Mirror of Truth

The pounding knocks on the door grew vigorously louder as she sat in the dimly lit closet where her uncle had previously placed her in great haste as he staggered into the connected back room of the house. The meager, small statured girl at just six years old watched her uncle as he thrashed around the bedroom, violently tossing around items, searching for something the girl was not able to comprehend at the moment. 

“Uncle Jeremy?” the girl quietly questioned the frantic man. “Do you need help finding whatever you’re looking for? Is it for the person knocking at the door? Would you like me to go and answer the door for you?” the little girl asked impatiently. 

 “No, Jaimey just stay in that closet and don’t come out until I say you can. I need to take care of some important business,” the man said, his face a ghostly white.  He finally found the item he had been searching for, a gun. At that moment a deafening crashing sound came from the front of the house. Jaimey shrunk back inside of the small and narrow walk-in closet. She felt as if the walls were beginning to cave in all around her, as the noisy commotion got louder and closer.  Her uncle mumbled a few choice words under his breath before he turned to Jaimey. He appeared to be avoiding her direct eye contact for a reason Jaimey was not yet aware of yet and wouldn’t be for years to come.

     “Do not leave this spot!” the man said with a look of sheer terror arising in his once youthful face. Jaimey stared deeply into his grimly lit eyes. She noticed the way he looked at her, as if she were a fallen angel. Something so pure it was untouchable. There was so much emotion, so much fear in his eyes. A deep sense of darkness covered his expression. She felt like she was witnessing the death of a part of her uncle, she would later realize as the death of his last bit of innocence and possibly her’s too. 

The noises at the front of the house grew louder as the source of them grew dangerously closer. Jaimey trembled as she listened to the deep angry voices that sounded like thunder through the  rustic walls of their old house. 

“Where are you Jeremy?” she heard a raspy voice yell in a threatening tone. Then the gunshots sounded. Jaimey winced at the defining sound of the gunfire, but the strange thing was the gunshots didn’t sound real. It was almost as if it were an echo of something that had already happened.  The thought threw her off for only a brief moment before she jetted out of the closet into the middle of chaos. Jaimey came to a halt at the doorway of the room that had once been identified as the den. It now had the appearance of a 19th century battlefield. There were four lifeless human forms that looked as if they had just been thrown on the floor. Staring at her from the other side of the room at the doorway that lead to the kitchen was her uncle. He was holding the gun in his hand as if it were a heavy weight that was super glued to his fingers. No matter how hard he tried he could not let go. 

“Uncle Jeremy, what did you do?” Jaimey asked squeamishly. 

     5 years later...

“Are you sure you want to go see him?” a blond woman wearing a dress suit asked the now 11 year old Jaimey. Jaimey took a deep breath and immediately regretted doing so, the stench in the prison’s visitor’s waiting room was horrific. The terrible smell that filled her nostrils made her want to vomit. 

“Jaimie Lynn and Kathryn Amble, you may now see Jeremy Lynn.” said a gruff looking cop standing at the heavy metal door.  Jaimey followed the woman into the room. The glass wall separating her and her uncle, the uncle she had not even laid her eyes on in five years, gave her a strange sense of security. She cautiously sat down on the red cracked plastic chair that reminded her of the chairs they had in her kindergarten classroom. 

Once she was seated, she picked up the weird black plastic telephone. A peculiarly familiar persona walked up to the glass and sat down. His face looked like it had been tie-dyed blue and purple and was swollen, but there was something about the way he looked into Jaimey’s eyes. It was the facial expression of sadness and grief. This was how he had looked at her before the crime was committed and the men were killed, and how he looked at her at the trial when she had been a witness to the crime and put him in jail in the first place.  

     “Jaimey?” The man asked, studying the girl who was now quite a bit tall for her age, Her light curly brown hair turned darker and less curly. Jaimey stared at the man, she felt tears forming in her eyes. Even though she knew it was wrong, she wanted to hug the man. He had raised her for the first 6 years of her life. She couldn’t just leave those feeling behind. Then again there was also the fact that he had killed four men while she was just a room away.

     “Why?” Jaimey said. She knew he would understand what the one word question meant. It was the question he had expected her to come and ask for years. “Why?” she repeated, this time the fountain of tears made its way down her cheek like a rainstorm in the middle of tornado season. She stared at her uncle, trying to figure out his response, guessing what his excuse might be. Nothing at all could have prepared her for the answer he was about to give.

“It wasn’t me. You know who it was, my dear. You just have to remember. You know who it was,” the man exclaimed passionately and without another word he hung up the phone and staggered out of the room one leg dragging behind the other as if he had a permanent limp, which Jaimey attributed to when the cops had shot him when they arrived at the house the night of the murders. Jaimey looked up at the woman who had been sitting beside her the entire time, her eyes sparkling from the tears had continued to form through the visiting session. The woman looked down into Jaimey’s eyes with a sympathetic expression but said nothing. 

 The words of Jaimey’s uncle stuck into her mind  like they had been branded into her brain. “It wasn’t me”, “You know who it was, You just have to remember”.  Was he telling the truth? She wondered. Did he really not kill all of those people? Could he be innocent? Do I know who actually did it? She wondered trying to wrack her brain for any memory that might indicate that someone else committed the horrible crime of a quadruple murder. 

     That night it happened, she remembered that night as if it were happening before her eyes. There was only one problem. She didn’t like what she saw, not only didn’t she like it, but it terrified her. The memory made her want to run and hide and never come back to her horrible new reality that she had to face whether she liked it or not, but that couldn’t have been how it happened. There had to be some mistake. Maybe she just had an overactive imagination. Yeah, that’s what it is, I am just over excited from getting to see Uncle Jeremy, she told herself. Unfortunately her attempt to self-reassure herself was useless. It all started to make since, all of the missing pieces, all of the memories from that day that had disappeared could all be fit in, and the scary thing was they fit perfectly. 

She walked up to the girl that was standing at the other side of the room by the wall. She could see the fiery fear in the girl’s eyes as the event played out before her. The men were knocking on the door, it was so loud. She was frightened. They couldn’t have come back for them already. They had just relocated for the 10th time. Looking around the room, the frightened girl spotted a shiny metal object. She had seen a similar object before, the people who took care of her used them to stop the bad men, such as the ones knocking at the door. She decided she would use the object to stop the men, just like her guardians. 

     The gun was quite heavy for a person her size. Her small arms struggled to aim the gun in the direction of the door. She watched the door splinter and crack as the door finally gave into the weight of the mass of the grown men trying to kick it down. As the men entered through the space of what was once the front door, the girl had tightened her grip around the trigger sending bullets soaring through the air. Each bullet striking each man multiple times in the chest and lower abdominal area. In the end four men had been left astray on the living room floor.  A man came and took the girl away, safe into another part of the house, while he figured out what to do with the mess she created. 

     The reality of this vision was, one of great consequences. Jaimey looked at the same girl with tears in her eyes and said, “It was you. You did it. You killed all of them. You’re the reason Uncle Jeremy is in jail.” The girl stared back the same tears streaming down her face. She appeared to be saying the same thing as Jaimey, but she had no voice. 

“He tried to protect you, he took the blame for you, and you couldn’t even remember what he did? He is in jail for life and you couldn’t even remember to thank him?  It may have been an accident, but he took the blame anyway. You stayed mad at him for years and refused to talk to him when in reality it was your fault. It was you.” Jaimey screamed at the girl in front of her. Once she finished with her yelling episode she moved away from the mirror hanging on her wall and sat on her bed, all alone, in her room as she had been for hours.