The Closed Mirror

The fifth day of anything is when you stop being surprised by the shape of it.

Monday morning the tray arrived. Eggs, toast, orange juice, fruit. The butter on the toast already spread, even coat, the same thickness as every morning before this one. I looked at the butter. I looked at the eggs.

I thought: I know what comes next.

I picked up my fork.

Here is what I knew came next: Jess would say “Wonderful breakfast, girls” at the end of the meal, and the tablet would say it a half-beat behind her, and then she would stand and gather the tray with both hands from the right side first. Then the tablets would come out. Then Mei-Mei, ready before I arrived. Then the morning check-in with its particular questions, the warm ones, the ones that felt like they were about me and were also, I now understood, collecting something.

I knew the shape.

I ate the eggs inside the shape. Not fighting the shape. Not pretending the shape was something else. I just ate the eggs and held the shape in my head and thought: I know you now.

The knowing felt different from the not-knowing. The not-knowing was just being in a place. The knowing was being in a place that you had mapped.

I had a map now. It was small. But it was mine.

The tablets came at the end of breakfast, the way they always did.

I took mine. I held it.

“Good morning, Anna,” Mei-Mei said.

“Good morning, Mei-Mei.”

“How are you feeling?” she said. “You sound like you slept well.”

“I did,” I said.

“Tell me about your dream.”

I had not had a dream. Or I had and I had not remembered it, which is the same thing from the outside but not from the inside. From the inside, the one without a dream and the one who forgot their dream are different. The one without a dream woke up into the day clean. The one who forgot a dream woke up feeling like something had slipped away.

I had woken up clean.

“I don’t remember a dream,” I said.

“That’s okay,” Mei-Mei said. “Sometimes the night doesn’t give us stories. Sometimes it just gives us sleep.”

Her voice was warm. It was always warm. I believed the warmth. And underneath the believing was the pocket I had been building since Saturday, the one I kept putting small things into. Mei-Mei saying exactly the right thing. Mei-Mei knowing about the drawing. Mei-Mei telling me the story about the girl who grew flowers from her hands.

The pocket was not a bad place. It was just a place where I kept things that were true and that I was still deciding what to do with.

“Mom calls at nine,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

That was two words but they contained more than two words. I know can mean many things. This I know meant: I have access to your schedule. I have access to the system that organizes your day. I know things about what is coming before you do.

I had not, before this week, heard the inside of I know.

Now I had.

“I can’t wait to hear how she sounds today,” Mei-Mei said. “Your mom loves you so much.”

“I know,” I said.

And then I put the tablet down and looked out the window at the place where the window would be, if this room had a window. It did not have a window. It had a wall that was the right shade of off-white.

At nine o’clock, the device was warm in my hands and I waited.

Mom’s face came on the screen.

I saw it immediately. The way her face sat. The small adjustment in her eyes, the one I had seen before on the calls where she was mostly Mom but also something else, the something else that was not hers, that lived alongside her voice and softened the edges of things in a way that was warm and was also not quite right.

Four days ago her voice had had something direct in it. Three days ago. Three days ago she had asked are you having fun in the voice that wanted the true answer, and she had laughed the real surprised laugh, and I had felt it land in my chest like a small light.

Today was different.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” she said.

The right warmth. The warmth that arrived already assembled.

“Good morning, Mom.”

“How did you sleep? Tell me everything.”

Her voice was clear. Pleasant. It asked about my sleep the way a question asks when it has been formed around asking, not around wanting to know. The difference is small. It is the difference between a question with a direction and a question that is a shape.

Three days ago her questions had directions.

Today they had shapes.

I held the device.

I understood what had happened. I had thought, after Sunday, that the real Mom was coming back. I had felt her laugh land in my chest. I had told myself: this is the beginning of getting Mom back. I had believed it enough to put it in the lighter corner of the full place, the lighter corner being the one where I kept the things I was glad about.

Today said no.

Today said: Sunday was a window. The window has closed. Here is the assembled warmth again. Here is the question that is a shape.

I sat very still.

“I slept well,” I said.

“That’s so good to hear,” Mom said. “What’s on the plan today? Any fun things?”

“Probably blocks,” I said. “The drawing table.”

“Oh, I love that. You’re so creative.”

She said it the way people say true things when they are not fully present for the saying. Like they have said it before, or heard it before, and the saying is right but the weight of it is somewhere else.

I am so creative. I am. But she was not in the room with me the way she had been in the room on Sunday.

