Maybe that is the point?
The note could be a metaphor, I suppose, or a word game. It is still unclear if I am being warned or threatened at this stage. But what is clear is that the man I saw on the CCTV footage has strong feelings about me being here in my father’s house. Does he know the woman who stayed here? Are they somehow connected?
Look in the mirror
Did my father do something to that man? Did I somehow do something without realizing?
I shiver and step back to view the mirror from a distance. I force myself to perch on the toilet lid and consider the mirror, my own drenched, thin frame unsettlingly staring back at me.
It is hard to look at yourself objectively, just as it is hard to look at anyone you are close to in the cold hard light of day. Love can blind us, the day-to-day of our lives can blind us.
Looking back at me I see now what I perhaps couldn’t see before my father died; I see the truth, or as close to it as I have ever gotten. I see a scared woman in her thirties with no family, no friends, a dead-end job, and nobody to come home to. The freedom that used to feel magical to me now re-labeled loneliness. I hold my own gaze. If I couldn’t even see my own life clearly, how the hell could I have seen my father’s? If I haven’t ever really known myself, how could I have presumed to know him?
He had a house, a fortune, a life I did not know about; it seems fair to assume he may have had a side I did not know about also. But I find that this line of thinking takes me nowhere fast.
I look at the note again. What am I not getting? What does it mean?
I look at the mirror itself now. It begins about five inches from the floor and ends about five inches from the ceiling. I scour everything I can see reflected in its surface for meaning and it slowly dawns on me that these notes might not mean me harm but might be offering me help.
I wanted to find more about my father out here, in this house, on this island. The mirror, the notes, the man leaving them, might hold the key.
I don’t know why but I suddenly recall a scene from years ago. I had won a prize at school for a poem I had written. A poem about silence. I was so proud; I took it to show him. I remember pushing open his heavy study door and wandering into that hallowed space. He’d looked up and smiled and taken it from me imbuing it with the same importance he would a historical document. And I sat on his ottoman and watched him read, the lamplight reflecting in a glimmer off his reading glasses as my words were acknowledged. He took his time, and in the gap, I imagined all his possible reactions until he finally lifted his eyes back to me and said, “It’s well written, Nina. Well done. A well-deserved prize. Congratulations.” And with those words all my pride, all my accomplishment drained from me. It was his tone. It was pragmatic. Nobody wants to be approached pragmatically, it is not indicative of anything good.
“You don’t like it, though, do you?” I had asked, careful to keep disappointment from my voice.
He removed his glasses and gave me a consolatory smile. “Do you want me to be honest?” he said with as much loving respect as one can say those words.
I nodded, no longer certain I could keep the emotion locked down.
“I do not. No. Simply put: it takes me to sad places and I do not like sad places.” He shook his head, knowing he was not fully serving his own meaning, not fully parenting me as he would want to. He tried again, “What you are writing about, it might seem very grown-up to you, but adults, adults like the light. Do you see?”
What I saw, for the first time, was that he was a person, not just my dad. A person with opinions, with judgments about life and me and about what gives something value. And the notion blossomed in me that not everything I did would have a value. To him, to the world. He had thoughts, and feelings, and a world inside him that I could not control or even touch. I was not his and he was not mine, but we were bound. And if I wanted to be valued, if I wanted my efforts to be valued, they would need to adhere to his.
I feel it again. That he is here, that man I do not really know. But this time I might finally find him.
I stand now, enthused, as if in a game somehow. A game where clues are given and there is ultimately an answer to be found.
He is here.
I reread the note.
Look in the mirror. Look. In. The. Mirror.
In the mirror?
I drop down quickly onto all fours. The mirror is, indeed, not flat. I can see, looking beneath its underlit rim, that it juts out from the wall a good palm’s width.
I inspect the mirror, towel wrapped tightly around me, on hands and knees, and then I see something unusual.
One of the screws holding the mirror’s bulk to the wall does not match the others. It is fresh, the metal brighter, newer, and it is not quite screwed back into its housing fully. Someone has recently replaced it.
I leap up, pull my towel tighter, and head for the bathroom door with purpose.
The house beyond the bathroom is silent. I watch for a moment and then decide to go for it, sprinting back to the bedroom and my phone. I grab it and quickly dial James’s number. It does not connect.
The house around me is silent. I think of what the note said. Look in the mirror. My answers will be there, suddenly, I am sure of it.
I head to the utility room, pull open the cupboard under the sink, and grab the toolbox. I heft its weight along the hall with me, my phone held tight in my other hand. When I get back to the bathroom, I lock the door behind me. Sink to my knees and rifle through the toolbox for a Phillips-head screwdriver.
