Page 14 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Esther reached down to squeeze her socked foot. Pearl’s parents had split up when she was a baby and both were heavy drinkers, but while her American father had barely been around, her mother had determinedly held things together for her daughter as best she could. She’d worked for twenty years as a receptionist in the same Sydney dental office, saved money for Pearl to go to university, and only drank in the evenings. Esther knew Pearl had spent many mornings tiptoeing around her mother’s passed-out form, usually on the couch but sometimes on the floor, cleaning up the bottles and sticky spills of booze from the night before so her mother wouldn’t wake up and weep from shame at the mess she’d made.

They’d been very close, and when Pearl had gone overseas to study in California, Pearl’s mother had missed her terribly. Without someone else to care for, someone for whom to perform the stability she’d valiantly maintained for so long, what control she’d had over her drinking quickly eroded. Pearl had come home the summer after her freshman year to find her mother in such a sharp decline that she’d stayed in Sydney and hadn’t ever returned to her studies, even after her mother died six years later. For Pearl, college was synonymous with a bone-deep, grieving guilt,whereas for Esther it was just another bitter bead in her rosary of missed opportunities.

“Where’d you find this book, anyway?” Pearl asked now, turning the pages with great care.

Esther could have told Pearl the truth without revealing any other truths. A gift from her stepmother, who’d found it in the attic; there was nothing strange about that. But speaking about her family wasn’t something she did, not even when she might have liked to, though even as she answered, she felt a queasy jolt at the unevenness of it. Pearl freely offered up all the joys and ugliness of her own past, and in return, Esther gave her lies.

“A used bookstore in Mexico City,” she lied.

“Read me a passage?” said Pearl. “In English, I mean. Your translation.”

Esther flushed. “No, it’s not any good.”

“I’m not interested in good,” Pearl said, and reached out a hand to stroke the only part of Esther she could reach from her position, her knee. A dirty trick. Pearl knew that Esther was more amenable to saying yes to things when she was being touched. “Please? One paragraph?”

“If you really want,” Esther said, because at least maybe she could give Pearl this, and Pearl adjusted herself on the bed, sitting against the wall and looking attentive. Esther went over to her ancient, bulky laptop and let it grumble itself awake, then perched at her desk and scrolled through the document. “It’s bad,” she warned Pearl again. “My Spanish isn’t perfect and I’m no writer.”

“I’m your adoring fan,” said Pearl. “I’ll be proud no matter what.”

Esther cleared her throat self-consciously and read.

“After the mirror you gave me broke, Doña Marcela demanded it be covered. No one knows how the glass first shattered but she’s convinced that looking in a broken mirror brings bad luck. How horrified she’d be if she knew that last night I lost control and uncovered it. I was lying sleepless in bed and staring at it hanging on the wall, draped in a whitescarf, when suddenly I couldn’t take it anymore. I rose and tiptoed across the room, but when I pulled away the cloth, I discovered that the mirror was no longer broken. Or perhaps the cracks were invisible in the low candlelight. Looking at it, I felt the same shiver I’d felt that day in the pavilion—it was as if you were gazing at me through the glass. And when I touched it, I swear it trembled and gave way beneath my fingers like the surface of a lake.”

Pearl applauded when she’d finished, but Esther stared at the document for a bit longer before shutting her laptop. She’d read the book a hundred times before but never felt the frisson of unease that had coursed through her body as she read the words aloud just now.

It was mirror magic.

“You’ve hooked me,” Pearl said. “Who gave her the mirror? It has to be a lover.”

“Yes,” said Esther. “He calls her name in the night and she tries to go to him through the glass.”

Pearl smiled. “So it’s a romance.”

“Not exactly,” Esther said. “The mirror doesn’t take her to him; it takes her to a different world where he can’t follow.”

“Ah,” said Pearl, her expression dimming.

Esther wanted to explain that it was a good thing; that the narrator wasn’t meant for her lover’s world in the first place, that the novel was a story of liberation. But despite the hours she’d spent poring over the book to find all the right English words, none came to her now.

Late that night, hours after the midnight meal for the third shift had ended and the station finally settled into the rhythm of sleep, Esther untangled herself from Pearl’s warmth and climbed carefully from the bed. Pearl woke, her eyes glistening in the darkness, but Esther made a comforting noise and a second later she was asleep again. Esther pushed her feet into her boots without lacing them, then felt along her desk inthe dark until she found her pen and notebook. She held them in her hands, forcing herself to confront what she was planning to do. Too often she made choices without looking them in the eye, she let her choices make her, so later she could think,Well, I didn’t really have a choice, did I? It just happened. It wasn’t my fault.Unfortunately, knowing she had this tendency and recognizing it as it manifested were usually two different things. Now, though, she made herself face it.

I am doing this on purpose.

The bathroom down the hall was, like most of the bathrooms, communal, shared by the six other people who had rooms in this hallway, and Esther called out very quietly as she entered. She opened each of the three stalls to make certain no one was in there and then she locked the door and faced the mirror over the sink. It was a head-and-shoulders view of herself, a pallid cast to her light brown skin, eyes black with pupil despite the overhead light. Fear. She dampened a finger and touched it to the pattern of blood on the mirror’s right side, one last attempt to wash the spell away, but it was as stubborn as dried varnish and didn’t budge even when she scratched it with her fingernail. She wondered if others had noticed and how they’d explained it away to themselves. Nail polish; a flaw in the painted back; a coded message for the janitorial crew?

“Hello,” Esther said into the mirror. She watched her mouth move. She touched the surface carefully. It felt like a mirror, cold and smooth. “If someone is there,” she said, “I’d like to talk to you.”

Long, heart-beaten minutes passed. Nothing. Not a glimmer, not a sound. The reflection remained accurate, Esther and the bathroom perfectly in reverse.

Esther took out the pen and her notebook. In large block letters, as neatly as her messy hand allowed, she wrote (both forward and backward, unsure of a magic mirror’s logic of reflection):

WHO ARE YOU?

?UOY ??A OHW

She held the notebook up to the mirror, against her chest like a number in a mugshot and again she waited, feeling her pulse everywhere: throat, temples, wrists, belly. It was like being a child at a sleepover, chantingBloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Maryand dreading the gruesome face that might appear, knowing on one level that Bloody Mary would not—could not—come, knowing on quite another that she absolutely might.

But the minutes circled by and... nothing.

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