The Reflection at the End of the Hall

The house taught her how to listen.

It did not do it kindly. It did it by subtraction. The refrigerator’s low hum slowed to a long breath. The old radiator ticked in a rhythm too steady to be mechanical. Even when nothing moved, it felt like something was still moving, just out of sight. Claire stood in the narrow hallway and watched the far mirror take her in.

It was a tall mirror, beveled at the edges, the kind that makes a hallway feel longer than it is. Her mother had kept it covered with a sheet. Claire remembered the way that fabric had moved when the furnace exhaled, remembered running a finger under the drape as a child, not to peek but just to know the texture. She had not planned to uncover it now. She found the sheet folded in a perfect square on the floor the morning after the funeral and told herself she must have done it in a fog. People do things without meaning when sorrow is a new language.

The light was fickle down the hall. One bulb near the mirror had a slow, stubborn flicker. The wood floorboards tilted slightly toward the middle as if the house were bowing. Claire stood at the near end with her hand on the wall and took one step, then another, counting the way sound behaved around her. Her breath felt too loud. Her pulse had a noise. Somewhere a pipe thunked and settled. She did not look straight at the glass. She looked at the frame, at the nick from where a movers’ dolly caught it once, at the wall paint that needed a second coat, at anything that was not the reflection waiting at the end.

She had moved back after six months of empty. The house had become a shape on the street no one looked at. The grass in the front yard had splayed itself open. The kitchen still smelled faintly of metal. She opened windows that stuck on swollen frames and let cold air move through rooms to breathe.

The first night she slept in her old bed she woke to the sound of the radiator ticking and the memory of her mother’s voice saying, Someone has to mind the house. The second night she brought one box in from the car, a box of winter sweaters, and set it in the hall because the hall was where things waited to be put where they belong. When she turned to leave, she caught her reflection not as a full person but as a pale arc where her face should be. It felt like being spotted across a room by someone you barely remember.

In the morning she made coffee that did not taste quite right. She stood in the hall with the mug and let the steam ghost up past her lip. The mirror had that quality old mirrors have that makes the world inside look like it exists in water. Claire leaned to the side. Her reflection leaned too, just half a breath late. She pulled back. The late echo made her stomach tighten. She did not move for three seconds, then four, counting. She raised her mug deliberately. The woman in the glass raised hers without delay. Claire told herself that light can trick the eye and that grief makes time slippery. She told herself a lot of useful, unconvincing things.

She placed a small notebook on the hallway table, under the catch-all dish of old keys and paperclips. A therapist once told her to write down the moments when she felt unreal, to tie them to paper so they could not float away and take her with them. The notebook had a mustard-yellow cover and the word NOTES in small block print. She wrote about the delay, a short delay. She felt sick. It steadied her to choose words and speak quietly to herself in that way, even if she only wrote enough to remember how unease tasted.

In the afternoons she worked from the table in the front room, the one that looked onto the street. She translated for a small agency, contracts and compliance. On the third day, as dusk thinned she noticed the hallway light had burned out. She recovered the new bulbs from the hall closet and smelled lavender. She stood there too long for a person who only needed a light bulb, then took two and shut the door with her hip. She replaced the near bulb first, then the far one by the mirror, and when she stood on the chair to reach up, she felt watched from below. She did not look down.

That night the house hollowed itself again. Claire woke at 2:53 with a blank alertness. She lay there and let the dark decide whether it would speak. At 3:01 there was a soft sound from the hallway, not a footstep but the noise wood makes when something shifts its weight. She sat up with both hands flat on the blanket, holding herself up. At 3:03 the radiator clicked in the front room and went still. At 3:05 the picture frame on the hallway table rattled slightly. She listened for her breath. She heard it. She told herself to wait. She counted. On some number that had no name she put her feet on the cold floor and walked to the door and let the hall’s dimness take her eyes.

She stood where the light touched the floor and swayed once toward the mirror without realizing she had moved. The woman at the end of the hall swayed a second later and then stilled. Claire raised her left hand. So did the reflection, no delay now. Claire opened her fingers, five petals. The reflection opened hers.

She wrote in the notebook: Woke at night, hallway sounds, radiator stopped. Reflection normal. Nausea. Not sleeping.

