What Lies Within

The Stranger with Familiar Eyes

The photograph dragged other photographs in its wake, the way one sin invites its friends. In the parlor cabinet, behind the good china, I found a small stack bound with twine. Dust clung to the corners like the room’s attempt to keep them undiscovered.

The top image was a summer scene—women in dresses on the lawn, a table with sweating glasses, someone mid-laugh in the background with their head thrown back. My mother stood off-center with a woman beside her. Same height. Same hair. Same mouth.

Not the same eyes.

On the back, in the trembling hand again: Clara, ’69.

I sat on the floor, right there among the fragile things, and let time do its strange folding. Twins. The locket had told me. The diary had told me without using the word. Now the pictures spelled it. Two women wearing the same face like a coin with two sides, except somebody had taken a file to one of the faces and smoothed it down until the metal felt thin.

The mirror over the mantel held my gaze the way a hand on the back of your neck holds you. It had a hairline c***k now, I realized, running from the top right corner like a strike of lightning. When had that happened? I don’t know. I stood and moved closer as if magnetized. The woman in the glass (me, not-me) looked tired. When the light shifted, her eyes went pale as unwatered sky.

I had a thought so foolish I nearly laughed: I wanted to see Clara in a place that wasn’t glass. I wanted her anchored to something that wasn’t reflection, because reflections have all the moral decency of smoke. I wanted a place to aim my anger.

“Show me,” I said, which is not the kind of prayer anyone should ever pray to a house.

The air cooled. The smell of lilac moved through the room like a person crossing the doorway.

In the mantle mirror, a woman stood in the hall behind me—long hair, white dress, eyes bright. She was not on the rug when I turned, obviously not. When I faced the mirror again, she stepped closer in the glass, her mouth opening as if to speak.

“You don’t get the mirror,” I said, and heard my mother’s voice come out of me—flat, ironed. I took the picture of Clara from the table, held it in the mirror’s line like an accusation. “Be a body, then.”

The glass pulsed in that low way, a bass note you feel under your skin rather than hear. The chandelier prisms chimed once, a sound like a drawer closing softly.

I should have felt triumphant. I felt hollowed out. As if giving her rules had invited her to operate inside them.

That night, the house held its breath for a long time. I lay in the bed staring at the ceiling until the lines between plaster cracks redrew themselves into maps I could almost read. Just before sleep, the bedroom door eased open half an inch. I had not left it unlatched. I said nothing because I did not trust my voice to be my own.

When I dreamed, I dreamed of the basement I had not yet entered—steps curving down, down, a cold that folded over my shoulders like a shawl. At the bottom, a slab, a ribbon, a small red book. I knew its weight before I touched it. Clara Langley, 1965 on the first page, as plain as an oath.

I woke with my heart knocking against the bars of my ribs like a thing that wanted out. For a moment, in the gray before morning has properly begun, I reached toward the empty dark and said the name like someone calling a dog home.

“Clara.”

And something in the wall behind my head answered by humming a low, contented note, as if I had done exactly what it had been waiting for me to do.