The two lines had a rhythm in them I had not, in nine years of ghosting, ever quite given to her. The rhythm was mine. The rhythm was, possibly, the only thing I had not let her have.
I shut the drawer.
I shut it hard. The brass pull jumped under my palm. The whole desk shook. The fiddle leaf fig leaned a fraction further toward the lamp.
I pressed both palms flat over my face.
It was then that the air pressure in the room dropped.
It dropped the way it dropped in the seconds before a real storm — that small, unsettling lift in the inner ear, the soft pop in the sinuses, the sense that the apartment itself had taken a breath and was holding it. The fig‘s largest leaf shivered without any wind to shiver it. The kettle, which was empty, made a small metallictinkon the burner as though it had been knocked.
I lowered my hands.
The bathroom door was open. I had not closed it on my way in. From the desk chair I could see directly into the bathroom—three feet of doorway, the edge of the white tile, and, on the far wall, the small medicine-cabinet mirror over the sink. The cabinet was old. The mirror was old. The silvering had worn in two thin lines along the bottom edge and I had been meaning, for two years, to ask the super about replacing it.
The mirror was rippling.
It was rippling the way the surface of a pond ripples when a stone has been dropped at the far end and you are watching the rings come toward you. It was rippling the way skin ripples under a hand pressed flat against the inside of it. It was rippling, and it was not—quite—reflecting my bathroom anymore.
I stood up.
It was a mistake. I should have backed against the desk and called somebody, although I was not sure who I would have called.
But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t have any option but to move closer.
I crossed the three feet of bathroom doorway and the white tile underneath my bare feet was, impossibly, warm. The air in the bathroom smelled of things that did not belong in a bathroom on Suydam Street. It smelled of cold water on stone, the way the inside of a cathedral smells in summer. It smelled, faintly, of jasmine, the way the air had smelled outside a hotel in Lisbon on a trip I had taken, once, alone, in my early twenties. It smelled of ozone, the way the platform at Hoyt-Schermerhorn smelled in the seconds after a train. It smelled, very faintly, of someone else’s perfume — a perfume I had never worn but recognized, the way you recognize a piece of music you have heard once in a film you cannot place.
The mirror was no longer a mirror.
It was a sheet of something the color of mercury, pearled along its surface with the soft iridescence of an oyster shell, and it had—somehow, without depth and with all the depth in the world—become a window. Behind it I could see the suggestion of a room: dark stone the color of wet slate, polished to a mirror finish, and the faintest wash of a sky going through a color that did not, that I could remember, exist. Lavender turning to bronze turning to a green I had no name for. Not the green of a leaf. Not the green of the sea. A green that had been waiting, somewhere, to be the green of something.
In the mirror—in the not-mirror, in the silver—there was a face.
It wasalmostmy face. It was the face of a woman who looked the way I had looked in the Crosby’s ladies’ room when I had let myself, for one second, look.Want.Bare. Undeflected. The hair down. The shoulders down from around the ears. The hazel eyes finally landing somewhere — landing, I realized with a small,distant shock, on me. The face in the silver was looking back at me.
The pressure in the apartment held.
The mirror did not close.
Somewhere on the other side of the silver—far away and also, it turned out, very near—there was a sound that was almost a voice. Not a word. Not yet. The shape, perhaps, that a voice makes in the half-second before it becomes a word. A breath in a room that had been quiet for a long time. A breath that knew my name.
The pilot light behind my ribs, the one I had felt at the bar, came back up.
I lifted my hand.
I put my fingertips to the silver. It was warm. Liquid. It gave, the way the surface of a held breath gives, and my fingers went through to the wrist, and the wrist went through to the elbow.
On the other side I felt a hand—hands—the tug of want, of need, of jealousy.
I stepped through.
Chapter 2
Mybodyfeltasthough I was being turned inside out. Like I’d been pulled through a small gap and reformed.
Then, after that bizarre sensation, I landed on my hands and knees on something solid. Solid but soft.
Not tile. Not stone. Something that gave under my palms the way hard flesh gives. Warm. Not hot. The warmth of a body that has been sitting in the sun. The warmth of skin.
