Stranger With My Face (4 page)

“I was—what?”

“High,” she said, and sank back on her pillow and was immediately asleep.

I shook my head, bewildered as always by the directions eight-year-old minds can go in, and more than a little irritated by
the thought of my sister standing at the window, absorbed in the sight of Gordon and me making out.
Tomorrow,
I told myself,
she and I are going to have a good, long talk
.

I left their room and continued up the stairs, passing the open door to my parents’ room, where Mom lay in bed, reading.

“Night, hon,” she called to me as I went by, and I called back, “Good night.”

The next few steps brought me to the short hall leading to my own room. I moved along it gingerly and stopped in the doorway.
The moonlight streamed through the east window to lie upon my bed, just as it had upon Neal’s, and the rest of the room was
sunk in shadows. I shivered slightly and reached around the door frame to switch on the overhead light.

Of course, there was no one there. Had I really thought there would be? Everything looked absolutely normal. The aura of the
foreign presence I had sensed so strongly that afternoon seemed to have faded. I stepped into the room, feeling more comfortable
than I had expected to, but I left the door standing open to afford contact with the rest of the house.

I became aware of how terribly tired I was. The illness the night before and the long day filled with so much tension and
confusion had left me drained and exhausted. I pulled off my clothes, let them lie where they fell, and got a nightshirt out
of the dresser drawer. I put it on and picked up my brush, and then decided to bypass this nightly ritual.

Glancing across, I saw myself reflected in the sliding glass doors that led to the balcony. I stared at the reflection, wondering
as I often did what it was that attracted Gordon. Why had he chosen me over Natalie and Darlene and Mary Beth and the others?
The girl in the glass gazed back at me with wide, dark eyes. Her hand held a brush, half raised to her thick, black hair,
and her body was slim and straight beneath the thin material of her summer nightshirt. As I watched, the full mouth began
to curve upward at the corners, as though this mirrored Laurie was pleased at what she saw.

It was not until I had turned off the light and climbed between the sheets that I realized what had been wrong with the picture.

The mouth on the reflected face had not been my mouth.

I had not been smiling.

I barely slept that night. For a long
time I
lay trembling beneath the covers, trying to tell myself that what I had seen could not have been real. Perhaps a warp in
the glass, an angle of the light, a trick of my own eyes had altered the image. Perhaps I had smiled without realizing it.
I had not been thinking about my expression as I stared at the reflection in the sliding door. I had been thinking about Gordon,
about the fact that we were back together, that we had survived our first big misunderstanding without a breakup. I might
have smiled at that thought, right? It would have been a natural thing to do.

Except that I knew I hadn’t.

I thought of going down to the bedroom below and pouring the whole story out to Mom. Her company would be comforting, but
what could she tell me? “You’re imagining things, honey. A reflection is just that—a reflection. It does only what you do.
You know that.” She would shrug off the situation the way she had that afternoon when I accosted her on the landing. “Oh,
hon, I don’t think so,” she had said then, and tonight she would say it again, except sleepily, her mind already tuned down
from the high energy level it reached in the mornings to the gentle, drowsy, relaxed plateau brought about by white wine and
nightfall.

And what could I tell her that wouldn’t sound ridiculous? What was it I wanted her to believe? That there was someone on the
balcony, brushing her hair and smiling in at me? “So let’s go look,” she would say sensibly, getting out of bed and reaching
for her robe. “If there’s somebody there, we certainly need to know about it.” But there was no one there. I knew that already.
From my bed I could see every inch of the balcony illuminated by moonlight, and it was empty.

When I did doze off at last, my sleep was fitful and filled with dreaming. They were strange dreams that seemed to overlap,
running one into another and fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, meaningless in themselves but building toward
a whole picture. In one dream Gordon and I stood on a rock at the cliff ’s edge, and as I reached up for his kiss, I saw far
above me Meg’s face framed in her bedroom window. Her mouth kept opening and closing as though she were trying to shout a
warning, but the roar of the surf was so loud that I could not hear. Then, suddenly, the rock beneath my feet tipped sharply.
I grabbed for Gordon for support, but he stepped back away from me, and my hands closed upon empty air. Then I was falling,
falling, for what seemed to be a million miles, to the cold, churning water below.

