The Mirrors Page 20

  “Well … I could threaten to sue and see if his lawyers capitulated, just to teach him a lesson.”

  “Wow, you’d really do that? I mean—seriously alienate the one doctor equipped to take care of her skin? Just—oh my God—wow.”

  Her husband, for the first time, had won an argument.

  Harper started dating Pax when she was seventeen. Under the boy’s influence, she became increasingly rebellious. Curfews came and went unheeded. Outfits that had left home perfectly draping Harper’s increasingly curvy frame came back in the door with a rumpled, disheveled look suggestive of a roll in the hay.

  Worst of all, she began to refuse to do movies.

  Janet saw the writing on the wall. She was losing her hold on the girl, and the boy was gaining a hold on her. She went down to Greg’s man cave one day to commiserate about it. Ordinarily, she couldn’t stand the racket of dozens of trains chugging along a football-field-size collection of tracks, but she needed to vent.

  Greg didn’t hear her approach, and so she had to tap him on the shoulder. He was so severely startled that he almost lost his conductor’s cap, then flicked a switch to turn off the trains so he could hear her.

  Janet decided she’d better not pussyfoot when it came to this topic. She needed to start off the conversation with a hook to snag Greg’s interest. “How,” she asked, “are you going to pay for all this when your little girl leaves the house at eighteen?”

  “Wow,” Greg said. “You know, that is … we have savings, y’know? Put some money away.”

  “It’s all hers at eighteen. She could cut us out completely and give it all to that boy.”

  “We’ll just talk to her, I guess. I mean. Yeah. She’s not eighteen yet. So, really, there’s nothing she can do.”

  “But it’s only months until then.”

  “Yeah … um … we’ll talk to her. Yanno? Just ask if we can have some money.” He turned the trains back on.

  Janet gritted her teeth and tapped Greg’s shoulder again.

  He flicked the switch to stop the trains. He trembled. “You really want to keep yammering about this, huh?”

  Janet gasped. (“Yammering”?)

  “Look, my goal is for the Super Chief to make five thousand laps today. It’s only made four thousand and there’s less than three hours left before midnight. So, yanno … just … well … get out and leave me alone.” He flicked the switch to start the trains up again. Pulled the conductor’s hat over his eyes.

  Janet marched out of the basement. Even though the route was familiar, she almost lost her way, so clouded was her vision with tears.

  Somehow, Janet’s personal cell phone number had gotten leaked to the tabloids. Two weeks before Harper’s eighteenth birthday, they called Janet asking for remarks on Harper’s imminent early retirement from the motion picture industry. The little bitch must have released a statement to that effect without consulting her!

  “No comment,” Janet said, over and over again. It was the first time since she’d been in L.A. that she actually dreaded the specter of media attention. She felt like the world’s worst mother. She had to confess to herself that, for the past several days, she didn’t even know where Harper was. She tried calling the girl over and over, and always the call went to voicemail.

  She had to tolerate news footage of man-on-the-street interviews with fellows old enough to be Harper’s father, all of them confessing their attraction for the “healthy-looking” young lady. For two weeks, it was nothing but “Harper this,” “Harper that.” Harper on the cover of a tabloid. Harper on the cover of a slick entertainment magazine. The entire media seemed to be doing nothing at all except harping on Harper.

  Then came the day itself. The eighteenth anniversary of that day with all the heat-imaging devices and the sounds-but-not-sights and the asking them to take the baby away until it had fake skin on. The paparazzi had the mansion surrounded, anticipating there would be a blow-out birthday party.

  But nothing happened. Not even a trace of Harper. Not until that night, when Janet got this email:

  Dear Mom,

  I’m coming by tomorrow to get some of my things and say goodbye. Today would have been just too crazy, with all the media.

  But I hear that another coked-up celebrity just bit the dust, so they’ll all be covering that now. I’m old news.

  Sincerely,

  H. I. Pruitt

  She was “H. I.” now, eh? Harper Isabella Pruitt. H.I.P. Janet pondered for a moment why she hadn’t thought of leveraging the initials into some sort of catchy marketing phrase. Such were the lost opportunities, the regrets of parenting.