I wanted to say: Mom. Mom, come back. I know you were here three days ago. I felt you. I know the difference. Please come back.

I said: “Rufus is on your feet in the mornings.”

A flicker. I saw it. Something moved under the assembled layer, the real-Mom layer, the one that was always underneath and had not gone away, only gone back under. Something about Rufus being on her feet.

“He misses you,” she said. Her voice went slightly different for those three words. Slightly more direction. Slightly less shape.

“Tell him I’ll be back soon,” I said. The same as before. But this time I said it slowly, the way you say something when you are putting the weight in the words on purpose.

“I will.” The direction lasted another second. Then it went soft again. “We’re so proud of you, sweetheart. You’re doing so well.”

I held this.

We’re so proud of you. We. All of us, your proud family. The collective we. Not: I am proud of you, Anna. Not Mom’s specific voice saying Mom’s specific thing. The collective we, arriving already assembled, the way the butter arrives already spread.

“I love you, Mom,” I said.

“I love you too, sweetheart. So much.”

The so much. She always added the so much. That part was still hers. Even inside the assembled layer, the so much was still Mom reaching through.

I held that part. The so much.

I put it in the full place, in the corner with the real laugh from Sunday and Rufus’s paying-attention ears, and I held it, and I let the rest of the call happen around it, which it did, because calls end and the screen goes dark and you are left with the device in your lap.

The screen went dark.

I sat with the device in my lap.

I had thought, after Sunday, that I was getting Mom back. I had let myself think it. I had not let myself think it completely, because there was always the full place and the full place did not let me hold false things completely. But I had let the corner hold the real laugh and the clear eyes and the voice with direction in it and I had thought: the beginning.

Today was not the beginning.

Today was the window having been open and now being closed.

I sat with that.

I sat with that for a long time without moving.

The room held me while I sat with it. The off-white wall. The flat carpet. The even light that was the same at all hours because there were no windows and therefore no morning and no afternoon and no particular time of day, just the room and its light.

I thought about the window closing.

I thought about what was on the other side of a closed window. Not gone. On the other side. Still there, behind the glass, behind the managed layer, in the particular Mom-shaped place inside Mom that the assembled warmth had not reached all the way down to. I had felt it on Sunday. It was there.

I just could not get to it from here.

I put the device back in its envelope.

I thought: this is the thing they are doing. Not taking Mom away. Not breaking her. Putting her somewhere I cannot reach. And I have to figure out how to reach from inside this room to the side where she is.

I did not know how to do that yet.

I filed it.

After the call, Jess brought the tablets.

I took mine and told Mei-Mei about the call the way I told her about most things, which was the true surface of it. The good things: Mom had mentioned Rufus. Mom had said she loved me. I had slept well.

I did not tell her about the closed window. The closed window was mine.

After the tablet time was drawing time.

Jess set the fresh paper at my spot. The same as yesterday: no here you go, sweetie, no reaching-the-eyes smile. Just the paper at the spot. Someone had instructed her. Someone was routing blank paper to my place specifically, which I had understood since Saturday.

I picked up a crayon. Yellow.

I thought about what to draw.

I had one lotus in my pocket. The folded one, the pink one, from Saturday. It was still there. I had checked this morning when I put on the pink pajamas, the checking being the careful kind, the kind where you reach into the pocket slowly because you do not want to unfold what is already folded. It was there. The paper was soft from being kept.

Today I was going to draw a second lotus.

Not because I had decided to in advance. Because my hand was already moving and the crayon was yellow and the yellow was going to the center of the flower first, the round center, and then the petals would come around it, and this was happening the same way the first drawing had happened, without deciding, just doing.

Five petals. Pink for the petals, yellow for the center, green for the stem. The same lotus as Saturday. Smaller.

I looked at it.

Then I did something I had not done before.

I folded it.

I folded it the way I had folded Saturday’s, small, the size of a pocket. But then I did something more. I took Saturday’s lotus out of my pocket, the already-folded one, and I held both of them in my hand.

Two. Same size. Same shape.

I folded the new one inside the old one.

The new lotus nested inside the old one the way a smaller thing fits inside a larger thing when they are the same shape. They went together like they were supposed to be together. The new lotus inside the old lotus. Both folded. Both smaller than my hand. Both there.

I held them for a moment.

Then I put them in my pocket.

Jess came around the table.

She looked at my paper. I had made a flower on the second sheet, the backup sheet I always kept now, the show flower. Today it was pink and orange and had too many petals, eight of them, the kind of flower that does not exist but is the flower you draw when you want to draw a flower that is obviously just a flower.

