Wild Fell (6 page)

“Stay down, you little bitch,” he said. “If you come at me again, I’m going to put you and your little buddy in the hospital. Got it?”

“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” she said again, but both of us heard the note of defeat in her voice under the shrillness, as did Terry. “He’s just a little kid. Give him back his bike!”

“He doesn’t have a bike,” Terry said. “
I
have a bike. It’s
my
bike now. Come on, guys, let’s get home and give this bike to my brother.” And with that, he pedalled off across the field toward the new subdivision, with his two friends half-walking, half-running to keep up with him.

I burst into tears. I not only felt the loss of my bike, but I felt the guilt of disappointing my father after all those hours of practice and all his patience. The bike had been a gift of love, the consummation of those painful hours of skin scraped against asphalt, banged-up limbs, and blood, and my father’s loving attention to helping me learn.

Hank hugged me. “Come on, get on the back. I’ll double-ride you home,” she said. “Let’s go tell your parents.”

I tasted the snot running down my upper lip, mixing with the tears. “They’re going to be
so mad.
 . . . I’m not supposed to be this far from home.”

“Don’t cry, Jamie,” Hank said. “Let’s get home and tell your parents. “We’ll get your bike back, I promise. I don’t know how, but we will.”

When we eventually made it home as dusk descended—a rickety, long, difficult ride with me on the back and Hank pumping heroically over the rutted sidewalks and stopping at crosswalks so both of us could dismount and walk safely across the street—my parents were furious. My mother in particular was enraged that we’d ventured so far out of Buena Vista, our neighbourhood, and managed to lose an expensive new bike in the process.

“It wasn’t a toy, Jamie.” After everything that had happened that afternoon, her voice seemed unbearably harsh in my ears. I had seen my mother angry before, but this seemed to be a level of developing anger that was new and a bit frightening. “It was a very expensive bicycle and now it’s gone. You lost it. You should have been more responsible instead of being such a damn
dreamer
all the time. I’m very, very disappointed in you.” My mother had wanted my father to spank me, but he’d refused.

“He didn’t
lose
it, Alice. It’s not
lost
. It was
stolen
. Another kid
stole
Jamie’s bike.”

“If he’d stayed in our neighbourhood,” my mother said, “this would never have happened. This is his fault and I want him to take responsibility for it. If you won’t spank him, I will.”

My father held up his hand. He, too, was furious, but his anger was directed differently: he seemed mostly angry that an older kid had bullied me into giving up my new bike. “Alice,
please
,” he snapped. “One thing at a time. I want to know how this happened. We can discuss the rest later, but right now I want to understand how this took place. I want to know who this kid was, and where this happened.” He turned to me and said, “Jamie, can you tell us again how this kid came to take your bike?”

I told the story again, feeling calmer under my father’s steady questioning. He asked me if I could remember the neighbourhood where it took place. I told him no, but that Hank would probably know how to get back to the field. The boys likely lived in the subdivision across from the field, since that was the direction from which they had come.

My father looked glum. “Well, Jamie, let’s call Hank’s parents and see if she can go for a ride with us tomorrow and see if we can find out who this kid is. We can drive around the neighbourhood and you can see if you recognize him. But I have to admit, it’s going to be a bit of a long shot. Your mother is right—this was very irresponsible of you. I hope we can get your bike back, but don’t get your hopes up. In the meantime, I’ll go call the police and see what the procedure is to file a report.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy. Really, I am.”

“I know, Jamie,” my father said. “But it doesn’t really help matters. It doesn’t really change things. You should have been more responsible. I think you should go downstairs and get ready for bed. I’ll be down in a little while to tuck you in.”

In my room, sobbing and in disgrace, I told Mirror Pal about what had happened.

As always, I did both of the voices, mine and Mirror Pal’s, and they both sounded like me. Both voices bore the imprimatur of my grief: one bore it plaintively; the other bore it with justifiably loyal outrage.