Except, when I entered, it was not cold at all, but gentle and warm, and I did not have to struggle to keep afloat, for it
held and rocked me. There was someone swimming beside me. At first I thought it was Gordon, but then I realized that it was
someone much closer, someone who moved as I moved and stopped and rested when I rested. The rocking continued, and the water
was gone, and it was my mother who was rocking me—but, no—it was not my mother—but a woman with long, dark hair hanging loose
over her shoulders, and worried, deep-set eyes.

“Can you see me?” asked a voice by my bed.

I opened my eyes. The moon had risen now above the level of my window, and the room was very dark.

“You do hear me, though, don’t you?” the voice asked, and although I knew I had never heard it before, it was as familiar
to me as my own.

“Are you the one with my face?” I whispered.

“I came first,” she answered with a little laugh. “It’s you who have my face.”

“Who are you?” I asked her.

“You must know that. We are the two sides of a coin. We floated together in the same sea before birth. Didn’t you know I would
be coming for you one day?” There was a movement by my pillow. I felt the air stir against my face, and something as slight
and soft as the breast feather of a gull brushed my forehead.

The next thing I knew, I was blinking at the ceiling, and the room was bright with sunlight.

The voice in my ears was Neal’s.

“Mom says to get a move on, Laurie,” he was saying from the doorway. “If you don’t hurry up, you’re going to miss breakfast.”

This day was just as beautiful as the one before it. I dressed and ate and went with the kids to the ferry, and the breeze
that struck my face as we left the shelter of the dunes should have been fresh enough to sweep the cobwebs away for anyone.
But the dreams would not loose their hold on me. They lay upon me like a heavy blanket I couldn’t shove off or wriggle my
way out from under. When I saw Gordon waiting for me at the landing, there flashed through my mind not a vision of his face
bent to mine in the moonlight, but a picture of him as he had been in my dream, jerking back from me as I grabbed for him
to keep from falling. When I stood with him by the railing on the bow with his arm around my shoulders, it wasn’t the blue
water I saw stretching away to the mainland, but the thick, dark water that had held me afloat and rocked me.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Gordon said. “You’re not still mad, are you? I thought we got everything straightened out.”

“It’s not that,” I told him. “I didn’t sleep very well last night, that’s all. There have been some things happening around
our place that have me sort of scared.”

“You mean a prowler? Your parents had better start locking up in the daytime. As wrapped up as they get in the stuff they
do, somebody could walk right in there and steal everything, and they’d never even know.”

He was repeating something he’d heard said in the village, I was sure. There were many people who thought the Stratton family
was pretty strange. How could two people live like my parents did, shut away in an extravagant house on the tip of the island,
with apparently no interest in anything except each other and their children and their work? Dad and Mom had never joined
the Yacht Club, which was where most people went to socialize. Although they could easily have afforded one, they had never
bothered to buy a boat, even a little outboard. They had permitted me to take out a junior membership at the Tennis Club,
because all my friends played there, but they themselves never showed up to watch the meets. They didn’t go to Brighton Inn
for dinner, and if they went to the beach, nobody knew it.

“My folks aren’t exactly stupid,” I said, trying to treat the subject lightly. “They’d know if people were tramping in and
out of the house carting out the furniture.”

“Don’t joke, Laurie,” Gordon said. “I’m serious. Your mom’s up in her studio, and your dad’s cooped up with his computer all
day, and they’re out of it. People probably
could
haul off the furniture without their knowing. And if you’re in the habit of wandering around by yourself at night, that’s
not too smart either. All kinds of things could happen. You and I were outside for hours last night, and your parents never
even stuck their heads out to check on you.”

“They trust me,” I said.

“That has nothing to do with it. What if you hadn’t been with me? What if some creep had sneaked up on you there on the rocks?
Jeff Rankin, for instance?”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said irritably. “Jeff would never hurt anybody.”

“You don’t know that. He’s been really weird since the accident. Everybody says so. And if not him, then somebody else, some
stranger. You’re so alone out there, you could scream your head off and there’d be nobody to hear you.” He tightened his arm
around me. “I care about you, Laurie. I don’t want something to happen to you.”

“I know that.” The things he’d been saying were true, of course. We did need to start being more careful. But the girl—I had
begun thinking of her as “the mirror girl”—would not be stopped by a lock on the door, of that I was certain. It was the only
thing I was sure about.