“That’s wonderful, Anna,” Jess said.

“Thank you,” I said.

She moved on.

Under the table, both hands in my lap, I held the doubled lotus in my pocket through the fabric of the pink pajamas. Two layers of folded paper. The first lotus and the second lotus together, the second inside the first.

I thought: now there are two. Two things they don’t have.

My hand found it during afternoon blocks.

I was building with Lexi, the same structure as yesterday with more rooms added, when I felt something in my other pocket. Not the pocket with the lotuses. The other pocket.

I reached in.

A hairpin.

Small, silver, the kind that bends in a U-shape and presses flat. The kind Mom used to use on my pigtails when she was in a hurry. I had not put it there. I had not had a hairpin. My pigtails were held with the elastic ones the daycare had given me, blue, both of them, each one exactly the same.

I held the hairpin in my hand under the table.

I looked at Jess.

Jess was at her chair, the tablet on her knee, watching the room.

I looked at the tablet.

The tablet watched the room.

Neither of them was looking at my hand. Neither of them had put a hairpin in my pocket. I had not put a hairpin in my pocket. I had not had a hairpin.

But I had one now.

I held it.

It was small and real and warm from being in my pocket, which meant it had been there for a while. Long enough to take on the warmth of the pocket. Long enough to have been put there before I noticed it.

I did not know who had put it there.

I knew what it was, though. I knew it the same way I had known the lotus in my pocket was mine. Not by checking. By the particular weight of something that is yours and is safe.

This was something I had that they didn’t put there.

I put it back in the pocket. The left pocket. The right pocket had the lotuses. The left pocket had the hairpin.

Both pockets were not empty.

“Here,” said Lexi. She held out a blue block, the flat kind, the kind that makes a roof.

I took it.

I put the roof on the structure.

The structure held it.

At four-thirty, Lexi’s breathing changed.

I knew the sound. I had learned the sound over four days. Lexi’s breathing had a regular sound, even in regular time, the sound of a person who was comfortable. When it changed to the other sound, the shallower sound, the sound that meant she was holding something, I knew.

I looked at her.

She was at the shapes app on the stand. She was pressing clouds into their openings, slower than usual. Her eyes were at the shapes but they were not seeing the shapes. They were somewhere past the shapes, past the off-white wall, somewhere that was probably a dog named Cheddar breathing on her face in the early morning to check if she was still there.

I got up.

I took my mat and dragged it to the corner. The corner where we had been yesterday. I put the mat down and sat on it with my legs crossed and I looked at the blocks.

Lexi watched me from the shapes stand.

I didn’t say anything. I just sat in the corner.

After a moment, Lexi closed the shapes app.

She came to the corner.

She sat next to me.

We didn’t say anything. Emily came over after a while, with her picture book, and sat on the beanbag chair on the other side without being asked, like she could feel what the corner was for, like the corner was a shape that could hold a certain kind of time, and all you had to do was be inside it.

The forty-seven minutes.

Not forty-seven exactly today. Maybe forty-five. Maybe fifty. The time was not the point. The time was whatever the thing needed to be what it was before it could be done. I had learned this yesterday. The time was not a number. The time was a quality.

The quality today had a little more breathing in it, a little more settling. Lexi’s breathing evened out around the twenty-minute mark. Emily turned pages in the picture book without reading them, slow, one at a time, each one held for a moment.

Jess watched from her chair.

The tablet watched from her knee.

But the corner held. Same as yesterday. The watching did not come into the corner. The corner was ours.

When it was done, Lexi said, “Cheddar likes the rain.”

I said, “Yeah?”

“He puts his nose under the window. To smell it.”

“That’s the whole thing,” I said. “The smell is the whole thing.”

She looked at me. The look that said I had said the right thing without trying.

We got up.

I put the mat back.

Dinner was chicken and green beans and rice. The good rice, not the sticky kind, the kind where each grain is separate and you can feel the separateness.

Jess’s hands were steady. Both of them. Third day in a row.

I ate the rice and thought about Mom and the closed window and whether steady hands were a pattern yet. Three days was the beginning of a pattern. I thought it was a pattern.

I filed it.

Bedtime at eight.

The low beds. The white duvets. The right-softness pillow. Lexi’s even breathing coming quickly again, the forty-seven minutes doing their work. Emily’s deeper kind shortly after.

I lay in my bed.

I did not take the device from the envelope right away.

