Chapter 20 Nina

Chapter 20

?Nina

L ook in the mirror.

I quickly raise my gaze.

But I can't look in the mirror. Its surface is too fogged to see a reflection in.

Hesitantly, afraid of what I will see when I clear it, I raise a hand to wipe away the fog but freeze mid-motion, suddenly certain something is right behind me. I whip around, but there is nothing there except the dripping shower.

Skittish, I turn back toward the mirror, inhale deeply, and drag a wet palm across its surface. My own terrified face is revealed as I wipe, then my shoulders, the wet room behind me, my towel-shrouded body, and finally the bathroom around me.

I am looking in the mirror, and all I see is myself.

Maybe that is the point?

The note could be a metaphor, I suppose, or a word game. It is still unclear if I am being warned or threatened at this stage. But what is clear is that the man I saw on the CCTV footage has strong feelings about me being here in my father's house. Does he know the woman who stayed here? Are they somehow connected?

Look in the mirror

Did my father do something to that man? Did I somehow do something without realizing?

I shiver and step back to view the mirror from a distance. I force myself to perch on the toilet lid and consider the mirror, my own drenched, thin frame unsettlingly staring back at me.

It is hard to look at yourself objectively, just as it is hard to look at anyone you are close to in the cold hard light of day. Love can blind us, the day-to-day of our lives can blind us.

Looking back at me I see now what I perhaps couldn't see before my father died; I see the truth, or as close to it as I have ever gotten. I see a scared woman in her thirties with no family, no friends, a dead-end job, and nobody to come home to. The freedom that used to feel magical to me now re-labeled loneliness. I hold my own gaze. If I couldn't even see my own life clearly, how the hell could I have seen my father's? If I haven't ever really known myself, how could I have presumed to know him?

He had a house, a fortune, a life I did not know about; it seems fair to assume he may have had a side I did not know about also. But I find that this line of thinking takes me nowhere fast.

I look at the note again. What am I not getting? What does it mean?

I look at the mirror itself now. It begins about five inches from the floor and ends about five inches from the ceiling. I scour everything I can see reflected in its surface for meaning and it slowly dawns on me that these notes might not mean me harm but might be offering me help.

I wanted to find more about my father out here, in this house, on this island. The mirror, the notes, the man leaving them, might hold the key.

I don't know why but I suddenly recall a scene from years ago. I had won a prize at school for a poem I had written. A poem about silence. I was so proud; I took it to show him. I remember pushing open his heavy study door and wandering into that hallowed space. He'd looked up and smiled and taken it from me imbuing it with the same importance he would a historical document. And I sat on his ottoman and watched him read, the lamplight reflecting in a glimmer off his reading glasses as my words were acknowledged. He took his time, and in the gap, I imagined all his possible reactions until he finally lifted his eyes back to me and said, "It's well written, Nina. Well done. A well-deserved prize. Congratulations." And with those words all my pride, all my accomplishment drained from me. It was his tone. It was pragmatic. Nobody wants to be approached pragmatically, it is not indicative of anything good.

"You don't like it, though, do you?" I had asked, careful to keep disappointment from my voice.

He removed his glasses and gave me a consolatory smile. "Do you want me to be honest?" he said with as much loving respect as one can say those words.

I nodded, no longer certain I could keep the emotion locked down.

"I do not. No. Simply put: it takes me to sad places and I do not like sad places." He shook his head, knowing he was not fully serving his own meaning, not fully parenting me as he would want to. He tried again, "What you are writing about, it might seem very grown-up to you, but adults, adults like the light. Do you see?"

What I saw, for the first time, was that he was a person, not just my dad. A person with opinions, with judgments about life and me and about what gives something value. And the notion blossomed in me that not everything I did would have a value. To him, to the world. He had thoughts, and feelings, and a world inside him that I could not control or even touch. I was not his and he was not mine, but we were bound. And if I wanted to be valued, if I wanted my efforts to be valued, they would need to adhere to his.

I feel it again. That he is here, that man I do not really know. But this time I might finally find him.

I stand now, enthused, as if in a game somehow. A game where clues are given and there is ultimately an answer to be found.

He is here.

I reread the note.

Look in the mirror. Look. In. The. Mirror.

In the mirror?

I drop down quickly onto all fours. The mirror is, indeed, not flat. I can see, looking beneath its underlit rim, that it juts out from the wall a good palm's width.

I inspect the mirror, towel wrapped tightly around me, on hands and knees, and then I see something unusual.

One of the screws holding the mirror's bulk to the wall does not match the others. It is fresh, the metal brighter, newer, and it is not quite screwed back into its housing fully. Someone has recently replaced it.

I leap up, pull my towel tighter, and head for the bathroom door with purpose.

The house beyond the bathroom is silent. I watch for a moment and then decide to go for it, sprinting back to the bedroom and my phone. I grab it and quickly dial James's number. It does not connect.

The house around me is silent. I think of what the note said. Look in the mirror. My answers will be there, suddenly, I am sure of it.

I head to the utility room, pull open the cupboard under the sink, and grab the toolbox. I heft its weight along the hall with me, my phone held tight in my other hand. When I get back to the bathroom, I lock the door behind me. Sink to my knees and rifle through the toolbox for a Phillips-head screwdriver.

Squinting under the giant mirror I begin to loosen the screws holding it in place.

When they are free, I climb up onto the sink counter and lean over the top of the mirror to unscrew the top fastenings. When all the screws are free, I drop down onto the floor, hands on either side of the mirror as I lift it from its moorings, and for the first time I am the only thing holding it up. The weight is extraordinary. I only manage a few seconds, my muscles and the joints in my hands screaming for release as my grip slips and the edge of the mirror crashes down hard onto the floor beneath, inches from my bare foot, cracking the tile as it connects. I somehow manage to keep ahold of it as the entire mirror begins to swing out of my clutches, but the knock sends a hairline crack racing up the mirror's edifice and I am terrified the entire thing will burst into a thousand shards in my hands. I steady myself. I test the structural integrity of it and when I am convinced it will not shatter into tiny, lethal splinters, I gently begin to slide it toward the nearest wall.

When I am sure it is safely leaning against the wet room wall and not going to fall on me, I release it and step back.

I turn to the wall where the mirror was mounted and my blood runs cold, horror washing through me as I understand what the note was trying to tell me. The notes have been warnings. Two warnings.

In front of me, at head height, mounted into the wall, behind the mirror, is a camera, its power light glowing red, recording, transmitting. In its opaque black lens, my face is reflected back at me.

"Holy shit," I breathe, stumbling backward, pulling my towel tighter around me, suddenly aware that everything I have done in this room has been watched. And like a forest fire my thoughts catch light one after the other…because if there has been a camera here in this mirror, then there are probably more. There are probably more cameras in this house, and those cameras will have seen even more.

Horror, shame, and gut-wrenching fear jolt through me.

What is this house? And what does it have to do with my father?

My phone clutched tight in my hand, knuckles white, I raise it and snap a shot of the camera in the wall recording me. That is when I see that the signal bars have completely disappeared from its screen. My stomach feels like it falls through the floor.

"No, no, no," I hear myself mutter as I try to dial James's number again, but of course it doesn't connect. I try again. I try the iPhone emergency button, but it does not work without a signal either.

"Please, please, please," I hear myself breathe, my voice oddly dissociated from me.

Then my gaze shoots back up to the camera recording everything and I understand with absolute certainty what it is I need to do. I need to get the fuck out of this house now.