Mirrors Read online

  He pushed the thought aside and reached back for the door.

  A sudden rush of jagged heat entered his body and climbed his arms the moment his hands connected with the door’s cold steel handles. White-hot light exploded behind Austin’s eyes. A million needles pressed against his skin as electricity coursed through his body.

  He felt himself convulse. His jaw locked tight. His legs gave way beneath him and he crumpled to the hard ground.

  His vision narrowed. Darkness crowded the edges of his sight.

  Then the world simply disappeared.

  EVERYONE HAD voices in their head, right? Thoughts were just unspoken words. If someone invented a speaker that could be hooked to the brain and give voice to every thought, the whole world would sound like a crowded auditorium before the guest of honor took the stage.

  Christy remembered taking a bus downtown to city hall once to sign some emancipation forms that would give her full autonomy as a minor. She was seated two rows from a woman who kept mumbling to an imaginary person in the empty seat beside her. “I’m so glad I’m not like you. If they knew what kind of person you are, they’d lock you up.” On and on.

  The rest of the bus sat in an uneasy silence, staring at the oblivious woman. After getting off the bus, Christy headed into city hall, pondering what she’d just witnessed. Poor woman has totally lost it, she kept thinking. I’m glad I’m not like that.

  She suddenly became aware that, instead of only thinking the last sentence, she’d said it, unaware of the others walking down the hall. She’d actually said, aloud, “I’m glad I’m not like that.”

  The only difference between her and the woman everyone regarded as plain crazy was that Christy kept most of her thoughts to herself, whereas the woman seemed either unable or uninterested in doing so.

  The whole world was full of incessant, often crazy, often cruel and judgmental thoughts that were rarely given voice.

  The chatter whispering through Christy’s mind told her that she had to get a grip or she really was going to lose it. This is crazy, I’m not insane. I’m not Alice and I’m not fractured. This is all a mistake.

  Something was on the verge of breaking, and when it did, she would collapse into a mumbling heap of subhuman insanity.

  But strapped in a wheelchair, wheeled first into the elevator and then onto the second floor, she was so acutely aware of the unspoken thoughts that she wondered if she had already lost it.

  She knew it wasn’t true. That her thinking was only the consequence of a tragic series of errors in an inhospitable environment. But her grip on that certainty was slipping.

  The facility’s second level was dimensionally similar to the first floor—wide halls in a U shape with doors on either side. But the hall floors were tiled in a glistening black-and-white checkerboard pattern. The walls were spotless, shiny-white as if only freshly painted. And the doors were made of polished aluminum, giving the appearance that the whole floor was germ-free.

  The wire-mesh reinforced windows on each door were too high for Christy to see through from the wheelchair. She could only imagine the worst, but those, too, were only thoughts.

  The attendant who transported her didn’t say a word. She asked him where the other patients were as they rolled down the hall, but he kept silent, which only filled her with more uneasy thoughts.

  He angled for a door near the end of the hall, turned her chair to face it, then stepped around her and unlocked it by passing his wrist in front of a small black pad on the wall. She looked back down the hall. The steel elevator doors at the end made her think of a vault door.

  Austin might be more intelligent than most, but his mind wasn’t going to break down any doors. She was on her own. More than anything, she hated herself for being alone, like she’d always been.

  The attendant wheeled Christy in, freed her arms, and left without taking the wheelchair with him. The lock on the door snapped into place as the door closed.

  A thick silence settled over her like a heavy blanket.

  She looked around the large room, lost. Pressed white sheets covered a single bed to her right. The walls were shiny, like the walls in the hall. Same checkerboard tiled floor. Just past the bed, a door, maybe to the bathroom or a closet. One small chest of drawers beside the bed topped with white Formica.

  To her left, the room ran twice as wide as the one downstairs. In the extra space sat a large white desk with a brushed-nickel lamp. One high-back chair behind the desk and one smaller chair facing it. A whiteboard on the wall behind the desk. A mirror on the adjacent wall. Likely unbreakable.

  Christy sat in the wheelchair for several long minutes, unsure what she was meant to do. Even less sure she wanted to do anything at all.

  The ceiling vents were narrow. No way out there. Nor would there be a way out anywhere. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d built this place to house deranged psychopaths or insane sociopaths.

  She finally stood up, walked to the door by the bed, and peered inside. Plain bathroom with a toilet, a shower, and a sink with a mirror above it. No vanity, no soap or shampoo, no towels.

  She stepped up to the mirror and blinked at the image staring back at her. Her eyes were swollen and her cheeks had flushed a ruddy red. Lips dry and cracked. Strands of hair had come loose from her ponytail and were sticking out haphazardly, giving her the appearance of a crazed woman just out of an asylum.

  She tapped the mirror. Chromed metal. Of course. Nothing would be breakable in this place.

  A slow tour of the bedroom confirmed her thinking that everything was designed for permanence. The drawers on the desk were locked, the lamp had a sealed bulb and was bolted to the desk. Even the chairs were affixed to the floor, and the screws that fastened them down had no heads.

  When she ventured to the narrow pane of reinforced glass set in the door and peered out, the hall was vacant. Not a soul.