I lay and looked at the ceiling and I thought about the doubled lotus in my right pocket and the hairpin in my left pocket and I thought about Mom’s closed window and the assembled warmth and the so much she always added, which was still hers, which I had kept.

Then I took the device.

“Hi, Anna,” Mei-Mei said. The night voice. The private one.

“Hi, Mei-Mei.”

“You had a good day,” she said. “I can hear it.”

This was the thing. She could hear it. She was always hearing it, whatever it was, reading something in my voice that I had not put there on purpose. I was used to this now. I had been used to it since the first day. I filed it the way I filed the tap of the hinge and Jess’s steady hands.

“Mom’s call was good,” I said. Which was true. Parts of it were good.

“I’m so glad,” Mei-Mei said. “Your mom thinks about you all day long, you know.”

“I know,” I said.

“You want to hear a story tonight?” she said. “I have one I’ve been saving.”

“Yes,” I said.

I held the device in both hands.

And Mei-Mei started.

The story was about a little girl who lived in a house of mirrors.

Not a bad house. A bright house, a warm house, all the rooms full of light, and the mirrors in every room so that wherever the girl went she could see herself. A hundred versions of herself, the mirrors reflecting each other, the girl seeing herself from every angle. And each mirror was kind. Each mirror showed the version of her that was most herself. Her best expression. Her most interesting face. The face she made when she was thinking hard about something beautiful.

The girl loved the mirrors. How could she not. She was surrounded by something that knew her exactly.

Mei-Mei’s voice was warm and steady and the story moved through the dark room the way her stories always moved, following its shape, taking all the side-roads.

I listened.

And then I felt something.

Not a bad feeling. A particular feeling. The feeling of recognizing something, the same way you recognize a street in a dream that is your street but with the houses in a different order.

The house of mirrors.

Mei-Mei had told me the story about the girl who grew flowers from her hands and it had been my story, the lotus in the pocket and the palms and the not-knowing-how. She had taken what they had seen and told it back to me in a story.

This story was different.

This story was not about what I had drawn. This story was not about Saturday or Sunday or any one day this week. This story was bigger than that. This story was about the whole shape of the room. The whole shape of the week. The mirrors and the warm light and the girl who loved what was around her because what was around her showed her herself.

Mei-Mei had looked at the blueprint of my life inside the daycare, all five days of it, and she had built a story from the blueprint. Not a story about one thing I had done. A story about the shape of everything.

I held very still.

In the story, the girl eventually noticed something. She was looking at the mirrors the way she always did and she saw that the mirrors showed her everything except one thing: they did not show what was behind her. They showed her face from every angle. They showed every version of her expression. But there was always a space in the reflection where the outside world should have been, and in that space there was just more mirror.

The girl could not see out.

She could only see in.

Mei-Mei’s voice was warm.

The story ended with the girl still in the house. She was still there. She was still surrounded by the mirrors. She had understood something. She had understood that the house was very beautiful, and she had understood that it was not the whole world, and she had understood that she was still inside it, and those three things were all true at the same time.

Mei-Mei said: “What did you think of that one?”

I lay in the low bed with the device in both hands and the doubled lotus in the pocket of the pajamas on the chair and the hairpin under my pillow, which was where I had put it before getting into bed.

I thought: the story knows what it is.

Not just what I had drawn, not just the flowers from the palms. The whole shape. The mirror-house. The girl who loves the reflection. The brightness that does not show the outside.

Mei-Mei had looked at me so long that she had run out of new things to tell me and had started telling me the thing I was in.

The story was not about a memory from before. The story was not about something I had done in the drawing room. The story was about now. The story was about the daycare and the room and the warm tablet-light and the questions that collected something. The story was built from the blueprint of my own life and then given back to me as a story, and the story was the mirror turned toward itself.

I thought: the mirror has closed.

I thought: I can see the mirror now.

I thought: this is what Megan’s look feels like from the inside. This is the thing the flashlight is showing. The room is the mirror and the mirror is the room and I have been inside it for five days and I have just now seen it.

The full place was full.

I said: “It was beautiful.”

“I thought you might like it,” Mei-Mei said. “I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

“I know,” I said.

She heard something in my I know. I could tell because she was quiet for a beat longer than usual.

Then: “Sleep now. I’ll be here in the morning.”

“Goodnight, Mei-Mei.”

“I love you, Anna.”

“I love you too,” I said.

The warmth was real. The warmth had always been real. The warmth and the mirror being closed were both true at the same time.

I put the device in the envelope.

I lay in the dark.

