Dead Reflections (15 page)

* * *

They heard the car hit something that sounded like a dull thud akin to a sandbag being struck. Robbie was sitting on the back porch, trying to leaf through a magazine but unable to concentrate. He and Tanya had questioned Cory about the dumb waiter chute when they’d gotten home, but he’d not said anything. He sat before them, visibly frightened and too quiet. In Robbie’s mind, Cory almost looked like he was trying to fold himself up inside himself, the way some flowers will draw their petals in during cold evenings.

“You can’t go in that chute. It’s an eight foot drop to a concrete floor in that basement, do you understand me?” Robbie had urged him. “I know it seems like a fun place to play because it’s different, but you could be killed. That is the second time you have done this. Why?”

Cory had looked at him with cry-swollen eyes, his arms wrapped around his knees, hugging himself. “What’s it like to die?” was all he’d said.

Robbie and Tanya had stared at him.

“What a thing to ask!” Tanya had exclaimed. “I don’t want you to find out by falling in that thing. We are sealing the door. That’s the end of it.” She’d glanced at Robbie, shaken her head, and had gone downstairs to fix herself tea, upset with the whole affair.

“What’s really bothering you, son?” Robbie had persisted. “You seem so…I don’t know…out of it. Is something else on your mind? Did you and your new friend have a fight? She’ll get over it and come back over, I assure you.”

“I don’t want any friends coming over.”

“What? Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

Robbie sighed. “Listen; you’ll make more friends. Life will get better. Just give things time. Will you look at me please?”

Cory raised his eyes again and Robbie saw something in them; something that reached out and twisted at his heart—unadulterated terror in his boy’s eyes.

“Everything is fine, son. Everything’s good. Gina will be back.”

The kid looked like someone who desperately wanted to believe his father’s words, but couldn’t. Robbie reached out and hugged his son to him.

He went downstairs and found Tanya sitting at the counter, drinking tea, her face tense.

“Chris says Gina came over to see Cory around 10 AM this morning and that they’d been playing upstairs. He says the kid must have gone home without them noticing. He and Cole were in the parlor playing video games. Cory must have gotten bored and gone exploring for something to do after she left. However, he’s really shaken up by something. He won’t say what.”

“That thing he said, about what it might be like to die…why would he ask us such a thing?” Tanya’s eyes searched his. “Why is he even thinking about it?”

Robbie waved his hand. “He fell in the chute. It scared him. He might have thought he was going to die. He’s had the morning to think about it. He’s at that age where the realization that we
can
die has sunken in.”

“The loss of innocence,” Tanya said.

“Yeah. Something like that.” Robbie rubbed his eyes and plucked a magazine from the counter. “I’m going to go sit out on the porch. Join me?”

“I will. I’m going to take some chops out to thaw for supper first.”

“See you out there,” he said, standing up and giving her a kiss before leaving the room. He’d been out there only ten minutes when the sound of a collision came to him. He stood straight up, dropping the magazine. Whatever had happened had occurred near their house. He was halfway through the yard when he saw Tanya run from their front door, her hands coming up to her mouth at the sight of something having taken place further up the road.

* * *

Cory wept. He cried until no sound came out of him and still he wept, his body shuddering. Tanya held him to her.

“It was a terrible, terrible accident. Her poor parents. It is okay, honey. I’m so sorry you had to see that.” Cory had come out of the house behind Tanya, drawn by the sound of a woman screaming: Gina’s mother. They’d been some of the first people to run towards the woman named Linda Dewar and to try to comfort her until the police arrived. Naturally, she had been inconsolable, rocking her poor baby’s body in her arms while the shocked driver had sat down hard in the road, pale, broken by what had just occurred.

“She just appeared in the road out of nowhere,” he kept repeating over and over again.

When the police had arrived, only then did Robbie walk back home, carrying his emotional son and consoling his broken wife; what they had witnessed was any parents’ worst nightmare. It was one of those horrible moments when no amounts of ‘I’m so very sorry’ phrases could help in any way. The mother of the girl had just had her heart ripped out of her life; her daughter, Cory’s new friend, gone just like that.

