The Family That Chose Me Back

The last thing my mother said before she drove away was that I made everything harder. We were at a rest stop outside Savannah, the kind with vending machines that hummed and a bathroom that smelled like bleach and pine. My stepbrother Marcus had cried when I touched his tablet, and my mother had looked at me the way she looked at a bill she did not want to pay. "Just sit here and think about what you did," she said. "We will be back in ten minutes." I sat on a green bench and counted cars. I got to two hundred and forty before I stopped counting. Then I counted the coins in my pocket, which was three dollars and seventy-five cents, and then I counted the vending machines, which was two, and then I counted the times my mother had driven away and left me somewhere. The first time, I was five and it was the grocery store parking lot and she came back in twenty minutes. The second time, I was six and it was the library and she came back in an hour. The third time was now. I was seven. A woman in a blue jacket asked if I was alone. I said my mother was in the bathroom. The woman looked at the bathroom, which was empty, and then she looked at me, and I could see her deciding something. I did not want to be a problem for a stranger, so I said my mother was coming and walked toward the motel behind the rest stop. The motel had a sign that said VACANCY and a lobby with a mirror behind the front desk. The mirror was tall and gold and older than the motel. It had a c***k in the bottom left corner, and the c***k looked like a river. I stood in front of it because the lobby was warm and no one was shouting, and I looked at myself, small and dirty and wearing a shirt with a stain on the sleeve, and the mirror looked back. Then the mirror moved. Not the glass. The reflection. My reflection turned its head when I did not turn mine, and she smiled at me, and she looked exactly like me except her shirt was clean. "You again," she said. Her voice came from inside the glass, soft, like someone talking through a door. I stepped back. "You can talk." "I can do more than talk. I can count. You have been left three times. That is the rule." "What rule?" "The rule that lets you choose," she said. "Not everyone gets to choose. Only the ones who are thrown away three times. You are the third time, which means you are the last time, and it means the door is open." I wanted to run, but my feet did not move. "Where does the door go?" "Somewhere else," she said. "A house where no one tells you to be quieter. A house where the food is warm and the beds are soft and no one cries because you touched something. You can come through. But you can only come through tonight." I thought about my mother. I thought about Marcus and his tablet and the way my stepfather looked through me like I was a window. I thought about the rest stop and the bench and the two hundred and forty cars and the three dollars and seventy-five cents. "What if they come back?" I asked. "They will come back," the mirror girl said. "They always come back. But the question is whether you will be here when they do." I put my hand on the glass. It was cold, and then it was warm, and then it was not glass at all. It was water, or air, or something in between, and I stepped through.