Chapter One

AMANDA IN THE MIRROR

“I will relate to you, my friend, the whole history, from the beginning to—nearly—the end.”

—Diana Maria Mulock, “M. Anastasius” (1857)

I want to teach you about fear.

I want to tell you a ghost story. It’s not a ghost story like any ghost story you’ve ever heard. It’s my ghost story, and it’s true. It happened here in the house on Blackmore Island called Wild Fell, in the inland village of Alvina, Ontario on the shores of Devil’s Lake. Like any ghost story, it involves the bridges between the past and the present and who, or rather what, uses them to cross from the world of the living into the world of the dead.

But I’m getting ahead of my story. I did say the bridge is between the past and the present. Although I’ll tell you this story in the present, I would be remiss if I didn’t start with the past—specifically my past. Time is, or ought to be, linear. Sometimes it’s anything but linear, which brings us back to ghosts.

Still, one thing at a time, right?

By the time he was gone, my father, a gentle, loving man with a fierce intellect and great wit, had already been gone for a very long time. He had forgotten everything about what had made him my father in the first place. He didn’t know himself and he didn’t know me. The erasing had been the hardest part for me to watch, harder even than the sure knowledge that he was going to die, and that it would be soon, if not quickly.

My father had always been my memory, the keeper of our family’s history, his own past, and even my past. The memories of any child, while vivid, are always subject to the subtle twist and eddy of time and emotional caprice. Which is in part to say, while I believe I remember everything about my childhood, I can only remember from the inside out. The actual events may have been something other than what I remember.

My name is Jameson Browning. In the summer of 1971, when I was nine I went to Camp Manitou, the summer camp deep in rural eastern Ontario where edges of towns yielded to woods and marshes and rolling farmland hills.

I hadn’t wanted to go at all. I deeply distrusted boys of my own age, all of whom had proven themselves to be coarse and rough and prone to noise and force. It would be tempting for anyone reading this to imagine a socially isolated, lonely boy with no friends—a loner not so much by choice, but by ostracism or social ineptitude. But the conjured image would be an inaccurate one. I wasn’t a lonely boy at all, not by any stretch, though I did indeed love to be alone.

I loved to read. I loved to be outside by myself, especially in the greenbelt near our house, whose trees, in places, were almost dense enough to be considered a small forest and which had a stream running through it.

I had friends, two little girls. One was real, and lived three doors down in a house that looked very much like mine, indeed like everyone else’s in our mid-century neighbourhood of elm-shaded, sidewalked streets and neatly tended lawns. The house in Ottawa in which I grew up was a classic 1960s-era suburban one on a tree-lined street, with four floors and a long, low roofline. On the top floor of the house were my parents’ bedroom and bathroom, and my father’s study. On the main floor were a spacious living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. One floor below that were my bedroom and a guest bedroom I can only ever recall my grandmother using, once, on a visit before she died in 1969. My bathroom, with the cowboys-and-Indians wallpaper, was a short flight of stairs down in the basement, next to the recreation room and the laundry room.

The other girl lived in the wood-framed full-length mirror bolted to the wall in my bedroom. The place she dwelt was indistinctly bordered by my imagination and by the infinite possibilities of the worlds-upon-worlds inside the reflected glass.

The real girl’s name was Hank Brevard—well, her actual name was Lucinda, and she was a tomboy who was as much of a loner as I was. Her father was away a great deal on business and her mother didn’t seem to like her very much, and was always at her to “act more ladylike.” Hank had short black hair she’d chopped herself, which had earned her a two-week grounding, during which time she’d not been allowed to spend time with me—which she’d found ways to do anyway, sneaking out of her bedroom window while her mother was watching television.

“She’s afraid I’ll just cut it again if she makes me grow it long,” Hank said with satisfaction when her hair started to grow back, ragged as a chrysanthemum. “She’s letting me keep it short as long as I promise to let her take me to her hairdresser when it needs trimming.”

Hank could cycle faster than any boy I knew, and she liked to catch tadpoles in the spring with me in the creek. When she’d asked me to call her by a boy’s name, I readily agreed. It seemed a very small concession for friendship, especially in light of the fact that she looked like a “Hank” and not remotely like a “Lucinda,” and we quickly became inseparable. We spent hours together building tree forts. In the spring, we caught tadpoles. In the fall, we threw ourselves into piles of leaves. In the winter, we tracked small animals by their prints in the snow, or pretended to be Arctic explorers.

We had no secrets from each other, except for the one I kept: I never told Hank about Amanda, the little girl who lived in my mirror, the little girl who had my face and spoke in my voice, but who was someone else entirely.

When I was seven years old, I’d begun speaking to my reflection in the mirror the way some children made up imaginary playmates. I named my reflection Mirror Pal and began to think of it as a separate entity.

I told Mirror Pal about my days at school, my teachers, the games I played at recess. When my mother was angry with me—and she was angry with me a lot—I told Mirror Pal about that, too. I spoke back to myself, pretending that my own voice was Mirror Pal’s voice, giving the response I wanted and needed at any given time. For instance, if I brought home a drawing with a gold star on it and my parents told me how good it was, Mirror Pal rejoiced with me. If I was sad, Mirror Pal was always sympathetic and agreeable that I was the aggrieved party, no matter the circumstances.

It was a lighthearted game of imagination and mental magic of the most innocent and childlike sort. At least until Amanda appeared a year later, when Terry Dodds stole my new red bike and had the accident.

I had learned to ride a bike the previous year on a battered and rust-veined green Roadmaster cruiser of my father’s that had been stored in my grandparents’ garage at the time of my grandmother’s death. In addition to its sentimental value, my father thought it was the perfect bike to teach me to ride. Learning to ride a bike is usually a painful process for any child, but my sense of balance was remarkably bad. In the beginning, my father held the bike as I pedalled, keeping me steady, running beside me as I wobbled along the sidewalks of our neighbourhood.

The first time he let go of the seat, I crashed badly, skinning both knees. I burst into tears. The pain from my kneecaps was like fire. They were bloody and there were tiny bits of dirt and concrete dust in them. My father held me and let me cry against his shirt. Then, gently, he insisted I get back up on the bike.

“It’s important, Jamie. You need to get back up now. I’ll clean off your cuts and put some Bactine on them when we get home, but right now you need to climb back up and pedal.”

I sniffled. “Why? I don’t want to. It hurts, Daddy. My knees sting. Look,” I added with dramatic flourish. “They’re bleeding.”

“Because you need to show the bike that it didn’t win, Jamie. That’s why.” His face was grave, that deeply serious expression he always had when he was imparting something vitally important. He rubbed the bridge of his nose where the horn-rimmed glasses he wore always left a red mark. “If we go home now, it will have beaten you. You need to get back up on the seat. You don’t need to go far, but you need to make sure that the last thing you remember about today isn’t that you fell down, it’s that you got back up again. That’s what we do when bad things happen to us.”

I stuck out my bottom lip. “I don’t want to.”

Without replying, he lifted me up and put me solidly back on the seat and told me to pedal. Which, of course I did, hating it, but with him walking slowly behind me, holding onto the seat with one hand so I didn’t fall, and steadying me with the other. The sidewalk ahead swam in my vision like I was underwater, but as the tears dried, the path in front of me cleared as sure as the pressure of my father’s hand on the small of my back. This became our routine over that week, every evening after dinner. In short order, I graduated to him running behind me holding lightly onto the end of the seat.

Every night, I told Mirror Pal about my progress. Mirror Pal confessed that he wasn’t sure I would ever learn to ride a bike, and agreed with me that it seemed like a stupid skill to need to master. He also agreed with me, though, that attaining this skill was necessary so I could ride with Hank anytime I wanted, even if the process would probably kill me.

Then, one day, I had pedalled down the half-length of our street before I realized that he was no longer holding on at all. I looked backwards without falling over and saw that my father was clapping, and doing a little dance because that barrier was down, never to rise again, and the bike hadn’t won.

My parents presented me with a brand new Schwinn for my eighth birthday. It was gleaming ruby red and chrome silver. It had a metallic gold banana seat and hi-rise bars, just like the ones the big kids rode as they swept by the front of our house on their way to school like alien gods of coolness from some other planet.

And now, I had one. I was going to be cool, too, just like the big kids. My joy knew no bounds.

Hank (who had learned to ride a bike at five) and I spent the next week exploring the length and breadth of our neighbourhood, which looked somehow completely different from this new vantage point of two-wheeler independence. We barrelled down the greenbelt hills and along the wooded paths by the creek. I’d been forbidden to cross Dearborn Road because of the traffic, so Hank showed me a way to approach the greenbelt from the rear, via the safe streets I was allowed on. We were the same age, but sometimes it was like Hank was older. She was already more like a boy than I could ever imagine being. If that made me the girl in our friendship, it wouldn’t have bothered either of us—if we’d thought of it that way, which we never did.

Two weeks after my birthday, Hank and I decided to have an adventure.

We rode our bikes as far as we could before stopping. We may have gone as far as three or four miles out of the neighbourhood but it’s hard to tell. It certainly seemed like that, or even farther. I had a very clear sense of being way outside the bounds of what my parents would have thought of as an acceptable distance at that age. Still, it was exhilarating. We’d packed a lunch we’d made ourselves, in secret: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cheese, cookies, and some candy. No fruits or vegetables—and not by accident, either. It was our adventure and it was, in every sense, outside the bounds of adult authority.

We stopped for lunch in a field and ate under the branches of an ancient oak tree. In the near distance, we saw the edge of one of the new subdivisions that were cropping up all over the city. They were different in every way from our neighbourhood, which was old and established. I imagined that the people living there must be just as different.

I was lying on the ground with my eyes closed, enjoying the sun on my face, well satiated after stuffing our faces with sandwiches and the cookies, when Hank said, “Look, here come some big kids. They don’t look like nice big kids, either.”

Three older boys, larger by far than Hank and me, were making their way across the field toward us. Rather than walk, they lumbered. They reminded me of a pack of cartoon jackals.

“Hey kid, nice bike,” the largest one said. “It’s too big for you. I want it. Give it to me.”

“You can’t have it, it’s mine. I got it for my birthday. My mom and dad bought it for me.” This was greeted with coarse guffaws from the three boys. Again I thought of cartoon predators.

The one who addressed me first—the one I would later learn was Terry Dodds—mimicked me. “‘You can’t have it, I got it for my birthday!’ Waaah, waaah, waaah, baby. What are you going to do if I just . . . take it?” He reached down and picked up my Schwinn as though it were a plastic model. “Huh? How ya gonna stop me?”

Hank shouted, “Leave him alone! It’s his bike! Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, you . . . you asshole?” There was a moment of stunned silence at the use of this word by an eight-year-old girl, but they laughed again.

Terry jeered at Hank. “Are you a boy or a girl? You look like a boy. If you’re a boy, let’s fight. If you’re a girl, then your pal is even more of a sissy for letting a girl fight for him.” He turned back to me. “Huh, kid? Are you a sissy? You gonna let this little girl do all your fighting for you, or are you going to come and be a man and take this bike away from me? Because otherwise, I’m gonna take it. And if it’s too small for me, I’m gonna give it to my kid brother. He needs a bike. That okay with you, kid?” he taunted me. “Huh?” Terry grinned at his friends. “I guess it’s all right with him. He didn’t say I couldn’t, did he?”

“Nope,” they chorused. “He didn’t say you couldn’t.”

“Yes I did! I did say you couldn’t. It’s my bike!”

“Too late,” Terry taunted. He climbed on the bike, which was ridiculously small for him—and which made him look even more like some sort of monster astride it—then did a quick, jerky circle on it. “Yep, this’ll be okay. See you later, kid. Come on guys, let’s get out of here.”

Hank, who had been standing next to me, fists flexed at her side, abruptly jumped on Terry’s back and began to punch him. She even managed to land a few major blows, blows that made him cry out in pain. He shoved her to the ground. She jumped up and went for him again, shouting a strangled war cry that she had probably picked up from a Saturday afternoon adventure film on television. He shoved her down on the ground again, and this time he put his finger in Hank’s face and wagged it.

“Stay down, you little bitch,” he said. “If you come at me again, I’m going to put you and your little buddy in the hospital. Got it?”

“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” she said again, but both of us heard the note of defeat in her voice under the shrillness, as did Terry. “He’s just a little kid. Give him back his bike!”

“He doesn’t have a bike,” Terry said. “I have a bike. It’s my bike now. Come on, guys, let’s get home and give this bike to my brother.” And with that, he pedalled off across the field toward the new subdivision, with his two friends half-walking, half-running to keep up with him.

I burst into tears. I not only felt the loss of my bike, but I felt the guilt of disappointing my father after all those hours of practice and all his patience. The bike had been a gift of love, the consummation of those painful hours of skin scraped against asphalt, banged-up limbs, and blood, and my father’s loving attention to helping me learn.

Hank hugged me. “Come on, get on the back. I’ll double-ride you home,” she said. “Let’s go tell your parents.”

I tasted the snot running down my upper lip, mixing with the tears. “They’re going to be so mad. . . . I’m not supposed to be this far from home.”

“Don’t cry, Jamie,” Hank said. “Let’s get home and tell your parents. “We’ll get your bike back, I promise. I don’t know how, but we will.”

When we eventually made it home as dusk descended—a rickety, long, difficult ride with me on the back and Hank pumping heroically over the rutted sidewalks and stopping at crosswalks so both of us could dismount and walk safely across the street—my parents were furious. My mother in particular was enraged that we’d ventured so far out of Buena Vista, our neighbourhood, and managed to lose an expensive new bike in the process.

