The Mirrors Read online

  And her daughter needed to go to preschool. Ever since the birth, Greg had to work two jobs to support them, while she stayed home full time with the kid. They weren’t able to afford a very nice place yet. Everything was so much more expensive in California than it had been in the Midwest. Janet reminded herself that it was all worth it, though, to be this close to Dr. Harper in the event the girl fell on the sidewalk or encountered some other catastrophe that tore her skin.

  The contacts gave Harper blue eyes, just like her dad. They were the final piece of the puzzle. They completed the look. They made the little girl normal. Janet explained this to Harper over and over, but the toddler somehow still had the insolence to lose the contacts, accidentally tear them, or ruin them trying (for some reason apparent only to the three-year-old brain) to put them in the eyes of the stray cat they’d taken in. This was a problem.

  Janet thought through her options. Preschool was out of the question. What could she do—drop Harper off in the morning wearing contacts, then come to pick her up and find the girl had blinked them out, revealing empty spaces instead of blue eyes? But another income was needed. Pronto. She had to find child care so she could get to work.

  One afternoon Greg came home for his usual two-hour break between his first and second jobs and made an announcement she never thought she’d hear. “I, um, left work a little early, honey, to swing by the food stamp office. I have some papers to fill out. Wow, I just, you know, didn’t think our family would turn out this way.”

  It had been four solid years of adversity for Greg and Janet. Four years, Janet told herself, without much of a break. Their luck had to change—and it did. It started in a rather unpromising way. Harper had put her contact lenses in the cat’s eyes again, necessitating yet another trip to the veterinarian that they couldn’t afford. While Janet and Harper sat in the vet’s waiting room (the cat tucked away in a carrier, yowling his head off), a lady with dreadlocks and a fashionable leather purse made conversation. She’d brought with her a dachshund wearing a huge plastic cone around his neck. It stared into the cat caddy, trying to make eye contact. The cat curled into the farthest back corner of the carrier, having none of it.

  “Your little girl looks like quite the movie star with those sunglasses on,” the lady said. “My goodness, she’s … she’s just beautiful!”

  Harper beamed.

  Janet smiled, grateful that the lady didn’t have a clue as to the real reason she’d made her daughter wear shades inside.

  She nudged Harper. “Did you hear that, sweetie? That nice lady complimented your appearance! What do you say to her?”

  “Thannnnk youuuuu,” Harper crooned. She flashed an overly dramatic grin.

  “Oh my, she does seem to have lost quite a number of teeth, though. Yikes, does she even have any choppers in there?”

  Janet felt her pulse quicken. The teeth. How could she have forgotten them? She’d been isolated for far too long, that’s how. Out of practice in carefully thinking through and preplanning each aspect of Harper’s appearance. It never occurred to her that when she went out in public the issue of teeth might come up.

  She took it for granted that her daughter’s teeth had come in. She’d poked around in her mouth herself, every now and then, when Harper was younger. She’d felt them. But she hadn’t thought of it in well over a year, and now that was coming back to bite her (so to speak). How could she have been so careless!

  “You know,” the lady with dreadlocks said, “I’m a casting agent. I need a kid to work in some commercials. One’s a public service announcement about child dental care. Your daughter looks like she’d be perfect!”

  The cat’s yowls increased in frequency and intensity. It was always a nervous wreck when going to the vet anyway— even more so when it had to endure the visit while afflicted with contact lenses that had veered off into the corners of its eyes.

  The casting agent frowned. “Awwww … poor little puddy tat. Whassa matter with him?”

  Janet frantically thought through how to best explain things. “Eye problems. Maybe an infection.”

  “That’s strange,” the casting agent said. “I never even knew cats could get eye infections.”

  “I think it’s a weird genetic thing,” Janet offered, trying to defuse the subject. “Anyway … this commercial thing. It pays?”

  “Oh yes, of course. I mean, not much. Your daughter isn’t a professional actor. But I’m sure she’ll do fine and we will, of course, pay her something. Tell you what, here’s my card.