When she looked up from the page, the drape lay on the floor again. She did not remember putting it back.

On the fifth night, Claire woke with the feeling of having miscounted something. In the mirror the hall had the wrong color. It took her a long moment to recognize that the lamp in her mother’s room was on in the reflection and off here. A small glow pooled on the carpet there. The door to that room stood open behind Claire in both worlds. She could feel the air pulling toward it. She did not go in. She watched the mirror and saw, for an instant, the slight suggestion of movement inside the room beyond the glass.

She spoke to it. Her voice surprised her, hoarse from disuse. “Stop.”

She thought she saw the reflection’s throat move, swallowing. She did not like giving it that much of her. She stepped forward to the halfway point in the hall and felt the floor dip. The glass collected her, brighter than it had any right to be. She said “Get out,” in the voice she reserved for dogs. The reflection stood very still. Its mouth did not say anything at all.

That night something knocked on the glass once. Not a request. A notification.

She pressed her palm to the cold hall wall and slid down it until she sat on the floor looking up the length of herself. Claire listened for the faraway traffic and did not find it. The street had gone empty. The house made its small noises. She remembered how her mother folded the towel end so the edge did not show. She remembered the smell of her mother’s hair in the last week, overclean and chemical. She remembered the exact sound of her mother’s voice in the night, the way it had come from the end of the hall, the way it had not sounded like it had to cross the distance.

Sometimes, when Claire stood in front of the mirror, she could not find her own face at once. She found the hallway and the door and the old picture of the sea and, after a quiet beat, her face assembled into place. Other times the face came too fast. On the seventh night she blinked and saw herself already watching before her eyelids opened. She touched her cheek, the hollow under her eye, an old habit from the year where makeup might hide what tiredness couldn’t. The reflection followed, slow as if the skin were heavier in there.

She wrote in the notebook: reflection delayed. Then: no delay. Then, smaller: she blinked first. Under that: I am not sleeping.

The lamp in her mother’s room burned in the mirror again. Claire did not turn it on in the world she could touch. She stood at the doorway to that room and held the frame with both hands. The bed was made with the blanket her mother liked best. A bowl sat on the dresser with a necklace in it. Her mother used to leave things in bowls to keep the room from feeling like a hotel. In the mirror, the bowl was empty. Claire stepped to the dresser and looked for a small scratch where a brooch once bit the wood. In the mirror, the scratch was longer.

She left the room open and made herself stand in the hall where the light from both worlds could see her. She said, “What do you want?” Her voice broke on the last word.

The person in the glass tilted her head exactly as Claire did. They looked at each other with attention. Claire had the smallest idea that maybe there had been a mistake in the geometry of this place, the long lines of the house too close to the long line of the mirror. A seam had formed and something kept running its nail along it out of habit. The idea steadied her, briefly, like an explanation steadies anyone.

It changed on the ninth night. She rose from bed with no sense of decision and walked to the hall. The floor did not creak. The mirror did not glow more than the room but she could see herself clearly. The woman in the glass did not mimic her. She was already standing in a posture Claire recognized and did not want to recognize. Shoulders set, chin a small degree higher than usual, mouth soft in a way that looks gentle.

The eyes mattered. The eyes were wrong. Not in color or size. In the way attention pooled there. Claire found herself holding her forearm. She had not told her hands to do that. The glass gave nothing back but surface and a woman who had decided something.

“Stop,” Claire said, softer than she meant.

The woman at the end of the hall smiled. It was patient. It did not show teeth. It was not her mother’s smile. It was the kind of smile Claire had used to get a child to hand her the scissors without complaining.

She stepped. The floor did not tilt this time, it was level. Her palms lifted and rose in front of her as if drawn, a leash attached to its heel. The glass was cold when she reached it. Then warm. The other palm met hers with a small give as if there were breath between them. The warmth soaked into the bones of her hand. She felt the shape of her own palm from both sides, which is a kind of knowing bodies are not meant to have.

“Please,” Claire said. She was not sure which one of them said it.

