Broken Mirrors

Chapter 13

Crystal woke up in the same familiar cold sweat that she so often woke up in. She rolled over in bed and glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It blinked back at her that she was really welcome to call this a Thursday morning or she could call it Wednesday night, depending on how big a stickler she wanted to be to detail. It was just after three. The witching hour, Crystal thought.

She could call it Wednesday night if she wanted to, but that made the facts more depressing. She wouldn’t go back to sleep, and she didn’t want to even if she could. The nightmares weren’t as frequent now as they once had been, back when she’d been closer to the time when she lived them, but they still came. Now they were just more unexpected and unpredictable, and Crystal thought they shook her more now than they used to simply because she didn’t have the comfortable warning that they would come nearly every time she closed her eyes.

The realization that she wasn’t going to sleep, though, made her decide that she might as well get up. There was no need lying in bed and staring into darkness where she might dwell on things more than if she were up and moving around. She could, at least, make Sophia a nice breakfast this morning instead of offering her toast or the pop tarts that she was so fond of.

Crystal pulled herself out of the bed and groaned a little against the fatigue of her muscles and the heaviness of her head. Her body wanted to sleep, but her body and her mind weren’t exactly friends and they seldom agreed on what was good for her. She got up and shuffled into the kitchen, fixing coffee and deciding she could camp out, for a while, at the table instead of lying in bed.

Crystal felt like, for as long as she could remember, she’d been existing in the most basic meaning of the term. She lived because she kept breathing, and she kept breathing because she really didn’t have much choice to do otherwise. It wasn’t that she was suicidal or longed to kill herself…that wasn’t the case at all. She just didn’t really care all that much.

Crystal could remember, when she thought back far enough, that once upon a time she’d cared a lot more. She felt like she’d cared about everyone and everything. She could, in her mind’s eye, see herself back then. She’d been young and energetic and like most people, when they’re young, she felt she had the world by its tail. Everything in life was going to happen her way. It was going to be beautiful.

She was going to have her dream job for one thing. The funny thing was she wasn’t even sure back then what that job was going to be, but she knew it was going to be great and she was going to be better at it than anyone else in the world. She’d be damn near awe inspiring.

She was going to marry the man of her dreams, who at that time was the high school quarterback. They’d get married and live some kind of blessed existence. They practically got along twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. In her imagination there was no reason to fight. He was the perfect husband, and she was the perfect wife, and their perfect kids gave them no reason to disagree. Her silly younger self had damn near constructed a movie plot, except it wouldn’t even be a movie that anyone would watch because nothing dramatic ever happened in it. It was too perfect, even for television.

Crystal laughed a little to herself remembering the way that she’d been sure it would happen. She’d written some kind of paper for her high school English class where they talked about their futures. She remembered writing that paper because the old woman who had taught the class was, so they thought, a jaded old widow whose husband had died only years after they’d been married. Crystal remembered, too, thinking that the woman was old and bitter and didn’t understand that just because she’d let her life go to s**t didn’t mean that was the way of the world. She’d turned in her pristine essay that she’d rewritten at least five times so that it achieved almost the same perfection as the image that she projected in it, and she’d been surprised when she got it back to find scrawled across the last page in red ink: Fairy tales are just that.

The old crone hadn’t been wrong, though. Even though Crystal thought she was at the time, she knew now that the woman was right. Her life had resembled nothing from those pages except that very last line…the one she didn’t even write.

She’d laid it all to rest, though, the same time she let that girl…the one that looked like her and still existed as a faded memory in the back of her mind…die. She wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened, and she didn’t know the exact date that she had decided it was best to let the girl go peacefully, but she knew that it happened.

She’d married Mike, but that had been the only thing in the essay that had come true. She’d married the man she identified in those pages as the man that would be her prince charming. And what a prince he was too…

And now Mike was gone. He was probably the one thing from her past that she didn’t miss at all. At one time she had mourned Mike..or rather she had mourned the man she thought he was, but now that was gone too. She didn’t miss him at all and she didn’t even miss the image she’d constructed of him out of her blind dreaming.

Now that he was gone, though, it didn’t change the fact that somewhere down the line she had laid that girl to rest. She was gone too. Crystal just didn’t really care enough to try and resurrect her. That had been one of her frustrations with some of the therapists that she’d tried to see once up on a time. They wanted her to resurrect the girl as though anyone that was dead just naturally sprung back to life and the fact that they had died and you had mourned them was of absolutely no importance.

No, that girl was dead. She was lost, buried, and mourned and that was where she’d stay.

Crystal fixed her cup of coffee and leaned on the counter. She had intended to camp at the table, but she didn’t really need to sit down. If she sat she’d feel more tired than she did while she stood, so it was best to stand, leaning against the counter, and somewhat rock back and forth to keep her body from getting angry with her mind over the fact that she wasn’t sleeping, yet again, when it was time to sleep.