  Give me a call and we’ll talk specifics.”

  “I sure will,” Janet said.

  Then the dachshund was summoned back for its appointment, followed in short order by Janet’s cat getting summoned back for its. The veterinarian wasn’t pleased.

  “How the hell does your daughter get a hold of contact lenses, anyhow?” He looked at the chart. “This is the third time the cat’s been in for this in eighteen months. Your daughter seems … well, frankly, ma’am … obsessed with this.”

  “It’s just a phase,” Janet said. “Isn’t it, Harper?”

  “Uh-huh,” Harper said. “Just a face!”

  The vet took out a variety of instruments and began his examination with grave earnestness. “Mrs. Pruitt, you might want to have Harper step out to the play area in the lobby for a moment. The receptionist can keep an eye on her. There’s some things—well, grown-up things—we have to talk about.”

  The cat yowled.

  Janet walked Harper back to the lobby. She knelt down next to her and whispered in her ear: “Remember, never take your sunglasses off unless Momma says it’s okay.”

  Harper offered an exaggerated nod, indicating she heard and obeyed.

  Then Janet walked back to the doctor’s office.

  “I’m afraid this time is far worse than any of the others. It appears that the contact lenses have lodged in quite a deep recess of the cat’s noggin. I think your cat will have to live like this forever. There’s no way for me to really get them out.”

  Janet bit her lip. Clenched her fists. “Surely there’s some way.”

  The veterinarian gave her an anxious grin. “Well … that is, what I mean … The only way I can possibly imagine getting them out would be to euthanize the cat, cut it open, and take them out.”

  The cat began yowling more than it ever had before.

  “A smart man, doctor. A very smart man, indeed.”

  “But … this is an otherwise healthy cat.”

  Janet couldn’t afford to purchase new contacts from the plastic surgeon’s office. She needed those two little discs ASAP. “But surely it would be inhumane to let the creature suffer so, don’t you agree, doctor?”

  The veterinarian sighed. Arrangements were made. Needles were filled. Lethal injections given. Autopsy instruments employed for a very non-autopsy purpose. The veterinarian only agreed to do all this if Janet paid cash up front, and promised never, ever to darken to the doorway of his office again.

  Little Harper waddled toward the cat carrier Janet held in her hand and frowned when she noticed that (aside from a white plastic contact lens case) it was empty. “Where’s kitty?” she asked.

  “You killed it,” Janet said.

  The good news was that Harper was an absolute hit in the commercial. The blue contact lenses proved as good as new after getting salvaged from the dead cat’s eyes. They just needed an extra day to soak in some solution. The combination of those sparkling blue eyes, telegenic skin, and an apparently toothless mouth wowed the masses, who were used to seeing far less telegenic toothless kids on those commercials. She only earned two hundred dollars for the filming of the dental care PSA, but the job attracted the interest of a talent agent. Janet had wanted there to be another income in the home and now that Harper was acting, there was one.

  Greg had objections at first. (Shouldn’t Harper be keeping a low profile? What if everyone found out she was a non evidens kid? Would she be publicly humiliated?) All thes
e protests evaporated the day he saw his little girl on TV. “That’s her … oh, gee … She’s actually there on the screen. Oh man … wow.”

  Eventually, they went back to the plastic surgeon and explained their problem with the teeth. “Yikes,” he said. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of that.” And in short order he created a fiberglass “dental edifice” that Harper could wear over top of her own invisible teeth. They seemed to fool everyone.

  In fact, the edifice expanded Harper’s marketability so much beyond the realm of dental care PSAs that she was now working five, six, seven times a week, in all sorts of commercials.

  It was increasingly difficult to find times to remove her plastic skin, wash it, and give the kiddo’s invisible body a bath. Her behavior at bath time didn’t make matters any easier. She shrieked whenever Janet revealed the carefully hidden zipper and pulled it down. “I’m really nothing,” the little girl said, sobbing. “I’m really, underneath, nothing.”

