Fifty-three
David grew weary of the Frisbee. It was getting too
dark to play anyhow. He tossed the toy back into the yard, then eyed the
lights of town glowing in the twilight. It had seemed so far away in the
past. Vaguely, he remembered being ill. More clearly, he understood that
the mirror had made him better. It had returned his mother to him, the
mirror's version of his mother. She and his father were together in the
house and he didn't want to disturb them.
He was too restless to stay put. "How about you and
me visiting town, Dobbie? I'll bet we can run all the way."
Testing his new body, he ran back down into the
valley with Dobbie dashing gleefully about, picking up his pace as he went
until he was flying, and shrieking his joy to the twilight world around
him. The mirror had fixed his heart and given him back everything he had
ever lost. It had fixed his father's hand.
There was nothing it could do for his mother.
I need a part of what I was.
She had meant it as a warning. He couldn't get it
out of his head, but neither did he want to think about it now.
He had jogged halfway to Eagle Junction before he was
aware of his destination. Despite the late hour, he was headed for his
mother's grave and the stone angel. He didn't know how to reconcile the
two, memory of his mother's death and the image of her the mirror had
conjured. Visiting her grave hinted at something that had to be done to
rid himself of the last terrible pain in his life and by far the most
serious injury that had ever been inflicted upon him.
His mother’s death.
A half mile from the cemetery, two boys were coming
toward him on the same side of the road. It was too dark to make out
their faces until they were just a few feet away. Tony Doran and Steven
Farley weren't as big or tough-looking as he remembered.
They stared at him in disbelief.
"Hi, guys. Whatcha up to?"
Dobbie gave a gruff bark of warning, already
possessive of his new master and unsettled by the panic-stricken strangers
blocking their way.
Tony screamed first, and then Steve. The two boys
wheeled about and ran wildly back down the sidewalk. Dobbie started after
them with a growl.
David called the dog back and gave him a reassuring
pat on the flank. It occurred to him that maybe he shouldn't take the dog
into town, not a guard dog unaccustomed to its freedom and so many
strangers about.
"I can take Dobbie back home," Jackie Kahl said from
directly behind him.
He whirled about and laughed at his own startled
surprise. "You guys are so sneaky!"
Jackie grinned. "Yep."
David gave the dog a light slap. "Go home, boy.
Wait for me."
Dobbie ran off back down the road, somehow guided by
a ghost that could be in more than one place and be more than one person
at a time.
"Are you going to walk with me?" he asked of the
girl.
"I guess."
Jackie had little to say. He enjoyed her company,
though. He had no other friends. It occurred to him that he could go
back to school now and make some. A bunch of new friends. Things had
changed. Everything had changed.
It was completely dark when they reached the
cemetery. The gate was closed, but he leaped the fence and charged up the
hill to the summit. His eyes were on the stone angel as he grew near his
mother's grave. He felt as sad and desolate as he had the first time he
had visited and gotten himself into so much trouble, but he was not so
trapped and helpless this time around.
"This is my mom's grave," he told Jackie. "My real
mom."
"I know."
"She's dead," he said, testing Jackie for a reaction.
"She's not dead, David. This is just where her life
stopped, at least the one you knew."
"What's the difference?"
"Well, to begin with, a life isn't really ended until
it is completed.”
David sighed. "My mom's here and she's dead."
"What about your other mom?"
David shook his head. The emotional conflict tore at
him. Tears came to his eyes. In the darkness, it didn't matter. "The
mirror was just some kind of machine when it first came here," he said.
"I saw it for myself. It started by taking bugs. It didn't know anything
else about this world except how to be a bug."
"Then it got me," Jackie said.
"Yeah, and you really scared me."
"At first, I was trying to trick you into the mirror,
too," she said. "I wasn't all that smart until the mirror got Julian and
Joyce Blair."
"But it never got my mom," David said, and he watched
her for a reaction.
"She wasn't your mom until you and your father taught
her how," Jackie said. "And then the mirror helped her to find the rest
of herself. Remember how your father told you that she had a special way
of looking at the world?"
"He told her that all the time," David said. "He
said she had a funny way at looking at things because she was never afraid
of the things that most people are afraid of."
"Like dying?"
David looked down at the ground. "Even that."
"Your father married her because of the way she
looked at things," Jackie said. "He didn’t feel so afraid around her
himself. And it's funny, because the special way your mother saw the
world was because she felt the mirror reaching back to her from the
future. Even before you were born, she knew that there was more to the
world than most people ever imagined."
David was amazed. "Really? Wow."
"But the mirror has to go back to where it came from
now," Jackie said. "And your mother can't go with it."
David fought through a terrible confusion. "But
she's not real. If she can't go back with the mirror, what's going to
happen to her?"
Jackie shrugged. "It's her job to prove that the
mirror knows what it means to be human. To do that, she has to find a way
to make herself real. She has to escape the mirror, David."
"But what if she can't?"
Jackie shrugged and looked up at the stone angel.
"But it's not fair!"
"It's not something she can do without your help."
"But I don't know what she needs!"
"Yes, you do," Jackie said. "You know. But you hide
it. You're so scared that you've always hidden it."
David was suddenly afraid of the cemetery. The fear
leaped unbidden from deep within himself. He squirmed with growing
anxiety. "I don't know what you're talking about!"
"A child is closer to his mother than anyone else in
the world," Jackie said. "Mothers are more important than anyone. Kids
love their mothers the most, and they hurt the most when they die. Like
you. And like me."
David turned away and hurried back down the gravel
road.
"It won't be as bad as you think," Jackie said.
"It's just that you can't have two mothers, one in your heart… and the
other in the ground."
David stopped, frozen to the spot by an astounding
thought.
The one in the ground has to come out! That's
what she was trying to tell him!
"Yes, and you have to be
able to accept it. You've always known. It wouldn't have been so bad
if you hadn't watched all those awful movies."
David ran down the hill and cleared the wrought iron
fence by two feet. He ran until his panic subsided, then walked through
Eagle Junction with his hands stuffed in his pockets.
"It's probably too late anyhow," Jackie said from
close by.
She'd always be close by no matter how fast he ran.
He glanced back at her and saw that she had stopped and was looking into
the sky.
"What are you looking at? Jackie, you're just trying
to fool me again!"
'I'm trying to tell you something, David. Can't you
see it?"
He looked again and saw it high in the sky. Coming
down. It was the same eerie glass egg with the green star in the middle
that had illuminated the Ridge in the middle of the night ages ago. Maybe
only days ago. It had put the mirror in the trees, and now it was back to
retrieve it.
"No, not now!” he cried. “Not yet! It isn't fair!"
He would never make it back to the house in time to
warn them.
David Hartman ran screaming back through Eagle
Junction as fast as his powerful new legs could carry him.
