the curb.

“Ron,” Mike said. “Get the name of the delivery guy and his driver’s license, will you? He gets a free ride on tickets for a while. Find out what his favorite beer is while you’re at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Really, I think I’m OK.” Mike plopped me in the open end of the ambulance and a frowning EMT attached a blood pressure cuff. “It was just a shock.”

“What was a shock?” he asked distractedly.

Of course. He had no idea about the mirror. “Inside.” I pointed to the house. “Someone broke in. They left a message on your grandmother’s mirror. I think it was written in ashes.”

“My grandmother’s mirror is in the bedroom.” He said it soothingly, but he looked concerned. Probably about whether I’d banged my head too hard on the concrete porch.

“And now it’s in the front hall,” I insisted. “Somebody moved it. I nearly stepped on it when I walked in the door. Someone tapped out a message, maybe with the stub of a cigar. See through her.” It sounded crazy. I needed to make him understand. “But it’s gone. The message. I blew it away. The mirror broke. I’m so sorry.”

As if the message had never been there at all.

It was like watching a Transformer convert for battle. Mike barked something and two cops appeared at his side within seconds. That’s the way it was with Mike. He led and cops followed him. Anywhere.

It was, he said in one of his more revealing moments, an awesome burden, and he meant awesome as in huge. Heavy. He’d never lost a man, and I dreaded the day he did. Mike was not one for telling big stories about himself, and every day on the job in New York was a story.

I knew, only because his mother told me on our wedding day, that Mike had saved two lives before he was twelve. A cat that a teenage boy was about to hang from a tree and, a year later, a little girl who almost stepped into a child molester’s van to pet a golden retriever puppy. Mike caught her arm and yanked her back. He memorized the license plate for the cops. The guy had been listed on the Sex Offenders Registry and was hauled straight back to prison.

The boy with the cat had just looped a noose around the animal’s neck when Mike showed up. Pretty quickly, the cat was watching the action from a safe perch in the same tree that was almost his gallows. Mike was bloodied and rolling on the ground when the cat’s owner, an old neighbor lady, showed up with a can of Lysol and shot the bully in the eyes. Mike escaped with a cracked rib, a commendation from the SPCA, and free homemade cookies after school until the old lady died his junior year. His mother loved to tell the details, and I loved to hear them, over and over.

I often wondered why his mother told me about his early heroic nature on the day we got married. Whether she knew I needed saving. What has always been perfectly clear between us is that she steadfastly believes that her only son is an instrument of God. It is one thing we agree on.

A half-hour later, I sat on the sidewalk in a lawn chair Mike brought out from the garage. Two cops were loading the mirror frame, now swathed in plastic, into the trunk of their patrol car.

A tech was just finishing up dusting the front doorknob and random surfaces inside that the intruder might have touched. The lock had shown signs of being greased and picked but not enough that all of Mike’s new colleagues had swallowed my story whole.

“Probably pointless,” Mike said. We watched the lid of the trunk slam shut on the mirror. “We aren’t likely to get prints. Whoever this was probably wore gloves.” He turned to me. “Come on, let’s go in. I’m home for the night.”

At the door, the fingerprint tech slid by us shyly, offering up a sweet smile, probably thrilled about a job that involved more than a stolen car radio. She barely looked old enough to babysit, but she was professionally attired in bootie-covered tennis shoes, latex gloves, and the Texas requisite Wrangler jeans.

Mike gripped my hand as we stepped over the threshold. It was like a bitter wind had blown through our home. The space felt tighter, compressed. The air smelled metallic.

“I’ve hired someone to clean up the powder.” Trying to reassure me, as if I was actually concerned about a little more dust. “I’ve already called a place in Dallas to install a new security system for us. They do some crime scene cleanup on the side. They won’t leave until there are alarms on every window and every door. They’ll be here at ten in the morning. I can justify keeping a unit at the curb for twenty-four hours. We’ll figure this out as we go along.”

I was suddenly feeling lonely and scared, very pregnant, a lot sorry for myself and ticked off. I didn’t have alarms on every window in New York City, but I needed them here. I missed my parents desperately, with a physical ache, like I hadn’t in years.

Mike and I ventured into the kitchen, a room relatively unscathed by the day. At least I could pretend the fingerprint dust in here was flour or, in the case of the graphite on the white Formica countertop, spilled pepper.

“I changed my mind,” he said. “Let’s go out. Get a burger or something.”

The thought cheered me up a little. A two-hamburger day.

“Oh, geez, I forgot. Wait a minute.” Mike was already out the back before I could stop him. I heard his car door slam. He returned in seconds with a large cardboard box, the flaps loosely closed. He set it on the floor and opened up the top.

“I was at Caroline’s today,” Mike said. “Didn’t think this little guy should be there alone.”

I heard a low and perturbed growl. Mike reached inside and lifted out my furry orange nemesis.