Depression. It had been an elephant in the room at almost all of her individual therapy session. She’d been offered pills and brochures galore to solve this problem that everyone said she had. She’d filled in bubble tests and stupid questionnaires that repeated time and time over the same thing.

And was she sad? Did she want to talk about it? How did that make her feel? Did she ever have thoughts of harming herself? She had memorized almost the entire list of questions that she was going to be asked every time that she had to see someone different. Every time that Dr. So And So had something to do and Dr. Such and Such or Dr. Whosit would be filling in for them that day.

Crystal didn’t know if she was depressed or not. She had her own construction in her head of what depression meant, and whether or not it was true, it was she thought it was. She thought that depressed people stayed in bed…camped out on their couches. They didn’t eat and they didn’t sleep and they didn’t socialize with their friends and family.

But Crystal got up and went to work everyday. She kept her house relatively clean, though she’d had to take to cleaning the upstairs more since Sophia had arrived, and she kept going. She trudged through life, it was just a mostly uneventful life. It had gotten stuck on the setting of dull and then had gotten hung on repeat, but she didn’t hate it entirely. Dull and boring was much nicer than what it had been. She preferred expecting nothing over expecting the life she’d had.

And she ate…she ate too much most of the time. Mike had always scolded her about her weight and he was really right, but no matter what she did it always seemed that there was an extra five pounds here to lose or really more of her in one place or another than there should be.

She didn’t socialize with her friends and family, but she didn’t have them to socialize with. Her parents were gone and she had no siblings. She supposed that somewhere she had aunts, uncles, cousins, and such, but she didn’t know where they were and it had been so long since she’d talked to any of them they’d probably mourned the passing of the girl she used to be and never realized that there was still some part of her that did something akin to living.

We are the hollow men…

She remembered a line from a poem that she’d once read. She’d remembered it in therapy one day when she’d been asked about the millionth time how some event or another made her feel. She didn’t know if she interpreted the poem the way that Eliot might have meant for it to be interpreted, but she thought she understood the hollow men.

You can only swallow down so much of yourself…like a snake eating its own tail…until you simply feel like there’s nothing left.

We are the hollow men…

Crystal rubbed at her temples. Her eyes were burning and she knew she was going to hate herself by lunch time when all the hours caught up with her and she still had to push through the day. She had to work and then she’d need to make sure that dinner was ready when Sophia got home from her little job.

Now there was Sophia in Crystal’s life. They’d spent two weeks together, half the time that they’d agreed to, and Crystal still didn’t know what to do with the teenager. They coexisted more than anything. They lived separate lives that sometimes merged together, mostly for meals, but for the most part they were in their own worlds.

Sophia was, perhaps, another of the hollow men.

Strangely enough, to Crystal , it seemed like Sophia had given her the only thing she’d had to care about in some time. Sophia kept her distance, a little like a ghost in the house at times, but Crystal knew that she needed something from her, and trying to figure out what she needed from her had been the only real thing she’d put any effort into for a while.

So she did what she knew to do. She made sure that there was food when the girl should eat. She had taken her shopping, against Sophia’s wishes, for some clothes and some shoes since the shoes that the girl had were too well worn if she was going to insist on walking as she did, every day, to the shop where she worked doing God only knows what. She engaged the girl in what conversation she could draw out of her, mostly getting shop stories about a cast of characters that she didn’t know well and wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And she offered for Sophia the same empty lines she’d heard from people along her own journey…if you want to talk, just let me know.

But Sophia seemed to not want to talk any more than Crystal had ever wanted to talk.

Crystal knew, from what she’d been told, that Sophia was supposed to be a troubled young girl, but Crystal wasn’t really sure what that was supposed to mean. She assumed it may have been the same kind of thing that had happened with her when it came to the therapists. They’d said she was depressed, and the social workers said that Sophia was troubled. What it really boiled down to, perhaps, was that they didn’t answer their questions in the manner that they wanted them answered.

Sophia was a lot of things…she was things that Crystal couldn’t even explain, but Crystal didn’t know if she was troubled. She hated school, though Crystal hadn’t really gotten a concrete answer why. She was snarly and sarcastic at times, but Crystal assumed that any teenager could be that, and even more so if you were a teenager who had been followed around by specialists with label makers that spent fractions of time with you and punched out label after label, plastering them to your forehead.

They hadn’t spoken, as per their agreement, about whether or not Sophia would stay beyond her month’s worth of time. No one from child services had called to say that they’d found a better place for her, and Sophia hadn’t mentioned any discontent with the arrangement, but Crystal felt somewhat certain that the girl wouldn’t stay. She didn’t really have anything to offer Sophia beyond the basics. She didn’t know what the girl needed or wanted, and neither of them was excellent at communication.