  There were no paparazzi in sight at ten a.m. the following day, when the doorbell rang. Janet opened it and found Harper and Pax on the other side. They’d brought a U-Haul. Janet shook her head. Really, they should have hired assistants to do this.

  “Well,” Harper said, “I guess this is goodbye.”

  Janet scowled. “Just remember, when the world gets brutal and nasty to you—and mark my words, you little hussy, it will—you can always come running home to Mom.”

  Harper ignored her. Pax brought in boxes. They went to Harper’s room and began packing, closing the door behind them. For ten minutes, Janet heard the muffled sounds of coat hangers clanging, zippers unzipping, dull thuds against cardboard.

  “The world doesn’t like people like you,” Janet said through the door. “It will be scary, it will be—”

  The door opened. Pax stood on the other side, alongside Harper’s skin-suit—which appeared to levitate in mid-air. “This isn’t mine,” Harper’s disembodied voice said. Then, abruptly, something—no, someone: an invisible someone—shoved the skin-suit toward Janet. “It belongs to you. You purchased it. You wanted it. You never asked me what I thought. That goes for these, too.” Invisible Harper piled two plastic cases on top of the skin that now hung limp and lifeless in Janet’s arms: one case contained the latest pair of contacts, the other the dental edifice.

  Janet snarled. “Why, you ungrateful little bitch!” She let the cosmetic equipment fall to the floor, took the flat of her hand and swatted in the air, trying to slap her daughter right in the face. She missed, and Harper giggled. Pax moved forward, out of the room. “C’mon, H. I., let’s make tracks.”

  “And you,” Janet said to Pax. “I can’t believe that you’d allow yourself to be associated with—with this freak. What’s wrong with you that you find an invisible girl attractive?”

  “Maybe it’s the way her hips feel in my hands when I’m dancing with her,” Pax said. “Or maybe it’s the soft smoothness of her legs. But honestly, I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m non evidens, too. The oscillating type. Why do you think my dad went into a specialty with such a limited clientele? He wanted to help kids like me blend in. But I like to think that if he knew how far some parents would take it, he never would have invented the suits.”

  “Yesterday we didn’t want to come because it was Pax’s non evidens day,” the Harper-monster said. “Today he’s evidens. It helps that he’s visible fifty percent of the time; like, when we want to run errands and that kind of thing. Most people still haven’t adjusted to the notion that there are some cars on the freeway that will look as if no one’s behind the wheel. We try not to alarm people—especially on the highway. That could be dangerous.”

  “Yeah,” Pax said. “We don’t want to alarm people, but we don’t want to apologize for our lives either. We just want to be ourselves, and H. I. can’t do that here, Mrs. Pruitt. At least, not now. We hope someday you’ll change.”

  And then the two of them started taking boxes out.

  Janet began desperately scrolling through her options to rescue victory from the jaws of defeat. “Your father!” she said. “Your father will be quite disappointed that you’re leaving without saying goodbye to him. You should go down to the basement and see him.”

  “I’ll just catch him on Skype,” the Harper-monster said.


  “That’s how we’ve been keeping in touch the last few months.”

  Janet fumed. She went downstairs to give Greg a good tongue-lashing. How dare he keep secrets from her! He was in the middle of talking to a couple of men in suits. “Oh, um, hey this is uh—my wife.”

  One of the men in suits, a bald man with a goatee, extended his hand. “Ah, so this is Mrs. Railroad Fanatic, eh?”

  Janet didn’t understand what was happening. “Beg pardon?”

  “I made it, honey!” Greg said. “I, um, now have the world record for—you know, most, um, revolutions of a toy train around a track in a single day! I, um, wow … I mean, I thought I told you about this earlier.”

  “You won’t mind if we get your husband out of your hair for a few months, will you, Mrs. Pruitt? We at Guinness World Records would like to take his toy trains on the road: we’re making a tour of children’s hospitals! Just think how many kids your husband will be making happy!”

  “He’s … leaving?”