“It wasn’t a toy, Jamie.” After everything that had happened that afternoon, her voice seemed unbearably harsh in my ears. I had seen my mother angry before, but this seemed to be a level of developing anger that was new and a bit frightening. “It was a very expensive bicycle and now it’s gone. You lost it. You should have been more responsible instead of being such a damn dreamer all the time. I’m very, very disappointed in you.” My mother had wanted my father to spank me, but he’d refused.

“He didn’t lose it, Alice. It’s not lost. It was stolen. Another kid stole Jamie’s bike.”

“If he’d stayed in our neighbourhood,” my mother said, “this would never have happened. This is his fault and I want him to take responsibility for it. If you won’t spank him, I will.”

My father held up his hand. He, too, was furious, but his anger was directed differently: he seemed mostly angry that an older kid had bullied me into giving up my new bike. “Alice, please,” he snapped. “One thing at a time. I want to know how this happened. We can discuss the rest later, but right now I want to understand how this took place. I want to know who this kid was, and where this happened.” He turned to me and said, “Jamie, can you tell us again how this kid came to take your bike?”

I told the story again, feeling calmer under my father’s steady questioning. He asked me if I could remember the neighbourhood where it took place. I told him no, but that Hank would probably know how to get back to the field. The boys likely lived in the subdivision across from the field, since that was the direction from which they had come.

My father looked glum. “Well, Jamie, let’s call Hank’s parents and see if she can go for a ride with us tomorrow and see if we can find out who this kid is. We can drive around the neighbourhood and you can see if you recognize him. But I have to admit, it’s going to be a bit of a long shot. Your mother is right—this was very irresponsible of you. I hope we can get your bike back, but don’t get your hopes up. In the meantime, I’ll go call the police and see what the procedure is to file a report.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy. Really, I am.”

“I know, Jamie,” my father said. “But it doesn’t really help matters. It doesn’t really change things. You should have been more responsible. I think you should go downstairs and get ready for bed. I’ll be down in a little while to tuck you in.”

In my room, sobbing and in disgrace, I told Mirror Pal about what had happened.

As always, I did both of the voices, mine and Mirror Pal’s, and they both sounded like me. Both voices bore the imprimatur of my grief: one bore it plaintively; the other bore it with justifiably loyal outrage.

A casual adult observer who happened to walk in on me would likely have seen an eight-year-old boy, his face red and puffy and streaked with tears, sitting on the edge of his bed talking to himself in the mirror, working himself into a state of near-hysteria, arms flailing and pointing, punctuating the air with angles and jabs. I have a memory of actually slapping the wall beside the mirror and imagining I heard two slaps.

But of course, I could only have heard one slap. I was entirely alone in my bedroom. The only illumination inside the room came from my bedside lamp, a green-glassed brass ship’s lantern with a hand-painted shade featuring a rendering of a sailboat at full mast, hard against the wind.

Feeling better for having vented a bit, I turned away to put on my pyjamas and get into bed. I thought I saw something flicker and shift in the depths of the mirror. There was a sudden impression of fluttering, as though a moth had trembled in front of a lamp, wings beating a frantic insectile tarantella in the air. But when I looked again, I was alone in the mirror with my empty bedroom reflected in the glass behind me.

Then suddenly I wasn’t alone. I knew I wasn’t alone as surely as I knew my own name, or that my beautiful red bike had been stolen that afternoon, or that I wanted it back at that moment more than I’d ever wanted anything in the world.

I touched the glass and tapped it lightly with my index finger. “Mirror Pal? Are you real?” Even at eight, I realized how ridiculous that question was, but I asked it anyway. I breathed on the glass, running the tip of my index finger through the condensation, bisecting the cloud of moisture with a jagged line of fingernail. “Mirror Pal?”

What happened next was something I felt in a way that almost precludes an adult ability to put it into words. As I opened my mouth to form Mirror Pal’s answer to my own question, the air inside my room became heavy with something like the weight of the electricity and ozone that presages a summer lightning storm. By reflex, I closed my eyes as though anticipating a thunderclap. There was the burst of the orange-red light that always accompanies a rapid opening and shutting of the eyelids.

An image rose in my mind—or, more accurately, appeared to impress itself on my mind from somewhere outside of my own reckoning—of a young girl of my age whom I had never seen before. She had long dark hair tied up in the sort of bow I had seen in pictures of my grandmother when she was my age. The girl wore some sort of dark-coloured dress rippling like black water caught in a shaft of moonlight. And her name came to me then: Amanda.

Amanda.

When I spoke, it was my voice, of course—Mirror Pal’s voice—but this time it was also not my voice at all. I had uttered the name without any conscious intent to do so, but I said it as reverently as if it were an invocation. The name seemed to pour out of me of its own volition, shaping and wrapping itself around my vocal cords and calling them to life. I heard it with my ears, but I also heard a double-voice say it in my mind, as though two record players were playing the same single at different speeds, causing a slight overlap.

With my eyes still closed, I reached over and switched off the light on my night table. Then I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror.

Something indefinable had changed in the reflection. It was still my room, but the edges now bled into a general murkiness, a blurring not dissimilar to that of the faded quality of an antique photograph: yellowing, age-burned and cracked at the edges. My reflection, too, had changed in a similarly impalpable way. My eyes were obscured by the shadows of the room, but my shoulders were hunched in a narrowing way that suggested somehow the fey mien of a young girl sitting on the edge of a large antiqued chair that was too big for her. When I instinctively relaxed my shoulders to dispel the illusion, my reflection followed suit, but it seemed to lag just a beat, as though it slyly wanted me to know that it was doing it on sufferance, not because the laws of physics had compelled it to do so because it was my reflection.

My. Mine.

Mine.

I said, “Mirror Pal? Is that you?”

Again, the unbidden response, the weird aural duotone of my own voice echoing in my head.

My name is Amanda.

I was entranced. I’d forgotten that I was speaking to myself, forgot that this illusion was impossible, forgot that I must be speaking in my own voice because there was no possible way my reflection could be addressing me independently. And yet, the name “Amanda” hadn’t come from me. I didn’t know anyone named Amanda.

Excitedly I asked my reflection, “Is this my imagination, or is this real?”

Maybe it’s both. Maybe I live in your head as well as in the mirror. I felt my shoulders involuntarily rise and fall in a mechanical-looking facsimile of a shrug. It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m here now.

“Who are you?”

I told you. My name is Amanda.

“Where did you come from?”

From your mirror.

“No, before that.”

There is no before, there’s only now.

“Where’s Mirror Pal?”

Mirror Pal has gone away. I’m here now.

“Why haven’t I ever seen you before?”

I don’t know why you haven’t seen me before. I’ve always been here.

I asked again, “Who are you?”

I already told you who I am. I’m just a girl. Stop asking me that. A pause. Where’s your bike?

“How do you know about my bike?”

I just know. Where is it?

“A kid stole it. In the park. I was out with Hank and he came and . . . and . . .”

Don’t cry. You’ll get it back, I promise.

“How do you know?”

I just know. You’ll see. You and your dad are going to go driving tomorrow to the place where you lost it. You’re going to look around the neighbourhood and see if the kid is there. Or if his brother is there. He has a younger brother, remember? He told you about him. He’s going to give his brother your bike as a present, and the brother is going to ride it all around. He’ll probably break it, then throw it away. Your bike. Yours.

I felt my fury rise again. “It’s my bike! I want it back. My dad gave it to me for my birthday!”

What do you want to have happen to him? The kid who took your bike?

“What do you mean, what do I want to have happen to him? I want him to give my bike back! That’s what I want. I . . . I want him to shut up! I want him to shut up and stop being so mean to little kids that are smaller than him. I want him to shut his mouth and give me back my bike.”

When Amanda spoke again, her voice—for I was now entirely thinking of it as her voice, the words choosing me, rather than me choosing them—had chilled perceptibly. But underneath the new frost I thought I heard a cruel sort of excitement, as though she was about to propose her own version of an adventure.

He will. We’ll make him shut up, I promise. And we’ll get your bike back.

Then the image in the mirror seemed to shimmer and sway. I tried to stand up, but stumbled and fell backward onto the bed. Hank had showed me a trick once: she told me to pinch my nose shut and hold my breath as long as I could. As the oxygen was depleted from my brain my head was full of giddy black stars and I’d felt like I was floating. It was like that now on the bed, except I could breathe easily. And my head wasn’t full of black stars, this time, it was full of gold ones, and there was a mighty hum in my brain as though I was lying on the grass beneath a tree alive with a swarm of furious bees hidden by thick branches. The hum rose in crescendo until there was simply nothing else. Near to losing consciousness, I reached for the switch and turned my nightlight on.

With the sudden light came sudden clarity, and with the clarity came silence and the realization that I was quite alone. There was no humming in my head. There was no Amanda. In the mirror I saw myself and no one else. The only room reflected in it was my own—my own, from wall to wall, every corner present and accounted for, every border distinct, impermeable, linear and real.

I felt something wet against my legs and looked down. The front of my pyjama bottoms were soaked with urine. A line of piss tracked down along the inside of my right leg all the way to the ankle.

I pulled my pyjama pants off and wadded them into a ball. After I had used them to blot myself dry, I put them inside a plastic bag on the floor near my closet door. I tied the bag closed and stuffed it under my bed. From the bottom drawer of my dresser, I took out a pair of clean pyjamas and put them on. Then I jumped onto the bed, crawled under the covers, and pulled the sheets and blanket over my head. I listened to the silence of my bedroom on the other side of the blanket, praying I wouldn’t suddenly hear that strange double voice, or feel a little girl’s icy hand pull the blanket away from my face.

Fifteen minutes later, I heard the sound of my father’s footsteps on the stairs and my bedroom door opened. He walked in and came over to the edge of the bed, smiled down at me. Very gently, he tousled my hair.

“Everything all right in here, Jamie? You ready for bed?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

He wrinkled his nose. “You smell anything funny, Jamie? You have any accidents you want to tell me about?”

“No, Daddy.” Normally, lying to my father would have been unthinkable, even impossible. But tonight, all I wanted was normalcy, ease and light. “I don’t smell anything funny.”

He shrugged. “Probably just my imagination, never mind.”

I took a deep breath. “Daddy?”

“Yes, son?”

“Daddy, I don’t like my mirror. Can we get rid of it?”

“What do you mean, get rid of it?” He peered over at the mirror on the wall. “Is it cracked?” He sighed. “You didn’t crack it, did you, Jamie? Your mother is going to be furious if you did.”

“No, it’s not broken, I just . . . well, I don’t need it.”

“Jameson,” my father said. The switch to my full name wasn’t lost on me. “Your mirror is fine. I don’t know what this is about, but—”

I cut him off, reaching for his hand and squeezing his fingers tightly enough for him to look back at me with an expression of mild surprise. “Daddy, would you stay here with me for a little while? Until I fall asleep? I’m scared.”

His face softened. “Jamie, what’s wrong? There’s nothing to be scared of. Are you upset about the bike? We’ll get it back. You shouldn’t have gone out of our neighbourhood, but what happened wasn’t your fault. Is that what this is about?”

I glanced over at the darkened mirror hanging innocuous and now empty on the wall. “Daddy, just stay with me. Please?”

“All right. But just for a little bit.” My father lay down beside me on the bed and put his arm around my shoulders, pulling me in close.

I pressed my face into his shirt and inhaled deeply. I felt my heartbeat slowing as I relaxed into the bulwark of his warm body and his warm scent. In time, I fell asleep safely against my father’s chest. He must have left the room at some point when he saw that I was asleep, turning off my bedside lamp and leaving me in the dark.

I dreamed I was astride my red Schwinn on a promontory of land overlooking a vast, dark lake.

From the centre of the black water rose an island encircled with a wild coronet of grey rock and black-green pine trees. On the island was a castle whose turrets rose above the blackened pines. The sky was streaked with thin sunset stripes of hard red, luminous orange, and bright celadon blue.

The vista was a familiar one: I knew every wave, every jutting rock, every arching pine bough stretching up to gouge the bleeding red sky. The landscape was as familiar to me as my street, but even in the dream I knew it was somewhere I had never been.

The air was raw and northern, but wondrously fresh. I was cognizant that it was late because the sun was going down and the temperature was plummeting as I sat there staring at the island. I knew I was a long, long way from my house—much farther than I had ever been before. I felt the comforting solidity of my Schwinn between my legs and I knew I needed to get pedalling or I was going to be in a lot of trouble.

There was someone standing directly behind me, but I didn’t turn my head to see who it was. I already knew who it was. Instead I just stared at the darkening twilight lake and said, “It’s late. I need to get home.”

I felt tiny fingers settle on my shoulder, and I heard a voice like glacier water whisper in my ear.

You are home, Amanda said. This is home.

If I woke screaming, there were no echoes of it in my bedroom when my eyes snapped open in the dark and it disturbed no one in the silent house. There were no footsteps on the floors above—either the living room directly above my bedroom, or my parents’ bedroom above the living room—no heavy adult tread taking the stairs two at a time to save me from any monster that had followed me out of my dreams and into the world.

Instead I woke to broad planks of moonlight on my bedroom floor from the open window on the other side of the room, and to the dreadful silence every child who wakes from a nightmare alone in his bedroom knows. As I lay tangled up in the maze of sweaty sheets and trapped under the suffocating blankets, the only sound in all that quiet was my own heart in my chest, and the pounding of blood in my temples.

Next to my bed, the mirror was black and opaque, as though even the moon was afraid of what it might call to life from the depths of the glass by shining on it.

I lay awake for what seemed like hours. Eventually, the sky began to turn to flush pink. When there was enough light outside to at least bring the contours of my bedroom back into the realm of the safe and the real, I slept, blissfully dreamless this time.

