The Mirror (14 page)

"Yes and thanks for showing me what to do."

"I just canna figure wot 'ee been doin' all these years till now."

The fact that Thora K.'d had to point out the use of those folded rags and pins in Brandy's trunk seemed to shake her theory that Brandy was a witch rather than crazy. But Shay was so confident she'd be leaving this world soon, she didn't fear losing her one ally.

"I'm going to miss you so," Shay whispered and hugged Thora K.

"Heavens, child, 'tain't like 'ee edden never comin' back." Thora K. looked flustered but pleased.

No, I'm not coming back. But I hope Brandy will and that she'll like you as much as I do.
Where'd Brandy been all this time?

Shay gazed around the tiny cabin almost regretfully. She'd never forget this place or this adventure.

Corbin walked her to the stage, loading for Boulder, and she embarrassed him by throwing her arms around his neck. "Take care, Corbin."

The sickroom at the Gingerbread House was the downstairs bedroom Rachael and Jerrold Garrett would use. Some of the furniture was the same.

Now it was darkened and the sound of John McCabe's tortured breathing filled it. He lay still and staring, his face a swollen gray.

Sophie rose from a chair beside the bed and held out her hands as Shay crossed the room. "Brandy, I'm so relieved you could get here before . . ."

"Elton said it was a stroke." Shay let herself be hugged.

"It was so sudden. He said your name twice in the night. Those are the only words he's spoken since he was struck down. Brandy, I think he regretted your marriage and it's weighing on him now. I know how you felt, dear, but. . . the doctor says your father hasn't much time. We didn't expect him to last the night. Don't let him die with your anger on his conscience. Tell him you forgive him."

"Will he hear me?"

"I don't know. At times he seems to respond and be aware of us."

Shay leaned over John McCabe and took his cold hand. "I forgive you, John McCabe ... I mean, Father."

He didn't blink or show that he could hear or see her. But Sophie said, "John McCabe? Father? I've never heard you speak to him that way."

"I don't think he heard me." These little slips in speech wouldn't matter soon.

"Stay with him and keep trying, dear. I'm going to find something to eat and I'll be back." Sophie paused in the doorway, looking confused. "Brandy, are you feeling well?"

"I'm feeling fine." Shay sat in Sophie's chair and wondered what to do. She'd never seen anyone dying before. In her limited experience the old or sick went into a hospital and left the world without distressing anyone.

She hoped Sophie'd hurry. The gloomy room and the raspy breathing were eerie. She fidgeted on the chair. Brandy's skin was scraped raw from the chafing of those disgusting rags.

John McCabe stirred suddenly and Shay jumped. She stood over him in case he could see her.

"I forgive you, Father. Don't worry. Everything'll be okay. . . ."

His eyes focused from a long way off. "Brandy?" he said faintly.

'Yes, and I forgive you . . . Brandy loves you I'm sure ... I mean I love you." Tears came to her eyes. Would Brandy have forgiven him? It'd be wrong not to reassure him at a time like this.

"Brandy . . . mirror . . . beware . . ." He sounded like a phonograph record playing at too slow a speed and his body struggled to help him speak as Grandma Bran's had done. His eyes reflected the fear Shay'd seen then too.

"Mirror? The wedding mirror?"

He choked and seemed to be trying to sit up. She slid her arm under him to lift his head. "What about the mirror? Tell me."

John McCabe stared over her shoulder. Fear and pain drained from his face. He smiled. "Joshua, oh, Joshua . . ." He fell limp against her.

"Elton. Sophie. Somebody!" Shay didn't move except to look around for Joshua. There was no one else in the room.

Elton arrived first. He laid his father back on the pillow and drew Shay away. "Did he speak at all, Bran?"

"I forgave him and told him I loved him and he answered me." Her teeth chattered with shock.

"Oh, thank God," Sophie said from the doorway. "Ma, he died in her arms. Now he can rest in peace."

