Spitting Image

The house stood in eerie stillness, as it always did in the winter, the back room that used to be Grant’s practically screaming its secrets. It had been so loud since he left, especially in the wintertime. He loved the snow, and the room never let me forget it. The gray clouds muted everything, especially at night, and the streetlamp outside the second-story window cast a long, ink-black shadow along the wall. I hadn’t realized that the wallpaper had started to peel where the wall met the molding. My fingers trailed along the top of the old paint there, my skin catching on dust, the corpse of a dead spider, and flaked wood. It really had been a long time.

I couldn’t seem to bring myself to step through the doorway. I felt his eyes on me. Grant’s. I knew it wasn’t possible. Not really. He was long gone. The wooden barrier swung open regardless, the hinges groaning in protest from lack of use. The room beyond, pregnant with energy – unsaid apologies, hateful ignominy, final punctuation – leaked old memories.

I hadn’t cleaned it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had all his furniture burned, of course. Couldn’t stand the sight of it. It hurt too much. I flicked on the light switch, and a dusty bulb flickered to life above me.

A chill breeze swept past me as I entered, and I realized very quickly that the window must have a crack or some kind of leak. The place was freezing. It probably explained why my energy bill was so high. My arms wrapped around myself instinctively. I didn’t really know why I brought myself to do this every single year. I was trying to get over something, something too big that I couldn’t put down. It hung on my shoulders like one of those sleep paralysis demons you see in old paintings, ghoulish and somehow a little like you. My fingers clenched around my sweater and the age-old unresponsiveness crept up on me again. My hands trembled. My chest wavered. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

I had to do it.

I spun toward the wall, toward the only thing in the room. Grant’s mirror hung there, covered by a cloth that I had thrown over it shortly after he left. After a few short chokes as beads of sweat formed on my forehead, I dashed for the fabric. I tore it away from the wall like one would rip off a bandage to reveal the mirror underneath. It hit me like a flood.

My reflection stared back at me from the mirror, and I remembered how terrified I looked. As the date approached, I lost out on sleep. Dark purple bags ringed my eyes, wide and white like saucers, and my blond hair knotted against my skull. I hadn’t bathed for days. Weeks? Was I always so thin? Then Grant came, as he always did. The memory of him danced around the room like bad imaging on an old television. He raised his hands up at me, screaming silent words that I couldn’t remember as he spun around the room. I shouted back, pointing an accusatory finger at him. I was much rounder then. He ripped up the corded phone off the nightstand, ripped the cord from the wall, and flung it at me. It left a dent in the door. And then I said it.

“When I know you’re coming home, it makes me want to kill myself!” I screamed.

The mirror had seen everything.

I yelled out in that room alone and I dropped to my knees under the weight of it all. I thought I could face it. I thought I could get the beast off me. I wailed so hard my throat tore itself open, and thundering footfall exploded from somewhere below me. Before long, someone had dragged me to my feet and was ushering me out of the room.

“Claire? Jesus, Claire! I go to make a sandwich for five minutes.”

Before I was pulled from the space, I took one last look at my reflection. That was the face of a woman who had told her husband she wished he was dead.

When I finally came out of my trance, I looked up to see who had grabbed me and nearly threw up. The acidic bubble of fear came up in my throat and I swallowed it, chunks and all, back down. Grant pulled me into the kitchen – no, not Grant. Garrett.

Grant wasn’t here anymore.

Garrett, Grant’s twin brother, sat me down at the kitchen table and hastily reached for an orange bottle. He popped the lid off and pushed my medication into my hands. After practically throwing a cabinet door off its hinges, he handed me a glass of tap water. “You have got to be kidding me, Claire. The psychiatrist said you weren’t allowed in there. Especially today. How’d you find the key?”

“It was under your laptop on your desk,” I replied. I was sure I sounded like my soul had left my body.

“I don’t know what else to do. Dr. Sturges told you that you’re not ready to handle it. Every single year you have another break because you don’t listen to what he tells you. I can’t have you having another break, Claire. I’ve already had to cover every damn mirror in the house.”

I didn’t say anything and just stared into the cup. I could almost make out my reflection there, but not quite, thank God.

“Do you think I wanted to move out here? Abandon my life? My job? Just because my brother decided to marry some—”

He stopped himself.

I looked slowly up at him, interested in what he had to say. “Some what, Garrett?”

* * *

My shaking hands fumbled with the bobby pin as I tried to pry it into the lock. I had let myself go too far. Get lost. If I didn’t do it now, I would never do it. I would be stuck in whatever hell this was, below the surface but never quite deep enough to drown.

Finally, the bobby pin clicked into place and the door popped open.

I turned to look over my shoulder. Garrett should be sound asleep. He hadn’t noticed the Hydroxyzine that I had slipped into his food.

Grant’s room stood before me again, that cold air wrapping me in a hug as I entered. I didn’t dare turn on the light this time. The cloth that I had pulled away remained in a heap where it had fallen a few days ago, crumpled in an uncomfortable shape on the floor. My eyes played tricks on me and imagined someone lying underneath it. I shook my head to clear my thoughts, as if that would help me, and then I looked to the wall. Where it hung, the mirror reflected just the edge of the window and otherwise empty room. I could not see myself in it. Not yet.