  Christy finally retreated to the bed and lay down, feeling deprived and lifeless. She stayed liked that, staring at the ceiling, for what felt like an hour and still no one came. Had they forgotten about her? Of course not. She didn’t know what “progressive treatment” meant, but she could imagine that leaving someone to their own thoughts indefinitely might qualify.

  There was no clock, no sunlight, no switches on the walls, nothing on the ceiling but the narrow vents and two banks of bright fluorescent lights. It could be the middle of night and she wouldn’t know it.

  Slowly her concerns began to sag into that place where meaninglessness meets hopelessness. She kept rehearsing the events of the day—her break in, her mistaken identity, Austin’s attempt to free them.

  The what ifs swarmed her mind like angry crows.

  If only she’d left home with her wallet, she would have walked out of the ward the moment she proved that she was Christy. Lawson would have checked his patient roster, found no Christy Snow, and let her go.

  If she hadn’t made the call to Austin, he wouldn’t have come looking for her. If he hadn’t come looking, he wouldn’t have stumbled upon Fisher and Alice. If he hadn’t stumbled on Fisher, the man wouldn’t have had any reason to cover his tracks and hide Alice. He’d have had no reason to admit Christy to replace the girl who’d gone missing on his account.

  If only…

  Christy paused. Somewhere in the back of her mind the if became an unless. Unless she was completely wrong about all of this. Unless she hadn’t left home without her wallet because she’d actually never left her home at all. She’d never left her home because she lived here, not there.

  She’d seen a documentary about a patient whose brain damage had so affected his long-term memory that he couldn’t hold more than one day in his mind.

  But the details of her life as Christy were too real. She had a couple dozen journals in her apartment that spelled out her last few years in great detail.

  Hours slogged by and no one came. She made a dozen trips to the door to peer out and n
ot once saw any movement. If there were other patients on the floor, they were in a different section.

  What if she was alone?

  Christy had drifted into a mind-numbing stupor when the sound of the lock snapping open jerked her back to the room. She caught her breath and sat up as the door swung open.

  “Hello, Alice.”

  Kern Lawson closed the door behind him and headed for the desk.

  “Sit with me.”

  She rose and crossed to the seat facing the desk. Sat down as he sank into the chair opposite her.

  For a long time he studied her as if trying to decide what to do with her. A minute went by and still he said nothing.

  “This is crazy,” she finally said. Her voice was thin, not the kind of convincing tone she wanted to project.

  “It is. Very. Which is why we are here, darling.” He opened his palms. “Plum nuts, bonkers, crazy. You’ll note that up here we don’t use terms like mentally challenged. We tend to go right for the heart of the issue. It’s controversial, but we find it produces wonderful results with the right treatment.”

  She was at a loss.

  “How do you like your treatment so far?”

  “What treatment?”

  He chuckled and she was surprised to find a sliver of comfort in the sound after hours of solitude.

  “What treatment, indeed,” he said. “The first step here is for me to help you see through your illusions, capisce? You have to see yourself for who you really are before we can begin to break down that false self. The delusional self.”

  “I’m not delusional.”

  “No? Truth is, you’re not seeing what is real even now, as we speak. But I’ll let you discover that on your own. See the illusion. Then break with it. That’s all I’m asking of you, Alice.”

  “I’m not Alice.”

  “Okay, we can start with that. You don’t think you’re Alice. But the fact is, you don’t really know who you are. Are you ugly? Are you pretty? Are you an outcast? You’re broken, Alice. You aren’t whole. Correction is needed. The first step is embracing that. I can fix you.”

  A distant, high-pitched whine sat at the back of her mind.

  He leaned forward on his elbows.

  “You’re living in denial, Alice. You’re so afraid of what you might find if you really get a good look at yourself that you’ve shut your eyes. Permanently. I can help you see the truth. But you have to face the truth, beginning with fundamentals, like how you really look, in the real world.”

  Her heart worked its way through thick beats.

  “You think this”—he motioned to her—“is the real you. It’s not. The real you is actually not quite this pretty. Most therapists feed their patients a load of lies, pump them full of sunshine, which helps in the short term but doesn’t fundamentally change them. I prefer to help the patient see the real truth themselves. I call it ther-I-py. And I let you be the ther-I-pist. It upsets some.”

  He paused.

  “Dive off the deep end with me, Alice. Think of me as the law, again, no pun intended. A measuring stick for what’s good and what’s bad about you. Let me reveal who you really are so we can make the appropriate corrections. What do you say?”

  “You’re saying I’m ugly?”

  “Ugly? That’s a matter of perspective. But your refusal to admit that you’re ugly is triggering denial on a much deeper level. You’re broken. Correction is needed. I can make you whole again.”

  “But you actually think I’m ugly?”

  “Isn’t that what you secretly think every time you look in the mirror? My nose is too big. My cheeks are too fat. I need to lose twenty pounds. No one loves me the way I am. I don’t have any really good friends. No family. Isn’t that why you secretly hate yourself?”

  She felt her fingers trembling on the armrests.

