Добавить в цитаты Настройки чтения

Страница 41 из 74

Marguerite had forgotten about the partial magazine page Chris had stolen from the clinic. He took it out of his jacket pocket and put it on the kitchen table.

“There is now,” he said.

Nineteen

Tess watched television while her father was out. Blind Lake TV was still ru

She knew her father was acting strangely. He had asked her all kinds of questions about the plane crash and Chris. The only surprising thing was that he had not once mentioned Mirror Girl. Nor had Tess mentioned her; Tess knew better than to raise that subject with him. Back at Crossbank, when her parents were together, they had fought over Mirror Girl more than once. Her father blamed her mother for Mirror Girl’s appearances. Tess couldn’t see how that was supposed to work — her mother and Mirror Girl had nothing in common. But she had learned not to say anything. Intervening in those fights did no good and usually just made her or her mother cry.

Her father didn’t like hearing about Mirror Girl. Lately he didn’t like hearing about her mother or Chris, either. He spent most evenings in the kitchen, talking to himself. Tess ran her own bath those nights. She put herself to bed and read a book until she could sleep.

Tonight she was alone in the house. Tess had made popcorn in the kitchen, cleaned up carefully afterward, and tried to watch the movie. Bombay Destination, it was called. The dancing was good. But she felt the pressure of Mirror Girl’s curiosity behind her eyes. “It’s only dancing,” she said scornfully. But it was unsettling to hear herself talk out loud when there was nobody home. The sound echoed off the walls. Her father’s house seemed too large in his absence, too u

He didn’t, though. When he got home he hardly spoke to her, just told her to get ready for bed and then went to the kitchen and made some calls. Upstairs, after her bath, she could still hear his voice down there, talking talking talking. Talking to the phone. Talking to the air. Tess put on her nightgown and took her book to bed, but the words on the page evaded her attention. Eventually she just turned off the light and lay there looking out the window.

Her bedroom window at her father’s house looked south across the main gate and the prairie, but when she was lying down all she could see was the sky. (She had closed her door to make sure no light reflected from the windowpane, turning it into a mirror.) The sky was clear tonight and there was no moon. She could see the stars.

Her mother talked often about the stars. It seemed to Tess that her mother was someone who had fallen in love with the stars. Tess understood that the stars she saw at night were simply other suns very far away and that those other suns often had planets around them. Some stars had strange, evocative names (like Rigel or Sirius) but more often had numbers and letters, like UMa47, like something you might order from a catalog. You couldn’t give a special name to every star because there were more stars than you could see with the naked eye, billions more. Not every star had planets, and only a few had planets anything like Earth. Even so, there might be lots of Earthlike planets.

These thoughts interested Mirror Girl intensely, but Tess ignored her wordless presence. Mirror Girl was with her so often now that she threatened to become what Dr. Leinster had always claimed she was: a part of Tessa herself.

Maybe “Mirror Girl” was the wrong name for her. Mirror Girl had indeed first appeared in mirrors, but Tess thought that was because Mirror Girl simply liked to see Tessa’s reflection there, liked to look and see the looker looking back. Reflections, symmetry: that was Mirror Girl’s turf. Things that were reflected or folded or even just very complicated. Mirror Girl felt a kinship with these things, a kind of recognition.

Now Mirror Girl looked through Tessa’s eyes and saw stars in the cold dark night outside the house. Tess thought: should we really call it starlight? Wasn’t it really sunlight? Someone else’s sunlight?

She fell asleep listening to the distant murmur of her father’s voice.

Her father was subdued in the morning. Not that he was ever talkative before morning coffee. He fixed breakfast for Tess, hot oatmeal. There was no brown sugar to put on it, only regular white sugar. She waited to see if he would eat something too. He didn’t, although he twice rummaged through the kitchen cupboards as if he were looking for something he had lost.





He dropped her off early at school. The doors weren’t open yet and the morning air was frigidly cold. Tess spotted Edie Jerundt hanging out by the tetherball pole. Edie Jerundt greeted her neutrally and said, “I have two sweaters on under my winter jacket.”

Tess nodded politely, though she didn’t care how many sweaters Edie Jerundt happened to be wearing. Edie looked cold despite her multiple sweaters. Her nose was red and her eyes were shiny from the sting of the wind.

A couple of older boys passed and made some remarks about “Edie Grunt and Tess the Mess.” Tess ignored them, but Edie didn’t know any better than to gape like a fish, and they laughed at her as they walked away. Mirror Girl was intensely curious about this behavior — she couldn’t tell one person from another and didn’t understand why anyone would make fun of Tess or Edie — but Tess couldn’t explain. The cruelty of boys was a fact to be accepted and dealt with, not analyzed. Tess was sure she wouldn’t have behaved the same way in their place. Though she was sometimes tempted to join in when the other girls made fun of Edie, if only to exempt herself from their attention. (She gave in to this temptation only rarely and was always ashamed of herself afterward.)

“Did you see the movie last night?” Edie asked. One thing that made the lockdown so strange was that there was only one video cha

“Some of it,” Tess allowed.

“I really liked it. I want to download the songs sometime.” Edie put her hands at her sides and wagged her body in what she imagined was a Hindi dance style. Tess could hear the boys snickering from yards away.

“I wish I had ankle bracelets,” Edie confided.

Tess thought Edie Jerundt in ankle bracelets would look like a frog in a wedding dress, but that was a mean thought and she didn’t say it.

Mirror Girl was bothering her again. Mirror Girl wanted her to look at the distant cooling towers of Eyeball Alley.

But what was so interesting about that?

“Tess?” Edie said. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Sorry,” Tess said automatically.

“God, you’re so weird,” Edie said.

All that morning, Tessa’s attention was drawn to the towers. She could see them from the window of the classroom, off across the snowbound empty fields. Crows swirled through the sky. They lived here even in winter. Lately they had multiplied, or so it seemed to Tess, perhaps because they were fattening on the garbage tip west of town. But they didn’t perch on the tall, tapered cooling towers. The cooling towers were there to conduct away excess heat from the Eye down below. Parts of the Eye needed to be kept very cold, almost as cold as it was possible to be, what Mr. Fleischer had once called “near absolute zero.” Tess rolled that phrase around in her mind. Absolute zero. It made her think of a bitter, windless night. One of those nights so still and cold your boots squeaked against the snow. Absolute zero made it easier to see the stars.