The Things the Mirror Refuses to Show

CW: Violence, blood, murder

The first thing the mirror showed Donny Baird was his daughter in a wedding dress. The second was a man burning alive.

He bought it on a Saturday because he was tired of seeing himself in the dark windows of an empty house. The estate sale occupied a brick Victorian on the far side of town, the kind with an iron fence and a porch that sagged in the middle. He had come for a dresser. Instead, he found a tall walnut mirror leaning against a wall in the basement. Its frame was carved with flowers whose petals looked like little open mouths.

The woman running the sale told him it had belonged to the dead owner's husband. She wouldn't meet his eyes when he asked why it was in the basement. She accepted $40 without bargaining and made him carry it out himself.

His wife, Ruth, had been gone for four years. An icy patch on a county road, a telephone call from a deputy, and a sealed coffin because the funeral director said the damage was extensive. Donny remembered those details more clearly than he remembered the last thing he'd said to her. His daughter, Claudia, was 26 and lived three hours away. She called on Sundays. He drank on the other six nights.

He put the mirror in the hallway, opposite the bedroom door. At 11:00pm that evening, he passed it with a glass of bourbon and saw Claudia standing in a church. She wore a white dress and held flowers. Donny turned around, expecting the television to be playing behind him. The hall was empty. When he looked back, the mirror showed a tired widower holding a glass.

He called Claudia. She answered after five rings, irritated and breathless. She had been out with a man named Peter. Donny asked whether they were serious. She said she didn't know. He asked if they planned to marry. She laughed, then went quiet.

“Dad, have you been drinking?”

He told her about the mirror. She told him to get some sleep.

On Sunday morning, the glass showed his own funeral. A narrow chapel, seven mourners, a closed casket. Claudia sat in the front row, older than she was now. Behind her stood a woman with a burn scar climbing her throat. The image lasted only long enough for Donny to see the flowers on his coffin: White lilies tied with black ribbon.

He covered the mirror with a sheet. That evening he pulled the sheet away. His hallway appeared exactly as it should. He was almost disappointed.

On Monday, he saw his house on fire. The flames came through the roof, then through the windows. He could make out the kitchen clock on the wall as the ceiling collapsed. Its hands stood at 2:17am. A woman was visible upstairs, beating against a window from the inside. Donny shouted and struck the glass. The scene vanished. He stood shaking in a hallway that smelled of dust and stale whiskey.

He called an electrician the next morning. He had the old wiring inspected, replaced the breaker panel, installed new smoke detectors, and bought two extinguishers. He cleared paper from the furnace room and hauled three loads of rubbish to the dump. When he finished, he felt almost proud. Whatever the mirror had shown him, he had changed it.

That night the house burned again in the glass. This time the clock read 1:52am, and there were two women trapped upstairs.

Before the electrician left, Donny asked whether faulty wiring could cause hallucinations. The man gave him a cautious look and said carbon monoxide sometimes caused confusion. Donny bought a detector that afternoon and set it beside the mirror. It remained silent. He checked the batteries twice, then stood in front of the glass and waited for it to show him a life that did not belong to him. Instead he saw Ruth at the kitchen sink, washing a plate. She turned and smiled with a tenderness he remembered so vividly that he reached out to touch her. His fingertips met cold glass. When she looked down, he saw blood spreading through the dishwater. The plate slipped from her hands and broke. Donny found himself on his knees, apologizing to an empty hallway.

He searched for the estate sale listing. The Victorian had been sold by the children of a woman named Hester Dale, who had died at 91. An obituary said she had volunteered at the county historical society for decades. Donny found her photograph and recognized her as the scarred woman from his funeral vision, though the photograph showed no scar. He called the number on the estate-sale receipt. A man answered and said Hester had never owned a mirror like that. The basement had been empty when they inventoried the house. Donny described the walnut frame and the carved flowers. The man went silent, then said his mother had warned the family not to take anything that appeared after her death. He hung up before Donny could ask what that meant.

Donny drove back to the Victorian. The basement windows had been boarded. Through the front door he could see bare floors and stripped wallpaper. A neighbor watering a flowerbed told him Hester had been afraid of mirrors. She had kept every reflective surface in the house covered for years. When Donny asked why, the neighbor shrugged and said Hester claimed they showed what people were trying hardest not to see. Donny asked about the burn scar. The neighbor stared at him. Hester's sister, Agnes, had been burned in a house fire decades ago and vanished soon afterward. Hester had spent the rest of her life insisting Agnes was still somewhere nearby.

