The Judas Glass (36 page)

“Who did you call?”

“You think you'll be able to see your reflection. That's where it is, that's what stole it. It's in that mirror, waiting for you. Isn't that what you think, Richard?”

Don't make me lie to you
.

“You want to find the looking glass,” she said. “And take it away. I wonder where you think you'll be able to keep it. Buried somewhere?”

“Tell me.”

Her tone was affectionate, even then. “I wanted to call my parents, but I couldn't. I wanted to hear their voices. I didn't want to suddenly be there with them. I wanted to warn them.”

“You're lying.”

My accusation kept her quiet for a moment. The she continued, as though I had not spoken. “But I realized what would happen. How the police would have the phone tapped. And how startled my parents would be. They must know. They must be afraid I'll suddenly be there, in their house. I love my parents so much, Richard. I don't want to hurt them.”

I shook my head.

“You don't believe me.” A tone of quiet amazement. “I was going to call them—but I couldn't bring myself to.”

“Why would you tell me the truth,” I said. “When it would be so easy to lie?”

“Do you
hear
yourself?”

“You called the sheriff's department. You told them where we were. There are a couple hundred men on the way right now.”

“Why would I do that?”

I couldn't answer her.

“Tell me, Richard—why would I lie to you?”

“To get the mirror for yourself,” I said, my voice hoarse.

She stroked the horse thoughtfully. “I love you because you aren't like me. You think life is a battle. You work hard, you win. You're willful.”

I leaned against a fence post, barbed wire swaying in both directions.

“You know where it is,” she said, “don't you?”

“I have a pretty good idea,” I said.

“I trust you,” she said. “You'll find it, and bring it to me.”

I nodded.

“Richard—promise me that's what you'll do.”

“Yes,” I said. “I'll find the mirror. And I'll bring it to you.” I was lying—promising her with a full heart, and meaning none of it. “But first, come with me to see Dr. Opal.”

“Why?”

I was afraid to tell her what I was beginning to believe about my own family. “He can help us.” Maybe we won't have to destroy the mirror. The mirror isn't what we want after all, I thought, convincing myself.

“Do you think he knows something?” she asked.

“I know he does.”

A pair of headlights combed the bright mustard. A frog belly-flopped across the dirt road. Figures climbed out of a Jeep. It was difficult not to take pleasure in the sight, men enjoying each other's company, one of them cradling a shotgun, a smell of perspiration and the dark, licorice flavor of chewing tobacco.

My hair stirred, a brief, sudden wind. Wings, the tip of one brushing me, like a finger in a glove.

Let them come closer, I thought. I nearly called out to them.

The wings skimmed the top of my head, persisting, the fine, sharp claws at my ear, the sound like a cape shaken.

55

My call was answered after the first ring, a woman's voice. No, Dr. Opal was not available, she said. Then she paused. She did not want to ask, lowering her voice. “May I tell him who called?”

“Tell him it's Richard Stirling.”

She muffled the phone. I could make out the words—Susan was not as subtle as she would need to be to keep Dr. Opal happy, I thought. But sincere. Sincere and afraid.

Dr. Opal's voice was hoarse. “You don't know how many questions I've had to answer, Richard.”

“I need to see you.”

“No you don't. You don't need me at all. Besides, I don't trust you.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No, I have not,” he said, sounding bitter. “I am in a very bad mood.”

“We can meet somewhere—”

“Richard, this call is being recorded and is going to be copied and translated into twenty languages by tomorrow morning. They'll do voice prints. They'll play it on CNN. They'll print transcripts of this call and put it on coffee mugs. This is not a private conversation.”

“Do you remember Ten High?”

He inhaled, straining to understand what I was talking about.

“My father hated it—”

“Yes,” he said at last. “I remember.”

“Meet me there.”

“Nice try. But I can't go anywhere, Richard. I have too many companions.”

We weren't there to hide. We knew they could see us.