The next morning at breakfast, the phone in the hallway rang. My father looked at the clock and frowned. My mother shrugged and lit her second cigarette of the morning, blowing another plume of smoke into the shimmering blue cloud already hanging over the breakfast table.

My father said, “It’s a bit early for callers, isn’t it, Alice?”

“Well, it’s ringing,” my mother replied tautly. “Either answer it or don’t answer it. I don’t care. But it’s ringing.” She took another sip of her black coffee. My mother wasn’t generally much of a conversationalist at breakfast, at least until she’d had her very own particular breakfast of caffeine and nicotine. All three of us knew it, and neither my father nor I attempted to engage her seriously until after the breakfast dishes were done, preferably by him, preferably with no audible clattering of crockery and silverware in the sink.

My father pushed his chair away from the table and stood up. “So it is,” he said. “It is ringing. Excuse me, my dear.”

Out in the hallway, his voice rose and fell. There was a long pause, then another soft volley of words. Then I heard him hang up the phone. When he returned to the table, his face was ashen. He sat down heavily and rubbed his chin the way he did when he was thinking about how, or whether, to say something painful or difficult.

I put my spoon back in my bowl of Froot Loops. “Who was it, Daddy?”

My father took a deep breath. “Well, Jamie, the police found your bike. We can go over and pick it up after breakfast.”

My mother perked up. “Really? Really, Peter? They found Jamie’s bike? Where? Did they catch the thief?” She seemed genuinely shocked, as though the prospect of my Schwinn coming home wasn’t anything she’d ever seriously entertained. It occurred to me that she sounded disappointed that the long, punitive lesson she’d hoped to teach me about responsibility was now lost to her forever, or at least until my next major cock-up.

My father delicately ignored her question, turning to me instead. “Jamie, you said you don’t know the name of the boy who took your bike, right? You’d never seen him before yesterday?”

“Right, Daddy. Was that him on the phone?”

“No, Jamie,” my father said slowly. “That was a policeman. I called them yesterday and told them what happened and gave them a description of the bike. The boy . . . well, his name is Terry Dodds. Damnedest thing. His kid brother brought the bike in to the police station this morning and told them Terry had stolen it and he wanted to give it back.” Something indefinable in my father’s face stayed my euphoria. I waited for him to continue, but my mother cut in before he could.

“His brother brought it in?” She exhaled smoke into the air above her. “And he just waltzed into the police station and confessed that his brother stole it from Jamie? What on earth would prompt him to do something like that? Not that I’m complaining, but it seems very unlikely.”

“His brother is in the hospital, Alice,” my father said. “In the intensive care unit. He had some sort of an accident this morning, apparently.”

Reflexively she stubbed the cigarette into the saucer of her coffee cup. “A car accident?” She lit another cigarette. “Good Lord. Is he all right?”

“No, not a car. Something . . . well, something else. According to the policeman, this boy was riding the bike around in the field where he stole it from Jamie. They think he must have run over a nest of wasps. Maybe it fell out of a tree or something. In any case, they swarmed. It’s pretty bad, apparently. He can’t speak.”

It was as though all the air was suddenly sucked out of the room. I felt dizzy and the kitchen swayed and dimmed around me. For a moment I thought I might faint. I steadied my hands on the edge of the kitchen table for balance.

We’ll make him shut up, I promise. And we’ll get your bike back.

When the vertiginous moment passed, my father was still speaking to me. He hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong. “The constable asked me if I wanted to press charges,” he was saying. “Of course, under the circumstances I said no, of course not.” He cleared his throat. “Jamie, the boy’s aunt would like to meet you at the hospital. She’d like to have her nephew—the thief’s brother—apologize to you on behalf of the family. Her sister, Mrs. Dodd, is with Terry in the ICU. Apparently some of the family is with her. The aunt and the younger boy want to speak with you. How do you feel about that? Shall we go down to the hospital after we pick up your bicycle at the station?”

In a very small voice I said, “Okay.”

“Are you sure, Jamie? You’re not nervous, are you? They just want to say they’re sorry. Apparently the police really gave the young fellow a good what-for about his brother stealing the bike from you. Told him it was your first bike and everything, and that you’d just gotten it for your birthday.”

“No, it’s okay, Dad. I just feel bad for the kid, even if he did steal my bike.”

“You’re going to be nice to them, aren’t you, Jamie? Even if the boy’s brother did take your bike?” My father looked at me hopefully. “They’re pretty upset, and it’s a hard time for their family, especially the boy’s mother. This would be a good time to be kind.”

Before I could answer my father, my mother interjected again. “What on earth would have possessed the boy to return the bike on the same day his brother had that accident? I would have thought that’s the last thing he’d be thinking about. The whole affair is rather odd. Still, I feel badly for the other boy, even if he’s a thief. And his poor mother must be beside herself. On the other hand, how very odd to be worrying about apologizing to Jamie at a time like this. If it were me, that would be the very last thing I’d be concerned about.”

I said, “I think it’s nice.”

“Hmmm,” my mother said, lighting another cigarette.

“Bad luck,” my father said. He rubbed his chin again. “Bad luck.”

“Well, it’s certainly more than bad luck, Peter, isn’t it? It’s a rather serious accident, all told. The boy could sustain a brain injury from those stings.” My mother could always manage to picture the worst possible outcome for any given situation, with or without the benefit of actual facts.

“No,” my father said. “That’s not what I mean, Alice. The boy’s brother—that’s why he brought the bicycle to the police station. He told the policeman at the front desk that it was bad luck. He didn’t want it in his house. He was afraid something would happen to him, too.”

Later at the hospital, with his Aunt Prudence standing behind him, Stevie Todd said that his brother was sorry for what he’d done.

“Thank you for not bringing charges against my brother,” Stevie said in a stilted voice. There was nothing spontaneous or natural in it. He had obviously been coached. Stevie was my age, eight. When Aunt Prudence told him to shake my hand, he started to cry.

“Stevie, shake Jamie’s hand,” she insisted. Under the harsh, unforgiving whiteness of the hospital’s overhead fluorescent lights, Mrs. Dodd’s sister’s face was puffy and blotched. Her eyes behind thick glasses were swollen and red from crying, bruised with plum-coloured smudges of exhaustion. If this was how her sister looked today, I couldn’t imagine how Terry’s mother must look. But still, Aunt Prudence pushed Stevie toward me. “I mean it. Come on now. He and his father are being very nice to us by not calling the juvenile authorities about your brother.”

“I don’t want to!” Stevie wailed. He shrank back from my extended hand as though it were leprous. “I said I was sorry. I don’t want to shake his hand. Why do I have to?”

“Stop it!” she practically shouted. Roughly, she grabbed Stevie by the shoulder and shoved him towards me. “Shake Jamie’s hand!”

My father raised his own hands in a gesture of gentle conciliation. “It’s all right Mrs. . . . ?”

“Miss,” Aunt Prudence said. “I’m not married. My name is Miss Prudence Rogers.”

“Miss Rogers, Stevie doesn’t have to shake Jamie’s hand. It’s fine. More than fine. The boy’s obviously upset about his brother. Thank you for inviting us to come and meet you. We don’t want to take any more of your time. You should be with your sister and Terry now.”

“I’m so sorry.” Aunt Prudence’s face appeared to fall in on itself. Her voice sounded raw and chapped, almost as though it was bleeding. “We’re all so upset. I thought this would be a good idea, you know. That the boys should meet. My nephew . . . Stevie that is, not Terry . . . well, he said he had a bad dream last night that something bad was going to happen. He won’t tell me about it. I just thought it would be a good idea for him to . . . to . . .” She began to cry. “My sister—Mrs. Dodd, Arlene Dodd—well, her husband passed away last year. It’s just she and the two boys, and me. I live with them and try to help out. Terry isn’t a bad boy, Mr. Browning, he’s just a little lost without his father around. And then this happened this morning. When the ambulance came for him, he was unconscious. Oh God, I’m so worried about my poor sister. If anything happens to Terry, too. His face . . .”

“Miss Rogers, please go to your sister. We’ll see ourselves out. My wife in particular asked me to send her best wishes for Terry’s recovery. I’m so, so sorry. We’re sorry, I mean. And thank you, Stevie, for being so honest. Your mother and aunt should be very proud of you.”

Stevie nodded dumbly and followed his aunt down the hallway toward the elevator to the ICU. Aunt Prudence called out to the two women who were in the elevator just as the doors were beginning to swing shut. One of the women reached out her hand and held the door till they reached it.

Stevie Dodd looked back just once. When our eyes met, his were full of a black dread that aged him beyond his years, far beyond childhood, maybe even further. Then they stepped into the elevator and the doors glided shut.

In the car on the way home, I told my father that I’d changed my mind about the mirror. I said there was nothing wrong with it after all, that I was just spooked last night by having my bike stolen and that I wanted to keep the mirror right where it was.

At first, he told me he didn’t know what I was talking about, but then he remembered what I had said the previous night before he tucked me in. He looked at me quizzically, but said he was glad that I’d come to my senses, and he’d never planned to get rid of it anyway. He said we’d already had more than enough disruption and carrying-on to last us quite a while, thank you very much.

When we arrived home after picking up my bicycle from the police station, my father took it out of the back seat and told me to put it in the garage, which I did. He said he was going to go across the street and check on Mrs. Alban’s eaves troughs, and that I should see if my mother needed any help in the house.

Mrs. Alban had been widowed earlier that year and my father had been doing the sort of odd jobs around the house that were formerly Mr. Alban’s bailiwick. Mrs. Alban always tried to pay him, but my father always refused, as gently as possible. My mother said Mrs. Alban had no sense of the value of money, but my father said she was trying to keep her dignity intact in her widowhood.

That first autumn of her bereavement, I’d caught sight of Mrs. Alban through our living room window trying clumsily to rake the leaves in her front yard in all the brittleness of her old age. It broke my heart to see her fragility. I wished I were old enough to do it for her. When I saw my father do it that first time, a sense that some sort of elemental justice and kindness had been returned to the universe came to me, and I loved my father a bit more for being the instrument of it.

Inside the house, I called out to my mother. There was no answer. I called out again. In the kitchen, there was a note on the table in her rounded, loopy scrawl:

Monica Birdwhistle stopped by for a coffee and some cake. We’re off to check out a sale at Ogilvy’s at the plaza. She’ll drop me home in a bit. There’s cold macaroni salad in the fridge for lunch. I will be home later this afternoon. Dinner will be at seven SHARP!

Love, MOM

xoxox

She always signed her notes “Mom,” even if they were intended for my father. Some days it seemed as though that was their agreed-upon nomenclature; the rest of the time it seemed calculated to head off the possibility of shocking me with marital familiarity in case I came upon one signed “Alice” by accident. In any case, she wouldn’t be home for hours, and for now the house was empty. Silence, general and complete, blanketed the rooms. I felt my heartbeat quicken in my chest.

Downstairs in my bedroom, I closed the door. There was a bolt lock that I had been forbidden to touch, on pain of both spanking and grounding. Neither of my parents believed young boys had any reason to lock their doors. I turned the bolt handle now, hearing the soft click as the door locked. Momentarily panicked at my own audacity in flouting this carved-in-stone prohibition, I turned it counterclockwise to make sure it unlocked. When it opened, I sighed with relief. Then I closed and locked it again.

My mother had made my bed while my father and I were at the hospital. The carpet had been freshly vacuumed. I sat down on the navy-blue coverlet and took the room’s measure. It was innocuous, full of early-afternoon sunshine. The mirror was still bolted to the wall adjacent to my bed. The glass was faintly streaked, and the ghost-scent of the vinegar she’d wiped it with hung in the air, mixing with the carpet deodorizer.

Briefly I wondered if my mother had caught a glimpse of anything in the glass other than her own reflection when she was cleaning it, but I already knew that Amanda—or whatever I had seen, or imagined I had seen, the night before—would never have shown herself, or itself, to my mother.

She’d been waiting for me, and no one else.

Standing in that mellow suburban sunlight, the rational side of my nature, the pre-adult side, told me that the first part of the dream I’d had about standing on the promontory over the lake had started hours earlier that evening, and that I’d very likely dozed off immediately when I came downstairs, then woken when my father entered to tuck me in. But the irrational side of my nature, the part of the nature that connects the open minds of children with magic things unseen and unheard by adults, things of beauty and of horror—what grownups indulgently call “having a vivid imagination”—realized that what I had seen last night had been real. I had seen a little girl named Amanda in the mirror. She had used my own voice to talk to me, but they had been her words, not mine. Of that I had not the slightest doubt.

And even if any doubt had remained, the black dread in Stevie Dodd’s face at the hospital had told its own story, told it in a language in which both he and I were fluent. I doubted very much that I had been the only dreamer of terrible things last night. Perhaps Stevie had even dreamed of the wasps themselves, dreamed of the swarm of terrible arthropod bodies moving like a yellow-and-black cloud with murderous purpose, stinging Terry’s face and mouth over and over till he passed out from the pain of the venom coursing through his bully’s body, finally screaming the way I knew he’d made other children scream, while the wasps stung him again and again. He’d finally shut up, all right.

The irrational, magical child I was smiled at that. Good, I thought. He stole my bike. He deserved it.

Then I touched the glass and called softly, “Amanda? I got my bike back, just like you said I would.”

After a while, she came out and we spent the afternoon behind that locked bedroom door until I heard the front door open and the sound of my father’s footsteps on the floor above.

That year, I spoke with Amanda mostly at night, when the light in my bedroom was dim, or when I switched off my bedside lamp altogether and pulled out and lit the candle that I’d hidden under my bed so my mother couldn’t find it. I used the candle mostly when my parents were asleep, because my mother could smell a lit match or candle practically through a wall.

