The Judas Glass (29 page)

“Eric Sunderland. Studious, insecure. Poor Eric,” she said, when I had filled in the last details of my recent days. “He hated me because he thought it was easy for me. I got the scholarships, the prizes. He actually had talent for a certain type of music. Music with splash. Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff. He could play that full-spectrum piano music much better than I could.”

“He envied you,” I said.

“Music was food for me. The struggle wasn't finding time to practice the piano. It was tearing myself away when it was time to do something else, like eat.”

“He didn't have your talent.”

“He did have a gift. His talent was different, but it was very much alive.”

She had her arm around me, her eyes closed, as though the familiar world of touch was, for the moment, less overwhelming. We stood in the stern of the boat, where I would have held the tiller if the engine were chugging, if there were sail.

She continued wistfully, “Eric knew at some point he would never really go far in music. He had trouble keeping teaching jobs. He thought people were narrow-minded, put off by him because he had a bad temper.”

I didn't want to think about Eric. I pictured him in his last moments despite myself, and I turned to look at the glassy wake of the boat. “You don't think I should have taken his life,” I said. Why, I wondered, did I avoid saying
killing him
.

She put her hand on mine. “You shouldn't have killed Eric. It wasn't necessary. It was wrong. Look at us—this is all we need, isn't it?

“Eric doesn't make sense,” I said. “Nothing about him does. You don't murder a woman because you envy her.”

“But you might,” she said, “kill a woman because you loved her.”

I showed her the place on my finger, the cut. It was invisible now.

“You were going to sail up the coast to Crescent City to see my brother,” she said. “To find out where the mirror came from. To fathom its secrets.”

I felt miffed by her tone. “It was a plan.”

“It was a good plan, Richard.”

“Except for one thing,” I said, prompting her.

“Connie lied to you,” Rebecca said. “The mirror was never in my family. My family prides itself on plain wooden furniture, craftsman bungalows, pruning the roses the day after New Year's. My father teaches engineering. My mother teaches remedial reading. They both believe in straight lines, neat handwriting, and balancing the checkbook.”

I'd lost the argument, but persisted a little longer. “Maybe it was something you never noticed.”

“Because I was blind I didn't realize we had an ornate treasure hanging in the living room?”

“You should have been an attorney.”

She laughed. “And if Simon ever got his hands on something like that, I can't imagine him sending it to you as a gift. Simon would keep it and try to write his master's thesis on it. Simon conserves. Reads military history, loves the French Revolution. Giving you the melted bracelet was an act of real generosity on his part.”

“I'm surprised I could be taken in so easily.”

“I don't think she sold it, either. I think Connie fell in love with the mirror, and doesn't want you to have it.”

I
will
have it, I thought.

“You certainly aren't going to break the mirror into a thousand pieces, Richard. I know you. You won't be able to.”

“It's a dangerous thing,” I said.

“Do you really think the mirror caused you to evolve into—whatever you are.”

“Whatever
we
are.”

“No, Richard—you brought me back into the world. Whatever happened between you and the mirror had to do with something in your nature, not in mine.”

She was mistaken, I thought, but I let it pass. “There is some kind of poison. Something in the silvering, in the frame. Something toxic. The way mercury seeps into your body from dental fillings.”

“I think Connie gave it to you,” said Rebecca. “As an experiment, to see how you would react. Or out of vindictiveness, wanting to remind you of something.”

“Then she must have known something about the mirror's history—”

“Something about its power,” she said, just a trace of teasing in her voice.

“Knowing something about me,” I said. “How I had always been fascinated by mirrors.”

The sea was wrinkled, the swells constantly shifting the horizon. The sudden etching of shadows on the surface told me everything I had to know about why the gulls were pink, why the sea birds to the east were suddenly visible in such detail, in such numbers.

“Dental fillings don't do that, do they?” she was asking. “You just heard that somewhere. It isn't true.”

I didn't answer. Dawn was nearly here.

