The gestures were various. Pointing at the calendar was the most common. Once it had looked to the left at a spot on the wall where I had been meaning to hang a second shelf for four months. Once it had held up a number of fingers I counted three times to be sure: five. And once — the one that made me close the notebook for a week before I could return to it — it had placed one hand flat against the mirror glass from the inside, fingers spread, as though testing whether the surface was solid, and looked at me with an expression I could only describe as urgent.
I had reached out and put my own hand flat against the glass.
It was cold. Glass-cold, ordinary cold, nothing unusual. The reflection removed its hand first.
I called my sister in November and told her. She was quiet in the way she went quiet when she was deciding whether to be worried about me. I gave her the full account, including the notebook, and she asked whether I was sleeping and whether I was eating properly, which were the questions she defaulted to when she didn’t have another framework. I told her I was fine, which was mostly true, and that I didn’t think the mirror was threatening, which was entirely true.
It was not threatening. That was the thing I came back to most often. Whatever the reflection was doing, it had never felt like a warning in the way of danger. It felt like a warning in the way of pay attention, you’re about to miss something.
My mother had been that way. Direct, slightly impatient with people who didn’t pay attention, constitutionally allergic to anything left unsaid.
I looked at my notebook. The gestures, the calendar, the number five. And I thought about my mother standing in her bedroom doorway on the morning I had told her I was leaving my marriage, saying: I just want you to make sure you know what you’re walking toward, not just what you’re walking away from.
The five came back to me in December. I was standing at the mirror — it had been pointing at the calendar again, with some force now, a decisiveness in the gesture that had not been there in October — and I counted forward five days from the date and landed on the fourteenth.
December 14th. I stood there turning it over. It was not a birthday, not an anniversary, nothing marked or significant. Just a date. I wrote it in the notebook and waited.
On December 13th, my daughter called.
I should explain that my daughter was twenty-two and had been living in another city for three years, and that our relationship had the specific texture of a bond that had survived something difficult — the divorce, her adolescence inside it — and had come out the other side functional but careful. We talked on a regular schedule, fortnightly, and not outside of that unless something required it. She did not call outside the schedule.
She called on the 13th and said she had been offered a job. A good one — significant, career-shaping, the kind of offer that did not come twice. It was in another country. She would need to decide by the 14th.
She was calling, she said, because she didn’t know what to do and because she had realised, recently, that she had not been asking me things she should have been asking me. That she had been careful with me in the way that was actually a form of distance, and she was tired of it.
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