Three weeks before I buried the bathroom mirror, my mother came home from Ballard with wet hair and a story I should have checked.
She sat at the kitchen table in her purple raincoat, turning a cracked mug. The neighbor’s beagle, Buster, was losing his mind in the next yard.
“The last 48 came,” she said. “I was at the shelter on 15th. There was a woman about twenty yards down the sidewalk. Same coat. Same canvas tote from the library. Same white streak.” She touched her hair. “Her umbrella was dry. Mine was dripping. I raised my hand. She raised hers at the same time. So I said, ‘Who are you?’”
I waited.
“She said, ‘Wrong question. Who are you?’”
Mom stopped talking. The rain had let up. Water ran from her coat onto the linoleum. She kept her eyes on the table instead of the dark window over the sink.
“The bus came,” she said. “I got on. When I checked the sidewalk, a man in a red jacket walked straight through her. Not around. Through.”
That was the first version. Later the ORCA card would tell me the last 48 never came that night—the route was canceled after a downed wire. The card showed a fare of two seventy-five at 6:12 that morning. Nothing after. I saw that by logging into her Metro account while she slept. But by then the house was already wrong.
The first thing I noticed: all the family photos were turned face-down. The shot of Mom at Deception Pass was in the crisper drawer, under a bag of carrots. She said she had cleaned. She had not cleaned in years.
Then the food. My mother hates cilantro. One Tuesday she made a lime soup with cilantro and acted like it was her recipe. My father asked about a voicemail she left on his work phone, canceling his dental appointment. She said she never called. He played it. The voice was hers.
One evening I came down the hall and saw her walk into the kitchen from the garage. At the same time the shower was running in the bathroom, and from behind the door came her humming—not a song I’d heard her hum before. I stood in the hallway between the two sounds. I pressed my palm against the wall until the wallpaper seam bit into my hand. Then I opened the bathroom door. The shower was on. The mirror was fogged with two handprints. No one was in there.
At 4:10 in the morning, Buster’s barking turned into a howl. I went to the patio door. Two women stood by the rain barrel. Same face. Same flannel robe. The one on the left had wet hair and was crying. The one on the right had dry hair and did not blink. Their voices overlapped.
“Come inside, Kate.”
“Kate, run.”
I must have made a noise. The dry one turned to me. The wet one’s mouth kept moving, but I couldn’t hear her anymore. I flipped the patio light. Then there was one.
After that, the dry one covered every mirror. The bathroom mirror with a green bath towel. The hall mirror with newspaper. She said the glass was causing drafts. I found Mom’s silver compact in the trash, cracked down the middle.
Three Sundays later, Buster howled under the bathroom window at 3:06 a.m. I got up. The towel had slipped from the bathroom mirror. In the glass, the bathroom should have been empty, but there was a woman in the reflection standing where no one stood in the room. Her hair was wet. Her lips moved. I leaned closer.
“Don’t open it,” she said. “The one who came back from the bus stop isn’t me.”
“Where are you?”
“On the other side of the glass. She took my place. She can’t cross a line of salt. The bag is in the garage, under the water softener.”
I asked if this was a dream.
The woman pressed her palm to the inside of the mirror. I pressed mine to the outside. The glass was cold as river water.
“Kate,” she said, “you have to choose fast. She knows I can see you.”
There was a knock on the bathroom door. The dry mother’s voice came through. “Who’s in there with you?”
I said, “Nobody.”
She said, “You’re lying to yourself.”
I opened the door a crack. The dry one stood there with a pair of kitchen shears. She had been cutting a coupon. Her right hand was dry. Her left hand was dry. She did not blink. I stepped out around her and went to the garage. I found the rock salt under the water softener. It was a yellow bag, half full. I carried it into the hallway. I cut the corner with the kitchen shears and poured a line of salt across the bathroom doorway.
The dry one came down the hall and stopped six inches from the line.
“What are you doing, baby?”
“Step over,” I said.
She didn’t. Her face hung there like a mask that didn’t fit. “That’s crazy.”
“Then step over.”
She lifted one foot. It would not go past the salt. It hovered, then set back down.
I took a screwdriver from the junk drawer. I went into the bathroom and removed the four screws from the mirror frame. The mirror came away from the wall. Behind it there was no drywall. The opening was black and smelled like rain and diesel and wet cedar. A cold hand came out. I took it. The real mother climbed through, her hair dripping, her robe soaked. She had a thin scratch on her neck. I gave her the bath towel from the floor.
The dry one made a noise like a teakettle. She tried to follow, but the salt line blocked her. She shrieked with my mother’s voice and another voice underneath it, like two radios in the same room.
I turned the mirror around to face the dry one. The glass did not show her reflection. It showed a dark shape with my mother’s face. The shape reached out of the glass. It took the dry one by the wrist. Her feet slid across the floor. She screamed with both voices. Then the glass rippled and showed the room again.
I did not sleep. I took the mirror out the back door. The shovel I’d bought at Home Depot on Aurora cost eleven ninety-seven; the price tag was still on the handle. I dug a hole two feet deep under the laurel hedge. I put the mirror in it face-down. The glass knocked from inside. I filled the hole. The knocking stopped.
Then I went inside and made tea. I poured a second cup for my mother. We sat at the kitchen table. Her hands were still blue around the nails. She checked the window over the sink, then me, then her reflection in the side of the teapot. She didn’t flinch.
“Let’s get a new mirror,” she said. “A small one.”
I said okay.