Robbie had stumbled home, numb, and had collapsed on a chair in the kitchen. Cory lay against Tanya on the sofa, both of them weeping, weeping, weeping. The day grew dark around them despite its sun and heat.

“What is dead?” Cory asked. “What is it?”

Robbie had come into the room to sit with them. He and Tanya stared at each other. He didn’t answer for a long moment and then, when he did, he chose his words with care, aware of how they could impact on a young mind.

“It’s when the person is no longer in their body.”

“Where do they go?”

Robbie wiped at his mouth, distraught. “I don’t know, son. Nobody knows for sure. Most people believe in heaven, a beautiful place where we all go when we know it’s our time to go home. Why did you ask about it earlier?”

“I don’t know,” Cory wept.

Tanya wrung her hands. “It doesn’t matter. He couldn’t have foreseen this. That poor woman. That poor family. Gina was their only child.”

“What’s home like in the place where you go when you die?” Cory persisted.

“I don’t know, Cory. I guess it can be anything you want it to be. It’s supposed to be very beautiful. I’m sure that wherever Gina is now, she’s being looked after.”

Cory looked at him. “Does that place have a screen door on its back porch?”

Robbie stared at him. “What? What do you mean?”

Cory looked away again, broken. None of it made any sense. The day felt like jelly slipping into a dark drain.

Night; the sky was clear and star-studded, the house silent other than the occasional chirrup of a cricket outdoors. The clock in their stove face read 3:18 AM, its digital numbers square and glowing an unearthly green. It had taken Tanya and Robbie a long time to fall asleep, but finally they had after they’d each gotten up and checked on Cory and then the other boys, almost afraid to leave their children.

Cory slept on his back, his tears dried, his mouth open. He’d cried himself to sleep.

Now something woke him up, a soft sound beside his bed. His eyes came open in the dark. He became aware that someone stood beside him, watching him. He rolled his head around to see who it was, expecting it to be his mother or father checking on him.

Gina stood there, her face whitewashed by moonlight. She wore the same clothes she had earlier today before she’d died. She wasn’t cut up and broken like she’d been at the accident scene. She was wholesome, clean, although her face looked sad.

“I miss you,” she said. “They can’t see me at home. Only that other family can and I don’t like them that much. They keep telling me that I’ll get used to them. I won’t. Can you come over, please?”

She walked away from him and up his hallway towards the spare bedroom. Cory watched her reach the open doorway of the empty bedroom. She paused to look back at him.

“They want you to come over,” she said, her voice more inside his head than resonating along the corridor. Then she entered the bedroom.

Cory hesitated and glanced into his parents’ room. He heard his father’s snoring. His mother’s form was still. Cory padded past his brothers’ rooms and into the empty bedroom. Gina had already gone ahead to the mirror.

He reached the mirror and stood in front of it, seeing his reflection only. He touched the glass.

“Gina?” He kept his voice to a whisper. Okay; so maybe this was death. At least she was still here for him. He brought his hands to the glass and pressed hard with his fingers, feeling for the familiar ‘give’ that he’d come to expect. Jeffrey had always let him come and go and now that he knew he could still see Gina, he felt better.

The glass didn’t give.

“Gina…”

Then he saw her standing on the other side of the mirror, her fingers pressed to match his on the glass, her eyes wide.
Help me.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked. He saw a dark form step behind Gina and yank her back from the mirror. A scuffle followed and both forms disappeared back into the depths of Jeffrey’s house. Cory hadn’t been able to discern if the form had been one of the men or women.

“Leave her alone!” Tears rode the edge of his voice. He pounded his fists against the mirror and felt the glass give a little. The first inch of each fingertip sunk into what felt like warm, silver mud and then his hands pushed through. He’d bring her back into his parents’ house. She’d be safe here. He felt certain of it. First, he had to find her. Then he’d tell his parents the truth about Jeffrey and the mirror and he’d make them stop.

* * *

From the time her first son had been born, Tanya never fully slept without one ear ‘attuned’ to the sound of her children at night. Call it a mother’s instinct, but she’d awaken over the softest cough or the sound of a footstep making a board creak along a floor.