The next summer, my parents thought it would be good for me to get out of the house and interact with some boys my own age.

Their solution was Camp Manitou, which my older cousin Timothy had attended years ago. My aunt Grace told my mother it had done him “a world of good,” and that it might help me “learn to fit in a bit.”

I pleaded with my mother. “But Mom, why can’t I just stay here? Why can’t I just spend the summer playing with Hank? Why do I have to go away?”

“Jameson, stop whining,” she said. “I don’t want you underfoot. It’s time you started meeting some normal boys your age. Maybe it’ll rub off on you. I’ve already told you, I don’t like you spending so much time with that strange girl. Honestly, what sort of girl calls herself ‘Hank’? It’s not natural.”

“Mom, she’s my best friend.”

“Well, you need to make a new best friend. For heaven’s sake. A boy shouldn’t have a girl as a best friend. When you’re older you can date, then someday you’ll marry some nice girl who’ll become your wife. But boys and girls aren’t supposed to be friends. Aunt Grace says Camp Manitou is full of wonderful fellows. You’ll have a new best friend in three shakes of a lamb’s tail. When you come home, you won’t even be thinking about Hank. Lucinda,” she corrected herself. “Lucinda.”

I called Hank on the telephone to tell her that I was going away for the summer.

“I wish it was just going to be you and me for the whole summer,” I said miserably.

“Your mom would hate that,” Hank replied. “You know she wishes you and I weren’t best friends.” She sighed. “I wish I could go away to camp. I hate it here. There’s nothing to do. Boys always get to do the best stuff. You’re lucky you get to go. I wish I could go instead of you. I’d love to go away to camp.”

“It’s a boys’ camp, Hank,” I said. “It’s not for girls.” I was utterly baffled by her nonchalance. To me it was the theft of our summer together at the hands of my parents. My mother didn’t even like her. I briefly considered sharing that dislike with Hank as a way to bring her more in line with my thinking on the injustice of the matter, but I reasoned that it would be unnecessarily cruel.

“So what? I’m more like a boy than you are. You couldn’t even climb a tree till I showed you how to do it, Jamie. I’d probably have more fun than you would. I get all that stuff. Don’t be mad, but you’re way more like a girl than I am.”

I thought for a moment. There was no malice in Hank’s voice. She was simply stating a fact both of us were aware of, one that didn’t really bother either of us. She was right—we were an odd pair in our reversals.

“I’m going to hate it. I’m going to really hate it.”

“Don’t be such a baby,” Hank commanded, ever the pragmatist. “You’ll probably have a great time. And when it’s over, you can come home.”

I had one last, terrible, burning question. “Hank?”

“What?”

“You won’t find a new best friend while I’m away, will you? We’ll still be, you know, best friends when I get back?”

“Don’t be such a baby,” she repeated, but kindly this time.

“Come on, swear?”

“I swear.”

“Pinkie-swear?”

“We have to be face-to-face for pinkie swear, dummy.”

“Okay, let’s just pretend we pinkie-sweared, then.”

Hank sighed. “Okay, Jamie, pretend-pinkie-swear.”

“Promise?”

“I promise, Jamie. We’ll be best friends till the day we die.”

Late that night, after I was sure my parents had gone to bed, I lit the candle in front of the mirror and tried to call Amanda so I could tell her what I had told Hank—that I was going away, even though I wanted to stay home that summer. I wanted to beg her to come with me, to find a mirror somewhere in the camp where I could see her.

“Amanda, it’s me. It’s Jamie. I have to talk to you.” I closed my eyes and relaxed my throat and willed her to speak to me, through me. But no words suggested themselves. I tried again, concentrating harder this time. I squeezed my eyes so tightly shut that I saw purple supernovas exploding behind my eyelids and my head throbbed with the sheer effort of my concentration. I tried again. “Amanda, please come out. Don’t be mad. I have to go. I don’t have any choice. They’re making me go.”

The candle flickered, and then went out.

In the dark, I whispered, “Amanda . . . ? Is that you? Don’t be mad . . . please? It’s not my fault.” But when I switched on my bedside lamp, I was alone in the mirror.

I lit the candle every night for seven nights, but she never came.

A week later, I left for summer camp. In all that time it was as though Amanda had never even existed, as though she had been nothing but a flittering enchantment I had conjured up from the depths of my imagination.

I spent three long, horrible weeks at Manitou as one of the camp’s two untouchables. I was in a cabin with five other boys, all of whom had been to Camp Manitou before, and all of whom seemed to be friends already. Worse still, they were friends in that way young boys have of being friends not based necessarily on shared experiences but simply on shared gender. They all spoke the same language, a language with which I had never been naturally fluent. Boys can smell difference at five hundred paces, and whatever they smelled in me, they hated everything about it on sight.

The ringleader was a boy named John Prince. He was a big ugly kid with a forest fire of red hair and a face that was prone to flushing just as hot. He had small, cold fish eyes and fists like hams and, based on my last name, he nicknamed me Brown Nose that first night.

The next night, I was short-sheeted and spent half an hour trying to unmake my bed while the five other boys laughed in the dark at my fumbling because I was too terrified to turn on the light. Finally, in despair, I ripped the rough red blanket off the bed and cried myself to sleep as quietly as possible on the crude pine floor beside the bunk. Two nights later, one of them put a dead squirrel at the foot of my bunk, under the blanket. When I shrieked, they broke into applause and crude laughter.

That night, after everyone else was asleep, I snuck out. I lay in my sleeping bag under a pine tree behind the cabin. After I’d cried all the tears I had to spare, I fell asleep watching a thick cloud of ghostly white moths spin and whirl around the rear exterior light of the cabin. The trembling movement of their beating wings acted as a hypnotic, summoning sleep.

The next morning, when I told one of our cabin counsellors about the dead squirrel, he laughed and said he thought it was a fine prank in the old Manitou spirit. He told me to stop complaining or I’d never make any friends.

The only boy who had it worse than I did was a fat blond boy named Olivier. He had a high, warbling voice and sad eyes set in his face like pale blue poached eggs. He seemed perpetually on the verge of tears. Had we been smarter about it, we might have formed an alliance of sorts, but we despised each other, for each saw in the other some reflection of his own loathsomeness, and we ate alone at opposite ends of the mess hall to avoid attracting the negative attention we would doubtless have attracted sitting together.

One afternoon, during free swim at the pool, Prince purposely jumped off the diving board and landed on my head, driving me underwater, almost to the bottom. My two front teeth buried themselves in the meat of my lower lip as the impact of his feet on my head caused my jaws to snap shut.

Underwater, I almost lost consciousness, but before I passed out, I managed to paddle to the surface, my head full of light and exploding stars. The corner of the pool was red with the blood that gushed from my mouth. The lifeguard took me to the infirmary where the nurse pressed a cold washcloth against my lip to stop the bleeding but deemed stitches unnecessary.

“Just hold the washcloth against your lip,” she said. “The blood will clot and it’ll stop. Everybody gets war wounds at camp sooner or later. Welcome to Camp Manitou! You’re an old warrior now. You’ve earned it.” To denote campers who had passed all the unofficial initiations and were on their second year at Manitou, the camp used the term “old warrior.” The nurse beamed at me like she was bestowing a knighthood.

By that evening, my swollen mouth looked like a clown’s makeup and almost every movement of my face threatened to open my lip again. When I tried to take a bite of salad and the vinegar in the dressing seared the raw flesh, I nearly screamed in pain and everyone laughed. And no one laughed louder than John Prince and my five cabin-mates.

The upside was that I was excused from most of the camp’s outdoor activities for the next two days, which meant that while Prince and the others were out learning to be old warriors, I was left alone to explore the fields and marshes beyond the camp. There was also the camp chapel, which was dark and smelled pleasantly of age and dry wood. It had a piano, which was only slightly out of tune. I played chopsticks for hours, and made up songs that made ample use of the few chords I could play, amplified by the sustaining pedal, which made it sound very symphonic and serious to my ears.

Several times I entered the communal bathroom when I knew it would be empty and stared into the mirrors over the row of sinks, hoping against vain hope that I might catch a glimpse of Amanda. The mirrors were dirty and cracked, and they held no secrets. If Amanda was hiding in their depths, she was well hidden.

But of course, those two days came and went too quickly, and before long I was back in all the camp activities.

I put on a brave face on the one Parents’ Day the camp allowed midway through the summer session. I’d shown my father and mother how my diving skills had improved, played the piano for them in the camp’s chapel, and introduced them to my counsellors. The counsellors put on convivial faces in front of my parents, even though by then most of them despised me and considered me lazy. That said, I think the counsellors were more worried about my injury reflecting badly on their leadership than they let on, which is why they told my parents what a terrific camper I was and what a great asset I was to Camp Manitou.

For my part, I spoke glowingly about my counsellors in front of my parents, too, even though I feared them and considered them bullies and sadists who exploited my physical weaknesses and pitted the other boys against me till the halfway point had seemed to stretch out like a life sentence of short-sheeting, dunking, and being the one everyone screamed at to hurry up, asshole! during those endless hikes under the blazing July sun.

While my mother stood just far enough apart from a group of mothers who were admiring their sons’ artwork to let them know that she considered herself a cut above the company, my father asked me to go for a walk with him, to show him where the tuck shop was so he could restock me with “supplies,” chocolate bars and the like. Even as he said it, I suspected he wanted to talk, and that it had nothing to do with replenishing my supply of chocolate.

We walked behind the arts and crafts cabin and up the hill overlooking the camp, and sat down on one of the logs that formed the seating boundary at the edge of the campfire pit.

My father reached for my hand, to hold it. I pulled it away sharply. I was horrified at the thought of anyone seeing me walking hand in hand with my father. In light of everything I had already endured, if any of the other campers caught me holding my father’s hand, they would see to it that it would be the end of me. I could see that my reaction had hurt him, which hurt me in turn. I didn’t like to see my father in pain so when he tried to put his arm around my shoulder instead, I didn’t pull away. Instead, I leaned into him. For a moment it felt as though I might burst into tears, but I held it in.

Although my attendance at Camp Manitou had largely been my mother’s idea, I also knew my father wanted me to be having a good time and I didn’t want to disappoint him. I never wanted to disappoint my father. I wanted him to be proud of me, and right now that meant me not acting like a baby. All it would have taken would have been for me to break down and cry, to tell him what a nightmare it all had been, and he would take me right out of there. I pictured a horrible, loud scene with the counsellors where my father would upbraid them for not taking care of me while my cabin-mates looked on and gloated at what a sissy I was.

My mother would be embarrassed about having a son that couldn’t get along with other boys, and I suspected I would pay dearly for that for the rest of the summer, if not longer. When my mother chose to withdraw affection, she could freeze ink with the chill of it.

No, it was better to suck it up and endure the next week and a half. It had to end at some point. In truth, I sensed that my cabin-mates were already getting bored of tormenting me as they developed alliances with other campers like them who had their own targets.

My father smiled and said, “How’s it going, Jamie? Are you okay? Are you having a good time at Camp Manitou?”

“It’s going great, Dad,” I lied. “I love it here.”

“Really?”

I tried to meet his eyes, but I couldn’t. Instead, I smiled brightly, looking away. “Yup.”

He paused. “What happened to your lip? You said it happened in the pool?”

“Roughhousing. It’s nothing, Dad. Really. It doesn’t even hurt.”

“Are you making new friends? Any new buddies you like in particular?”

I shrugged, thinking of the dead squirrel under my sheets and how I’d screamed, and how they’d all laughed. “It’s okay, Dad. Everyone’s okay.”

“You know, your mother and I are very proud of you, Jamie. Your granddad always used to tell me that the wilderness really made a man out of a boy. I guess it’s sort of like that for you here, isn’t it. You’re really growing up.”

“I know, Dad. Thanks.”

“Are you sure you’re okay, Jamie? There’s not something you’re not telling me, is there? Because you can tell me anything, you know.”

I forced a smile at him. Even to me it seemed the smile didn’t quite make it to my eyes. But I wanted the conversation to be over, and I didn’t want my father to be disappointed in me. “No, Dad. Really. It’s fine.” I swallowed the thickness in my voice and took a deep breath. “Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“Would you buy me a mint Aero bar at the tuck shop?”

My father seemed relieved by the innocuousness of the request. “Of course, Jamie.” He seemed as relieved as I was to bring this conversation to a close, though I wasn’t sure if it was because he suspected more of what was going on than he let on, and that the prospect of dealing with it was too daunting. If so, then my fantasy of him withdrawing me from Camp Manitou if I asked him to really was just a pipe dream. And I didn’t want to know that. It was safer not knowing. “Anything else?”

“Dad, would it be okay if we bought some for my cabin-mates?”

It was a sudden, ludicrous burst of inspiration, the notion that chocolate bars might be enough payola to buy, if not the friendship of my cabin-mates—I’d gladly settle for their indifference at that point—at least a reprieve from their bullying. And, as it turned out, it would, for a few hours that evening anyway.

“Of course, son. I’m glad to see you thinking of your buddies.”

Then we walked down the hill to where my mother was standing impatiently next to the Mercedes-Benz Estate station wagon she’d insisted my father drive, even though he’d said over and over that he couldn’t afford it. My mother didn’t look much like she was enjoying Camp Manitou, either.

In any case, it had all come to an end a week and a half later, the day the busses rolled up the gravel drive to the chapel in preparation for the end-of-camp exodus that would to take the boys home and take me to freedom.

But not before I’d found the painted turtle.

