The Twin Mirror on Riverside Drive

The first time I lost time, I was in the operating room at Riverside Veterinary, holding a scalpel over a golden retriever named Cooper who had swallowed a sock, and then I was standing in the hallway twenty minutes later, the scalpel still in my hand, Cooper's abdomen sutured shut, and no memory of doing any of it.

I dropped the scalpel. It clattered on the tile floor like a dropped coin. The nurse—Chloe, who had been working with me for three years—picked it up without looking surprised.

"Victoria," she said. "Again?"

"How long?"

"Twenty-two minutes. Doctor Patel signed off on the closure. The sock is out. The dog will live."

I looked at my hands. They were steady. They were always steady when I was operating, which was the problem. My hands were reliable. My mind was not.

"How many times this week?"

"Three. Tuesday, Thursday, today."

"I don't remember Tuesday either."

"Nobody expects you to."

I washed my hands. I washed them until they were red, until the soap had done everything it could do and then some, until the skin felt thin and raw. I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink. My eyes—my mother called them "too intense," my sister called them "burning," and I called them whatever they were because I stopped trying to name them the day Elizabeth died.

Elizabeth Watson died five years ago. She was seventeen. I was twenty-two. The official cause was an accidental fall from the balcony of our family's Summer house in Nantucket. The unofficial cause—I have my theories—was something my mother will not discuss and that I will not investigate.

I am a veterinarian. I treat animals. Animals do not have psychological disorders. Animals do not suffer from dissociative identity disorder. Animals do not look at you with eyes that are exactly like yours and feel, for a moment, that you are looking at yourself.

I am Victoria Watson. I am twenty-six years old. I am a licensed veterinarian working at Riverside Veterinary in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I have a cat named Bellerophon—who is named after a mythological figure who flew too close to the sun, which is either ironic or prophetic, depending on the day. I have student loans of one hundred and forty thousand dollars. I have a mother who calls me three times a day. And I have a gap in my memory that is growing wider every week.

Julian Black moved into the apartment above Riverside Veterinary on a Monday in March. I knew him by Wednesday because he came to the clinic at noon on a Wednesday, carrying a Persian cat that was vomiting and had the sort of coat that costs more than my monthly grocery budget.

"The cat's name is Churchill," he said. "He gets motion sickness. We just moved from Berlin, and the taxi ride from the airport must have aggravated his stomach."

He spoke English with an accent that was not quite American and not quite European—somewhere in between, the kind of accent that belongs to someone who has learned to speak English well but has never quite decided to claim it as his own.

He was handsome. Not boyish handsome, not movie-star handsome, but the kind of handsome that belongs to someone who knows he is handsome and has made peace with the consequences. Tall, dark hair that was slightly too long, eyes the color of slate—gray, but the gray of a blade, not a sky.

"What's the diagnosis?" he asked.

"Likely motion sickness. I'll prescribe an anti-nausea medication. But I would recommend stopping all food twelve hours before travel and offering small amounts of water frequently."

"Of course. Twelve hours." He paid with a credit card that was black—American Express Centurion, the sort of card that not even rich people get, the sort of card that gets given to you.

He left Churchill's medication on the counter and said: "Thank you, Dr. Watson. You're very... thorough."

There was something in the way he said thorough that was not a compliment. It was an observation, and observations from strangers are rarely harmless.

I noticed other things about Julian Black after that. He lived in the luxury building on Riverside Drive—the same building where I had grown up, the one my mother had said was "respectable" and "proper" and "the sort of place where good families live." I had assumed he was an heir to something: money, connections, a name that opened doors.

But I noticed the way he avoided mirrors.

Not all the time. Just sometimes. In restaurants, he would sit with his back to the wall, facing the room, and his place would be chosen so that the mirrors on the adjacent walls were either blocked or turned away. In his elevator, if there was a mirror—some luxury elevators have them—he would stand in the corner, facing the door, and would not look up.

When I asked him about it, casually, over the phone, because he had called the clinic the next day to follow up on Churchill's medication, he said: "I don't like mirrors."

"Why not?"

A pause. "They show things I don't want to see."

Then he hung up.

I lost time again on a Friday. Twenty-five minutes this time. I was in Room Three, performing a routine dental cleaning on a siamese cat named Cleo, and then I was in the hallway, my scrubs were stained with something dark, and Room Three was empty, and Cleo was gone.

Chloe found me standing in the hallway, staring at the stain on my scrubs. "Victoria. Breathe."

"What happened to Cleo?"

"She left. Her owner picked her up ten minutes ago."

"Ten minutes? I lost twenty-five minutes, Chloe, and Cleo was here the whole time?"

"No. Cleo was here for three minutes. Her owner said the cat seemed fine, just a little drowsy, and— Victoria. Look at me."

I looked at her.

"You did something to that cat. I don't know what. But the owner is happy, the cat is happy, and I am not going to ask."

"What kind of veterinarian leaves a stain on their scrubs and doesn't remember it?"

"The kind who needs to take a sick day."

I did not take a sick day. I went home to my apartment on West 78th Street—a small, neat apartment that my mother had helped me choose—and I stood in my bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror.

My eyes looked back at me. They were dark. They were burning. They looked exactly like the eyes I saw in photographs of my mother and exactly like the eyes I saw in photographs of Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, who had fallen from a balcony.

Elizabeth, who had looked in the mirror the week before she died and told our mother: "There's something wrong with Vicki. She's not herself anymore."