After I cut my forehead on the mirror, my mother drove into Stinson Beach so a tanned, jolly, half-retired surgeon could chill my skin with a local anesthetic and take what he called a painless tuck, three stitches. I rode home in the front seat, marveling at all the blood on my T-shirt.

Rebecca was right. I didn't want to find the mirror. I wanted to stay like this, and some part of me sensed that, once I rediscovered the mirror, all of this would end.

44

As a child I loved rainy nights. I listened to the drift of the rain over the shingled roof and felt protected. As I grew older, and sued builders for roofs that could not withstand fallen branches, foundations built in dry creeks that flooded every January, I learned that no refuge is what it seems to be.

And yet, under the sea those long hours, I again felt protected. The waves were a quaking roof, the walls made of water.

So when I woke, the last light of sunset dimming from the water, it was a shock to find myself alone. I spun in the water, kicking hard in the direction Rebecca had been asleep during those hours of daylight. Her rope coiled and twisted high above, drifting. She was gone.

I scrambled to the surface. The ocean was calm, but a calm that breathed, alive. I called her name. The radio dangled from its bent nail, and the mattress on the bunk was just as we had left it, a wool blanket folded neatly at the foot. But the mattress was damp, and there were drops of water gleamed on the planks of the floor.

The Radio Shack receiver had been left switched on, faded now to an even more ghostly whisper,
three to five knots out of the north-west
, an innaccurate report. Still, I understood the instinct that had driven Rebecca to hear a human voice. I switched it off. There was a footprint, a parenthesis of water. She had sat here, on the bunk.

I could detect no wind, and the swells were glassy. I leaned against the stem calling, rushed to the bow, continuing to sound the three syllables of her name.

A gray whale lifted above the surface, breath fuming. It lifted a forked tail, lazily, and dropped it, a loud clap that reached me after a few seconds.

There were two layers of weatherproofing on the deck. The layer that was peeling, the outermost coat, was plastic, verathane. Then there was a yellow varnish, a coloring that did not peel away but wore through. Beneath it all was the decking itself, teak, fine-grained.

I had worn through to an inner core of myself. This was a substance that endured, my fiber. I climbed to the top of the cabin, crooked my arm around the mast, and called her name. In the early evening there were two tight clusters of lights, small craft making way to the north, toward the Golden Gate or Monterey Bay; I wasn't sure how far south we had drifted. For a moment the sight of these fishing boats or pleasure craft made me feel thin comfort.

But another sort of vessel, still far to the north, was heading this way.

The prow of this fast boat was cutting the seas. The waves parted neatly, twin leaves of water catching the starlight. The vessel sported a tall tower of radar equipment and broadcasting gear. A wide cylinder of light winked on, and its beam swept the water.

Surf worked the dark rocks to the east, cliffs and evergreens. The seas around the hull roiled, and something tangled and dark clung to the keel, slowing the boat. Some merchant marine or fisherman had spotted our boat, perhaps thinking we were in danger. But it was more complicated than that: we had left behind an abandoned car, not to mention an aggrieved boat owner. Perhaps all the deaths had been pieced together by now.

This new craft kept coming. I balanced briefly on the rail. Then I dived deep, slipping through the pods and stalks of a grove of kelp. A bank of fish broke around me, perch, shivering with the tide that swept through their fins, their gills.

My arms warped, my legs deformed, muscling into a shape that powered through the water. I had no clear concept of my body's configuration, only the awareness that I hunted and found nothing. Two otters tumbled through the water, awakened by me. They avoided me, and then tailed after me, urgent, curious.

A sea forest surrounded me. The vegetation was gigantic, hollow tubes connected to the sandy bottom with yellow roots. Mats of tangled plant stuff floated on the surface, kept bouyant with hollow knobs speckled with limpets. The stalks of the trees were bronze-brown, and they clung to my limbs, slowing my progress as I writhed and twisted.

The otters attracted my eye. They circled, and something about their curiosity guided me, as they began to wend onward ahead of me, as though they knew something.