It had been sunning itself all that morning on a rock jutting out of the surface of an algae-encrusted, shallow marsh up the road from the chapel—the swampy water bracketed by pussy willows, lily pads, the dead, bleached skeletons of trees, and rotted stumps. With boys milling nearby and shouts ricocheting across the water, it was hard to believe no one else had seen the turtle, which was so beautiful and perfect that I momentarily lost my breath. It was a midland painted turtle, a specific subspecies of painted turtle with a gleaming olive-coloured carapace streaked with bands of red and orange along the sides. Its plastron was yellow, with butterfly-shaped markings along the midline. Its little head and neck, arched as though it were scenting the air, was streaked with thin bands of crimson and gold. The creature shone like a perfect emerald and ruby brooch in the sunlight.

I knew I had to have it. I had to own it.

I told myself that I wanted the turtle to be my friend, but the truth was I couldn’t bear the thought of it not belonging to me. So much of the cruelty of childhood is thoughtless, in the literal sense of the word. When I waded into the swamp and plucked the turtle off the rock, I had no sense that I was kidnapping it, of taking it out of its natural world—indeed, its home—and forcing it into my own.

Terrified, it moved its tiny limbs in frantic protest, and then withdrew its head into its shell. It defecated into the palm of my hand. I wiped my hand on the leg of my khaki shorts, for the first time all summer not caring about how dirty nature was. As gently as I could, I placed the turtle into my pocket and hurried out of the swamp.

Behind the counter in the mess hall, I found a paper sack. I transferred the turtle from my pocket to the sack, carrying it carefully by the bottom with the lip of the bag open to the air so it wouldn’t suffocate. The turtle tried frantically to scramble up the sides of the bag. Its head moved from side to side, as though trying to comprehend how one minute it had been basking in the late-July sunlight on a rock in the middle of an eastern Ontario marsh and the next, a prisoner in a brown paper cell.

I felt a flutter of pity. “Shhhhh, little turtle,” I murmured. I caressed its drying shell with my index finger, hoping it would feel reassured. “Shhhhh. It’ll be okay. You’re safe with me. You’re coming home with me, to live in my room. We’re going to be best friends, you and I. You’ll see. I’ll feed you and give you water. In the basement, we have a terrarium. I’ll wash it out and it can be your new home. I’ll watch you grow up. It’ll be great. Don’t worry.”

The turtle’s legs kicked more weakly, as though it had finally realized there was no escape. Then they stopped moving, and its head retracted inside its shell again.

In my mind, I had already named the turtle Manitou, after the camp. Even if I had endured three weeks away from everything familiar and comforting, something good would come out of it. My new friend would carry the camp’s name. I enjoyed the perversity of that as only a nine-year-old boy can.

For as long as I could, I avoided the counsellors and the other boys. It was fairly easy to do. I’d packed my green canvas duffel bag the night before and delivered it to the dining room where it would then be loaded onto the bus.

I knew that if any of the counsellors saw me, they would confiscate the turtle and let it loose in the marsh. It was expressly forbidden to take wildlife away from the woods and marshes here, even into the camp. At Manitou, we’d done our nature study in nature. No snakes, frogs, birds, or turtles were to be captured. The camp organizers were deeply committed to the notion that wild things were wild, and belonged in the wild as their birthright. But what I wanted at that moment more than anything else was to bring the turtle home with me.

I’d received a few sideways glances from boys that had passed me where I sat behind our cabin, and one of them even asked me what I was doing there. The question as usual wasn’t really a question at all. It was challenge. But this was the last day of camp, and the challenger was bored enough to accept my stock offering of nuthin’ without it being a prelude to something that would make me cry out in pain.

When the time came, I climbed aboard the bus and secured the seat two rows behind the driver, Olivier having claimed the seat directly behind him, which was the safest seat of all. Since no one wanted to sit with me, I had both seats to myself—correction; we had both seats to ourselves, Manitou and I. When I looked into the paper bag to see how he was doing, he appeared to have given up trying to climb out. He looked like he was resting. As quietly as I could, I whispered to him that we were almost home and that I’d let him out of the bag.

The counsellors and the other boys must have assumed I had a snack in the paper bag because no one asked what was inside, at least not until the bus was just outside of Ottawa. Then I felt a rough tap on my shoulder.

“Whatcha got in the bag, Brown Nose?” John Prince had lumbered down the aisle of the bus from the very back where he’d been sitting with his buddies. I’d heard them shouting and laughing almost since we’d left Camp Manitou. He smacked me on the back on my head. “You got food in that bag, Brown Nose? Huh? You got candy?”

I closed the bag and put it to my side and used my body to block access to it. “No,” I said. “Nothing. I don’t have any food. No candy.”

When John Prince laughed, it was a snarling sound full of teeth and phlegm. “Yeah, you’re ‘know-nuthin’ all right, retard. Whatcha got in the bag?” he demanded again. “Show me.” Prince shoved me to the side and took the bag in a chapped hand. He opened it and looked in. His eyes widened. “Hey, it’s a fuckin’ turtle! Brown Nose kidnapped a fuckin’ turtle!” He laughed again, showing all his yellow teeth. He reached inside and took Manitou out, bringing the small creature right up to his face. For one horrible moment I was sure Prince was going to eat him, was going to tear Manitou’s head off with those teeth and crack his shell with his jaws. The turtle’s legs were kicking helplessly in the air and its head swayed from side to side in terror. Prince swung Manitou through the air between his thumb and index finger like a child with a model airplane.

“Give him back to me!” I screamed. “You’re scaring him! Give him to me!”

Prince said, “Make me, Brown Nose. I fuckin’ dare you. Make me.”

The bus driver half-turned. He shouted, “Sit down, you two! Get back to your seats right now, or I’ll pull this bus right over to the side of the road till the police come, you hear me? And then you’ll be headed straight for reform school!”

But of course, it was too late for any of that.

Prince swung Manitou through the air, making vroom vroom airplane noises as he did. His friends in the back seat all laughed as though it were the funniest thing they’d ever seen. A few of them started to clap, and one of them—I didn’t see which one—said, Throw it! Let’s see if turtles can fly!

What happened next is still a bit unclear after all these years, but my memory is that I had glanced up at the driver’s rear-view mirror and seen nothing in it but clouds.

In one second, the mirror reflected the entire rear aisle of the bus and the faces of forty shouting, jeering prepubescent boys; in the next, it went blank, the view—if it could even be called that—was something akin to looking out the window on one of those mornings in late fall, right before winter, when the fog lies as thickly on the glass as white paint.

Then my vision blurred. I tasted blood in my mouth, and the world was reduced to the sweet music of Prince’s screams. I found myself standing up in my seat with a handful of Prince’s hair in my fist, smashing his head against the metal bar of the seat. I felt the vibration of the impact thrum up my forearm. I was possessed of a sudden, vicious strength that was so entirely unlike me that I felt myself observing the scene as though from a distance. It was a dark and delicious, even voluptuous, violence that lifted me up above myself on black wings.

It occurred to me that Prince sounded much less terrifying with blood from the gash over his eye smearing the chrome and the cheap vinyl upholstery of the bus seat. I loved the sound of his screaming. I loved it. I adored it with a barbarism that was entirely alien to my nature. I wanted to lick the air around him and taste that sound. Then I was punching him in the face, hitting his nose, his forehead, and his chin.

The bus swerved as the driver pulled over to the side of the road and the boys were all screaming, Fight! Fight! Fight! But there was an undercurrent of awe beneath it all, because someone had changed the rules of dominance, neglecting to tell John Prince or his friends that the impossible had occurred, and Brown Nose was going to kill him unless someone pulled them apart.

At the roadside, the bus diver did just that. He pulled the bus to a stop and broke up the fight, though “fight” was a bit of misnomer: Prince was out cold and his face looked as though someone had swished it around in a tub of blood. It would be closer to the truth to say that the driver pulled me off Prince, and Prince slid to the ground like someone had poured him from a pitcher.

I looked down at his hands: they were empty. The paper bag was crumpled under the seat across the aisle where Prince had kicked it during his struggle. I looked around for Manitou, but I didn’t see him anywhere nearby. I shrugged out of the driver’s tight grip, kneeled down on the floor of the bus, and looked under the seats.

I stood up and stared at the now dead-silent bus. “Where’s my turtle?” Silence answered me. The other boys seemed transfixed by the blood, still trying to reconcile what they had just seen, the utter demolishment of Camp Manitou’s Goliath by the unlikeliest possible David. “Where’s my fucking turtle? If anything happened to him, I’ll fucking kill you guys!”

The bus driver shoved me back down into my seat. He pointed his finger at me, then jabbed his finger into my chest for emphasis. It hurt when he did that. “You sit down and shut up, you crazy little freak. You don’t move. Boy, you’re in some kind of trouble.” He looked down at Prince, who was moaning and starting to regain consciousness. Then back at me. His face was a mixture of adult fury, worry, and a grudging sort of admiration. At least it felt like admiration, though I could have been wrong about that, too. “Jesus fuck,” he said. Then, to the other boys: “Okay, you bozos, what’s this about a turtle? Did one of you take his turtle?” He looked back at me. “What the hell . . . was this about a goddamned turtle? Seriously? A goddamned turtle? Do you two little fucks know how dangerous it is to fight on a bus?”

“The turtle is mine,” I said weakly. “He’s just a little turtle I found in the swamp. A midland painted turtle.” It was as though by naming the turtle’s species and genus, I might make it easier for the driver to either locate Manitou on the floor, alive, or else identify his remains if one of these other monsters had done the unspeakable while I was taking apart their leader. I felt everything—the rage, the strength, the fight, the pleasure in the blood and the pain—rise up out of my body and dissipate like vapour. I was lightheaded with it. It was as though an entirely different being had abruptly taken leave of its temporary occupancy of my body and left me with what I had started with before the possession. A sting of tears pricked my eyes. “John was going to hurt him. He took him out of the bag and he was waving him around like an airplane. Manitou was really scared.”

“Manitou!” The driver gave me a look of fury leavened with frustration, perhaps even sympathy. But when he addressed the bus full of dumbstruck boys in the bus, there was no sympathy, just anger. “Everyone look on the ground, and under your seats. If there is a turtle there, alive or dead, bring him to me right now.” The boys all scrambled to obey the driver, obviously grateful for something to do to break the tension. They dove onto the floor of the bus and peered under their seats. “You,” he said to me, pointing again. “Don’t move a goddamned muscle.”

Finally, a boy in the back I didn’t recognize shouted out, “Sir, I found him!” He held up Manitou, who kicked his legs in the air. My relief—for I’d had visions of the turtle’s crushed shell and limbs—was so all-encompassing that I felt as though the air had been sucked out of me.

“Bring that thing up here,” the driver told the boy. “And give it to this kid,” he added, pointing at me. “Right now.”

The boy hurried up the aisle and handed Manitou to me, not looking me in the eye as he did it. I cupped both hands like a crèche and he deposited the turtle’s little body into them. As gently as I could, I retrieved the paper bag and put Manitou back inside. The boy hurried to the back of the bus, still not looking at me.

I could feel, if not actually hear, the collective exhalation of breath when the driver helped Prince to his feet and Prince shrugged him off with a defiant, if bruised I’m fine, Jesus Christ, leave me alone! before limping down the aisle back to his friends in the back row. But Prince didn’t look at me, either, and no one bothered me on the last forty-five minutes of the bus ride back home.

The bus driver came to my defence at the terminal when Mrs. Prince saw her son’s battered face and began to scream. Cold-eyed and red-haired like her son, it was apparent even to me where his splenetic temperament came from. She swept him up in her arms as though he were an injured refugee from a lifeboat suddenly reunited with his lover.

“Your boy started it with this boy, ma’am,” the driver said when she wheeled on him and demanded to know what had happened to her baby. I saw Prince wince at the word baby, which made me smile in spite of myself. But I was in no way confident enough to laugh at him, however much I wanted to. The driver continued. “He came up behind him and smacked him in the head. And he took this boy’s pet turtle away. The boy’s reaction was maybe too . . . impulsive. But your boy started the fight. No question about that at all.”

“My Johnny is a good boy. He would never have started a fight with this little brat. This boy must have started it—look, he doesn’t even have a scratch on him. What kind of camp are you people running anyway? Where are this boy’s parents? Where?” Mrs. Prince turned to the throng of parents and called out shrilly, “Who are the parents of this boy?” She plucked the sleeve of a random passing brown-haired man in a madras summer jacket who looked nothing like me. “You? Are you his father?”

“Excuse me,” said the man, looking appalled. He extricated himself from her clutch and hurried away, looking back only once, as if to make sure she wasn’t following him.

Turning back to the driver, Mrs. Prince said, “I demand to speak to someone about this right now! Do you hear me?”

The driver had clearly had enough. A small crowd of parents and boys had gathered nearby. “I expect everyone has, ma’am. I’m not running the camp, I just drive this bus. You can talk to one of the counsellors if you want. Or you can find the boy’s parents and complain to them. But if anyone asks me, I’m going to tell them that your son is a bully and a brawler and he picked on this kid for no reason. Now, good day, ma’am.”

Mrs. Prince wheeled, about to turn her fury on me, when her son abruptly went rigid in her arms and said, “Mom! Fucking leave it alone. Let’s go. I want to get out of here.” He looked around at the people staring and lowered his head.

“Johnny, don’t curse! And besides, your poor face. You poor baby. We need to get you to the hospital. Then we’ll call the police. We’ll sue . . .”

“Mom, now. I mean it. Let’s go.”

The crowd of parents and boys had grown larger now and were all staring. The mothers in particular, seemed to be taking the measure of the differences in the relative height and weight of Prince and our respective demeanours, as well. In their faces was the beginning of disapproval, though directed not at me but at Prince. They knew a bully when they saw one.