Donny drove home with a terrible new suspicion: The mirror might know more about him than he knew about himself, and it might have been waiting for someone willing to carry it away. He found himself checking the rearview mirror at every red light. Twice, he thought he saw a woman's face in the back seat. Both times, the seat was empty when he turned.

He stopped drinking for three days. By the fourth he was seeing things without the mirror: Movement at the end of the hall, an unfamiliar hand withdrawing around a corner, a woman humming in the laundry room. His doctor said grief could take peculiar forms. Donny didn't mention the fire or the funerals. He accepted a prescription for sleep and threw it away on the drive home.

On Thursday, Claudia called to say Peter had proposed. Donny sat down on the kitchen floor. She thought he was crying from happiness. He wasn't sure why he was crying at all.

He demanded that she wait. He told her the marriage would be a mistake, although he had never met Peter. He said things that sounded ugly even to him: That men were liars, that nobody could be trusted, that she would regret tying herself to someone she barely knew. Claudia hung up. When she called back an hour later, she said she wouldn't be visiting for Thanksgiving.

The next time he looked in the mirror, the wedding had changed. Claudia stood alone in the same church, holding a bouquet of dead flowers. There were no guests. Her dress was stained dark across the stomach. She lifted her head, and her mouth opened without making a sound.

Donny dragged the mirror into the garage and faced it toward the wall. At midnight he heard glass tapping, slow and deliberate. He opened the garage door. The mirror had turned around. Its reflection showed a narrow bedroom with pale green wallpaper. A woman lay on the floor beside an overturned lamp. Blood had pooled beneath her cheek. Donny recognized the wallpaper but could not say from where. The woman opened her eyes.

“I thought you were dead,” she said.

Donny stumbled backward and hit the workbench. He had never seen her before. Yet he knew she had a crooked lower tooth, that she hated the smell of cigarette smoke, and that her name was Marlene. The knowledge arrived whole, like a memory returned after anesthesia.

He covered the mirror with a tarp and drove to the only bar still open. He ordered bourbon, then water, then bourbon again. At closing, he found himself writing a street address on a napkin. He didn't remember learning it. He went there anyway.

The house was on a quiet street near the old hospital. It had been converted into apartments. A young man in a security uniform answered the door and told him nobody named Marlene lived there. Donny asked how long he'd owned the place. The man said he rented. Donny asked if there had ever been a death upstairs. The man closed the door.

On the way home, Donny pulled into a gas station and searched the address on his phone. A newspaper archive listed an unsolved homicide 21 years earlier. The victim was Marlene Keaton, 32, found in a second-floor bedroom. The photograph showed her smiling in front of a Christmas tree. One lower tooth overlapped the next. Donny vomited beside the fuel pump.

He drove home without remembering the roads. In the garage, he tore off the tarp. The glass showed a motel bathroom. A man knelt beside a bathtub, his hands red to the wrists. Donny knew the man's name before he saw his face: Victor Sloane. He had disappeared 16 years ago. The face in the glass turned toward him. It was Donny's face.

He backed away. The mirror held the image as though waiting for him to finish looking. On the counter lay a motel key attached to a blue plastic diamond. Donny had one exactly like it in a shoebox at the back of his closet. He had always believed it was a souvenir from a road trip he took with Ruth. He couldn't remember which road trip.

He found the box beneath old tax returns. Inside were the key, a silver ring too small for Ruth, a woman's wristwatch with a cracked crystal, and three photographs of strangers. On the back of one photograph, in his own handwriting, were the words: SHE PROMISED NOT TO TELL.

Donny sat on the bed and tried to make the pieces fit. He remembered Ruth finding the shoebox. He remembered a terrible argument. He remembered her saying she was going to take Claudia away. He remembered begging her to listen. Then came the county road, the deputy, the sealed coffin. He had always imagined a clean line between those memories. Now there was a hole in the middle, and everything he had built his life around leaned toward it.

At dawn he went to the cemetery. Ruth's stone was wet with frost. He knelt before it and spoke aloud about Marlene and Victor. He asked what he had done. A groundskeeper passed without looking at him. Donny remained until the cold had numbed his fingers.

When he returned home, the mirror stood in the hallway. He knew he had left it in the garage. The sheet was folded neatly on the floor. In the glass Ruth stood beside him, wearing the blue coat she had worn on the day she died.

He turned. Nobody was there.

“Tell me,” he whispered.

Ruth in the mirror touched his shoulder. Her fingers looked bruised. Donny felt pressure through his shirt, unmistakable and cold.