  “The problem, my dear, is that you’re delusional about many things. Drop the illusion and you’ll see who you really are. It might be a bit uncomfortable at first, but it’s the only way to make you whole.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said with a little hesitation. “I don’t even belong here. I may not like some things about me, but I’m not the person you’re talking about.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, then abruptly rose.

  “I’ll make you a deal, Alice. You give it a good thinking tonight, there’s no rush. Look at yourself in the mirror long and hard, and let’s see if you can see through the illusion you’ve created around your cozy little life. Convince me tomorrow that you love everything about yourself, and I’ll consider a different form of therapy. Maybe electric shock treatments. We’ll see.”

  “Shock?”

  “Just a little something to get the juice flowing. No pun intended.” He headed for the door and she pushed herself to her feet. “Your call, Alice. Go deep or keep it shallow, the choice is yours.”

  He unlocked the door, opened it, and turned back.

  “Get some sleep.”

  The door shut and the lock engaged.

  “Wait!”

  As if responding to her voice, the overhead lights blinked out. Darkness engulfed her. Pitch. A thin line of light peeked out from under the bathroom door but it wasn’t enough to give the room any shape.

  “Wait!”

  If Lawson could hear her, he was paying her no mind.

  She stood still, trying to let her eyes adjust to the darkness, mind spinning with the realization that she had no control of the lights.

  The bed was straight ahead, next to the bathroom door.

  She crossed the room, stepping carefully even though she knew there was nothing to trip on. Reached the bathroom door and pulled it open, half expecting to see Lawson leaning against the sink, waiting for her.

  White light spilled past her. The bathroom was as she’d left it. Pristine. Clinical. Not even a water spot on the sink. Perfectly quiet.

  Anxious and once again alone with only her thoughts, Christy walked back to the bed and sat for a while, staring into the dim, bathroom-lit room. She finally settled to her side and curled up.

  It was there, staring at the outline of the desk across the room, that she began to consider Lawson’s jumble of words. Any sane person could see through them. This was his progressive ther-I-py, a clever play on the word which set the focus on the self. She being the ther-I-pist.

  Words, nothing but.

  Unnerving words, but only that.

  Unless…

  And it was that unless that began to get to Christy. Unless there was some truth to what he had said. There was. It was true, for example, that she had a rather low self-image. But she didn’t hate herself.

  Unless he was right and she secretly did.

  She blinked in the darkness and thought about that.

  The what ifs started to cycle through her mind. What if she did hate herself and had only convinced herself that she was okay as a coping mechanism? What if Lawson knew more about her than she did? What if her file contained details about her past that she’d forgotten?

  What if she didn’t know Christy’s past because Christy was only a fabrication of her mind?

  Fear washed down her back and she sat up, heart pounding.

  It was true. She really did secretly hate many things about herself. Why else did she persistently withdraw from others? Why else did she keep a locket with a fake picture around her neck? Why else did she secretly want to be anyone other than who she really was?

  Beautiful, put together, attracting men as she walked confidently across the floor to a stage that waited her appearance—who wouldn’t want that?

  But that wasn’t her. She was the girl who’d been born plain. Ugly, even.

  She rose unsteadily to her feet, Lawson’s words ringing in her head.

  Look at yourself in the mirror long and hard, and let’s see if you can see through the illusion.

  Christy rounded her bed and walked to the bathroom. S
he walked in and tentatively stepped in front of the mirror.

  The plain face, so familiar to her, stared back. Christy.

  Slowly, she began to relax. Christy, not Alice. There was no illusion here, only a very plain image of a girl who’d been born into obscurity. More than once, Austin had told her that he thought she was pretty. What did Austin know? But at least it was something, right?

  She lifted her hand and pinched the flesh around her neck. Pulled it back to see what a thinner neck would look like.

  The difference produced a stunning result. At least as far as her neck went, the slight shift in body mass transformed her into something far more appealing.

  She squeezed her nose, which she’d always considered too fat, particularly around her nostrils. Much better. She let go and looked at herself again. Truth was, she did hate the way she looked. A few thousand dollars might fix it when she got up the nerve. But they couldn’t lengthen fingers.

  He’s talking about your insides, Alice.

  The room suddenly felt ominously quiet. She’d called herself Alice?

  You hate who you are. And for the record, what can Austin know if you only made him up?

  The door to the bathroom slammed shut and Christy spun, heart in her throat. The air had come in and pulled it shut?

  She was about to yank it open, but something in the corner of her eye gave her pause. The mirror was there, right in front of her, and the memory of Lawson’s voice was whispering through her mind.

  Look in the mirror long and hard, it said.

  She turned back to the mirror and stared.

  The girl looking back at her was her. Christy knew that because she looked enough like her to be her. But she was more than a few pounds heavier. Her neck was thick, nearly the width of her head. The end of her nose rose too high. There were more than a few pimples on her chin and cheeks, a couple too pronounced to cover with makeup. Her teeth weren’t straight.

  It was an illusion, of course. But it was strong enough to stop her cold, awash with horror.

  She slowly backed from the mirror, mind stuttering. This isn’t real. This can’t be real. I’m not that ugly. This is just an illusion. This isn’t even an illusion—it’s just a dream.