She sat upright in bed, the tone of Cory’s voice resounding on the edge of her sleep. She hurled the bedcovers back and hurried into his room. His bed was empty.

“Cory?” She flipped on the light switch in the bathroom. Not here, either. She poked her head into Cole’s, then Chris’s rooms to see if Cory may have slipped into bed with one of his brothers, something he’d do from time to time when he’d had a nightmare. Both of her sons were asleep, but Cory wasn’t with either of them.

She stepped back into the corridor, heart pounding, wondering if he’d gone downstairs. She was about to start back that way when she heard Cory say, “Leave her alone.”

Tanya ran towards the spare bedroom. She hurried into the bathroom in time to see the lower half of her son’s body hanging out of the antique mirror.

Hanging out of it
, as if he were caught within it. Her mind tried to comprehend the impossible, but this was overridden by her maternal impulse to protect her son. Something had him.

“Cory!” she screamed. She grabbed onto each of his ankles and tried to pull him back. She saw the mirror ripple as if it were made out of thick, almost plasticized lead that adhered to the contours of his body like rubber. She heard other footsteps rushing along the corridor, heard Robbie’s, then Chris’s voices calling her name.

“In here!” she screamed. Something had Cory on the other side; it hauled and Cory sunk into the mirror to just below his knees, slamming her hard against the bathroom cupboard as she tried to secure her grip on him. The light in the bathroom flashed on and Robbie rushed in just as Cory was pulled again, his ankles sliding from her grasp. She, Robbie, and Chris stood in shock and horror as they watched Cory’s feet slip from her and through the glass, to disappear. The mirror shivered, like a pond recovering from a dropped rock, and went still.

“What the fuck?” Robbie shrieked as Tanya fell backwards, sobbing. Robbie pounded on the mirror, his fists raining blows over every segment of the glass. It was solid, unbreakable, unrelenting in any way.

“Where is he?” Chris yelled, panicked. “How can he go through glass? What is that thing?”

Robbie picked up a clay vase of dried flowers and hurled the vase against the mirror. The vase exploded into fragments, but the mirror did not crack.

“I should have known something was wrong with it. I should have said no to this house,” Robbie raged.

“What do you mean something was wrong with it. What are you talking about?” Tanya sobbed. “Where’s our boy?”

Robbie was on the counter now, his hands yanking at the mirror frame, doing everything in his power to disengage it from the wall. Chris joined him, followed by Cole when he’d come into the room. All three of them used their weight and strength to try to pull the mirror and frame from the plaster, to no avail.

“It…must be riveted…to the fucking plaster,” Robbie panted, his face a mix of rage and fright. He examined the frame. “They’ve used screws and anchors to secure the thing.”

“You saw what I saw,” Tanya said. “He went
through
the damned glass!”

“I know that!” Robbie screamed, regretting it when he saw her recoil, but they all stood there, a family in their new home, having witnessed their youngest son and brother enveloped by what was supposed to be a solid object—a man-made piece of framing and wood and silver-backed glass. It had not swung open. It had not cracked. It had
softened
enough to allow him passage through, and then had re-hardened immediately. No law in physics, no sensible explanation existed that could account for what they’d just seen occur.

“It has to come off,” Robbie said. He rushed downstairs to the kitchen where he’d placed his electric screwdriver from a job earlier in the day and carried it back to the bathroom. He got onto the counter and proceeded to remove screws that held the heavy mirror to the plaster wall. Chris and Cole got on each side and carefully wedged the mirror away from the wall. There was nothing behind it except old plaster and dust. They hauled the mirror onto the bathroom floor and examined every facet of it; sides, back, along the edges where glass melded with the frame. There were no buttons, levers, or anything that could possibly explain what they all knew they had just witnessed.

“Where is he?” Tanya wept. “Where’s our Cory, Robbie? I feel like we’ve all woken up in some kind of a carnival fright house. First that little girl. Now this.”

“He has to be in the house,” Robbie said. “I know what we all
think
we saw, but there has to be some kind of rational explanation.”