I wished I could talk to Gordon, really talk to him, but I knew that was impossible. He’d think I was crazy, and maybe he
would be right. Wasn’t that what crazy people did, imagine things that couldn’t be real? But if I followed that line of reasoning,
then Gordon himself must be crazy, and Natalie, and my father. And Megan. What was it she had said? “You were up so high”?
I had thought that was sleep talk, but now I wondered. Who was it she had seen last night, me or the mirror girl? What had
she meant by my being “up high”? Gordon and I had been standing below her window.

“Where’s my sister?” I said, pulling back from the railing. “I need to ask her something.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Gordon said, stiffening. “Can’t you stand here and talk to me without getting jumpy? You don’t
need to chase down Meg. You were with her at breakfast. It’s somebody else you want to go looking for, isn’t it?”

“Somebody else?” I repeated blankly.

“That guy you were on the beach with. It is, isn’t it? Is he one of the island guys? Look, Laurie, be honest with me. I told
you about Nat—”

“Oh, Gordon, go to hell!”

There was a moment’s silence. I could not believe I’d snapped like that.

Then Gordon asked quietly, “Do you mean that?”

“No—no, I don’t. I’m sorry.” Here we were, back together again, and already I was wrecking things. What did I want to do,
anyway, hand Gordon over to Natalie on a silver platter? He was suspicious of me, and why shouldn’t he be? He’d seen me with
his own eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “Like I said, I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I’m tired and edgy, and you keep accusing
me of things that aren’t true.”

“Okay, okay,” Gordon said placatingly. “Do you want me to go find Meg for you?”

“No,” I told him. “I’ll talk to her later when we land.”

But when the ferry docked there was such a hectic mass exodus that no one could have found anybody, and by the time I did
see Meg, she was encircled by her cronies, all squealing and chattering and trotting off in a herd toward the elementary school.

The day had started badly; it continued to get worse. I forgot my locker combination and had to attend my first two classes
without books, which did little to endear me to my teachers. I did manage to catch Helen in the hall after second period,
and she worked the lock, so I entered third period with algebra book in hand, but my mind was in such turmoil that I missed
every equation the teacher asked me to solve. In fourth period, English, I realized I had left that morning without any money
or a lunch.

“Don’t worry about it,” Helen said as I shuffled through the contents of my purse. “I’ve got enough for both of us. You can
pay me back tomorrow.”

So when the bell rang we went to the cafeteria together, which meant that after we bought food I had the choice of sitting
alone with Helen as I had the day before or taking her with me to the table where the island kids were gathered. Either one
was going to be a problem. There was an unspoken understanding that the students from the mainland sat at the table only by
special invitation, which was pretty much decided on by the group as a whole. At the same time, now that Gordon and I had
patched things up, it would seem strange for me to turn my back on them and go sit in the corner with some girl I hardly knew.

“Let’s take our trays over there,” I said to Helen, nodding toward the table.

She followed my gaze, surprised. “I thought you said that was a clique.”

“It is,” I told her. “But I’m sort of a part of it. At least, Gordon, the guy I go out with, is.”

“Which one is he?” Helen asked. “Not him?” as Blane Savage glanced up from his overloaded plate and zeroed in on us as we
stood there, balancing our trays.

“No, Gordon doesn’t eat this period. He’s got B lunch,” I said. “But these kids are nice too. Come on, let’s go over. It’ll
give you a chance to meet some people.”

It was a bad decision. I knew that the moment we reached the table.

“Hi, everybody,” I said, setting down my tray in the space across from Darlene. “This is Helen Tuttle. She’s new this year.
This is Darlene—Blane—Mary Beth—” I continued to make introductions the length of the table.

Blane mumbled something that passed for a greeting and bit into his sandwich.

Darlene said, “Hello,” in that sweet, soft voice of hers that always sounded as though she were a little surprised. I watched
her eyes go up to the top of Helen’s head, which was about four inches higher than mine, and work their way down over the
rust-colored hair, the light blue eyes with their almost invisible brows and lashes, the pleasant, freckled face, the neck
encircled by a silver chain from which there hung a little turquoise carving. Then they took the long plunge to the large
feet, encased in socks and Converse. She and Mary Beth smirked at each other.

“Hi,” Helen said unself-consciously and began unloading her tray.

“Helen’s from the Southwest,” I said as I took my seat, hoping I didn’t sound apologetic. “She’s just beginning to learn what
it’s like to be a New Englander.”

Mary Beth looked amused. “You don’t become a New Englander just by moving here.” She paused and then added without much interest,
“Where in the Southwest are you from, Helen?”