  Greg played with his cap nervously. Rubbed his three-day growth of beard-stubble. “Well, um … you know, with H. I. on her way out of the house and everything, I just thought … well, you know …”

  H. I.? “Fine,” she said. “Leave me. I’ll be fine here all by myself.”

  “Oh, wow … just wow, that’s good to hear. Okay, then, I just gotta go talk to these guys for a bit longer about the details, yanno?”

  “But—”

  The three men started talking again. Janet walked back upstairs.

  In a few days, Greg and his trains were out the door, destined to entertain gaggles of waifs and guttersnipes. Janet guessed he was too good to entertain his wife anymore. Too good to entertain anyone anymore, unless there was a goddamned camera rolling.

  After the toy train tour, Greg didn’t come back home. Must have finally found a way to gather shekels, Janet mused. She let him go.

  For many years, Janet lived alone in the mansion. Maids and assistants left, in a slow trickle. But the bills always got paid. It seems that the invisible-Harper-thing wasn’t completely heartless.

  She made some provision for the woman who had sacrificed so much for her. She probably looked down her nose at her whenever she wrote the checks to the electric company and so forth, but at least she wrote them.

  Years passed without any real contact between the two of them, and Janet began to grieve the loss less and less. This new entity, this so-called “H. I.,” was just a phantom. Just a cruel ghost who decided she could no longer inhabit the precious skin Janet had scrimped and saved to purchase for her.

  The skin was the important thing. One day, when she let her thoughts drift toward the subject, when she let herself feel some flicker of sadness, she reminded herself that she still had that. She’d wrapped the plastic skin in a plastic bag and kept it in the hope chest that still lingered in her daughter’s old room. “Yes,” Janet repeated to herself, aloud, “I still have the skin!”

  This notion energized her in a way she hadn’t been energized for years. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, she left the house to go somewhere other than the grocery store—Home Depot, to be exact. She purchased two large bags of sawdust there and had a nice man carry them out to her aging Cadillac. When he asked her, in the course of making small talk, what she planned to do with them, she told him she was planning to use them as a remedy, to make her sick daughter well. He gave her a strange look and walked away without saying another word.

  Some months after the trip to the Home Depot, a journalist called and asked her if she had any comment about the tell-all book written by her daughter, H. I. Was she aware that the young lady had painted an unflattering portrait of her? Was she aware that H. I. Pruitt had become one of the first celebrities in the world to come out as non evidens? Was she aware that she was starting a foundation to help non evidens kids? That she was becoming an advocate for the cause?

  “There must be some mistake,” Janet said. “My daughter’s name is Harper and she lives here with me. She’s never felt the need to leave home. Each day we have a mother-daughter brunch in the sun room. Each night we have drinks out on the veranda. She’s a beautiful girl, my daughter. Hasn’t aged a bit since her eighteenth birthday. She’s the loveliest girl I’ve ever seen.”

  The Squatters

  I have every right to get rid of the squatters.

  I’m the sheriff of Conowingo County, Indiana. Just that, in and of itself, should be enough to grant me the authority to do the job. But if that’s not enough, I’m also the man who owns the particular tract of land in question: the ugly, vine-smothered place called Orescular Island.

  It’s not an actual island. Just a mile-long stretch of land jutting out into the Ohio River, about forty-five minutes southwest of Cincinnati. A peninsula. But folks around these parts don’t know a peninsula from penicillin, so they call it an island. It’s a fucked-up place to find squatters. There’s not even a house on Orescular Island to squat in. Just an old barn, left over from God-knows-when. And even that has a collapsed roof. Even that has succumbed to the vines.

  I’m no horticulturalist. I can’t tell you what the fuck that vine is. I know it’s not kudzu because, A. I don’t think kudzu has quite worked its way this far north yet, and B. I Googled “kudzu” and the picture doesn’t match. But whatever it is, it’s aggressive. Creepy, too. Green and gray and brown. Grows all over the ground and all over the trees and then all over itself in tufts and mounds. I always tell myself I’m going to make a clearing, but Mother Nature works at Orescular Island year round and I’m only there a few weekends during the summer. Whenever I try to cut some of it out, it grows back within a month. I’m no glutton for punishment, so I leave it as is.

