The Mirror (55 page)

"Because every time you look at me you see Shay." Why did tears always come to women at the wrong time?

"It's because I don't want to scare you." He forced her to face him, studied her face and grinned--again as if at a private joke. "And because sometimes you scare me."

Marek drew her to the cribs by the fireplace and whispered, "How long before these tigers go off again?"

"They ate shortly before you came."

He led her to the stairs to the balcony bedroom. "Do you want a drink?"

"Why?"

"Might loosen you up." His expression reminded her of the satyr goat Hooligan. "But then maybe you don't need it."

Embarrassment heated her skin, left a chilled place behind her ribs that deepened with every stair she ascended. "You're laughing at me."

"No."

"I don't know what to do with this." She fingered a small box on the bedside table nervously. "It doesn't play music or turn on the lamp."

"It controls the electric blanket. Heats the bed." Marek pulled her shirt up over her head, slid the blue jeans down over her hips and kissed her. "I don't think you'll need that either."

When he lay naked beside her, Brandy couldn't look at him. "Is ... is everything electric in this world?"

"Some things still come natural." His hands were warm and everywhere.

The mushy soreness of her granddaughter's body contracted to tight tingles. "This isn't easy for me. ..."

Marek chuckled. "Easier than I thought it'd be, Brandy McCabe."

FORWARD

Wilson Antiques, Ltd., closed for two weeks after the death of Cindy Wilson.

When it reopened, Ned was still out of town attempting to recover from his shock over his wife's suicide (she'd hung herself from a rafter in the storeroom one night), and an employee, Myrtle Teagop, was doing her best to run the business without him when a lady in a red pantsuit entered the shop for the purpose of browsing.

While she did so she explained to Myrtle that she'd flown to Denver to help her daughter and family pack up for a move back East and that there was nothing in the store she couldn't get cheaper at home and that the mountains were pretty but the air too dry here.

And then she ignored the E
MPLOYEES
O
NLY
sign and disappeared into the storeroom. Myrtle followed, protesting, but the lady chatted on, poked about in the dust and confusion and stopped to stare when she'd pulled the cover off the old mirror with hands for its frame. The one poor Mrs. Wilson had refused to sell and Mr. Wilson had been threatening to get rid of for months.

The lady declared she had another daughter at home who was soon to be married and who went in for "weird stuff" and this would be a perfect wedding gift to decorate the couple's new apartment. Myrtle Teagop, as anxious to be rid of the pushy intruder as her boss was the ugly mirror, sold it for twenty dollars to the lady in the red pantsuit.

Two days later the wedding mirror sat in a trailer behind a station wagon, a tarpaulin that covered the rest of the contents pulled tightly around it about three-quarters of the way up its frame, an old beach towel tied over the top fourth.

The station wagon pulled out into the traffic, leaving Denver on I-76.

"Well, New York City, here we come," the man behind the wheel said to his family, and wondered how far the moving van that had left the day before had traveled by now.

The people in the car were unaware of the way the tarpaulin rubbed against the mirror's hands, of the image playing across the hidden glass. An image of a slender platinum blond with a dark-haired baby on each hip, her head bowed as if in prayer.

The wedding mirror rode cold and inert in the trailer with U H
AUL
I
T
emblazoned on its sides through the middle portion of the country, but as it reached the more densely populated and damper section of the continent the beach towel began to tatter and fray in the winds whipping behind the station wagon and the bronze talonlike fingernails of its frame poked through to freedom.

And one day the towel ripped to expose the grainy glass itself. In its surface were reflected a wealth of electric power lines and a sky charged with summer thunderclouds.

And thus the mirror continues its journey. . . .