I falter suddenly and swing around. There’s no one there. But the sense that there had been is strong enough that I step forwards, my heart beating too fast. I look across the road at the red sandstone terrace El and I used to call the Gingerbread Coop. Its narrow houses and neat white lintels and window boxes full of pansies and petunias, so at odds with the looming grey house it has always faced. That sense of being watched – examined – intensifies; the hairs on the back of my neck shiver. Stop it.
I turn back to number 36, open the gate, walk the path, climb the four stone steps, and there is the red metal boot scraper, the red last step, the huge red front door. It’s ajar. I once asked Mum why it wasn’t called the Red House, and she blinked, gave me the stupid girl look that is sometimes all I can remember now when I think of her.
It’s the Mirror House. Just like you and Ellice. Just like Mirrorland.
Perhaps El and I once had the same obdurate symmetry as this house – no perhaps about it, I know we did – but nothing can stay the same forever. I push open the door, step up into the entrance hall. Black and white chequered tiles. Dark oak wainscoting and crimson-red walls. As if to prove me straightaway wrong. I close my eyes, and at once I hear the heavy turn and clunk of a deadlock. A flash of black dark. Run. But when I spin around, the door is still open, still warm with sunlight. Stop it.
I turn the brass handle of the second door, catch a glimpse of my big-eyed reflection inside it before the door opens onto the hallway proper, the curving shadow of the staircase. The old carpet is gone, in its place shiny parquet. The sun pierces the fanlight above the door, and at once I see myself sitting cross-legged inside that spear of light, reading Grandpa’s encyclopaedias, the carpet scratching my skin like pricking pins.
The hallway walls are crowded with familiar mounted plates, small and large, scalloped- and gilt-edged: finches, swallows, robins perching on leafy branches, bare branches, snowy branches. The tall oak telephone table and grandfather clock are exactly where they used to be as well, flanking the drawing room door. And even if that seems too unlikely – too bizarre, almost twenty years later – there they stand sentinel nonetheless. The smell is exactly the same, utterly unchanged: old wood and old age and old memory. My incredulity is tempered with a relief I hadn’t been expecting, and an unease that I had. And when I take a long, deep inhale, something inside me loosens and breaks free. It’s still a little like fear – it’s brittle and has sharp edges. But it’s warm too. Deep like the ocean. It has expectations. Too big a part of me is glad that I’m back here after all. Glad that all is exactly, incredibly, inexplicably the same as it ever was.
I turn into the kitchen as if this still really is my house, and there is Ross, on his hands and knees on the blue and white tiles. He looks up. Blinks. Flinches.
And I’m too busy thinking of all the things I can’t say to him to come up with anything better than ‘I’m flattered. Most folk just say hi.’
*
‘Cat.’ His voice breaks as though my name has two syllables. When he stands up, I realise that there are slivers and chunks of smashed white china scattered all over the tiles between us.
‘Can I help?’
‘I’ll sort it later.’ He steps over the broken china and stops a foot short of me. His smile is as tight as mine feels. ‘How’s LA?’
‘Hot.’
His knuckles are white. ‘How was the journey?’
‘All right. Long.’ I don’t know why I can’t speak. I don’t know why we’re trying to have this ridiculous conversation. Ross looks the same but different, just like the house. His face is pale, the skin beneath his eyes heavier than in those news reports, no longer purple but black. His stubble is dark, his hair messy as if he’s run his fingers through it too many times. Underneath all that he looks older, I suppose, but it hasn’t done him any harm. Not the way El going missing has. There are more wrinkles around those peat-brown, silver-flecked eyes; his face is leaner. I wonder if his smile is still crooked, if his left canine still slightly overlaps his front incisor. Immediately, I look away.
‘They say it’s always hardest coming back,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
He clears his throat. ‘I mean, travelling west to east.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know what you mean.’
His T-shirt is wrinkled, his arms are goose-bumped. He steps forwards. Stops again. Rubs his hands against his face.
‘God, how many years has it been?’
‘Twelve?’ I whisper, as though I don’t know, and my throat closes up and my eyes start to burn. Suddenly all of it – El, him, this house – is too much. I’m tired and I’m sad and I’m scared, and most of all I’m so fucking angry – angry that I’ve had to come back here, angry that even one part of me wants to be back here. It’s been less than twenty-four hours, but when I think of my beautiful Pacific Avenue condo now, it has the texture of glossy paper. Just some place I visited a long time ago.
Maybe that’s why I don’t step away from his embrace. Why I let him put his arms around me and pull me so tight against him that I can feel the scratch of his stubble against my neck, the warmth of his breath against my skin, the vibration of his voice – familiar and forgotten. Utterly unchanged.
‘Thank God you’ve come back, Cat.’
*
I try not to look at anything else as we climb the stairs, but it’s
