Chapter 64 The Glass Where We Live #2
I stepped out of myself the way a river steps out of a bend and continues.
One foot, then the other, not down, just through.
The sense of falling lasted the length of a blink; then I discovered I had not fallen but crossed.
The cold stopped being cold. It became as natural as water to a fish, as effortless as air to a hawk.
Weight arranged itself into a different answer.
My body lay in the snow, with my lashes sugared and my mouth parted, my chest still. But I was no longer inside it. I was inside the glass.
I turned, and there she was.
Not a suggestion, nor blurred, but Temperance in her entirety.Her hair was unbound and haloed with frosted light. Her mouth was dimpled with the shy happiness I had come to think of as mine because it only appeared when she looked at me. When she touched me, her palms were tangible.
I laughed, the sound joyful and loud. The laugh made the mirror throw little shards of light along the wall.
She laughed too, before taking my hands and guiding me to the place inside the pane where the window and the mirror speak to one another when the house is asleep.
It looked like a seam, barely there. When we stood there, the world on the far side—the living room with its ash-dusted hearth and the chair pushed away from the vanity—tilted slightly, like a painting hung just crooked enough to trouble the eye.
I felt tenderness for it that bordered on pain.
“You stayed,” I said, though she had done nothing but stay, always.
“You came,” she answered, as if that had been the promise and the miracle both.
We walked.
At least, that’s what it felt like: walking, though our feet were only ideas now and the floor a suggestion.
The hall’s long runner threw our reflections in a rivered red.
The portraits watched as we passed; some with envy, some with relief, one with an oddsort of pride.
In the dark armoire mirror, we were two candles seen from a different room.
In the oval glass at the end of the corridor, we were a pair of moons, thin and curved toward one another.
Snow pressed its face to the pane and left its breath before it slid away shyly.
Night came early, as winter teaches it to do.
We learned the house’s twilight tricks: how the mirrors keep a little of the day and then let go all at once; how a brass lamp globe, if coaxed, will show you the dream it heard the last person think aloud.
We often found ourselves in the east bedroom, where the body I had used lay stories below, blanketed in snow.
We did not feel fright. The sight was not grotesque.
It was—unexpectedly—beautiful. My hair had frozen in a spill across one shoulder, each strand a thin blade of light.
My eyes had closed as if for a nap. The mouth wore a soft, immodest smile.
“Someone will find you,” she said. “Or they won’t. The house is patient with such decisions.”
“I should be sad,” I said, testing the truth of it. “I’m not.”
“That’s because you moved toward yourself rather than away.” She tipped her head, the gesture she had when something pleased her. “And because you are not finished.”
We learned our new craft.
We learned to walk the perimeter of a teacup’s polish and to appear in the sheen of an eye.
We learned to ride the skin of a window until the morning warmed it and sent us pulsing inward, a tide obeying the moon that lives behind glass.
When I put my face close to the pane at night, I could smell the iron in the snow, the resin in the pine, the distant sea the wind remembered.
When Temperance pressed her forehead to mine inside a mirror, light gathered where we met, and we were brighter for long minutes afterward, phosphorescent fish in a black lake.
We yearned and we loved.
I learned that yearning, here, was not famine but rather a long table with two chairs situated side by side.
It was also not a performance. I learned the map of her: the way her mouth shaped laughter on the right side first; the place on her lower lip where a tooth had once made a permanent, tender dent; the way her gaze went bright when I said my own name as if I were proud of it.
And Temperance learned me in turn: the rhythm my hands made when they told a story in the air; the section of my shoulder that believed first in being held; the exact pitch of my humming when I looked out at snow and meant yes.
Sometimes, when the house was most quiet, we would pressourselves against one pane together and watch the world beyond the glass. A fox trotted single-mindedly along the fence line, red against white, like a crimson bloom. The sky turned the color of bruised peaches and then iron.