I had not understood what Elizabeth meant. I understood it now, or something like understood—it is not the same thing.

I started paying attention to the gaps. They were getting longer: fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes. And between them, things were happening that I could not explain. Bellerophon, my cat, would be sitting on my bed in the morning, looking at me with an expression that was not feline but almost human—almost knowing. Small things would move in my apartment: a book on the coffee table would be closed when I remembered leaving it open; the refrigerator would be stocked when I remembered leaving it empty.

And then there were the dreams.

In the dreams, I am seventeen again. I am standing on the balcony of the Summer house in Nantucket. The wind is blowing. The sea is dark. And Elizabeth is standing next to me—not the Elizabeth I remember, the Elizabeth who was seventeen and bright and cruel in the way that young beautiful people are cruel because they have not yet learned that cruelty has consequences.

This Elizabeth is different. This Elizabeth is looking at me with an expression I have never seen on her face before.

"She's coming," Elizabeth says.

"Who?"

"The burning one. She's coming through the mirror."

I wake up. I am in my apartment on West 78th Street. I am sweating. Bellerophon is on my chest, looking at me.

And the mirror across the room—the full-length mirror that I keep covered with a sheet, because mirrors make me uncomfortable too—shows, for one brief moment, that the sheet has fallen off.

And in the mirror, I am not alone.

I do not scream. I do not run. I walk across the room, slowly, and I look at myself in the mirror. My reflection looks back at me. It is me. It has to be me.

But the smile on my reflection's face is not my smile.

I cover the mirror again. I sit on the floor. I breathe.

The next day, Julian Black came to the clinic again. Churchill was vomiting again, or perhaps he was not and Julian was using him as an excuse.

"Dr. Watson," he said. "How are you?"

"Fine."

"You don't look fine."

"I'm a veterinarian. I don't have time to look fine."

He was quiet. Then: "Do you believe in mirrors?"

"No."

"I do. Or rather, I believe in what they show. And what they don't show."

"Which is?"

He looked at me with those slate-gray eyes and said something that I would remember for the rest of my life: "Some people have more than one reflection, Dr. Watson. Not metaphorically. Literally."

Then he left. Churchill too, apparently. Or perhaps Julian had never had a cat.

That night, I stood in front of the covered mirror and I said out loud: "If there's someone else in here, I know you're there. And I'm not afraid of you."

The sheet on the mirror moved. Not much. Just enough to know that something had touched it.

I did not sleep that night. I sat in my armchair, facing the mirror, and I waited. At three in the morning, the mirror fogged—not the whole mirror, just a patch in the upper right corner, the size of a handprint. And on the fog, words were written in a handwriting that was mine but not mine:

BURNING EYES SEE ALL

I touched the mirror. It was warm.

I am Victoria Watson. I am twenty-six years old. I am a veterinarian. I treat animals. I have student loans. I have a mother who calls three times a day. I had a sister who died. And somewhere in the architecture of my mind—a structure my mother built brick by brick, control upon control, expectation upon expectation—there is a room that I cannot enter and a person who lives there who can.

Her name is Burning Eyes. Or that is what she calls herself. Or that is what I call her. I am not sure which anymore.

She is not evil. She is not good. She is simply there—like a room in a house that you did not know existed until you open the door and find that someone has been living in it. Sleeping in your bed. Wearing your clothes. Looking in your mirror with your face and not your expression.

Julian Black is not who he says he is. I know this now. I do not know what he is. Architect? He carries himself like a soldier. He moves through rooms the way someone surveys exit routes. His apartment is filled with mirrors that are all covered with sheets. When I was there—why was I there? I do not remember visiting his apartment—when I was there, I saw photographs on his wall. Photographs of women. Women who looked like me. Not identical. But similar. The same eyes. The same burning, intense, too-aware gaze.

"Who are they?" I asked him.

"Subjects," he said.

"What kind of subjects?"

He looked at me for a long time. "The kind that break. And the kind that split. My father studies the architecture of the mind. I build buildings. But we are both in the business of structure, aren't we? Your mind has structure. So does a building. Both can be mapped. Both can be predicted. Both can collapse."

I left his apartment. I do not remember how I got home.

The next morning, I did not answer my mother's phone. Not because I was angry—though I was angry—but because I was afraid that if I heard her voice, I would hear something in it that I had never heard before: fear.

My mother fears nothing. She is Dr. Elaine Watson, author of The Price of Perfection, the woman who raised two daughters with the kind of love that is indistinguishable from control. She will not be afraid of a ghost in her younger daughter's mind.

But she should be.

Because Burning Eyes is not a ghost. She is a person. She is a part of me that my mother's control created—the way a cracked wall creates a place for mold to grow. The more my mother tried to make me perfect, the more perfect I was not allowed to be imperfect. And the imperfection split off, like a cell that mutates and becomes something the body does not recognize.

I stand in front of the mirror. The sheet is on the floor. I look at myself.

My reflection smiles. I am not smiling.

"You're not real," I say.

"I'm as real as you are," she says. Her voice is my voice, but lower. Slower. Like someone speaking through water.

"Who are you?"

"Your name. Your eyes. Your mind. I am what your mother made me."

I look at her. She looks at me. And for the first time in five years, since Elizabeth fell from that balcony and disappeared into the Nantucket darkness, I feel something that is not fear.

I feel recognition.

Author Note & Copyright: