He jumped from his chair. A wheelchair was folded up in the corner of the room, and he quickly opened it. He had to move fast, because he knew that if Gary or the nurse came in, they would surely intervene. He pushed the chair to the side of the bed, and tucking the blanket all around her, he lifted Sarah into it. She weighed so little, it was like lifting a bundle of rags.
Glancing out her bedroom door, he was glad to see that Gary and Walter had moved down the hall, toward the reception desk and its big silver coffee urn. In one swift motion, he steered the chair out her door and then out of sight down the hall. Now he just had to find his way into that garden.
In his haste, the first door he tried turned out to be a utility closet, the second one a dispensary. But the third, with a metal crossbar across it, looked more promising, and turning the chair so that he could press on the bar with his own back, he felt a rush of cold air. While he was dragging the wheels over the bump of the threshold, a corner of the blanket got caught in the closing door, threatening for a second to pull Sarah out of the chair altogether. David had to stop, bend down, and wrench it free.
When he looked up at her face, he thought he saw a glimmer of recognition.
“David? Are you … really here?” she said, her voice murky and slow.
“Sure looks that way,” he said, tucking the blanket back around her.
“Where are we?”
“We’re getting some fresh air,” he said, his breath clouding, as he pushed the chair out into the garden.
“Cold,” she said. “It’s cold.”
“I know that,” he said, his fingers scrabbling under his shirt to retrieve the Medusa. A gust of wind plucked the scarf off her head and blew it onto the frozen pond. “I just need you to do something for me,” he said, as he lifted the amulet over his own head, and brushed aside the black silk backing that concealed the mirror.
“Are we in the backyard?” she asked. “I bet Emme’s waiting for you upstairs—you should go and surprise her.”
“I will,” he promised, “I will.” He put the Medusa into her palm and helped her to raise her hand. “But right now I want you to look at yourself in this mirror.”
She seemed confused, and irritated. “No, I don’t do that anymore. I don’t look at myself in mirrors anymore.”
“You have to, just this once.” He glanced over his shoulder, past the roof of the hospice, to gauge where the moon was in the sky. A dark cloud was just drifting past it.
He angled the mirror to be sure to catch the emerging rays.
“The mirror,” he repeated. “Look in the mirror.”
Frowning, she did what he asked. “I can’t see a thing,” she said.
“You will in a minute,” he said, humoring her, as he bent low to see if the mirror was being held in the right spot. Its convex surface gleamed, like a shiny dark scarab, in the moonlight. He could see his sister’s reflection, hovering in the glass as if it were staring out rather than in, and he braced her hand so that the pose would be held. The waters of eternity, captured behind the glass, were receiving their blessing from the radiant moon.
But how long did it take?
He was startled by a thumping sound—a palm flatly smacking against a window—and he glanced back into Sarah’s lighted bedroom where he could see Gary, his shocked face pressed close to the glass, banging again and again.
“Keep looking,” David urged his sister, “just keep looking.” Any moment, he expected Walter to come barreling outside to rescue her.
But the hand holding the mirror suddenly dropped into Sarah’s lap and her head snapped back against the wheelchair, as if she’d suffered a seizure.
Had it worked?
David snatched the mirror out of her lap, wondering if he would actually feel any difference in it. Would it be hotter? colder? charged somehow?
But it was his own face he was seeing … his own eyes staring back at him from the bottom of its deep, dark well … and before he knew it, a jolt like electricity had sizzled through his limbs. His jaw clenched shut, his head went back, and his knees nearly buckled; if he hadn’t been holding on to the wheelchair, he’d have collapsed on the spot.
The courtyard door flew open, as Gary and the nurse came running toward them.
“Are you out of your mind?” Walter said, pushing the helpless David away from the handlebars of the chair.
David staggered backwards, his arms dangling loose, his legs shaking. He leaned, reeling, between the birch trees, afraid that he might pass out.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Gary barked, as he snatched her scarf from the icy pond.
Walter whirled the chair around and headed back through the door. Gary, following him in, was so mad he didn’t even bother to look back at David.
And David didn’t blame them. He knew how insane this looked.
A bank of clouds obscured the moon, casting the courtyard into darker shadow.
Through the window of her room, he could see Sarah being lifted back into the bed, extra blankets being piled over her again. And he could only imagine what was being said about her distraught, but deranged, younger brother.
But none of it mattered. Not any longer. He had done what he had set out to do … and no one—no Greek hero, no Florentine artisan—could have achieved anything more. Come what may, he was at peace with what he had done.