Chapter 36 THE MIRROR

Chapter 36 THE MIRROR
POV: Anna De'Leon

The face in the mirror was not entirely hers.

She understood this in the specific way she had been understanding things for three days, in the body first, a cold recognition that moved through her before she had consciously assessed what she was looking at. She had looked at her own face in mirrors her entire life and she knew its landscape, the specific arrangement of features she had inherited from both parents in proportions that had always been familiar, and what was looking back at her from the bathroom mirror was that arrangement altered by something she was still in the process of measuring.

The cheeks had hollowed in three days.

She had not known that was possible in three days, had not understood that the body moved that fast toward its reduced version of itself when the inputs stopped, but the evidence was in the mirror and the mirror was showing her something that had not been there before Victor's hand had turned the key.

Her lips were cracked along the lower edge in two places, dried blood in the creases, the specific damage of a body that had been producing sound past its capacity and had not had enough water to sustain the production. Her eyes were red at the rims, not from crying but from the specific irritation of eyes that had been without adequate moisture and had been exposed to sudden light after extended darkness.

Her hands, resting on either side of the sink, had dark matter under what remained of her fingernails.

She looked at her hands for a long moment.

She looked at the evidence under the fingernails of what the first hours in the storage room had been, the specific record of a body that had not yet understood that concrete and steel did not negotiate, and she looked at it with the directness she had decided to bring to things and she filed it in the place she was filing everything.

Victor moved behind her.

She saw him in the mirror before she felt him, stepping forward from where he had been standing near the door with the glass of water, and she watched his reflection approach hers and she held herself still and she breathed.

His thumb touched her chin.

He wiped away the water she had spilled with the movement of someone performing an act of care, the specific gesture of tending to something, and she felt the warmth of his thumb against her skin and she looked at his reflection looking at hers and she thought about her father wiping grease from his hands on Sunday mornings before he picked up the coffee she had brought him.

She did not let herself finish that thought.

"See what happens when you listen," Victor said. His voice was quiet and carried the satisfaction of a man confirming a theorem he had always known was correct. "See how much better everything is when you trust me to know what is best."

Anna looked at her own reflection.

She looked at the hollowed cheeks and the cracked lips and the red-rimmed eyes and the hands on either side of the sink and she thought about what trust meant and what best meant and what know meant in the specific context of a man who had put her in a storage room for three days and was now asking her to confirm that his judgment was something she could rely on.

She nodded.

The nod arrived before she had decided to produce it, her head moving in the small affirmative motion that her body had calculated was the required response and had generated without consulting her. She watched herself nod in the mirror and she noted it with the same directness she brought to everything and she filed it.

"Good girl," Victor said.

She had heard the phrase enough times now that she had developed a relationship with it, understood its function in his vocabulary, the specific work it did in the economy of his approval. She had felt the warmth it produced in her chest the first time in his office and she had hated the warmth and the warmth had kept being produced regardless of the hating.

It was produced now.

She hated it now too, with the same specific self-disgust she always brought to it, and the hating and the warmth existed simultaneously in her chest the way they always did and she breathed through both of them and held herself still.

Victor leaned forward.

His lips touched her hairline, above her forehead, in a different place from the forehead kiss in the office, higher, the top of her head, the specific placement of a gesture that was not about affection but about territory, marking the highest point of something he had claimed.

She did not flinch.

She had stopped flinching.

She could not have said exactly when the flinching had stopped, whether it had been in the storage room or before it or during the three days of dark, but it was gone now with the other things that were gone and she stood with Victor's lips at her hairline and she looked at their two reflections in the bathroom mirror and she breathed.

"Clean yourself up," he said, stepping back. "Take your time. When you are ready, come find me. We have things to discuss."

He left.

The door closed with the soft click that she would never be able to hear without knowing what it meant, and she was alone with the mirror and the fluorescent light and the empty glass on the counter and the face that was not entirely hers.

She gripped the porcelain sink.

She looked at herself.

She looked at the specific detail she had been avoiding since she first looked up, the one her eyes had found and moved away from and returned to and moved away from again, the thing in her reflection that was not the hollow cheeks or the cracked lips or the red-rimmed eyes.

The necklace.

Victor's gold, still against her throat.

She had been in a storage room for three days with no light and no water and no sound except her own voice failing, and the necklace was still on her throat, had been on her throat through all of it, and she looked at it in the mirror in the fluorescent light and she understood something about herself that she had not understood before three days of concrete and darkness.

She had not taken it off.

Not in the Escalade after the slap, not in the trailer in the hours before Victor's men came for her, not in the weeks of performing compliance between the photographs and the bus ticket, not in any of the moments when taking it off would have been the thing that corresponded to who she believed she was.

She had not taken it off because taking it off required being someone who could take it off, and she was no longer certain that person existed, or whether she had ever existed, or whether the person who had bought a bus ticket with twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents in tip money and felt hope for the length of several mile markers was someone she was going to be able to find her way back to.

She looked at the necklace in the mirror for a long time.

She looked at it and she looked at the face above it and she breathed through the looking until she had finished with it, until she had absorbed what it showed her and filed it in the place she was filing everything, the place she was keeping back from the performance, the place she was going to need when the time came.

She turned on the tap.

She washed her face with the cold water and she washed her hands carefully around what remained of her fingernails and she looked at herself one more time when she was done, wet-faced and hollow-cheeked and red-eyed with Victor's gold at her throat.

She looked at that face and she remembered her father on a Sunday morning and the socket wrench in her twelve-year-old hand and the coffee going cold on the workbench and the sound of the Harley engine turning over in the bay, and she held it for one breath, just one, before she filed it with everything else she was keeping.

Then she dried her face.

Then she went to find Victor.

The girl in the mirror was Victor's creation, and Victor's creatures survived by accepting their place in his carefully constructed world.