expensive collection.”
Alex forced a brief smile and nodded as he tucked the painting under his arm.
He didn’t know if he would ever see the woman again. He realized that it was rather silly to think that he would.
But if he did, he wanted to give her the little painting. He wanted to see her smile again, and if it took only a painting then it would be more than worth it.
4
I THINK THE MIRRORS ARE WATCHING ME,” Alex said as he stared off into distant thoughts. Ben shot him a look back over his shoulder. “Mirrors tend to do that.”
“No, I mean it, Ben. Lately it feels like they’re watching me.”
“You mean you see yourself watching you.”
“No.” He finally focused his gaze on his grandfather. “I mean it feels like someone else is watching me through mirrors.”
Ben gave him a look. “Someone else.”
“Yes.”
Alex wondered how she knew.
He was beginning to seriously doubt that she had been real. Was it possible that he could have imagined such a thing?
Was it beginning to happen to him, too? He fought back a ripple of panic at the thought.
“Don’t let your imagination get the best of you, Alexander,” his grandfather said, turning back to the work at his bench.
Alex’s gaze again wandered off into gloomy memories.
“Do you think that I’ll end up crazy, too?” he murmured after a time.
In the dead silence he turned to see that his grandfather had halted his tinkering at his timeworn workbench to stare up with an unsettling look, a kind of hard glare that could have been born only in dark and angry thoughts.
Alex found such a look frightening in that it was so unlike his grandfather, or at least the man Alex knew.
A wrinkled smile finally banished the forbidding look. “No, Alex,” the old man said in a gentle voice, “I don’t think that at all. Why would you come up with such depressing thoughts on your birthday?”
Alex leaned back against the paneling covering the stairwell nook so that the mirror on the wall to his left couldn’t see him. He folded his arms.
“I’m the same age, you know. Today I’m twenty-seven, the same age as she was when she got sick. . when she went crazy.”
The old man stirred a long finger through a battered aluminum ashtray overflowing with a collection of odd screws. Ben had had that ashtray full of used screws for as long as Alex could remember. It wasn’t a convincing search.
“Alexander,” Ben said in a soft sigh, “I never thought your mother was crazy then, and I still don’t.”
Alex didn’t think that Ben would ever come to grips with the sad reality. Alex remembered all too well his mother’s inconsolable, hysterical fits over strangers who were supposedly after her. He didn’t believe that the doctors would keep the woman locked in an institution for eighteen years if she wasn’t seriously mentally ill, but he didn’t say so. Even having the silent thought seemed cruel.
He had been nine when his mother had been institutionalized.
At such a young age Alex hadn’t understood. He had been terrified. His grandmother and Ben took him in, loved him, took care of him, and eventually became his legal guardians. Living just down the street from his parents’ house kept continuity in Alex’s life. His grandparents kept the house clean and in shape for when his mother got better and was released — for when she finally came home. That never happened.
Over the years as he grew up Alex would go over there from time to time, usually at night, to sit alone in the house. It felt like his only connection to his parents. It seemed to be another world there, always the same, everything frozen in place, like a stopped clock. It was an unchanging reminder of a life that had been abruptly interrupted, a life suspended.
It had made him feel like he didn’t know his place in the world, like he wasn’t even sure who he was.
Sometimes at night, before he went to sleep, Alex still worried that he, too, would end up falling prey to insanity. He knew that such things ran in families, that insanity could be passed down. As a boy, he’d heard other kids say as much, even if it had been in whispers behind his back. The whispers, though, had always been just loud enough for him to hear.
Yet when Alex looked at the way other people lived, the things they did, the things they believed, he thought that he was the sanest person he knew. He often wondered how people could be so deluded about things, like the way they would believe it was art if someone else simply said it was.
Still, there were things when he was alone that worried him.
Like mirrors.
He studied the side of the old man’s gaunt face as he searched through all the odd bits of junk littering the workbench. His gray stubble showed that he hadn’t shaved that morning and possibly the morning before that. He had probably been busy in his workshop and had no idea that the sun had come and gone and come again. His grandfather was like that — especially since his wife, Alex’s grandmother, had died. Alex often thought that his grandfather had his own difficulties dealing with reality after his son and then his wife had both passed away.
No one thought the old man was crazy, exactly. Most people thought that he was merely “eccentric.” That was the polite word people used when a person was a little loony. His grandfather’s impishly innocent outlook on life — the way he always smiled and marveled at everything, and the way he became distracted by the most ordinary objects, along with his utter lack of interest in the business of others — reassured people that he was harmless. Just the neighborhood nut. Most people regarded Ben as a meaningless old man who tinkered with the likes of tin cans, tattered books, and odd assortments of mold that he grew in glass petri dishes.
It was an image that Alex knew his grandfather cultivated — being invisible, he called it — and was quite different from the kind of man Ben was in reality.
Alex never thought that Ben was crazy, or even eccentric, merely. . unique, a singular, remarkable individual who knew about things that most people could not even imagine. From what Alex gathered, Ben had seen enough death. He loved life and simply wanted to investigate everything about it.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Ben asked.
Alex blinked at the question. “What?”
“It’s your birthday. Shouldn’t you be with a young woman, out enjoying yourself?”
Alex let out a deep breath, not wanting to get into it. He forced a smile. “I thought you might have a present for me, so I came by.”
“A present? What for?”
“My birthday, remember?”
The old man scowled. “Of course I remember. I remember everything, remember?”
“Did you remember to get me a present?” Alex chided.
“You’re too old for a present.”
“I got you a present for your birthday. Are you too old?”
The scowl deepened. “What am I to do with, with. . whatever that thing is.”
“It makes coffee.”
“My old pot makes coffee.”
“Bad coffee.”
The old man shook a finger. “Just because things are old, that doesn’t mean they’re of no use anymore. New things aren’t necessarily any better, you know. Some are worse than what came before.”
Alex leaned in a little and lifted an eyebrow. “Did you ever try the coffeemaker I got you?”
