And in the mirror, you saw a shimmer. A sparkling something that wasn’t there before.
“Mother?” you whispered, your eyes on the shimmer.
Not just a shimmer now, a shape. A darkly glimmering shape hovering in the mirror behind Mother’s reflection. Mother shook her head at the mirror. She took another drag of her cigarette. She was staring at the shape too. Like she wasn’t at all surprised to see it there.
“It said something else,” Mother whispered, her eyes on the shape. What sort of shape? Something or someone?
Someone.
A figure. Staring at Mother. You could feel it staring though it had no eyes you could see. Just a silhouette, remember?
“What did it say?”
“Something terrible,” Mother said, staring at the figure who stared back. “Something inevitable. Something true.”
Like what? Like what?
Mother shook her head again and again. She looked in the mirror like she was about to cry. The figure was looking at Mother sorrowfully. Fake sorrowfully, you felt, you didn’t know why. And that’s when it looked up. Lifted its eyes from Mother to you. Yes, it had eyes, though you couldn’t see them. You could feel them on you. A coldness. It stared at you and smiled. You knew it was smiling, though it had no mouth you could see either. Just a man-shaped shadow. Just that shimmering silhouette.
You should’ve been afraid. You really should’ve been. Definitely. But you weren’t, were you? When you felt his eyes on you, all of you was suddenly lit up. Like the glow-in-the dark stars on your bedroom ceiling. Like your grandmother’s chandelier. You were smiling now.
“And then what happened, Mother?” Your eyes were staring right into his eyes, you could sort of see them now. He had eyes that saw your soul, you knew this. It was a he, you knew that, too, didn’t you?
Mother wasn’t looking at the figure anymore. She was looking at you.
“Mother?” you pressed, feeling the figure’s eyes on you. “What happened?”
But Mother just smiled darkly in the glass.
“And then all hell broke loose.”
Part I
1
2016
La Jolla, California
After the funeral. I’m hiding in Mother’s bathroom watching a skincare video about necks. Cheap black dress that chafes. Illicit cigarette. Sitting on the toilet amid her decorative baskets, her red jellyfish soaps, her black towel sets. Smoke comes tumbling out of my mouth in amorphous gray clouds. I blow it out the window where the palm trees still sway and the alien sun still shines and the sky is a blue that hurts my eyes. There’s a Kleenex box made entirely of jagged seashells at my back—probably she never once filled it with Kleenex. There’s her mirror over the sink, a crack running right down the middle of the glass. Whenever I look at myself in that mirror, I look broken. Cleaved. There’s the perfume she wore every day of her life on the marble counter, the Chanel Rouge Allure lipstick in its gold-and-black case. A little cluster of red jars and vials on a silver tray. For the face, dear. For the face, I can hear Mother saying to me. Need all the help we can get, am I right? Cynical smile of the beautiful who know they’re on the downhill slope.
Yes, Mother, I’d say. But not you. You don’t need any help at all.
I don’t look closely at any of it.
Instead I stare at my phone, where the skin video plays. My eyes are dry and they are focused. Focused on Dr. Marva, who is telling me in her reassuring English accent all about my poor, poor neck. The video is actually called “How to Save Your Own Neck.” I’ve watched it before. It’s one of my favorites.
Dr. Marva’s soft yet firm words fill my mother’s bathroom.
“We don’t take care of our necks,” Dr. Marva is saying sadly. And she looks quite sad in her white silk blouse. As if she is grieving for us and our poor necks. “They often get neglected, don’t they?”
She looks right at me with her golden eyes. I find myself nodding as I always do.
“Yes, Marva,” I whisper along. Yes, they do get neglected.
“Which is quite a tragedy,” Marva observes. “Because the skin there is already so thin.”
Didn’t Mother always tell me this? The neck never lies, Belle. The neck is truthful, deeply cruel. Like a mirror of the soul. It reveals all, you see? And she’d point at her own throat. I’d look at Mother’s throat and see nothing. Just an expanse of whiteness shot through with blue veins.
I see, Mother, I always said.
On my phone screen, Marva shakes her head as if this truth about necks is one she cannot bear to speak. “What atrocities,” she whispers, stroking her own neck, “might bloom here? Redness, of course,” she intones. “A brown pigment, perhaps. Thinning, atrophied patches. Essentially,” she adds with a laugh, “a triumvirate of horror.”
As Marva says this, she tilts her head back to reveal an impossibly smooth white column of flesh. Untainted, unmarred. She strokes the skin softly with her red-nailed hands.
As I watch her do this, I begin to stroke my own neck. I can’t help it.
A flash of Mother’s throat appears again in my mind’s eye. Smooth and pale just like Marva’s. Always some pendant to show off the hollows. Then toward the end, this sudden fondness for jewel-toned glass, stones cut in the strangest shapes. An obsidian dagger. A warped, dark red heart. The way she’d clutch that heart with her fingers. Look at me on video calls like she was lost and my face was a dark forest, a mirror in which she barely recognized herself.
Dread fills my stomach now as I stroke my own neck. Not at the memory of Mother, I’m ashamed to say. But because I feel the skin tags, the unsightly bands here and here and here.
“Your poor, poor neck,” Marva whispers, shaking her head again as if she can actually see me. “It could really use some tightening and brightening, couldn’t it?”
Yes, Marva. It really could.
Knock, knock.
Sylvia. I can feel it. Her little knuckles rapping on the door. Then the saccharine tone I hear in my teeth roots. “Mirabelle?” she says. “Mira, are you in there?”
Terrible to hear my name spoken by that voice. I think of Mother’s voice. Rich, deep, accented with French. I was only ever Mirabelle when she was angry. She never once dignified Mira, though it’s what I mostly go by these days. Belle, she always called me. Toward the end, though, she just stared at me confused. Who are you? she’d whisper. Who are you?
Now I close my eyes as though I’ve been struck. The cigarette is ash in my hands.
Another, more persistent knock from Sylvia. “Hello? Are we in there?”
I can’t ignore Sylvia. She’ll try the door. I’ll watch the crystal knob rattle. When she finds it locked, she’ll take a screwdriver to the handle. A credit card to the lock. She might even kick it down with her little Gucci-soled foot. All under the smiling guise of concern.
I open the door. Step back and smooth my little black dress down. Is it a dress? More like a strangely cut sack. It hangs on me like it’s deeply depressed. Maybe it is. It was Sylvia who loaned me this dress, of course. Brought it in from her and Mother’s dress shop, Belle of the Ball, where I myself used to work years ago. Before I left California and went back to Montreal. Left Mother’s dress shop to work in another dress shop. Left me, Mother might say.
Here you are, my dear, Sylvia said yesterday, handing me the sad black shroud on its wooden hanger. My dear, she called me, and I felt my soul shudder.
In case you need something to wear for the… party. That’s what they call funerals here in California now, apparently. Parties. I looked at the black shapeless shift and I thought, Since when did Mother start selling such grim fare in her shop? I wanted to boldly refuse. My firmest, coldest No thank you. But I actually did need something to wear. I’d brought nothing with me on this trip. Ever since last week, I’ve been in a haze. That was when I got the phone call from the policeman at work. Mirabelle Nour? he said.
Yes?