The mother of the boy who had brought Manitou to me in the bus pointed at Prince, and then leaned down to whisper something in her son’s ear. When he nodded, she stiffened, hurried him out of the terminal. The boy looked back at me, almost apologetically. For a moment, I thought I saw something like empathy, but by the time I could have been sure, he was already gone. In any case, the summer was over and the time for empathy long past. I looked around for my parents, feeling very alone in the terminal with the paper bag containing my turtle clutched in my hand.

For a moment, it looked like Mrs. Prince was going to say something else, but her son gave his mother a hard, brutal shove toward the exit, picking up his duffel bag from the heap of luggage near the bus door and left the terminal without even a backward glance at me.

From inside the paper bag, I heard Manitou’s feeble scratching as he tried to get out of the bag. I opened it and stroked his shell with my index finger, hoping he’d feel some sort of comfort from it. “We’ll be home soon, Manitou,” I whispered. “We’ll be safe from all this stuff soon.”

My parents pulled up to the entrance of the bus depot fifteen minutes later. I was waiting for them outside, beside the curb, my duffel bag at my feet and the paper bag in my hand.

I’d caught sight of my own reflection in one of the windows in the terminal and had noticed that I was smeared with Prince’s blood. Not only had it spattered all over my white t-shirt, there were droplets of it on my forehead and under one eye. My knuckles were beginning to ache. I ducked into one of the bathroom stalls in the men’s room of the terminal and changed into one of the unwashed t-shirts I’d shoved to the bottom for my mother to wash once we got back to the house. It smelled musty, but at least there was no blood on it.

When she stepped out of the car, I saw that my mother wore a dark linen dress. This was a change from the slacks she’d been wearing around the house all summer long. It signalled to me that picking me up was an event, and that she’d missed me. That, at least, was how I chose to interpret the gesture. My parents apologized for their lateness and for not being there to greet me as I stepped off the bus. God knows what image they had in their minds of who, or what, would be greeting them. I’m sure they envisioned their proud, sunburned son, returning home to them from three weeks away, a little closer to manhood now, and proud of his achievements of the summer. The reality is what they’d missed: the apoplexy of Mrs. Prince, the bellowing of the bus driver, and the shame in Prince’s eyes. And me, spattered with his blood.

I inhaled the smell of my father’s blue cotton broadcloth sport shirt, which smelled like fresh laundry, sun, and Bay Rum aftershave. He held me tight and squeezed me. In my ear he whispered, “Welcome home, Jamie. Did I ever miss you, son. We both did.” Then he hugged me again and I collapsed into his arms.

While pleased to see me, my mother was not remotely pleased to see Manitou. When I opened the bag to show her, beaming with pride, she recoiled and took a step backward.

“Jamie, what on earth . . . ? What is this? You brought home a turtle? What were you thinking?”

“Mom, his name is Manitou.” Her face remained blank. “He’s a midland painted turtle,” I coaxed. I was hoping that by working up my own level of excitement about the painted turtle, the excitement would become contagious and magically spread to my parents. “I found him on the last day of camp. He was lying on a rock. I’ll take care of him, I promise. He’ll be my responsibility. You won’t have to do anything.”

My mother said, “We’re going to take that . . . that thing right to the pet store on Bank Street and see if they want it. They can sell it. Maybe they’ll let you keep part of the money. But you didn’t ask permission to bring that turtle home. You know how your father and I feel about pets.”

I blinked, feeling tears prick my eyes. Having endured three weeks at Camp Manitou already, let alone the horror of the day that had just been, the turtle was the only decent thing that had come out of it and I felt responsible for him. In many ways, he had come to symbolize everything about the vulnerability and fear I had felt during that three-week eternity. I had a sudden image of him in Prince’s hand, his tiny legs kicking in terror as that monster swept him through the air from side to side.

“Mom, please . . . he’s so far from home. I’m all he’s got right now. And he’s so beautiful. Look at him. Mom, please? Let me keep him?”

But she was adamant. “Absolutely not. We’re going right to the pet store on the way home. I don’t know what you were thinking, Jameson, but you’re going to have to learn that sometimes your actions carry consequences. This is as good a time as any to learn that lesson.”

“Dad?” I looked imploringly at my father, but he looked away. I had a sudden, dreadful vision of Manitou on display in one of the terrariums at Willard’s Pet Shoppe on Bank Street, as far away from the paradise in which he was born and had lived his short, wild life as possible. I pictured children poking him with their grubby fingers, or tapping on the glass walls of his prison trying to get a reaction. I felt a return of some of the rage I felt on the bus when Prince swung him through the air, but there was a new, desolate identification with Manitou that I hadn’t felt the last time. I hated my mother then, and wished her dead. “Dad, please. Please? I’ve never wanted anything more in my life. And if you let me keep him, you never have to give me anything ever again, not even for Christmas, or on my birthday.”

My mother said peremptorily, “Don’t try to play your father and I off one another, Jameson. You know better than that.” She turned to my father. “Peter? Where did you park? Let’s get home. After we drop the turtle off, we can all go to Ponderosa to celebrate Jameson’s first night back. Would you like that, Jameson? It would be a special treat.” You can tell us all about your adventures at Camp Manitou this summer. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Before I could reply, my father said to my mother in a very clear, firm voice, “Alice, I think Jamie’s old enough to be responsible for the turtle he’s brought home. I think it’ll be fine.”

My mother stared at my father, open-mouthed. “I beg your pardon? The decision has been made, Peter. I’m not having that thing in my clean house. Turtles are messy and they’re crawling with disease. I’m not having us all die of salmonella just so Jameson can keep a pet.”

“We can talk about it later, Alice, if you like.” There was the faintest trace of an edge to his voice, faint but detectable to both my mother and myself. “But I think it’ll be fine. What was his name? Manitou? Like Gitche Manitou, the head-honcho Indian spirit? Good name. Jamie will take good care of him, won’t you, son? We can use that old terrarium, the one I kept my garter snake in when I was a boy. I think we still have it, don’t we, Alice?”

My mother narrowed her eyes and said nothing.

“Yes, Dad, I promise.” I turned to my mother pleadingly. “Mom? You’ll see. Is it okay? Dad says I can.”

She didn’t reply to me, either, but she shot my father a look of icy fury. Then she said, “Jameson, take your duffel bag and wait for us outside. I want to have a quick word with your father before we drive home.”

I slung my duffel over my shoulder. My parents never raised their voices to each other in public, let alone fought in public, so I knew that this would be settled in a matter of minutes in one of two ways. Either Manitou would be coming home to live with me in a terrarium in my room where I could take care of him, or else we’d be stopping off at Willard’s on the way home, in which case I would never forgive my mother as long as I lived. Just before I reached the exit, I turned back and observed my parents.

My mother’s face was white with rage and she was speaking to my father in a voice too low for anyone around her to hear. But whatever she was saying was no less furious for its inaudibility. So engrossed was my mother in berating my father that she didn’t even notice that he stopped listening to her long enough to give me a brief, almost imperceptible wink.

When he did that, I knew we’d won, at least this round.

My mother sat in the front seat and smoked steadily as she stared out the window. My father tried to make light conversation—with her, at first. When she pointedly ignored him, he tried to engage me instead, but I was too self-conscious to answer beyond monosyllables. Both my father and I were acutely aware of my mother’s silence, as we were doubtless intended to be.

Jovially, my father said, “I guess Ponderosa is out of the question, Alice . . . ?
Or would you still like to have dinner there? I bet Jamie could use a steak, couldn’t you, son? I sure could.”

My mother stared straight ahead without replying.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I said. “I’m not all that hungry.”

My father glanced sideways at my mother, then back at me in the rear-view mirror. He sighed. “Well,” he said. “Hidey-ho! Home we go!”

As soon as we arrived at our house, my mother went up to their bedroom and slammed the door. Rather than jumping, both of us exhaled our relief simultaneously.

My father grinned and said, “Well. Let’s get this little fellow out of that bag and into something more comfortable.” He laughed at his joke. I laughed too, more in solidarity with my father than at his joke, which really wasn’t all that funny. The love I felt for my father at that moment was profound and all-encompassing. “Put him in the sink, Jameson. Run some water first so the porcelain is a bit moist. It’s high enough that he won’t be able to get out. Then you and I will get the terrarium out of the garage and get his new home ready.” My father reached out and gently squeezed my shoulder. “You like him, don’t you? I can tell. Your first pet. Well, well. How about that? Kind of exciting, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is. Thank you, Dad. You know . . . for making it, you know, okay with Mom.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s okay with Mom,” my father said. “But it’s okay with me, and she’ll get used it, you’ll see. Come on now; let’s get that sink ready for him. He’s been in that paper bag of yours for a very long time.”

I ran the water in the sink, then gently took Manitou out of the bag and placed him on the damp porcelain. It could have been my imagination, but the turtle seemed to revive as I watched. He crawled around the perimeter of the sink, not scrabbling hysterically as he had in the bag. If not actually pleased with his temporary quarters in our kitchen sink, he seemed, at least, resigned to it. I felt the first stirrings of something like actual guilt for having taken him home with me. I shuddered to imagine the height from which he must have fallen to have landed on the floor of the bus.

I knew fear. I’d known it for three weeks. I could only imagine what Manitou had felt when he fell from John Prince’s hand.

Inside the sink, the turtle circled the perimeter of the porcelain, pausing where the water had puddled, as though he was confused by its presence in a world gone so completely alien in every other way.

I said, “Dad, do you think he’ll be okay?”

“What do you mean, son?”

“I mean . . . do you think he’ll be okay living here with us? Do you think he’s happy?”

My father regarded me thoughtfully. “Jamie, let me ask you a question,” he said. “Did you think about any of this when you brought him home? I mean, I know he’s beautiful, and I know you wanted to have him as a pet. But did you ask yourself about any of that when you reached for him this morning?”

I thought about it, then shook my head. “No, I guess not.”

My father paused. When he spoke again, his tone was gentle but serious. “Well then, son,” he said, “it’s pretty simple: you made a choice that has impacted this creature’s life. You brought him home with you. You took him out of his world and into yours. Now you’re responsible for him. Actions have consequences. Your mother was right about that part, even if the way she said it wasn’t quite the way she meant it to sound. It’s up to you to take care of him now. Do you understand what I’m saying, Jamie?”

“Yes, Dad. I understand.” I did, too. What had seemed like a great idea this morning in the swamp now seemed to be a portentous responsibility.

“Jamie?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“I want you to know something.” He took my chin in his hand and squeezed it very gently. “I know Camp Manitou was hard for you.”

“Dad, it—”

“Jamie, listen to me, I know what it was like. I’ve been to camp. I saw it in your eyes on Parents’ Day when we had that talk. I recognized that look. I know you were putting on a brave face for me, and I know why you were doing it, too. I know you wanted your mother and I to be proud of you. Well, we are proud. I just wanted you to know that. That’s one of the reasons why I thought you should keep Manitou. You showed me that you could be responsible this summer, and I’m going to trust you now.

My eyes filled with tears, but I was smiling for the first time since I could remember. “Thanks, Dad. I love you.”

“I love you, too, sport.” His own eyes were slick when he ruffled my hair. “Good,” he said. “Now then let’s go find that old terrarium of mine. Nobody should have to live in a paper bag as long as Manitou did this afternoon. Or our kitchen sink, either.”

Dinner that night was a humourless affair, though less tense than the car ride had been.

After my father and I had set up the terrarium, and filled it with water that would need to be changed daily until we were able to install a filtration system—as well as moss and small gravel rocks for him to rest on—we put Manitou inside.

“I think that’ll do it,” my father said. “Now I think we need to take a ride to the pet store and pick up some turtle pellets. Then maybe we should stop at the library and check out some books on turtle care so you’ll know how to take care of him properly.”

At the pet store, my father found a paperback book on the care of reptiles and amphibians. I found one specifically on the care of turtles. My father shrugged his shoulders and bought them both. In the car afterwards, my father and I didn’t say much to each other, but that didn’t mean we weren’t communicating.

When I think back today, that ride home from the pet store was one of the happiest moments of my childhood, full of promise. In retrospect, the wonder of that moment made everything that was to come later all the more cruel.

When we got home, my mother had come out of the bedroom and was cooking dinner. Without turning, she said, “Dinner in fifteen minutes, you two. And wash your hands, for heaven’s sake. I know you’ve been handling that filthy thing.”

My mother clearly still resented her edict about the turtle having been overridden by my father, but she was less angry than she had been in the car. Sustaining that level of ire over a long period of time wasn’t impossible for her, but it drained her in the same way that leaving a battery outside in sub-zero temperatures would drain its energy. In order to conserve the status quo, my mother must have realized she would have to dial her anger down.

Not for the first time, I looked between my father and my mother at the dining table and wondered why they had ever married in the first place, since she clearly didn’t really seem to even like him and he seemed to put up with her out of a sense of loyalty to something other than his love for her.

But in those days, in the early 1970s, divorce was something shameful that “other” people did, the sort of “other” people that people like my family and I had only heard of, but didn’t really know. A boy in my class at Buena Vista Public School, Tommy Marx, had divorced parents, a distinction he wore like an affronting port-wine stain birthmark. To the rest of us, Tommy never seemed completely clean.

The wife was usually to blame, in popular divorce lore. Even if the husband was the cause of it, it was because of her deficiency in performing her role as a wife and mother. And she passed along her disgrace to her children by alchemical transmutation.