The paper in my hand crumpled as my arms started to tremble and my fingers tightened into a fist. With my teeth, I unrolled packing tape – it practically screamed out as the adhesive gave. After ripping away a piece, I closed my eyes and pressed the tape to the paper and the paper to the wall. My finger glided over the smooth tape, and I tried to calm my breath. I could barely stand. I didn’t know if my body could take it.

It had to.

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the paper. A dark photograph took up the upper half of the page, almost indiscernible in the dark. But the headline wasn’t.

Acclaimed and Beloved English Professor, Aged 38, Dies in Head-On Collision with Big Rig.

My eyes met the mirror. A dark silhouette lurked in its circular frame, haloed by the snow-reflected light from the window. I took a step away from the mirror. Then back toward it. My eyes adjusted to the darkness. I didn’t see my face. Not clearly yet. One more step toward it. And then I met eyes that weren’t mine. My eyes were blue. Grant’s dark ones stared back at me.

The world turned around me and suddenly I had been flipped upside down. My face slammed into the mirror, the glass breaking against my skin. Something hit the wall against my head, and when I turned to look back into the room, the light had turned on, and the phone that had once been on the nightstand had slammed into the wall.

“Grant!” I cried, turning to find my husband behind me with his hand behind my head. “Grant, let me go!”

“This is all your fault, you know,” he replied, his tone as smooth as a pane of glass. “You told me to go kill myself, so I did.”

He pulled me back from the mirror by the knots in my hair so I could face him. I grabbed for anything I could, but my fingers merely met wallpaper. “Garrett! Garrett help!”

“It was as easy as driving under the overpass on I-25 right into that 18-wheeler.”

My knees buckled and I hit the floor. The phone. I scrambled for it, but he kicked it away from my hand.

“I’m sorry, Grant! I’m so, so, so sorry!”

“I really made you that miserable?” He kicked me. “I never hit you. Never told you I hated you. Always did everything for you.”

He grabbed me by my face, pinching my cheeks in so hard I couldn’t talk. He had such large hands, and I had lost so much weight. There was no way I could fight back.

“No wonder you can’t look at yourself. You’re horrifying. I hope you really soak in every single second of suffering. That’s how every moment I spent with you felt.” He spun me around and shoved my face into the shattered mirror again, cutting my cheeks and my bottom lip. The metallic bitterness of blood dribbled across my tongue and then down my nightgown. “I hope I eat you alive.”

The mirror. I turned and grabbed the mirror from the wall, spinning with as much force as I could to slam the glass into the side of his head. The mirror shattered into a thousand pieces, the glass slicing open the left side of his face. As soon as the glass hit his skin, time froze. All at once, it was not the glass of the mirror that dashed across his face, but the glass from his car’s windshield. The headlights of the big rig bleached his face out and his muscles contorted from the force. And then we were back in the empty room. The mirror’s frame danced across the floor as it slid into the corner. He looked at me, his smile swimming with blood.

He lunged.

“Grant!” I pleaded. “Grant, stop!”

We danced around the room, the broken glass on the floor cutting open my bare feet. I grabbed a piece and wielded it at him.

“I’m going to follow you every waking moment, Claire. You won’t be able to look at your face ever again without seeing yourself as I saw you in the end. As the bitch that told me to take my life.”

“I was wrong, Grant. I was confused!”

“You weren’t confused, Claire. You were hateful. You hated yourself and couldn’t stand the ugly bitch you had become, inside and out, and so you took it out on everyone else.”

He came at me again, and I lunged at him with the same ferocity. My arm jutted toward him, glass in hand, skin burning from the deep laceration that was forming there from gripping the shard so hard. But I moved past him. I moved my arms under his and I wrapped my arms around him as tightly as I could. I embraced him.

“I’m sorry Garrett,” I cried, tears mingling with blood as they trailed through my cuts, stinging them with their salt. “I’m so sorry. You’re right. My own hurt was never an excuse to hurt you in the way I did. We weren’t the perfect couple, and we tried. But I can’t let you hurt me anymore either.”

I raised the piece of glass as his arms tightened around me, pushing every bit of air out of my lungs, and I drove it into my eye.

* * *

My body shook. Not shook, necessarily, but rattled back and forth. As I emerged from a fog, something pressed into my face, so heavy I couldn’t sit up.

“I need you to call ahead to Denver General, let the surgeon know we’ve got a self-harm suicide coming in with severe head trauma.”

I didn’t recognize them.

“Oh, thank God! Hey, hey! She’s breathing!”

Grant. No. Not Grant. Garrett.

Someone squeezed my hand.

“Garrett?” I asked. My throat felt like I had swallowed sandpaper.

“Jesus, Claire,” he replied in the darkness, his voice shaky with sobbing. “Why’d you go and do something so damn stupid?”

“I’m gonna make you a promise, Garrett,” I croaked, attempting to turn my head. A hand promptly stopped me from doing so. “I screwed up our lives. I shattered our whole family. I shouldn’t have yelled at Grant so much.”

“It wasn’t all your fault, Claire. Grant threw shit at you, too. Don’t forget—”

“It’s okay. None of it matters anymore. I’m going to fix this shattered life. He doesn’t have a hold on me. I’ll never see his reflection – or mine – ever again.”