She didn’t, though, want the girl to go. She wasn’t sure she could admit it to Sophia…she’d barely been able to admit it to herself yet…but she didn’t want her to go. Even her silent presence was a presence, and it was one that Crystal was slowly growing accustomed to. Her conversation, although mostly circling around the shop crowd and dotted with profanity and sarcasm, was still conversation. It was another voice. The verification that someone else lived there and the verification that, at least in some way, this other person was interacting with Crystal . Sophia was another life and she was a life that may only be coexisting with Crystal , but she was something that Crystal wasn’t entirely prepared to lose.

Crystal wouldn’t keep the girl there, though, if she didn’t want to stay, and she wouldn’t guilt her into feeling like she had to stay if she was ready to move on to bigger and better things. She certainly wouldn’t tell her that, as of late, the nightmares that she’d had were taking a different turn. Now, instead of just Mike…instead of all the images of her past stuck on some kind of repeat over and over in her head…the nightmares were starting to include Sophia. Crystal had no degree in dream interpretation, but she was clever enough to know that when her nightmares began to include the loss of the girl…usually in some tragic manner…it was her subconscious letting her know that she didn’t want her to go.

Crystal finally abandoned her coffee cup and walked around, turning the lights on downstairs. She stepped over to her purse and dug around. She popped a mint into her mouth after picking off a piece of blue pocket fuzz that had landed on it and then she pulled the little book out of her bag. She turned it over in her hand a moment before putting it down on the table next to where she would put Sophia’s plate in a little while.

She really didn’t have much to offer the girl, and when Sophia left Crystal figured that she wouldn’t take much of her with her, but she wanted her to take something with her. Every sixteen year old in the history of the world wanted to know how to drive. Even Carol could remember that it had felt like if she could drive at sixteen, she could own the world.

So Crystal had picked up the manual for Sophia and she’d called the DMV the day before. She intended to surprise the girl. She was going to take her, as soon as she was ready, to get her driving permit…and then, before it was time for Sophia to move on, she’d teach her to drive, or at least get her started. Wherever she went from here she could perfect her skills, but for the time being she could at least get the basics.

Crystal went about fixing breakfast. Slowly there was light rising in the sky outside. She always felt better once the sun started to come up. There was something about when the world was asleep…when even the sun didn’t feel like shining…that brought out the darkest of your demons. Crystal always felt the worst when the sun wasn’t out, but as it rose she felt a few of those demons running for the shadows, waiting until night to come back again. She could hear the echoes of Mike’s voice, the ones that played around and around in her mind when she was lone, growing softer too.

The sun was coming up and Sophia would be up soon. Crystal stepped into the kitchen and started breakfast. She hoped that the girl would be excited when she found out she was going to teach her to drive. She hoped it was at least something.

—————————————————————

Sophia flung her backpack at the floor near the door and dropped the shoes she was carrying in her hand in front of her to put on while she waited for Crystal to finish breakfast and sit down with her for the rushed meal they shared before they headed of in their direction.

Before she put the shoes on, though, Sophia craned around trying to catch a glimpse of Crystal’s face. Unfortunately it looked like she’d worried it would. As soon as she’d smelled the bacon this morning she’d suspected that she would find Crystal like this. For as much as she enjoyed the large and almost royal breakfasts of mornings like this, she’d trade them in for the toast any day.

In the two weeks that she’d been there, Sophia hadn’t learned much about Crystal . Crystal seemed pretty private and Sophia got the feeling that there was something behind that privacy. She certainly didn’t want to pry much. After all, she knew how annoying it could be when people wanted to go poking their fingers into your wounds only to ask you stupidly if it hurt a few seconds later.

Sophia knew that Crystal had some kinds of wounds…something, somewhere, had gone wrong. At first Sophia had interpreted it all to be her fault. She was the entire reason that Crystal looked like she did on the mornings of the big breakfasts. Something she’d done was the reason that Crystal’s eyes were dark and she barely smiled unless it was the forced smile that looked more like the facial expression you saw from people who were bored with their jobs.

As time had gone on, though, Sophia hadn’t been able to find any pattern in the things that happened in the house and the big breakfasts. They came when they came, and so she’d figured that they had little to do with her.

The most she could do on these mornings was eat the breakfast and try to eat all of it, even if she felt like she’d have bacon and eggs dripping out of her nose for the rest of the day because she was so full. Crystal seemed to like it when she ate…she seemed a little excited by it…and so Sophia choked down more than she even wanted.

Sophia plopped down at the table and pulled the first of her shoes on, tying the laces into a knot so she wouldn’t have to retie the stupid things just as she got on the bus. She glanced toward the table and in her spot was a book. She picked it up and read the title, but she wasn’t sure what to think of it.

“What’s this?” She asked.