  Janet didn’t like seeing her daughter cry, of course. It annoyed her. But she was glad that Harper understood the importance of keeping her skin on. During those tear-filled bath times, Janet would comfort Harper by reminding her that, with her plastic skin on, she was something. More than something—an actress.

  Commercials led to bit parts on sitcoms, which eventually led to the lead on a sitcom. Harper played the role of a plucky orphan who hung out all the time in the lobby of a police station in the hit show Pigs & Pigtails. Janet began to worry that millions of viewers would find Harper’s performance so convincing that they’d assume she was a real orphan, so she badgered the publicist into getting a puff piece written for Parents magazine entitled “The Loving Real-Life Mom Behind America’s Favorite TV Orphan.”

  In less than a year, the family moved out of their lower-middle-class digs and into upper-middle-class-digs. After two years, they lived in a mansion. With the paparazzi stalking Harper at every turn, they couldn’t afford the risk of going to the plastic surgeon’s office for checkups and skin-maturing-adjustments. So they paid double the usual rate for him to come in and make house calls. Janet had to make certain she gave all the servants the day off on this day, once a year, lest they become aware of Dr. Max Harper’s presence in the home and leak the information to TMZ.

  Pigs & Pigtails ran for seven years. After that came the movie deals. Travel to film in Prague, in Vancouver, and, rarely, in New York. Harper blossomed into a stunning young lady. Many a lecherous older man had her eighteenth birthday circled on his calendar, in bright red ink. Her publicist tried to convince her to date one of the several teenage boys she was paired with in the movies, as this would give the tabloids something to talk about, but (to Janet’s relief) she always nixed the suggestion.

  In the midst of all this, Janet hesitated to give Harper the typical talk about the birds and the bees. She wouldn’t have felt comfortable with this even under the most ordinary circumstances, but the non evidens thing raised the embarrassment factor exponentially. Take this exchange, for example: Janet’s attempt to impress on her daughter the uncouth nature of masturbation after noticing that Harper locked herself away in her room for hours on end. “Don’t do it,” Janet warned, “it’s not ladylike.” Harper shrugged and agreed to comply. “I don’t feel that much down there, anyway. Not with the skin on, at least.”

  How could Janet not find this conversation mortifying?

  If she didn’t have an interest in having grandchildren one day, she might have decided to ask the plastic surgeon to refer Harper to a gynecological surgeon to perform a hysterectomy. But Janet did want grandkids, and this meant that she’d have to find a way to convince Harper to lower her expectations in regard to sensation. Or, possibly, to engage in some conversation with the surgeon about how sensitivity might be increased.

  Obviously, no mother wants to think of her daughter in that way. If she considered it at all, it was in a fleeting manner— associated with the birth of grandchildren. Hopefully, visible grandchildren. She reasoned that ordinary sexual functioning had to be possible. There was, after all, a special apparatus in the skin that facilitated other, unspeakable functions of the nether regions. The next time the plastic surgeon came for a house call, they’d sit down, like mature adults, and talk about it.

  He came to the house as planned, but brought trouble along with him. “This is my son, Pax.”

  “Beg pardon,” Janet said. “Did you say his name was, well, Pax?”

  “It’s Latin,” the young buck said, “for peace.” The lad had a strong jaw, a handsome brow, and piercing blue eyes.

  “It’s take-your-kid-to-work day, and Pax wanted to see what his old man’s job was like. Please be assured that he’ll keep all this completely confidential.”

  “I, well, I guess I’ll have trust that now, won’t I, doctor.”

  The plastic surgeon grinned. “You don’t have to worry about Pax. He won’t blab to the Enquirer. He doesn’t want anything to do with the limelight. I keep telling him he ought to go into movies. He’s had a director or two interested already.”

  “I don’t want to be in movies,” Pax said. “The media gets all up in your business.”

  “Smart guy,” Harper said. “A lot of times I don’t want to be in movies, either.”