“Are we happy?” I asked her one evening when the mirrors were blue and the lamps had not yet gilded them.
“We are true,” she said. “Happiness is a season. Truth is forever.”
“And we live here now.”
“We always did. You just hadn’t realized it before.”
I laughed and pressed my lips to hers—no glass now, because we were the glass—and light shivered through the long hall like a chord struck on a bright instrument.
When spring came, the world remembered that it could blossom.
Icicles loosened their knife-sharp edges and became water, dripping away with small sounds.
The birches peeled their paper ribs to reveal the green underletters.
I worried, briefly, whether the thaw would make us thin.
It didn’t. We learned that glass remembers winter even in June.
We learned that reflections grow longer in summer and give us more room to keep our joy.
Sometimes, I stood in the mirror of the front hall as the door opened on warm afternoons, and the smell of cut grass arrived like a cheerful aunt.
Visitors stepped in and shivered for reasons they could not name, then smiled at nothing and went on.
Temperance stood beside me and touched my hand.
We didn’t need to hide. The living rarely look into mirrors long enough to find who’s also there.
At night, we returned to the east room and sat with the memory of the body that had once been mine.
It had been buried by then, carried out gently by strangers in soft voices.
The window frame kept the memory of the weight, a dent like the first line in a poem.
The glass still knew my breath’s pattern and came awake when I hovered close.
We whispered to it the way one whispers to a loyal dog that waits where you left it.
“Do you miss it?” I asked her once, meaning not the body, but whole mornings spent among the living; the careless magic of it.
“Sometimes I miss the noise of spoons,” she said, smiling, and it made me love her with a fierceness that would have warmed iron. “But not enough to leave you for it.”
On the hottest night of June, lightning walked the ridgelines, and the house shuddered in a delighted sort of fear.
We stood in front of the long mirror in the hall and watched the sky’s teeth.
Each strike briefly restored the spires to their winter thrones, made the windows flash like a thousand eyes sending code.
Temperance took my face in both hands and kissed me, the electricity threading between us.
If you passed by then, you might have seen what the locals say they see: two women in the east window at twilight, one in black, one in white, their foreheads touching as if sharing a secret.
You might have thoughts of saints or witches or loneliness, and been wrong on all counts.
We are not emblems. We are not warnings.
We are not hunger made into a fable. We are only what happens when a woman refuses to apologize for wanting another woman enough to follow her through winter’s mouth.
On late nights, when fog came up from the river and blanketedthe field, we would slip into the window glass and listen as crickets sang in the dark.
She braided my hair with fingers that were patient and made of frost. I rested my head on her shoulder.
Our silence was not empty; it’s full of every word we no longer needed to be brave enough to say.
Sometimes I’d lay my palm against the inside of the window where my handprint first bloomed the word WITCH, and I would whisper to the girl who arrived here convinced survival was the highest art.
We did more than survive, I told her. We chose a more authentic life.
Across the glass, the world nodded.Or maybe that’s only the birch trees agreeing with anyone who spoke softly to them.
I didn’t know if there was a heaven for women like us, or if heaven existed at all. I only knew that this house learned one word and repeated it all year, on every surface that kept a little shine: ‘yes.’
Yes to laughter that doesn’t ask permission. Yes to hands that make the body a shrine rather than a crime scene. Yes to love that outlived its first weather.
When the first snow returned, we were ready.
We stood together in the second-story window, the house’s gentlest eye, and watched the field unmake itself into white.
Temperance hooked her fingers through mine.
I pressed my mouth to her knuckles and felt the old music start up again in the walls—the song of boards and beams that remembered blizzards and death and new love.
“Do you regret it?” she asked, not because she doubted, but because she liked hearing how I answered.
“Only that I did not do it sooner,” I replied.
She smiled, and the frost drew flowers around our faces. Behind us, the mirrors caught us and held us, and held us, and held us. Ahead of us, the snow said what snow always does in a patient whisper: Begin again.
And we do.