He jogged toward me along the marina, past the sailboats moored in the dark harbor. A rope chimed against a mast, tapping musically, a light breeze, two on the Beaufort scale.

Bring them along
I had said. Bring as many people as you want. As
long as they don't get too close—I want a private consultation with my physician
.

He embraced me, panting. “It's good to see you,” he said. I introduced him to Rebecca, and he gave a little bow. She offered him her hand, and despite his lively good manners he hesitated for an instant before taking it.

“You're cold,” he said, finding her pulse with his fingers.

She smiled, but did not speak.

“Richard has probably told you I'm a terrible grouch,” he said. He still felt her pulse, and he could not restrain himself. He touched her cheek, feeling for a pulse in her neck.

“No, not at all,” she was saying, her voice almost inaudible. “He speaks of you very fondly.”

The shore was a mass of lights. From time to time someone stepped before a headlight causing the light to twinkle. “How many people are watching us?” I asked.

“Both of you need friends,” he said. “It's cruel what they want to do to you.”

A searchlight came on, the beam seeming to hiss as it fell across the water, and found the three of us.

He whirled. “Turn it off!” he called.

I could sense hurried consultation on the shore.

“Off!” he called again.

The light went black.

“A couple dozen police,” he said with something like good cheer. “I saw a couple of high-powered rifles and some night scopes.”

“Is Joe Timm here?” I asked.

“From what I hear Joe Timm isn't feeling well.”

Ten High had been a yacht berthed beside my father's boat years ago. The owners of the yacht had held parties, riotous celebrations, bottles and bikini bottoms flung all over the adjacent craft. My father had hated the parties, the owners, the boat itself, heaving the champagne bottles back where they came from. As a boy I think I found the parties fascinating, a glimpse of adult debauchery.

“No, we can't talk here,” Dr. Opal was saying. “I worked a trauma unit years ago. One of those rifles will take you off at the neck.”

We followed him along the wooden walkway.

“It's a strange sort of manhunt, Richard. It's like they're afraid to really get close to you.”

The nostalgia I felt just then was painful. I was glad when Dr. Opal led Rebecca by the hand, down a gangway, onto a vessel I had never seen before.

“Mine,” he said. “Just bought it. Madness, of course. I never have time. But it's one of the joys your father and I shared.”

He produced keys, and we went below, into a cabin with blue-cushioned chairs and the sort of decor shoreline cocktail lounges try to achieve, a sea-faring hideaway.

“You didn't tell anyone, did you?” I said. “Until the police paid you a visit. You weren't going to tell anyone about me, ever. Because you loved my mother. And because you swore to her that you would keep a family secret.”

Dr. Opal was playing the host, offering us chairs while I seethed inwardly, wanting him to finish pouring himself a drink and sit down. “You are my patient,” he said. “I used discretion.”

“Until you knew I was dangerous.”

He did not respond to that. He said, “Your mother was one of those people who are made of finer stuff than the rest of us.” He sat, finally. “Your father was so fortunate.” He took a sip of his scotch and winced, looking around for soda.

“I want you to tell me about my brother.”

He fussed at the bar, bottles tinkling. “I don't think people grow more afraid of death as they age. I think it's rather the opposite. So much of your life has died by the time you see the inevitability of it. There are houses you can never visit again, valleys turned into lakes, orchards cut down, towns bloated beyond recognition. Not to mention people you'll never see, voices you'll never hear again. I love life, but I don't worry much about dying.”

“My brother was mentally deficient—is that the right phrase?”

Dr. Opal gave up on finding soda, waved a pair of ice tongs at me, and dropped them into a drawer. “There was something wrong with your brother. But your mother loved him with all her heart. It was your father who was afraid.”

“Don't you mean embarrassed?”

“He was afraid.”

“It was on my father's side of the family, wasn't it? Something genetic.”

He didn't answer at once. “Please forgive me for not discussing it with you before,” said Dr. Opal. “I didn't really know very much.”