Shay and Elton sat at the kitchen table picking at their food, he mourning the loss of a father and she dying to get up to Brandy's room.

Elton seemed real, not a caricature of times past. Shay'd never had a brother, and looking at him she wondered what it would have been like. She couldn't remember her mother mentioning an Uncle Elton. "It was so sudden, Bran. Did you know it happened in your room?" "The stroke?" Her neck prickled. "Is the wedding mirror still there?" "Yeah, we found him on the floor in front of it. He'd taken to brooding in there. Over you, I think. A thunderstorm was making so much noise we didn't hear him fall or call out or anything."

Upstairs, the wedding mirror sat in the corner, reflecting wavy light from the funny bulb in the ceiling.
Did you cause John McCabe's stroke?
Did strokes come on that suddenly to apparently healthy people?

One of the books Sophie'd sent to Nederland instead of the mirror was a green leather-bound diary. Shay'd been disappointed to find it blank but had brought it back to the Gingerbread House. It was a way to communicate with Brandy privately.

A narrow table stood under a slope of the ceiling, a straight chair in front of it, a pen and an old-fashioned ink pot. Shay sat down to write to Brandy:

I hope you will return to your body when I leave it. I don't know where you've been but I feel you must know what's gone on here while you've been away.

Shay knew her handwriting was horrid and she dripped ink trying to use the unfamiliar writing apparatus but she wrote slowly and carefully.

She tried to explain Thora K. and Corbin, to soften the blow of life in Nederland and the death of John McCabe. But she avoided any mention of the Maddon twins. Brandy would make her own mistakes, obviously, or Shay wouldn't be born a platinum blond.

And she didn't go in to the future, except to admit she was Brandy's granddaughter. Shay'd come to know how awful it was to
know.

Poor Brandy would return to find the Gingerbread House a house of mourning and herself trapped in an unconsummated marriage.

She added more of Corbin, knowing that someday Brandy would continue the family line with Hutch Maddon. Shay ached for Corbin.

It was late when she closed the diary and faced the mirror.

But the wedding mirror wouldn't work its magic that night . . . nor the next. . . nor the next. . . .

Sunlight flooded Columbia Cemetery, the trees too young to mask its glare.

Elton's arm trembled in Sophie's. She pretended to lean on him as a grieving widow should on her grown son. But in fact he leaned on her.

"Yes, it was so sudden, such a shock," she repeated for the umpteenth time, now to the president of the bank, Mr. Harker. He looked in pieces to her befogged mind, all cut up by the black threads of her veil.

Brandy stood next to the husband John had forced upon her, staring at little Joshua's grave as if she'd never seen it.

... the line of stilled black carriages filling the trails of the cemetery . . . spilling out onto the road to town . . . horses stomping, jingling harness . . . buzzing grasshoppers and the sweet call of a meadowlark . . . subdued voices.

The night before, Sophie'd prayed to God to forgive her for the unexpected feeling of freedom and importance the devil had sent to her when she should have been mourning. She knew it was just the attention she received as the widow of John McCabe and that Satan had used it. But the realization that John's every mood would no longer organize her day . . .

Guilt sent her through the house seeking solace. To find her son with his head in his arms at the dining-room table actually weeping, terrified at the thought of his father's business affairs being thrust at him. Strange, sensitive boy she secretly loved above all others. But who was no help to her now. She'd had to comfort
him.

And then upstairs to find her daughter looking at her with the eyes of a stranger. Brandy, too, seemed terrified, but Sophie could sense a strength here she knew was not in Elton. She couldn't confide in the stranger her daughter had become.

People were filing toward the carriages and Sophie moved to Brandy's side. "It's time to go back to the house, dear."

Brandy's face was pale, a dark tinge marring the skin around her eyes. "Brandy had another brother . . . Joshua."