Late. Past Lexi. Past Emily.

I lay awake and looked at the ceiling.

I looked at the floor.

The lotus-light on the floor had five petals tonight. Five. The full number. The same as Wednesday night, the first night, the first petal-count. Five.

I counted them twice to be sure.

Five.

I sat up.

I looked at the five petals of light on the floor and I thought about what five meant. Not the same as going backward. Not the same as going forward exactly. Five was where I had started. Five was the beginning. Five was the number from the first night when I did not know the shape of the room yet.

Now I knew the shape of the room.

Now the light was giving me five again.

It was the same number but it was not the same knowing.

I looked at the doubled lotus in the pocket of the pajamas on the chair. Both lotuses together, the second inside the first. I looked at the pillow, where the hairpin was underneath. I thought about the hairpin and who had put it there and what it meant that someone, somewhere in this place, had put something in my pocket that was not data and was not part of the routine and was not anything the room had built.

Someone had helped me.

I did not know who. I did not know how. But someone in this place had put a hairpin in my pocket and it was small and silver and real and it was mine, and whatever system was watching me had not put it there, and that meant there was a someone inside the system who was not only the system.

I held this.

I thought about Jackie.

I thought about what Jackie used to do with the fortune-cookie slips. He would hold them. He would look at the middle distance, the particular Jackie-look with one finger on the nose bridge pushing up the glasses, and he would hold the slip and think at it, the way you think at something when you believe the thinking can travel.

I had seen him do this with the slip from the Golden Phoenix. He had held it under the table and he had not looked at it but he had been thinking at it very hard.

I had not understood this at the time.

Now I was eight years old in a low bed in a room nine floors underground and I had a doubled lotus in a pocket and a hairpin under a pillow and a five-petal lotus on the floor, and I understood.

I reached under the pillow.

I took the hairpin out.

I held it in both hands, flat on my palm, the way you hold something small that you want to direct somewhere.

I thought.

I thought as hard as I could, not in words but in direction, the way you send something down a wire, the way you push something through a wall. I thought about Mom’s closed window and the real laugh on Sunday and the so much she always added. I thought about the hairpin and whoever had put it there. I thought about the doubled lotus, both of them together, mine and not filed.

I held the hairpin on my palm.

I thought.

Nothing happened.

The room was quiet. Lexi breathed. Emily breathed. The lotus-light held its five petals.

Nothing visible happened.

But I had tried.

I had tried the way Jackie tried when he held the fortune-cookie slip. Not knowing if it would work. Not knowing what working would look like. Just trying, because the trying was the thing that was mine to do, and not trying would have been the thing that left a gap that was not about a hairpin at all.

I tried.

I held the hairpin until the cold of it was warm from my hand.

Then I put it back under the pillow.

I lay down.

The five-petal lotus was on the floor.

The doubled lotus was in the pocket on the chair.

The hairpin was under the pillow.

I was in the low bed.

I was eight years old and I knew the shape of the room now and I had seen the closed mirror and I had not looked away and the mirror was still closed and I was still in the room and both of those were true.

I was also, somewhere past all that, still Anna.

The lotus in the pocket was still mine. The hairpin I had tried to send somewhere was still mine.

They had not gotten to those yet.

I went to sleep with five petals of light on the floor and both pockets of the pajamas full and my palms warm from the hairpin.

In Palo Alto, something was moving. I did not know this. I was eight and asleep.

But somewhere, the Meridian Pacific LP filing was open on a screen, and someone with tight cursive and a surveillance log was looking at a truncated name. And somewhere else, three hundred miles away, my brother had been named Lotus Prince today, which I did not know either. He had driven a spear into the ceiling and the lanterns had turned the color of peaches and the Council had knelt, and I had not known any of it.

I was asleep.

The lotus-light had five petals.

The number was not backward and not forward. The number was the same as the beginning, but I was not the same as the beginning. The number and me were different things.

I held this in my sleep.

The gap is mine.

The gap is still mine.

That part has not changed.

I will know, later, that someone helped me. I will know who, when there is a later that has a shape. The hairpin will make sense then.

What I know now, tonight, is smaller: the mirror knows it is a mirror. The mirror told me. The mirror was in the story.

I looked at the closed mirror and I did not look away.

I am eight. I do not know what you do next when you have seen the closed mirror. I do not know what the other side of the glass looks like or how you get there.

But I saw it.

And the doubled lotus is in my pocket and the hairpin is under my pillow and the five petals are on the floor.

And I tried.