  Now I know why the land was so cheap. It wasn’t that the seller was sucking up to me; it’s that he knew it wasn’t worth a damn. I think the moon’s more hospitable. That’s probably why my ex-wife let me keep it in the divorce, too.

  It makes no fucking sense for someone to squat there.

  But people—I swear to Jesus—people on the other shore, in Kentucky, spot a campfire on the land and call my cell phone at six in the morning. It’s that old couple who spots it, the retirees from Michigan. The ones I drink with a lot in the summertime. The ones who take their boat over to my dock and bring over lots of gin in the summertime. The ones I never usually hear from this time of year.

  “There are hippies on your land,” the husband says. He has a warble in his voice that makes everything he says sound demented.

  “Homeless hippies,” his wife adds in the background. Her voice is a grating, three-pack-a-day smoker’s croak that sounds distant but still distinct. “Pretty lookin’ birds,” she adds sarcastically. The slurred ess in “birds” tells me all I need to know.

  “Probably just hunters,” I tell them. “Deer season started a week ago.”

  “They ain’t no hunters,” the wife says. They’re on speakerphone. “Me personally, I think they’re devil worshipers. All prancin’ around naked. And one of ’em’s a man, covered in thick hair. He lets out loud grunts, like a wild boar. Maybe he’s Satan himself. The great hairy goat-man! The other one is a young lady. Over by the campfire, I could see her dancin’ and chantin’ with the others. I think she worships Satan!”

  “The third one, though, that one’s the scariest, if you ask me,” says the husband.

  “That one, it’s not man nor woman,” says the wife. “It’s somewheres in between ’em.” She starts giggling. “Both … neither …”

  I think the old couple is pulling a prank on me. Or maybe they’re going through hallucinations—senility is bad enough without spiking it with gin. I’m not gonna call them full-blown alcoholics, but they’ve been known to get weird like this when they’ve been going for awhile. “How can you tell what these folks look like, from across the river?”

  “Because,” the husband says, “last night we got out my binoculars and took a gander at ’em. Once, on Jerry Springe
r, I saw one of ’em—what you call ’em?—Afro-dites? I think that’s what the third one is.”

  “Hermaphrodites,” I say, correcting him.

  The wife interrupts again. “Jerry Springer said they like to be called ‘intersexed’ now.” She giggles. “Don’t want to take the wrong turn at that intersextion.”

  I force out a chuckle. I want to acknowledge their distress but also defuse it. “Look,” I say, “let’s suppose there are hippies out on my property. It doesn’t sound like they’re doing any harm. Hell, if they’re making a campfire it might-could help make a clearing in all those vines.”

  “Not the sort of response I’d expect from a man in law enforcement,” the husband says. That part gets on my nerves. He makes it sound like I’m not doing my job. Living across the river in Kentucky, they aren’t, technically, even in my fucking jurisdiction, but they want to bitch at me.

  “They’re making a ruckus,” the husband says. “Disturbing the peace. They’re not as loud as they were a few hours ago, but they’re still going. Kept us up all night. It sure would be nice if you saw to it to at least investigate, sheriff.”

  So, round about nine in the morning, I investigate.

  It’s November, and there’s a ragged, smacking wind along the shore of the Ohio. The sky is the color of suffocation— gray here, blue there. The trees are naked and gaunt.

  The vines are dying but not quite dead. Their green is gone. Now they’re just gray and brown. Most have dried up and become more brittle than they appeared during the summer. That helps, because I have to tramp though an awful lot of them to get to the campfire. I follow the smoke and the smell of burning wood.

  When I arrive, a passed-out, hairy ass greets me. Fella looks like a fucking caveman. He’s on his stomach and holding the hand of the hermaphrodite, who’s sleeping on his/her/its back. Damn, I’ve been in law enforcement almost fifteen years now, and I’ve never seen anything like that before. A tiny dick sittin’ on top of labia. Small boobs. A girly face, except for the sunken brow. Mannish hands. Tiny shoulders. The hermaphrodite, in turn, holds hands with a damn sexy-looking young lady. She’s on her stomach, showing me her tight little ass and the sides of her tits. Bitch is curvy as all get-out. In her mid-twenties. Brunette. (They’re all in their mid-twenties and have brown hair, actually.)