“You knew enough. You were loyal, but not to me. And I don't blame you. My mother was a troubled person, and I'm glad she had a good friend.”

“I admired your family,” he said.

“My father's genes,” I said.

“Genes reproduce. All the little adjectives and adverbs get reproduced by the great printing press of the chromosomes. That's all genes are—a way of making it happen one more time.”

“Like a mirror.” Rebecca spoke above a whisper for the first time. “Except the new image is the result of two people, not one. And the living image can step out of the glass, into the world.”

“That's a good analogy,” he said. “Pointless or not, meaningful or not, the genes bring it from the past into the future.”

“What was wrong?” I asked.

“Your father's family,” he said, “had a history.”

“A history,” I prompted, barely concealing my impatience.

“A tradition of mental illness,” he said, “going back generations. It wasn't just insanity, or the sort of birth defect we see too often.” He caught himself.
We
. “They died before puberty, the ones with a certain characteristic. You never had the trait—so you were safe from birth.” He shrugged: at least, he meant, until now.

“What characteristic?” I heard myself ask.

“Medical people call it ‘failure to thrive.' Many of the Stirling males died in infancy.”

I felt dizzy, hating the ugly slop of the water around the hull of the boat.

“Your brother had to be hospitalized from within a few weeks of his birth. That he lived as long as he did was something of a miracle. There wasn't anything fantastic about it,” he added. “It was a genetic flaw.”

“You must have a theory.”

“I'm wise enough, but my problem is I have to go around telling people how wise I am. Let me give you a big surprise, Richard. I don't have all the answers. Your brother needed constant transfusions. He didn't need to eat blood or drink it, and he wasn't dangerous. Some factor in his body dissipated blood, something in the spleen, or in the marrow. Something that ate blood up. It had to be constantly replaced.”

“Why did he have to be hidden away?”

“Because it wasn't that simple.”

“He was a child,” I said. “He needed companionship—”

“Genes are very old, Richard. The way water is old, and air.”

The vessel creaked. All three of us listened.

“They aren't going to leave us alone here much longer,” said Dr. Opal. Steps hesitated on the planks of the walkway, and Dr. Opal stepped out onto the deck for a moment, made a show of being alive and well, calling, “I'm all right!”

When he returned he swallowed the remains of his drink, and said, “What are you going to do, Richard?”

“You haven't answered my questions.”

“I could still arrange to take you into medical custody, someone who is a threat to themselves and others.”

“How did this happen to me?”

He sat, leaning forward. “This can't continue.”

“Explain to me,” I said, “how I got up every morning and ate breakfast and lived my life, and then this relic from my past—”

“The mirror,” he said.

“What is it?”

He shook his head. “The mirror wasn't stolen. Your father got rid of it.”

“Why?”

He spoke reluctantly. “He began having nightmares about it. He dreamed a unicorn found its way into the house, looking for someone.”

“Looking for my father?”

“Not necessarily,” said Dr. Opal, avoiding my eyes. “Searching for someone who lived in the house. He asked me to arrange to sell the mirror.”

“Did you?”

“I brought the mirror home, stored it in my cellar. And it vanished.”

“Burglars?”

“There was no sign of forced entry,” he said. “The mirror was simply gone one evening when I went with an expert to have it appraised.”

“The unicorn in the old legend looks for a mirror, searching through the woods,” said Rebecca. “He is seeking his own reflection.”

“He found it,” I said. “I am the reflection. My father dreamed the unicorn was after me, didn't he?”

Dr. Opal had not refilled his glass. He gazed into the empty tumbler thoughtfully. “I think when we study dreams, really examine them, what they mean doesn't amount to much.”

“What is going to happen to us?”

“I cancelled my lecture series. ‘The Function of Intuition in Diagnosis.' It's a pity—the lectures were pretty good. The point I keep discovering time and again is that we already know what the data indicates. Our senses already have the answer. You might say that this lapse between our true knowledge and our ability to act is a burden for most of us, a cross we all have to bear.”