Crystal turned a little toward her, the pan in her left hand and a pair of tongs in her right, frozen a second in her efforts to put together the breakfast that Sophia was going to stuff herself on.

“It’s a driving manual,” Crystal responded, her voice sounding a little lighter than Sophia expected. “I thought that you could read it, maybe this weekend? I thought that next week I could take you to get your permit and we could start teaching you to drive.”

Sophia looked at the book. She wanted to know how to drive…after all, who didn’t? She’d never really thought, though, that she’d actually learn until she was released from the prison of the system. She’d never really own anything until then, so she’d never have a car, and she certainly knew that none of her foster parents were ever going to let her touch their cars. They seemed terrified to let her operate the toaster, less likely their vehicle.

“Are you serious?” She asked, tying her other shoe.

Crystal brought over a plate for her then, loaded down with food. Sophia looked at it and sighed a little. Every time she made up her mind to eat all the food on the plate, she made it…by the grace of slightly oversized pants…she made it. However, it seemed like every time she met her goal she was presented, at the next royal breakfast, with a fuller plate.

“If you don’t want to learn you don’t have to,” Crystal said. Sophia looked at her. Her voice had dropped the octave that gave it the familiar haunted sound of mornings like this. Sophia shook her head.

“No, I want to,” she said. “What am I going to drive, though?” She asked.

Crystal smiled at her then and Sophia wondered if she might be able to at least leave behind some of the eggs and still not make the morning worse for the woman.

“My car, Sophia, what did you think you’d drive?” Crystal asked. She came back a moment later and sat down with her breakfast.

“I can’t drive, though,” Sophia said.

Crystal laughed.

“Sophia, no one can drive before they learn to drive…that’s sort of the idea of learning how to do it,” Crystal said. “It’ll be fine.”

Sophia was a little worried now. Crystal wasn’t someone who seemed crazy about her car, not like some of the people that she’d met, but she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the possibility of destroying something of Crystal’s, even on accident.

“What if I hit something?” Sophia asked.

Crystal shrugged a little.

“Then you hit something. We’re going to try to go for not hitting things, though, OK?” Crystal asked.

Sophia shoveled in her breakfast, but she was worried. The month was drawing closer to a close and she was hoping that Crystal was interested in renewing the contract, so to speak. She was trying to mind herself as much as possible so that the impression she left was the best that she could. Messing up on something as big as driving a car could look a lot worse than getting home late from the shop or having to bring Crystal yet another detention slip to sign because she’d said a little more out loud than she’d meant to in class.

“Don’t look so worried,” Crystal said. “When I was learning to drive I plowed down our mailbox three times. I also ran a stop sign, giving my father a heart attack, and I can actually remember him telling me at one point that any side of the road I wanted to drive on was fine, so long as I actually chose just one side and stuck to it for a while.”

Sophia laughed. She couldn’t really imagine Crystal at sixteen…it seemed so young for her. She knew that Crystal was thirty three, and Sophia didn’t really know how most thirty three year olds were, but she felt like Crystal was a lot older than her original take on the age had been. It was hard to think that she was sixteen once and learning how to drive.

“So your dad taught you?” Sophia asked.

Crystal nodded.

“My mom was a pretty nervous person,” Crystal said. “She was always jumpy…but my dad was really very laid back. It just made more sense for him to handle something like driving.”

“And are you jumpy or laid back?” Sophia asked.

Crystal smiled.

“When it comes to teaching you to drive? I don’t know.” She paused and bit the piece of bacon she was holding in her hand. “I guess we’ll have to find out, but I’ll do my best to channel my father. Now you better hurry up and eat or you’ll miss your bus.”

Sophia nodded a little and turned her attention to eating as much of the food as she could. Since she’d first seen her face this morning Crystal was already looking lighter and Sophia wondered if it was the breakfast, the driving, or maybe even the mention of her father that had done it. She didn’t feel, though, the same pressure to scarf down all the food that she had before.

Finally, when Sophia was done, she checked her watch. She’d make it to the bus stop with a few minutes to spare if she left now. She got up, exchanging the normal morning niceties with Crystal and picked up her backpack off the floor.

“Don’t forget your book,” Crystal said.

Sophia nodded and grabbed the manual off the table. It was kind of exciting just holding the thing in her hands. She’d read it all and Monday they could go after school and she could get her permit. She’d tell Mac that Monday she wouldn’t be in to work. Before long she’d know how to drive, and then she could move the cars around the shop on her own…and that would be one less thing for Mac and Wren to rib her about.

Sophia slammed the door behind her and bounded down the steps. She could go ahead and start reading the book. The better she learned everything that was in there, the better she’d be when she started driving, and the less likely it would be that she’d hit the mailbox or end up all over the road. She was excited about learning to drive, but she still wanted to avoid doing anything that might leave a lasting, and poor, impression on Crystal . Two weeks wasn’t long enough to forget something like that.