A casual adult observer who happened to walk in on me would likely have seen an eight-year-old boy, his face red and puffy and streaked with tears, sitting on the edge of his bed talking to himself in the mirror, working himself into a state of near-hysteria, arms flailing and pointing, punctuating the air with angles and jabs. I have a memory of actually slapping the wall beside the mirror and imagining I heard two slaps.

But of course, I could only have heard one slap. I was entirely alone in my bedroom. The only illumination inside the room came from my bedside lamp, a green-glassed brass ship’s lantern with a hand-painted shade featuring a rendering of a sailboat at full mast, hard against the wind.

Feeling better for having vented a bit, I turned away to put on my pyjamas and get into bed. I thought I saw something flicker and shift in the depths of the mirror. There was a sudden impression of fluttering, as though a moth had trembled in front of a lamp, wings beating a frantic insectile tarantella in the air. But when I looked again, I was alone in the mirror with my empty bedroom reflected in the glass behind me.

Then suddenly I
wasn’t
alone. I
knew
I wasn’t alone as surely as I knew my own name, or that my beautiful red bike had been stolen that afternoon, or that I wanted it back at that moment more than I’d ever wanted anything in the world.

I touched the glass and tapped it lightly with my index finger. “Mirror Pal? Are you real?” Even at eight, I realized how ridiculous that question was, but I asked it anyway. I breathed on the glass, running the tip of my index finger through the condensation, bisecting the cloud of moisture with a jagged line of fingernail. “Mirror Pal?”

What happened next was something I
felt
in a way that almost precludes an adult ability to put it into words. As I opened my mouth to form Mirror Pal’s answer to my own question, the air inside my room became heavy with something like the weight of the electricity and ozone that presages a summer lightning storm. By reflex, I closed my eyes as though anticipating a thunderclap. There was the burst of the orange-red light that always accompanies a rapid opening and shutting of the eyelids.

An image rose in my mind—or, more accurately, appeared to impress itself on my mind from somewhere outside of my own reckoning—of a young girl of my age whom I had never seen before. She had long dark hair tied up in the sort of bow I had seen in pictures of my grandmother when she was my age. The girl wore some sort of dark-coloured dress rippling like black water caught in a shaft of moonlight. And her name came to me then: Amanda.

Amanda
.

When I spoke, it was my voice, of course—Mirror Pal’s voice—but this time it was also
not
my voice at all. I had uttered the name without any conscious intent to do so, but I said it as reverently as if it were an invocation. The name seemed to pour out of me of its own volition, shaping and wrapping itself around my vocal cords and calling them to life. I heard it with my ears, but I also heard a double-voice say it in my mind, as though two record players were playing the same single at different speeds, causing a slight overlap.

With my eyes still closed, I reached over and switched off the light on my night table. Then I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror.

Something indefinable had changed in the reflection. It was still my room, but the edges now bled into a general murkiness, a blurring not dissimilar to that of the faded quality of an antique photograph: yellowing, age-burned and cracked at the edges. My reflection, too, had changed in a similarly impalpable way. My eyes were obscured by the shadows of the room, but my shoulders were hunched in a narrowing way that suggested somehow the fey mien of a young girl sitting on the edge of a large antiqued chair that was too big for her. When I instinctively relaxed my shoulders to dispel the illusion, my reflection followed suit, but it seemed to lag just a beat, as though it slyly wanted me to know that it was doing it on sufferance, not because the laws of physics had compelled it to do so because it was my reflection.

My. Mine.

Mine.

I said, “Mirror Pal? Is that you?”

Again, the unbidden response, the weird aural duotone of my own voice echoing in my head.

My name is Amanda.

I was entranced. I’d forgotten that I was speaking to myself, forgot that this illusion was impossible, forgot that I must be speaking in my own voice because there was no possible way my reflection could be addressing me independently. And yet, the name “Amanda” hadn’t come from me. I didn’t know anyone named Amanda.

Excitedly I asked my reflection, “Is this my imagination, or is this real?”

Maybe it’s both. Maybe I live in your head as well as in the mirror.
I felt my shoulders involuntarily rise and fall in a mechanical-looking facsimile of a shrug.
It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m here now.