What had I become now, I found myself wondering, a sea lion, that man-seal of legend, the Great Selkie? I floundered through the waves, and there on the beach was a scattering of logs, piled haphazardly together. But the logs were creatures, nosing the air as I dragged my body through the water. What I expected to be an arm was a broad, wet paddle, cutting the sand, and when I tried to lift my head I couldn't, my huge body clumsy and heavy.

At the very last a surge of foam caught me and carried me high onto the beach. The dry sand crusted on my flanks, loose sand in my nose. I sneezed. This was not a sneeze like any I had experienced before, the convulsion of a strange body. I was helpless afterward, flailing. My body wrenched, bones reknitting, my skull swelling again into a human form. It was painful, but sudden, and when it was finished I clutched at the wet sand.

I approached the sea lions with a thought that quieted them. At sea, the Coast Guard cutter bore down on our boat. Our baremasted vessel was caught in the kelp, kept by the island of plant life from running aground. The Coast Guard beam illuminated the heaving sea weed, and the mast of our boat was a bright needle. Then the light dismissed our boat, and searched the beach.

Perhaps my presence would have made the beasts more restless, except for the distraction of the boat's searchlight. The seals were ruddy in this bright beam, auburn, brunette, their fur knicked and scarred. A loudspeaker sounded, words I could not make out.

I felt that some inner tongue, a power articulate in my psyche, could ask these animals where she was, and they would tell me. But it wasn't necessary. The way they had shifted along the beach, the sand scraped and molded, showed me where to look.

I found her human form on the beach, beside a huge mass of kelp. Her body left an imprint in the wet sand as I scooped her up and held her in my arms. I carried her through ferns, into the woods, to the side of a stream.

Human flesh itself was clothing for something effervescent, but I could not awaken her. She lay still, one hand open in the current of the stream, water streaming through her fingers.

A fox hesitated, one paw raised, ears cocked.

The air whispered above him. Wind, or a night bird. He couldn't tell. His dark eyes took in the sky, the leaves, everything that moved. But I did not move. I clung to the branch of a tree.

He lowered his head and lifted it again without touching the water. He heard it, too. The far-off rattle of an outboard motor above the rustle of the surf.

He sniffed the wind. Noise, and the scent of cold things, steel and rubber, and fuel. Silence was life. He lowered his nose and drank from the stream.

I did not want to take this quickness, this color. I found myself in a tree, hanging upside down, my body enfolding itself. The sound of his tongue on the water was not comforting, as the lapping of a family dog can be. It was a furtive sound, paws pressed into the mud of the stream.

I captured him. In an instant I knew what he knew, the field. And his prey, the sudden rush, the feathers, the warm heart, the quarry with its tiny bones, its stuttering blood.

She opened her eyes. As always, she touched my face, still trusting her fingers more than her sight. Then she looked up beyond me in wonder, and a little fear.

“Redwoods,” I said.

Her lips shaped the question.

“Somewhere south of Point Lobos.”

“A forest,” she said at last. “How did we get here?”

I counted off her actions on my fingers. “You untied the rope. You swam up into the boat. You got tired of waiting for me—”

“Don't tease me, Richard.”

“You tell me—what happened when you dived into the water?”

“I don't know.” She meant: she didn't want to remember.

“I was very proud of that knot,” I said. “Was it difficult?”

She gazed at her hands, her fingers, her nails. “No.”

“So you do remember that much.”

She sat up. Her fingers searched her surroundings, moss, wild iris, its blossoms folded, sorrel, like oversized shamrocks. She seemed to glow. “We need a doctor.”

“That's a brilliant idea. We'll just drop in, sit in a waiting room, and then what? The doctor will ask us how we're feeling, and what will we tell him?”

She had already adopted the mannerisms of someone who could see, and expected to be seen in return.

“We have so much to do,” I said.

She stood slowly, shaking out the folds of her gown. “I am starting to believe it all.” She reached out to touch a sapling that was growing straight upward out of a fallen log. “I won't be able to see Simon again, or my parents. I won't be able to play the piano.”