"Sure you won't have a little more?" she asked.
"Better not, I'm driving," Mike said, and they had another laugh. Cory came back and Lisey thought Mike would also ask to use the bathroom, but he didn't - guys had bigger kidneys, bigger bladders, bigger somethings, or so Scott had claimed - and Lisey was glad, because that meant only the girl gave her that funny look before they drove away with the disassembled booksnake in the back of the van. Oh, she undoubtedly told Mike what she saw in the living room and found in the bathroom, told him on the long drive north to the University of Maine at Orono, but Lisey wasn't there to hear it. The girl's look wasn't so bad, come to that, because Lisey hadn't known what it meant at the time, although she had patted the side of her head, thinking maybe her hair had fallen funny across her ear or was standing up or something. Then, later (after popping the iced-tea glasses into the dishwasher without so much as a look at them), she'd gone to use the bathroom herself and saw the towel hanging across the mirror in there. She remembered putting the hand-towel over the medicine cabinet mirror upstairs, remembered blinding that one perfectly well, but when had she done this one?
Lisey didn't know.
She went back to the living room and saw there was a sheet hung in a swag over the mirror above the mantel, as well. She should have noticed that on her way through, she imagined Cory had, it was pretty smucking obvious, but the truth was little Lisey Landon didn't spend much time studying her own reflection these days.
She did a walk-through and discovered all but two of the mirrors on the ground floor had been sheeted, toweled, or (in one case) taken down and turned to the wall; the last two survivors she now covered as well, in the spirit of in for a penny, in for a pound. As she did them, Lisey wondered exactly what the young librarian in the fashionable pink Red Sox baseball cap had thought. That the famous writer's widow was either Jewish or had adopted the Jewish custom of mourning, and that her mourning still continued? That she had decided Kurt Vonnegut was right, that mirrors weren't reflective surfaces but leaks, portholes to another dimension? And really, wasn't that what she did think?
Not portholes, windows. And do I have to care what some librarian from Moo U thinks?
Oh, probably not. But there were so many reflective surfaces in a life, weren't there?
Not just mirrors. There were juice glasses to avoid glancing in first thing in the morning and wineglasses not to peer into at sundown. There were so many times when you sat behind the wheel of your car and saw your own face looking back at you from the dashboard instruments. So many long nights when the mind of something... other...might turn to a person, if that person could not keep her mind from turning to it. And how, exactly, did you keep from doing that? How did you not think of something? The mind was a high-kicking, kilt-wearing rebel, to quote the late Scott Landon. It could get up to...well, shit fire and save your matches, why not say it? It could get up to such badgunky. And there was something else, too. Something even more frightening. Maybe even if it didn't come to you, you wouldn't be able to help going to it. Because once you stretched those smucking tendons...once your life in the real world started to feel like a loose tooth in a sick socket -
She'd be walking downstairs, or getting into the car, or turning on the shower, or reading a book, or opening a crossword magazine, and there would be a feeling absurdly like an oncoming sneeze or (mein gott, babyluv, mein gott, leedle Leezy - !) an approaching orgasm and she would think, Oh smuck, I'm not coming, I'm going, I'm going over. The world would seem to waver and there would be that sense of a whole other world waiting to be born, one where the sweetness curdled and turned to poison after dark. A world that was just a sidestep away, no more than the flick of a hand or the turn of a hip. For a moment she would feel Castle View drop away on every side and she would be Lisey on a tightrope, Lisey walking a knife-edge. Then she'd be back again, a solid (if middle-aged and a little too thin) woman in a solid world, walking down a flight of stairs, slamming a car door, adjusting the hot water, turning the page of a book, or solving eight across: Old-style gift, four-letter word, starts with B, ends with N. 9