The glass changed to a kitchen he did not recognize. A younger Donny sat at a table across from Ruth. She was crying. Between them lay the shoebox. Claudia, then a child, listened from the stairs. Ruth said she had found the newspaper clippings and the jewelry. Donny said they were not what she thought. Ruth asked how many people had died.

Donny watched his younger self smile. It was an expression he had never seen on his own face.

The scene skipped. Ruth was at the back door with a suitcase. Donny stood behind her holding a tire iron. He raised it once. Then again. The third blow landed after she stopped moving.

He screamed at the mirror to stop. The glass showed the kitchen empty, then a stretch of county road beneath falling snow. Donny drove Ruth's car into a ditch and wiped the steering wheel. He placed her behind it, struck the dashboard with the tire iron, and walked away through a stand of trees to where his truck waited.

The mirror had never shown him the future. It had shown him pieces of lives stolen from other people, assembled into the shape of the future he believed he deserved.

He looked at the old photographs again. Each stranger had once trusted somebody. Each had walked into a room expecting to leave it. He wondered how many nights he had slept soundly while their families waited for a telephone to ring.

He called the sheriff's office. When the dispatcher answered, Donny said he needed to report a murder. She asked whether anyone was in immediate danger. He looked into the mirror. Claudia stood in a kitchen holding a knife. Peter lay on the floor. Behind her stood a man with Donny's face, older now, smiling. Donny dropped the phone.

He understood then why the wedding had changed when he interfered. The mirror wasn't punishing him for changing destiny. It was showing what he had already set in motion. His warnings had planted fear in Claudia. His voice, his suspicions, his certainty that love concealed violence: She had grown up learning them. The people he had killed were gone, but their stories had continued inside him, and inside the daughter who had listened from the stairs.

He picked up the phone and gave the dispatcher his address. He said there were objects in his closet that belonged to missing people. He said his wife's death had not been an accident. He said he would wait outside without a weapon. The dispatcher asked him to stay on the line.

From the hallway came Ruth's voice. “You always liked to decide how the story ended.”

Donny lowered the phone. The mirror showed Claudia's wedding again, but this time she was laughing. Peter held her hands. The church was full. In the back row, Donny sat beside Ruth, both of them alive, both of them applauding. For one terrible instant he wanted that life so badly he could feel it beneath his skin.

Then the image shifted. Marlene stood behind the couple. Victor stood beside her. The woman with the scarred throat sat in the aisle. More faces gathered until the church was crowded with people who had never reached their own weddings, funerals, or ordinary Tuesday mornings. Donny recognized them one by one. Every recognition hurt like a nail driven into his skull.

He stumbled toward the glass. The faces stepped aside, revealing a little girl sitting on the church floor. Claudia at eight years old, holding a drawing of a house. The drawing had no windows. Every wall was covered in doors.

“Why didn't you stop?” the child asked.

Donny had no answer. He pressed his palm to the glass. On the other side, the child placed her hand against his. The surface was warm. It yielded beneath his fingers like skin. He pulled back and saw his own handprint remain, red and wet, on the inside.

Sirens sounded in the distance. Donny walked out onto the porch and sat on the steps. He told the dispatcher he was still there. He watched a patrol car turn the corner, blue lights washing over the neighboring houses. For the first time in years, he was sober enough to remember everything.

An officer approached with one hand near his holster. Donny raised both hands and began to speak. Behind the officer, through the open front door, the mirror reflected the porch. It showed Donny seated on the steps, the officer approaching, and the patrol car idling at the curb. But it showed one other thing: A woman standing in the doorway of the house across the street, watching.

The woman wore a blue coat. Her face was not Ruth's. It was older, unfamiliar, and burned along one side. Donny knew her name was Agnes, and that he had buried her beneath a stand of cottonwoods before Claudia was born.

The officer asked him to stand. Donny obeyed. As the cuffs closed around his wrists, Agnes raised one finger to her lips. Then she turned away from the mirror and walked into the house across the street.

Donny tried to tell the officer. He tried to say that the mirror was not finished. The officer guided him toward the car, speaking calmly, and Donny understood that his confession could not give those people back the years he had stolen. It could not erase the things his daughter had heard. It could not tell him whether Agnes was alive, dead, or something his mind had invented to survive itself.

In the rear window of the patrol car, his reflection stared back at him. For a moment, he saw a crowded church. Then a burning house. Then nothing but his own face, finally old enough to belong to him.