Kathe Koja - Mirror of My Youth

Side by side in the morning room, slow lemon light and the thin fizz of soda water in her glass, Carlene’s profile like talking to herself, her young self, oh God had anyone ever had such a chance? Her life beginning anew without Raymond’s tyrannical insistence on his genius and her incomprehensible acquiescence to same, she could not live it all again, had no desire to, was in the end too fatally tired. But. The new improved version. What she couldn’t do.

Hearing above them Raymond’s petty bluster, eternal petulance at being again excluded from their morning tête-à-tête; “How can you stay?” Rachel asked her, and Carlene’s exquisite shrug: “Why did you?”

Exquisite, too, the tang of shared bitterness: “It was in my contract, too.”

“Yours was a hell of a lot easier to break.”

Rachel, brittle and slow, back a torment in the wicker chair, seeing her own blind chains snaking like living things to encircle these young wrists, choke out a second life; no. Very very quiet: “We’ll see.”

Carlene’s frown. “We won’t see. If I violate the terms of the contract, I can’t get a job, I can’t rent an apartment, or get credit — I can’t even get a social security card. I’m an appliance, remember?”

“No,” and even Carlene drew back now, from the venom in that word, the shaping of it like poison in the cage of withered lips, was she frightened that one day she would look that way, too? That’s what we can’t let happen, little girl. Not again. “Once,” Rachel said, “was enough.”

Time was the object. They had little of it, either of them, but they were industrious, they could squeeze everything from a moment. Carlene was decoy, pleasantly demure in the presence of attorneys, her daughterly affection touching the strangers who watched her helping her afflicted mother from office to office, my goodness isn’t there a family resemblance! “It’s not that we want to break the contract, no,” Rachel’s cool headshake, Carlene’s youthful gravity, “we only want to modify some of the circumstances. You know I think the world of Carlene, I think of her as my daughter,” and Carlene’s smile on cue, perfectly on cue.

It was her job, too, to keep Raymond busily oblivious in the times and moments when his attention would have been worse than nuisance. Sometimes Rachel watched them, phone to her ear, murmuring questions and asides and slow cool ponderings, no hint of ticking desperation in the attempts to cut the path she needed, gazing through the bedroom window: their walks in the Japanese garden, Raymond’s tee-hee-hee audible even from this distance, and she smiled like an adder, even the trebling pain a spur; I’m running away, Ray, you goddamned son of a bitch, you vampire. Finally running away.

“It’s not going to work,” Carlene’s midnight bitterness, face in hands, Rachel lying newly pinned and tubed on the bed. “You said yourself that if there were any new loopholes in the Frawley Act, these guys could find them.” More bitterly still: “But there aren’t.”

Who would imagine that mere breathing could hurt so much, just breathing? “We can find another way.”

“I can’t wait for another way. I can’t stand him, Rachel.”

“Neither can I. Carlene, I’m doing my best. Believe me,” looking at that face, that future, “we’re going to find a way.”

But: Episode after episode, dreary daily tragedy of a soap opera, what time she had, left lucid, was in doubt, what time at all. Raymond refused to come near her room, he said it smelled, in fact he said the smell was all over the house. He wanted her put in a nursing home. He was making some telephone calls of his own. Carlene said.

“I keep calling them back,” she said. “I tell them I’m you.”

“We’re coming so close,” Rachel said. Today the pain was thumbscrew, corkscrew, through every joint and muscle, walking through her brain, new owner. The doctors — Raymond insisted she know — were quietly shocked she had lasted this long, even with treatments, even with drugs just this side of experimental. “I think if we had more time, if—”

“Shhh.” Carlene’s hand on her shoulder. “Don’t talk, I know it hurts you to talk.” Looking up, to see Carlene’s tears.

“I didn’t want it to be you.” Crying now and that hurt, too, immeasurably but not as much as the knowledge that without her it could never have been done, without the final monstrosity of her consent, of the bits of her body given over in the same heedless headlong way she had given everything, everything to Raymond. We were stupid, in those days, she wanted to say, though nothing could finally excuse her, nothing could explain and maybe it was really only she who had been so stupid, who had not only made Raymond her life but had made another life, identical to hers, to make his as well. Crime and punishment there before her. With tears on her face.

I tried to fix it, Rachel thought, you know I did, tried, too, to tell Carlene that, but found in her lungs the brutal ache of airlessness, in her eyes the delicate swim of motes as dark as the claiming of that which ate her, now and finally, alive.

Her head on Carlene’s breast, when Raymond found them. Her eyes, as open as Carlene’s, as wide, as if both were left astonished in the ancient wake of the bridegroom, come to take the elder daughter to the dance.

“It was going to happen no matter what,” he said, heavy with the grief at having to participate in something as sorry as a memorial service. Everyone who came, he was sure, came for his comfort. “It’s not genetic, though. I had the doctors make sure. There’s nothing for you to worry about.” Silence. The slip and tug of her hair through his fingers. “Her, her half, she wanted it to go to you. And all the prenuptial things.” More silence. “It’s come to a fair amount. She was good with money. I don’t bother with the lawyers, you know, but they tell me it’s legally yours. Through me, of course.”

Carlene’s tiny nod, not seen but felt. “I’d rather not talk about it,” she said.

“I understand.” More arthritic stroking, tangling her hair so it hurt. “When I’m, when — someday, you know, I can’t leave it to you, you’re not in a position to receive property, but I’ll take care of you. I will take care of you.”

And the slow time-bomb tick of his heart, her face pillowed on the flat rise and fall of his sour old man’s chest, “Mmm-hmm,” the ghost of her silent grin in the dark. “Mmm-hmm.”

There are all kinds of contracts, when there is money enough — she had more than you think, Raymond, more than you knew about — contracts you don’t need to be legal to sign, contracts that are in themselves illegal. Rachel knew about those kinds of contracts, but they frightened her. We’ll do it the right way, she said, we’ll take the time. Rachel was so patient.

But I couldn’t wait for her. And I won’t wait for you, either, Ray.

Because I’m not patient.

Because I’m not Rachel.