"Of course. You and Josh had such fun together when you were small," Sophie whispered, hoping no one else had heard, feeling a tightening around her heart. She prayed this behavior was due to sleeplessness, rather than serving as another indication of an unbalanced mind. Sophie'd heard her daughter moving about in her room at all hours since her return.

At the Gingerbread House, she was able to draw Mrs. Strock aside for a moment. "I'm worried for Brandy. She's behaving queerly."

"'Er do seem to be takin' it hard, poor thing. It's the age, 'ee know. Death be mystifying to they young."

"If your son won't mind, I'd like to keep her here for a while."

"That's as it do belong to be. 'Ee need she now."

That night as Sophie and Nora arranged bedding on the floor of the parlor for the out-of-town guests who couldn't be accommodated with beds or at neighbors' homes, Thora K. bustled in to help.

The Strocks weren't what Sophie would've chosen for Brandy socially but the seedy little woman wasn't the ogre she'd pictured either. "I'm putting you and my sister, Harriet, in Brandy's room. Elton's brought down a cot. I think I'll have Brandy and Mr. Strock sleep in the guestroom next to it."

Thora K., who was on her knees plumping a pillow, straightened suddenly. " 'Ee mean to put Corbin and Brandy . . . oh, but . . ." she started and then seemed to change her mind. "That do sound like 'andsome arrangements, and I thank 'ee." Her smile was unexpectedly sly.

In the kitchen Brandy sat with a towel still in hand while women moved around her finishing up the dishes.

"Sophie." Harriet shook her white curls and rolls of fat simultaneously. "Your girl looks exhausted to me. She should be in bed."

"Does your throat feel sore, dear?" Sophie asked her daughter.

"No, I'm just so tired. But I should be helping you now."

"Bless you, but get a good night's rest and you can help tomorrow. The ladies will understand if you go to bed early at a time like this."

Again Sophie had that treacherous feeling of importance as her friends chimed in with sympathy and approval.

"Even with her husband struck dead, that Sophie doesn't forget how to be a good mother," someone whispered behind her as she led Brandy out.

Shay'd spent so much of her nights working on the recalcitrant mirror that when Sophie helped her slip into the strange bed she was asleep before she could identify and voice the nagging thought that the mirror might harm whoever slept in Brandy's bed.

It occurred to her again when she awoke in the night, but was erased by the shock of finding herself snuggled up to a deliriously warm body.

Shay sat up. "Corbin?"

"Go back to sleep, Brandy." His voice came strained out of the dark. "Your mother put me in here and I couldn't object . . . without causing embarrassment. I won't bother you, Brandy."

Won't bother me!
Shay moved primly to the cold part of the bed and almost fell out.
They sure didn't used to make double beds very big.
And just out of a period, Brandy felt about as prim as a bitch in heat.
The only good thing about being in someone else's body is being able to blame it for any unexpected eccentricities. Down, girl!

Shay went back to sleep wondering who she thought she was kidding.

She was dreaming shocking things about herself, Marek, and both Maddon twins when she awoke next ... to find gray dawn seeping through window glass and Corbin wrapped around her from behind.

A warm hand moved carefully up, drawing the voluminous nightgown from her legs. It cupped around Brandy's breast.

Shay thought "cool" for about a second and then swiveled until his hand was on Brandy's back and she was facing him. Even with the tangle of bedclothes, she managed to kiss him.

Corbin stiffened and drew away. "Brandy, I'm sorry--"

"Sorry!" She drew him back. He was so big and hard and old-fashioned and those shoulders . . . "Corbin, you can have sex with Marie and May Bell and you're sorry to touch your wife? They cost money, I'm free . . . oh yeah, I forgot. I'm crazy." She leaned over to kiss him again. "Crazy people have needs too, don't they?"

Corbin shook all over. "What kind of woman are you?" He sounded as if he'd choke.

"How many kinds are there?" She ran Brandy's hand down his body. What was he wearing? Long underwear? In the summer? Shay Garrett would have giggled if Brandy'd had the time . . .