“Who are you?”

I told you. My name is Amanda.

“Where did you come from?”

From your mirror
.

“No, before that.”

There is no before, there’s only now.

“Where’s Mirror Pal?”

Mirror Pal has gone away. I’m here now.

“Why haven’t I ever seen you before?”

I don’t know why you haven’t seen me before. I’ve always been here
.

I asked again, “Who are you?”

I already told you who I am. I’m just a girl. Stop asking me that
. A pause.
Where’s your bike?

“How do you know about my bike?”

I just know. Where is it?

“A kid stole it. In the park. I was out with Hank and he came and . . . and . . .”

Don’t cry. You’ll get it back, I promise.

“How do you know?”

I just know. You’ll see. You and your dad are going to go driving tomorrow to the place where you lost it. You’re going to look around the neighbourhood and see if the kid is there. Or if his brother is there. He has a younger brother, remember? He told you about him. He’s going to give his brother your bike as a present, and the brother is going to ride it all around. He’ll probably break it, then throw it away. Your bike. Yours.

I felt my fury rise again. “It’s my bike! I want it back. My dad gave it to me for my birthday!”

What do you want to have happen to him? The kid who took your bike?

“What do you mean, what do I want to have happen to him? I want him to give my bike back! That’s what I want. I . . . I want him to
shut up!
I want him to shut up and stop being so mean to little kids that are smaller than him. I want him to shut his mouth and give me back my bike.”

When Amanda spoke again, her voice—for I was now entirely thinking of it as
her
voice, the words choosing
me
, rather than
me
choosing
them
—had chilled perceptibly. But underneath the new frost I thought I heard a cruel sort of excitement, as though she was about to propose her own version of an adventure.

He will. We’ll make him shut up, I promise. And we’ll get your bike back.

Then the image in the mirror seemed to shimmer and sway. I tried to stand up, but stumbled and fell backward onto the bed. Hank had showed me a trick once: she told me to pinch my nose shut and hold my breath as long as I could. As the oxygen was depleted from my brain my head was full of giddy black stars and I’d felt like I was floating. It was like that now on the bed, except I could breathe easily. And my head wasn’t full of black stars, this time, it was full of gold ones, and there was a mighty hum in my brain as though I was lying on the grass beneath a tree alive with a swarm of furious bees hidden by thick branches. The hum rose in crescendo until there was simply nothing else. Near to losing consciousness, I reached for the switch and turned my nightlight on.

With the sudden light came sudden clarity, and with the clarity came silence and the realization that I was quite alone. There was no humming in my head. There was no Amanda. In the mirror I saw myself and no one else. The only room reflected in it was my own—my own, from wall to wall, every corner present and accounted for, every border distinct, impermeable, linear and real.

I felt something wet against my legs and looked down. The front of my pyjama bottoms were soaked with urine. A line of piss tracked down along the inside of my right leg all the way to the ankle.

I pulled my pyjama pants off and wadded them into a ball. After I had used them to blot myself dry, I put them inside a plastic bag on the floor near my closet door. I tied the bag closed and stuffed it under my bed. From the bottom drawer of my dresser, I took out a pair of clean pyjamas and put them on. Then I jumped onto the bed, crawled under the covers, and pulled the sheets and blanket over my head. I listened to the silence of my bedroom on the other side of the blanket, praying I wouldn’t suddenly hear that strange double voice, or feel a little girl’s icy hand pull the blanket away from my face.

Fifteen minutes later, I heard the sound of my father’s footsteps on the stairs and my bedroom door opened. He walked in and came over to the edge of the bed, smiled down at me. Very gently, he tousled my hair.

“Everything all right in here, Jamie? You ready for bed?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

He wrinkled his nose. “You smell anything funny, Jamie? You have any accidents you want to tell me about?”

“No, Daddy.” Normally, lying to my father would have been unthinkable, even impossible. But tonight, all I wanted was normalcy, ease and light. “I don’t smell anything funny.”