While I had on occasion overheard my mother and her friends refer to divorced men as “cads,” or “bounders,” whenever the topic of a divorced woman came up, their mouths would set in obdurate lines, their eyes managing to communicate both pity and a kind of flinty resentment that one of their own sex would have let down the team so badly by falling so low. They used the term “broken home,” which I found horribly vivid, picturing, as I did, an actual smashed house: shattered walls, jagged spikes of timber beams strewn as though from a great height, deadly shards of glass, rusty nails, everything pointed and lethal—all of it the woman’s fault, a failure at the only thing that really mattered in a woman’s life.

Still, when I pictured my parents divorcing—something I did with increasing frequency as time went on—I imagined a world composed of my father and me alone, a world which was, if not always joyful, at least always even-tempered and full of simmering love and acceptance. For that, I would have gladly worn the port-wine stain of being the child of a broken home. In those fantasies, my mother was always living somewhere else and my father and I formed a universe of two.

“Mom, is it okay if Hank comes over after dinner so I can introduce her to Manitou?”

It seemed politic to ask permission from my mother rather than my father this time. Even though there was always a better chance of her saying no, I’d been the recipient of enough bounty from my father today that she would forbid me almost anything at this point, just on principle. I waited, resigned to that outcome.

To my surprise, she said, “Yes, Jamie, that would be fine. But she can’t stay too late. It’s been a long day for you, and for your father and I because of you. And please don’t make too much noise. I have a headache. You can play in your room. Do we understand each other, young man?”

“Thanks, Mom.” I began to push my chair back in preparation to leave the table. “May I be excused?”

My mother sighed deeply and theatrically, and reached for the pack of cigarettes and the lighter she always kept on the buffet table. She smiled wanly. “You didn’t even finish your dinner, Jamie. I can see how glad you are to see me, and how glad you are that I put in all that work to make your favourite dinner to welcome you back home. Oh well, I should be used to that by now. No one in this house appreciates what I do.”

Two years before, when I was seven, my mother complained about all the work she did for my father and me, and how no one appreciated the sacrifices she’d endured for our benefit. I’d made the mistake of suggesting to her that if she didn’t like housework, she could get a job and hire someone else to do the cooking and cleaning.

I’d thought it was a brilliant idea: in my mind I pictured something glamorous, like being a secretary, or working as a reporter for a newspaper, like Brenda Starr did in the comic strips that came to the house every Saturday in the Citizen. I expected a beatific smile and an enthusiastic hug in appreciation for my ingenuity in solving her problem for her. What I’d gotten instead was a spanking, and I was sent to bed without any dinner.

I looked down at the half-eaten plate of spaghetti, the sauce for which I knew she prepared in bulk, then stored in the deep freeze. I also knew there were frozen strawberries from the supermarket in the fridge for dessert. “Mom, it was so good!” I said it with as much enthusiasm and sincerity as I could muster. “Thanks! That was the best dinner I’ve had in weeks! The food at Camp Manitou was—”

She cut me off sharply, moving her hands in a brushing-away motion as though she were shooing away an overly familiar dog. “Go on, Jamie, go call your friend Lucinda. Make sure it’s okay with her mother she comes over. And remember what I told you about noise.” She looked meaningfully at my father, who stared at some point in the middle-distance but said nothing. “Your father and I have things to talk about.”

Hank tapped on the glass wall of the terrarium. “What’s he doing in there? He’s not even moving.” She was about to tap again, but I reached out and took her hand.

“Don’t do that,” I said. “You’ll scare him. Just let him get used to his new home. The book says they need time to acclimatize.” I pointed to the paperback on my dresser: So You’re a Turtle Owner Now! How to Take Care of Your Newest Family Member! On the cover were two blond children; the boy crew cut and ruddy-cheeked, the girl blue-eyed and pigtailed. They were both smiling at a pet painted turtle that looked sicklier, greener, and less vivid than Manitou. It was sunning itself on a rock in their backyard.

Hank frowned. “Acclima-what?”

“Acclimatize. It means ‘get used to.’ He needs to get used to his new home.” I had told Hank the entire story of how Manitou had come to live with me and she was impressed. “He’s had a rough day, so I want him to calm down.”

“Calm down?” Hank looked doubtful. “He’s not moving at all in there. He’s calm all right. Are you sure he’s even alive?”

“Of course he’s alive.” I tried to sound scornful, but I still reached in to the tank with my finger and gave him a little nudge. He moved a few more paces, then stopped, head retracting back into his shell. Manitou had clearly had enough of everyone, including me. “See? He’s moving just fine. Geeze, Hank.”

“You’re lucky,” she said. “I wish I had a turtle. When our cat died, my mom said no more animals, period. Me, I’d love a turtle. Or a snake.”

“A snake would be cool,” I admitted. “But not as cool as this turtle. Maybe if you grew your hair long, your mom would let you get a snake.”

“I’d rather eat worms than grow my hair long.”

“You’re right, Hank” I said loyally. “You wouldn’t even look like you anymore.”

“Hey, do you want to take him to the greenbelt tomorrow afternoon? We could see if he wants to play down by the creek. It would be just like home for him. Bet he’d like that a lot.”

“Sure,” I said. “But my dad and I are going to build him an outdoor terrarium tomorrow afternoon. We’re going to put chicken wire around the sides and the top so he can sun himself outside during the day until it starts getting really cold.”

“Yeah, well. Aren’t you afraid someone will steal him out there?”

“Who would steal a turtle?”

“I dunno,” Hank admitted. “Maybe no one. Probably no one. You’re right. You guys have a fence anyway, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” I looked out the window. The sun was going down behind our house. Long shadows reached across the lawn from the edge of the property where the low slats of the redwood fence around the yard were planted. Since Manitou was my first pet, I had never given any thought whatsoever to the notion of a fence as anything except something to keep me in the yard. It looked high to me, but who knew? I loved Hank, but I resented her just then for putting that fear in me. “It’s pretty high, too.”

“You’re right,” she said again. “Anyway, I gotta get home. I’ll meet you in the greenbelt.” She wiggled her fingers at the terrarium. Hank was a good friend—I’d asked her not to tap on the walls of Manitou’s new home and she’d listened to me. “Bye, Manitou.” Hank saluted the turtle. “See you tomorrow.”

After Hank left, I felt very tired. My mother had been right—it had been a very, very long day, and it was catching up with me now.

When I’d taken a shower, put on the clean pyjamas my mother had tucked under my pillow, and said goodnight to my parents, I went back downstairs to my room. Before I closed the door, I waited a moment till I was sure my parents were engrossed in their reading—the Citizen for my father, my mother flipping through Family Circle.

When I was sure they wouldn’t come downstairs, I closed the door and turned off my bedside lamp. The only illumination in the room now trickled in weakly through the cedar hedges bordering our yard and the neighbour’s from the pole-mounted floodlights around his aboveground swimming pool.

I took off my clothes and sat naked on the bed cross-legged. I stared into the vertical mirror on my wall. In the light of the candle I’d placed on my night table, the image in the mirror was shadow-shaped and ambiguous of gender. I bowed my head as though in prayer, then closed my eyes and whispered: “Come on out, Amanda. Come and talk to me. It’s me, Jamie. I’m home.”

I felt rather than heard the sigh, and I sensed rather than felt the movement in the air. When I opened my eyes again, I saw my own face in the shadows of the mirror. But it wasn’t really my face. It looked like my face—the same nose, the same mouth, the same prepubescent brow-ridge, and the same pale skin, tanned now from three weeks outdoors at Camp Manitou. It was my face the way an artist of incomparable genius might have replicated it on canvas. The same dark hair as mine, though there was admittedly a suggestion of moving shadows behind the head, as though it were longer hair, a girl’s hair.

Yes, the head, not my head, for by now who, or what, was looking back at me through the glass wasn’t me anymore. The eyes were my eyes, but not my eyes.

I felt my lips form the words Amanda spoke in the mirror using my voice. I felt my larynx move, but it was her voice I heard.

Jamie, I missed you. Why did you go away?

“I was at camp, Amanda,” I replied. “I told you I had to go. I didn’t want to. You know that.”

You left me alone here. I was alone for three weeks.

“I hated it, Amanda. They put me in a cabin with five other boys. They were mean to me. They beat me up and made me cry every night. Once, they even put a dead animal in my bed. Why didn’t you come to visit me?”

I heard genuine regret in my friend’s voice. No mirror.

“Not in the cabin, no,” I said. I hated the whiny sound of my own voice, but my pique didn’t allow me to stop pressing. “But there were mirrors in the washroom. You could’ve come then. You could’ve come at night. But you didn’t.”

I don’t live in those mirrors. I live in this one. I felt gentle pressure on my neck as my head turned towards the terrarium. You brought home a turtle. Why did you do that?

“I don’t know.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Everyone keeps asking me that. I guess I just wanted to. He’s beautiful. I named him Manitou, after the camp. He’s the only good thing that came out of me being there.”

Do you like him better than you like me?

“Amanda, he’s a turtle. You’re my secret friend. Who do you think I like better?”

I don’t know. Do you like Hank better than you like me? You talked to her tonight before you talked to me. Which one of us did you miss more?

“You, Amanda. Only you. Always you.”

Good. You beat up that boy on the bus, didn’t you?

“How did you know about that?”

My secret. Mine.

“No, really, Amanda, how did you know? Did you see it?” I remembered the sudden impression of clouds in the driver’s rear-view mirror before I blacked out and came to, seconds later with John Prince’s red hair in my fist and his blood spattered on my shirt. “Did you use the mirror over the driver’s seat? Did you help me?”

My secret. You beat him up pretty badly. He deserved it.

“Amanda, tell me if that was you. It didn’t feel like me. I never beat anyone up in my life. I really hurt him. I didn’t want to beat him up; I just wanted him to give Manitou back to me. I didn’t want what happened to happen. Tell me, please. Was it you? I won’t be mad. Because you just got through telling me that you could only live in this mirror, in my bedroom.”

My secret, she said again. A pause, then: I could have killed him, you know.

I was suddenly very cold in spite of the humid night and parents who didn’t believe in air-conditioning. “What? What did you say?”

I said, ‘You could have killed him, you know.’

“That’s not what you said, Amanda.”

Isn’t it? What do you think I said?

“Why are you being like this? Why are you scaring me? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Yes, we’re friends. But you left me alone here. You’re not a very good friend anymore, Jamie. I don’t like to be alone. I’m always alone.

“It was only three weeks.” My stomach contracted and I felt moisture gather under my arms. “And I told you I didn’t want to go to the stupid camp. My parents made me go. It was horrible. I missed being home. I missed you, especially.”

Liar. You’re a liar, Jamie.

“Goodnight, Amanda. I’m going to blow out the candle and turn on the light now. I want you to leave. I want to go to sleep now. Goodnight, Amanda. Go away.”

Don’t turn on the light yet, Jamie. Let’s play. Let’s take your turtle out of the terrarium and play with him. It’s dark. Your parents think you’re asleep. They won’t come down to your room. We can have some fun with him. No one will know.

This new hint of gleeful savagery in the voice terrified me. “I’m going to turn on the light now, Amanda.”

Don’t. I’m not ready to leave yet. You’ll be sorry.

In the dark, I flailed for the switch to my bedside lamp. When the yellow light flooded my room, the only image in the mirror was my own: wild-eyed and pale, a terrified, naked nine-year-old boy whose chest rose and fell in rapid bursts.

I looked around my room, checking to see if anything had shifted or changed. Everything seemed in its place: the sheet and coverlet on my bed were still turned down, the window was still open just enough to admit whatever pathetic breeze might manage to navigate the humid night.

I hurried over to Manitou’s terrarium on the table by the window, fearful of what I might find inside, or rather not find inside. But Manitou was there, exactly as he was supposed to be, apparently asleep beside the smooth rock we’d brought home from the creek at the greenbelt, thinking it might make him less homesick for the paradise I’d stolen from him.

Impulsively I tore the sheet off my bed and thumbtacked it to the wall over the mirror, covering it. If my mother noticed this at all over the next week (and she must have) she never let on. Since my return from Camp Manitou, her attitude toward me had grown increasingly distant, as though we had decided by mutual consent to stay out of each other’s way.

This suited my purposes perfectly. The mirror stayed safely hidden behind the sheet and no one asked me what I was up to, or what I was trying to not see when I looked into it.

In the days following my return from camp, my father had built a custom outdoor pen for Manitou. It was a work of art—basically a larger version of the best terrarium available, complete with a vegetated freshwater pool for him to swim in. The base was padded with moss and bark and grasses, and it was surrounded by strong enough chicken wire to keep predators at bay. In any case, our yard was fenced and we never even had cats roaming the neighbourhood, at least during the day.

The turtle took to it immediately, which delighted my father and me. We wanted him to enjoy the fresh air and warm sun as long as possible until fall and winter set in and we had to bring him back inside. It became my routine to take him outside to the pen at midmorning. I’d make sure the water was fresh, feed him, and leave him there. When I was home, I would check on him every hour or so. When I was away, I’d check him first thing when I came back.

My initial guilt at bringing him home had somewhat abated as we settled into the days and nights together. I never ceased to marvel at how exquisitely beautiful he was with the jewel-toned colouring of his body and the gold streaks veining his neck and head. I was already imagining bringing him for show and tell when school started again in a few weeks.

The day Manitou disappeared, Hank and I had been reading comic books in her basement for most of the afternoon. She had the biggest stack of horror comics in the entire neighbourhood, and when we read them together, we lost ourselves in them.

At four-fifteen, I knew it was time to go home. My mother had told me in no uncertain terms that morning that we were having dinner at five p.m. sharp, because she and my father were going out that night to a party given by someone from his office and she wanted to make sure she had enough time to “dress to the nines.”