  Janet let out a clumsy laugh. “You’ll have to indulge my daughter in her flights of fancy, doctor. Harper says the craziest things sometimes. I tell her that she can do that here, but outside of this house such statements might be misunderstood. Anyway, I suppose we should be getting down to business. She’ll need her yearly adjustment and maturing work done. We also had, well, a sort of private question to ask you. Something that might best be handled without your son around.”

  “Fair enough. Can we meet in your den? Just the three of us?”

  “Just the two of you,” Harper said. “I don’t want to talk about it. My mom can tell you everything. It’s really her question more than mine.”

  “Not a problem,” the plastic surgeon said. “Shall we then, Mrs. Pruitt?”

  Janet looked at Pax and Harper smiling at each other. She didn’t like it. Smiling led to holding hands. Holding hands led to, well, other things. It felt almost incestuous, the notion of Harper admiring her plastic surgeon’s son. Images flashed through her brain. First dates. Second dates. Someday a wedding, and the specter of her daughter taking the boy’s last name, going around Los Angeles with the name Harper Harper. She felt the need to nip this in the bud.

  Janet glared at her daughter. “Harper, are you quite sure you don’t want to join us?”

  Harper rolled her eyes. “I. Am. Sure.”

  Janet fumed. The girl sassed her. For the first time. Right in front of company. Oh, how she’d pay when the doctor and his son left!

  Footfalls pounded on the basement steps. Greg ascended them, coming up to the living room for the first time in many hours. “Oh, hey … I didn’t think … you know … think there’d be anyone up here. Wow … it’s a party! I mean, we usually don’t hang out in the living room on this day—you know, Harper’s house call day.”

  Janet snapped at him. “What are you doing up here?” She quickly realized she might make a scene in front of company. She couldn’t let herself seem too strident. “What I mean is, I thought you’d be downstairs with your model trains all day.”

  “Parts,” Greg said. “UPS was supposed to bring parts, you know. Have they … well, have they come yet?”

  “No dear, I’ll let you know when they do.”

  “All right then, I’ll just go back to polishing the tracks while I’m waiting.” He clomped back down the stairs to his man cave.

  “Well, Mrs. Pruitt?”

  “Yes?”

  “You did want to talk, right? I have another appointment back at the office in two hours and you know how traffic is. We need to get things moving.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course.” They went into the den. Janet explained everything to the plastic surgeon. She emphasized that t
his was a discussion that didn’t have any practical bearing now, but something worth thinking about “down the road … a few years from now, after she gets married.” The surgeon admitted to her that the sort of skin that had been engineered for Harper maximized realism at the cost of sensation. “There’s a trade-off there, I’m afraid. We could have a new suit made, of course—one that enhanced her sense of touch; but it would be, by necessity, thinner—less convincing.”

  “I see,” Janet said. She wouldn’t allow Harper to wear anything that might endanger her career. “Well, it sounds like for now we’ll just keep things as they are.”

  “As you wish. Now is that all you want to say to me in private?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Okay, then let’s bring Harper in.”

  Janet went to fetch her. The girl came into the room, grinning like the proverbial cat that ate the canary. “What are you so happy about?” Janet said, worried she already knew the answer.

  “I have a date tonight.”

  That night, Janet went down to Greg’s man cave. They needed to have a talk. “I’m worried about our little girl.”

  Greg’s blue-and-white-striped conductor’s hat wobbled around his head as he followed the course of his Lionel Super Chief. “Well, yeah, I think any parent would be worried on a first date. But he’s, like—what?—the plastic surgeon’s son? So, um, yeah. Wow, you don’t have to worry about this being some guy who’s just after her for her money, y’know?”

  “She’s going to want to feel something, honey. That means she’s going to want to take off her suit.”

  Greg flicked a switch, and the train switched tracks. “But the boy came here with his dad. I mean, well … I guess … he knows why his dad was here.”

  “It was a violation of our privacy rights. Doctor Harper should never have been able to bring the boy here. I could sue him for that.”

  “Well, in that case you’d be, I mean—sheesh, we’d all be—in the news, yanno? Wow, you’d really want that?”