It happened the way thunder happens even when you have counted the seconds. A flicker in the light, a quiet shivering in the glass, a small sinking in the gut as if the body knew the ground has decided to change its mind. The hallway behind the other Claire lifted itself into clarity. The lamp in the back room shone with a domestic glow. The air on that side looked warmer. Not brighter. Warmer. She felt her hand pushed forward without moving. The other hand accepted the push. Pressure met pressure like two equal arguments.

Her eyes closed and opened with the smallest delay. The world blinked. It tilted a fraction of a degree. The palm under her own departed.

She was standing. The hall was familiar. The angle of the picture frame. The hairline cracks in the paint near the ceiling. The threadbare runner in the middle. Behind her the house made the little ticking noise it made when the furnace thought about waking. The radiator clicked in the front room. Claire turned toward the sound automatically, the way a person turns toward their name.

The woman in the mirror watched her from the far end.

For a second she did not understand. The mirror looked like a piece of dark water. Then the woman inside lifted her hand and pressed it to the glass. The gesture was hers, so exactly hers that she felt a trill of annoyance the way you feel when someone says something to you in your own exact cadence as a joke.

“Hello,” Claire said.

The woman in the mirror did not speak. Her mouth was closed in that patient way. She placed her other palm next to the first. Her breathing did not fog the glass. Claire stepped closer. The floor had a new weight. Each plank felt like it remembered her feet. She put her palm to the mirror and felt only cool. No give. The other woman’s hand met hers on the other side with the same precise placement. Claire looked into her own eyes. They were very attentive. They were the eyes of a person about to say an important thing and choosing not to.

“Let me out,” Claire said.

The mirror gave no warmth. Claire’s mouth had gone dry. She watched the other woman step back a small degree and turn her face as if considering how the light touched it. She watched the mouth relax. She watched a thought cross the features in the exact pattern of her own thinking. She watched the person she had been tilt her head and find it pleasing.

She struck the glass once with her palm. The sound ran up the hallway and came back thinner. The woman on the other side lifted her hand again and patted the place Claire had hit, a small, absent reassurance given to a child to quiet them without listening.

“Please,” Claire said. The word had worn a groove in her.

Time began to pool differently. The hallway did not shorten or lengthen. It remained exactly what it had been for thirty years and for the last ten minutes. She placed both palms flat and pushed and felt nothing but the idea of pushing. She wanted to scream. She did not. Screaming, she understood suddenly, would teach the walls to expect screaming. She did not want to give the house any more words. She watched instead.

On the far side the woman turned away from her, just a little, and looked down the hall toward the room that had been Claire’s. She paused, as if remembering a thing she did not want to forget. Then she looked back at Claire with a gentleness that had a knife under it.

Claire put her hand against the glass and slid it down until her fingers touched the bevel of the frame in there. Her nails made no sound. It occurred to her that the mirror had never been a picture of what was. It had always been a picture of what paid attention.

The other Claire lifted the old bone-colored drape from the floor. She shook it once out of habit. The fabric fell into place over the frame on her side, softly, like the closing of a mouth after a breath.

Dark.

The world inside the frame did not go fully out. It thinned. Claire kept her palms where the wood would be. She waited. She was practiced at waiting. She knew the shapes darkness makes when it does not yet believe it needs to be complete.

If she had a watch, she could not see it. She counted with her mouth closed until numbers felt like teeth. She stopped counting then, and listened instead for the small noises grief makes when it settles into a structure. There is the scrape of a drawer. There is the soft, entirely domestic click of a light switch. There are footsteps in a hallway that know which boards complain.

She thought she heard the shape of a woman moving away from the end of the hall. She thought she heard the door to the back room close with the care of someone who has a reason not to wake anyone. She thought she heard the house exhale.

Claire kept her hands on the glass because it was the one surface left to her that still acknowledged touch, even if only in the imagination. She set her jaw. She breathed. She did not scream. The silence did not return her kindness.

Time offered itself to her in long pieces. She accepted them because there was nothing else to do. Somewhere far through the dark the world kept doing its stupid little miracles. Radiators warmed. Coffee steamed. A human hand smoothed a towel’s edge. A mirror stood quiet at the end of a hall, covered in a sheet the color of bone.

The woman at the end of the hall waits for the light to change back, but it never does.