Nineteen
Following his father's confrontation with the two
deputies, David fled a few hundred feet into the tall grass of the slope
and dropped to his belly, tempering his panic with wisdom born of fear.
The heart was a muscle that needed oxygen just like any other muscle of
the body. Pushed too hard, his leaking valves would not allow it to pump
enough oxygen-enriched blood to keep even itself from failing completely.
Ben and Jimmy's gruffness had frightened him, but his
father's drunken rage had terrified him. He had never seen his father
fight the good guys before. He had never suspected he could be so
dangerous.
But it was all his own fault. He alone knew about
the mirror in the trees, and he had made no effort to tell anyone. He had
been selfish, and his father was paying for his mistake. Even if he tried to explain, they
would think he was lying to protect his father, or they would want to see
the mirror for themselves.
His mother crouched at his side. "I can protect you
and your father. We can help one another."
David sniffed back his tears. "He would be afraid of
you!"
"Very much so."
"He thinks he killed you! Everybody thinks he killed
you! You're supposed to be dead!"
"Your father has known fear before, David. He knows
how to deal with it quite well."
David trembled violently. Whatever she was trying to
do, it wasn't going to work.
"David, it has taken us time to understand you and
your father and his friends. Some of our behavior must seem to be so
terrible clumsy. We allowed you to put the clothing from the mirror in
the trash barrel. Zeke found it, and Gene is very angry. He has no way
of knowing that those people have not been harmed."
"It wasn't my fault! I didn't know!"
She crouched closer, providing
all the security she could muster in his behalf, as if a ghost could hide
him from the world and defend him against the sheriff's anger. "We we have more of what we need to avoid making those kinds of
mistakes again, David."
But it was too late. "They think my dad hurt
Jackie," he said weeping.
She reached out for him and then paused, as if
forgetting momentarily that she could not touch him. He had already put
his arm through the hem of her dress when she wasn't looking just to
confirm what he already knew, that she was only a ghost like all the other
creatures the mirror had taken.
"David, your father had problems before I arrived,
very serious problems that you do not know about. I know we have
caused problems, but we can protect you and your father from those, and
help a great deal more the others. We need your help, and your
father's help, but I promise your father will appreciate my help when the time arrives. It
will be more than a fair
trade. I can give you everything you want. I just need you to believe in me."
David said nothing. He
had no way to judge the truthfulness of anything she said.
"I'm not asking that you trust me, David. I'm only
asking for the opportunity to prove myself."
"That's impossible," he muttered, terrified of her
confidence to do something he knew full well could not be done, and
terrified, too, of her reasons for doing so. They were not human reasons.
She knelt at his side. "The mirror has its own
agenda, David, but I can speak for it. I can tell you that it and you are
very different forms of living things, but you and it are the same in some
ways. You are both curious about the world around us. You both want to
learn new things. Human beings may go to the stars someday, and they will
take very great care not to harm what they find, just as the mirror does.”
Maybe he could let himself believe that, except that
the mirror had already caused so much trouble that anybody else would
think it evil.
"You and your
father need me, David."
He had heard her say that often enough to begin to
suspect that the mirror had revealed to him a weakness and a
vulnerability. She needed to be someone she was not.
"Ben and Jim are coming back up to the Ridge to look
for you. If you want, they will take you to your father. They
mean you no harm. Your father
won't be long in returning home in any case. Gene may be angry, but
he's an intelligent man. He knows your father is innocent."
David buried his face in the dirt.
With the worst of his fear receding, some of his curiosity had returned. Something about
her had changed. She was softer and nicer. She was more like his mother
had been.
A chill crept through him. Maybe she even put the
thought deep in his mind so that it would creep out a little at a time and
not startle him. "You have someone else with you," he said.
Her silence coaxed him to think through what it
meant. "You want me to move more clothes," he whispered.
"Just a few."
"You're not very smart, you know," he said in sudden
bitterness. "Who were they?"
"Joyce is with us."
David rolled over and scooted away from her.
"Joyce? Not Joyce!"
"And Angel."
He knew who Angel was. He had heard Gene talk about
her.
"Angel would like to speak with you, David."
"It would just be a trick!"
"It's not a trick. I promise."
David shook his head. Another ghost was the last
thing he wanted to deal with now, but after a moment or two, he saw a girl
standing out on the slope behind his mother. She had blonde hair, long,
bare legs, and she had a fur around her neck.
She came closer. A safe distance away, she smiled
and dropped to her knees before him. David was astounded to see that she
was crying, too.
"Hi, David."
David trembled like a leaf in the winter wind.
Angel looked up into the sky. "Oh, God, how do I
explain to a child?"
"I'm ten-years-old," David said without enthusiasm.
"I'm not a child."
"They needed me and Joyce to help be your mother,"
Angel said. "We know more about being women than Jackie or Julian. We
still don't have a real mother with us."
"You wouldn't hurt a real mother, would you?" David
cried stridently.
"We wouldn't leave a child without a mother. I
promise."
David wanted to believe her. He couldn't even come
close to doing so. Not after this.
"Remember what your father used to say about me,
David?"
David looked down at his feet, burning with
embarrassment.
"Your father said I was not very bright. He said I
was nice, but that I was tragic. Aren't those the words he used?"
David gave a quick nod of agreement. They were
exactly the worlds he had used. His father had felt sorry for Angel. He
said that Angel was a nice person who was being used and discarded and
that she would get sick and die without ever having had the chance to live
and love like a woman should.
"Are you old enough to know the kind of person I
was?"
David shook his head quickly, suspecting he knew more
than he should.
"Okay, so now look at me."
After a time, he looked up at her. She held her
hands out to him. "I'm free of everything that can hurt me. I'm with
people who can help me be more than I was. And I can help them, too. I'm
like a ghost. I can do things I could never do before. But I'm not dead. I don't seem to be."
"But you're not the same," David said softly. "The
mirror got you."
Angel gave an uncaring shrug. "Is it such a bad
thing?"
David had no way of knowing whether it was bad or
not. "Dad's going to be mad about Joyce. He liked her a lot."
"And Joyce liked your father a lot, but she can be of
more help to him with us. It's all she wanted, anyhow, and it's more than
a fair trade for both of us. Do you know what it means for a thing to be
more than the sum of its parts?"
David had a general idea of what it meant. "You're
still tricky," he said.
Angel looked surprised by his accusation. "I suppose
we are. Are we bad, do you think?"
His mother had told him about good and bad. Most
people thought things like snakes and spiders were bad, but bad was
someone's intent to do harm. Being bad was a human thing. "Maybe you
don't know what you are," David said.
"Do you want to stop helping us?"
David was alarmed by the offer, sensing that it was
sincere. "Jackie said she'd punish me if I didn't help you. She said
she'd make me see bad things."
"A child said that. Jackie is still with us. You
can speak to her, if you want. But we are more than a child now. We
share one another, David. We are all more than we were."
David was beginning to tremble with nervousness. It
was more than he could deal with. "Go away," he said. "Please."
Angel vanished. His mother knelt at his side again.
She reached as close as she could and pretended to wipe a tear away.
David felt like bawling again. He held it back only
because his constant tears had chaffed the skin around his eyes. There
was nothing more to say to her. In complete resignation, he climbed to
his feet and started out across the slope to move more clothes from the
mirror. Whatever the mirror wanted, he would do, not because he would be
made to see bad things, but because he had his mother back, and he didn't
ever want to lose her again.