“Don’t you be the reason we’re late, young man,” my mother had warned me that morning at breakfast. “I’m not kidding. I want you home from Lucinda’s by four-thirty so you can do some chores and set the table. Do we understand each other?”

I’d assured her we did, and that had been that.

At four-thirty, I came around the side of the house along the flagstone pathway that led to the backyard and stopped short. The gate was unlatched and stood wide open. I knew I had latched it shut and secured it with the circle of wire we used around the handle like a makeshift lock. I vividly remembered that I had done so.

Or had I? With my heart in my mouth, I stepped into the yard.

Manitou’s pen was in shambles. The chicken wire had been torn apart and lay littered in jagged shreds all over the yard. Bits of wet moss and vegetation had been flung all around the tangled wreck and all the water had drained into the grass. Hoping that by some miracle I would find Manitou either in the wreckage itself or on the grass nearby, I dropped to the ground and searched. I scoured the length and breadth of the yard; I looked in every one of my mother’s flowerbeds, under every plant, all to no avail. There were tears running down my cheeks, blurring my vision, before I even realized I was sobbing. But even with that, it was obvious that the turtle was nowhere in our backyard.

Inside the house, my mother had surprised me with a sudden show of tenderness by holding me close while I cried. There were none of the expected lectures from her about my irresponsibility with regard to the gate. For his part, my father sat me down and told me there was an excellent chance that Manitou had escaped whatever had happened.

“Then where is he?” I said, weeping. “I couldn’t find him anywhere in the yard! Not anywhere! If he’s safe, why can’t I find him?”

“Think, Jamie,” my father said encouragingly. “Where would he go? He’d go down to the creek in the greenbelt. That’s the place that’s most like his home. That’s where he’d go. That’s where you need to think of him being right now.”

I turned my tear-stained face to him. “Then let’s go look for him. If he’s there, we should be able to find him and bring him home where he’ll be safe. Please, Daddy, can we go down to the creek and see?”

He looked over my head at my mother. I didn’t see what passed between them, but my father sighed and gently squeezed my shoulder.

“Sure we can, Jamie. You know your mother and I have to go out tonight, but let’s go down to the creek now, before we have to get dressed, and look for Manitou. But remember something, Jamie,” he said. “If we don’t find him down there, that doesn’t mean he’s not there. It just means he’s found somewhere new to live, probably with others like him—a place that reminds him of his home. We all want to be at home, don’t we? Even turtles. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Daddy,” I said. “I understand.” Then I started to cry again.

My father spent an hour with me at the creek looking for Manitou. He got down on his hands and knees with me and looked under rocks and ferns. Even when it started to rain, he kept looking, only taking my hand and telling me it was time to go back to the house when the rain began to sluice down to a degree that made it impossible to keep searching because we could no longer see. Then, hand in hand, we ducked our heads and ran back to the house as lightning flashed in the roiling sky overhead.

Today, of course, I know my father had gone through the charade of looking for Manitou with me out of his love for me, for my peace of mind, because he understood my guilt about having taken the turtle out of its natural world only to meet such a brutal fate in ours. He knew we wouldn’t find Manitou, but he’d managed to convince me that we might, for at least one night sparing me the heartbreak of the truth.

That night, I was in bed before the babysitter arrived. I hadn’t wanted supper, and my mother, again surprisingly, hadn’t tried to make me eat something. She’d let me go directly to bed. I’d stayed there until my parents came downstairs to kiss me goodnight before they left for the party.

My mother said, “It’ll all feel better in the morning, Jamie, you’ll see.” She kissed my cheek and switched off the light. The scent of her perfume hung in the darkness after she’d left. I found it oddly comforting that night.

The rain pounded against the roof of the house and ran down the windows in vertical rivers. A sudden flash of lightning from outside lit up the room like daylight. The empty terrarium on the table by the window was like a reproach, but it also comforted me to see it there, to imagine the beautiful little creature whose short life had been entrusted into my hands against its will.

With my cheek lying against the soaking wet pillowcase, I eventually fell into a fitful sleep.

What woke me was the insistent pressure of my bladder.

The room was dark and silent except for the sound of the rain, which continued unabated. I pushed aside the covers and tiptoed past the covered mirror and opened my bedroom door. There was a light on upstairs and I heard the muffled sound of the television through the doors of my father’s den. I assumed the babysitter was up there watching it. Opening the door to the basement, where my bathroom was located, I hurried down the stairs. Once there, I relieved myself, remembering to flush the toilet and lower the seat when I was done. I switched off the light and turned to head back up the short flight of steps to my floor.

On the stairs back up to my room, I suddenly stopped and stood completely still. I had not turned on my bedside light when I’d gone downstairs, but there was now a wavering yellow glow coming from inside my room. I blinked rapidly, and then squeezed my eyes shut. But when I opened them again, that quivering light still flickered.

Taking the remaining steps to the landing, I paused in the doorway of my bedroom and peered inside.

Beside my bed was the candle I’d hidden away from my mother’s prying eyes under my bed—Amanda’s candle. Someone had lit it. I smelled the dead plume of waxy candlewick smoke in the air. The sheet I had carefully tacked to the wall to cover the mirror had been torn away. It lay bunched on the floor. In the refraction from the candlelight in the mirror, I saw the dull glint of the two tacks on the rug.

My first thought was that the babysitter was playing some sort of a trick, but almost before the thought was fully formed, I knew otherwise. The babysitter was upstairs, entirely oblivious to what was occurring just under the room where she sat watching television. I heard the loud theme music of some western or other, and the sound of gunshots coming from the television set. No, I knew who had lit the candle and I knew to what purpose.

This had been the inevitable outcome all along. I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that if I tried to run upstairs to the light and security of the sane, adult world of babysitters and television and light, a world of concrete, impermeable borders, something horrible would happen—either to stop me from reaching that world, or in punishment for reaching it.

I sat down on the edge of my bed and looked into the glass.

“Amanda, come out. I know you lit the candle. I don’t know how, but it was you. Come out. Please? I’m sorry about before, but you scared me. Please, let’s make peace.”

I begged you not to leave me alone, Jamie. I told you you’d be sorry if you did.

“Amanda, did you hurt Manitou? Are you the one who opened the gate?”

No. But maybe you really did leave it open. You know how you get when you’re gathering wool, Jamie. You’re a dreamer, aren’t you?

“I did so lock the gate! I did. It was you! You did it! You killed Manitou by opening the gate!”

Are you sure? How could I have done that?

“You made the wasps come and they stung Terry Dodd. You made me beat up Prince! You can light candles when you want to! I know it was you!”

Are you sure?

“I didn’t do anything! My dad told me Manitou is in the greenbelt. He got away and now he’s living with the other turtles down there in the creek!”

Your father is a liar, Jamie. Manitou isn’t in the greenbelt. Do you want to see what really happened to your precious turtle? I can show you.

I whimpered, “My dad said . . .”

Touch the glass, Jamie.

Torn between my fear and a growing, dreadful fascination, I reached out and placed the tips of my fingers against the mirror.

When I was three years old, I apparently cut an electrical cord with a pair of metal scissors. My mother told me the force of the electrical jolt threw me across the room and knocked me unconscious. The doctors said it was a miracle I hadn’t been killed. The steel blades of the scissors were melted away where they had wrapped themselves around the live wire. I didn’t remember it happening, but my mother had saved the scissors as a sort of souvenir. She’d shown me where the steel had dissolved in the crackling electricity.

Had I remembered the event, I likely would recall it as having been like what happened when I touched the mirror. The current that threw me back on the bed wasn’t electrical but illusory.

The mirror rippled and shimmered, then my room was flooded with warm afternoon light and the smell of fresh-cut grass.

I was standing in the backyard between the two Dutch elm trees at the farthest edge of the property, near the fence. The back door opened and my mother came out of the house carrying a small clear plastic bag of raw meat. I waved to her but she didn’t seem to see me. As I watched, my mother opened the back gate and dropped a piece of the meat on the flagstones, then clapped her hands. Moments later, a large black dog padded into the yard. I recognized the dog at once: it belonged to a family that lived two streets over. It occasionally broke out of its fenced-in backyard and was known to be aggressive. A muzzle order had been imposed on the family by the city after it had attacked a smaller dog in the greenbelt the previous summer, but it was known to escape and roam. And here was my mother, feeding it. She continued to back into the yard, beckoning the dog with her hands. The dog, smelling the meat, followed her, cautiously at first, then with increased confidence. She hand-fed the dog another piece of meat.

Then, when she was standing next to Manitou’s pen, my mother dumped the remainder of the meat into the pool of water where my turtle was bathing.

The dog attacked the chicken wire in a fury of teeth and claws, pulling it apart as though it were made of wet leaves. Driven by the scent of cooked flesh, it pushed its nose through the wire until it located the pieces of meat my mother had dropped, then devoured them.

The turtle’s terrified scrambling movements as it tried to get out of the dog’s way caught the animal’s attention. The dog picked Manitou up between its powerful jaws and shattered his shell. Flesh, bone and carapace pulped together with a horrible cracking sound, oozing between the dog’s teeth and out the side of its mouth as it chewed. As pieces of Manitou’s body dropped from its jaws to the grass, the dog leaned down and snatched them up, seeming to swallow them without even chewing.

When there was nothing left of my turtle to devour, the dog licked its lips and wagged its tail at my mother as though begging for more meat.

“Shoo!” my mother said, swatting it on its hindquarters. “Go on, get out of here! Shoo! Shoo! Go away! Git!” Startled, the dog backed away from my mother, then turned tail and cantered out of the yard. It looked back once, reproachfully, but she just made a sweeping motion with her arms and hissed, “Shoo! Shoo!” she said again. This time, the dog tucked its tail between its legs and bolted out of the yard.

My mother walked over to the gate and made to close it, but appeared to change her mind. It remained open. She looked back over at the ruins of Manitou’s outdoor pen and smiled, a trifle grimly but with no visible remorse. My mother wiped her hands on her apron. Flecks of greasy steak came away on the white starched cotton. Then she went back into the house and shut the back door, the screen door banging behind her.

Your mother killed Manitou, Jamie. Now you know.

I tried to see Amanda’s dim shape in the candlelit glass, but my head pulsed with soaring agony, and black stars exploded every time I tried to focus. “That’s not what happened! Mymother didn’t kill Manitou! You’re making me see that! That’s not what happened! That’s not real!”

Are you sure, Jamie? You know your mother hates you, don’t you? And she hates your father. I think we should punish her for killing Manitou. I think it would hurt terribly to get eaten alive by a dog, don’t you?

In that moment, for the first time since she appeared to me, I was aware that Amanda didn’t sound like a little girl at all. She never had, really. All this time she had fooled me, but now she sounded like a grownup woman pretending to be a little girl. I had never really known with whom I had been conversing. And without knowing how, I knew she could make me see things that weren’t real. Or were they real?

I screamed at her, “What are you? Who are you?”

I told you. I’m just a little girl.

“No, you’re not a little girl! You’re not even real!”

Of course I am, Jamie. I am real. You know who I am. I know you recognize me. Look harder into the mirror and tell me what you see.

“Liar! Liar! You killed Manitou, not my mother! You hurt people by magic! You’re bad! You made the gate open and you made the dog come and eat Manitou! I want you to go away!”

Are you sure?

“Yes! Now go away!”

You know what I think, Jamie? I think we should hurt your mother next. And then, when we’re finished with your mother, we should punish your father for lying to you about Manitou being in the creek with the other turtles. He’s not, you know. The dog that ate him has already shit him out on somebody’s lawn.

“GO AWAY, AMANDA!”

I reached for the bedside lamp and swung it as hard as I could against the mirror. The glass shattered with a silvery, wintery resonance that I heard in my brain as well as in my ears—one that I felt, as well. Underlying the cold din of breaking glass, I felt rather than heard the shriek of undulant, malignant rage. It thundered through me, as cold as I’d imagined the lake in my nightmare to be.

But before it did, I felt my larynx flex unbidden and my lips formed Amanda’s words one last time before sound and time and memory evaporated into the air above my head and tattered away to nothing but the mirror frame and shattered glass.

I will always find you, Jamie.

When the babysitter rushed into my room, white-faced and in panic at the noise, she found me standing beside my bed holding my bedside lamp in my hand.

I didn’t know what in the world it was doing there, or why my feet were bleeding, or how the floor was littered with broken shards of glass. I glanced dumbly at the mirror, then back at the lamp. She gently took the lamp from my hands and laid it on my nightstand.

“What happened, Jamie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you break the mirror?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you dreaming?”

I rubbed my eyes. “I don’t know. I guess.” My feet were beginning to hurt from the glass I’d stepped in. The sole of my left foot was bleeding. “I want my dad.” Then I started to cry.

When I was forty, decades after my parents had divorced, the year my father was diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s and had begun to visibly deteriorate—still three years away from the events at Wild Fell—he asked me if I remembered the boy who had stolen my bike in the summer of 1970, the one who had been attacked by a swarm of wasps the next day and who had succumbed to the venom from thousands of stings three days later, dying in agony at the age of twelve.

I’d stared at my father blankly and told him, No, I don’t remember anything like that happening that year, or ever. And it was true: I had no such memory.

Privately I’d wondered, at the time, if the disease had already taken hold to the point that he was not only forgetting what had happened, but was also beginning to imagine things happening that never had. But of course I never said anything to him about those suspicions. I knew that what was coming for him was crueller than anything I could imagine in my worst nightmares, and I couldn’t bring myself to add to his terror by verbalizing my own fears about the long, dark tunnel of loss into which he was descending, taking me with him, and away from him, at the same time.

As for the little girl in the mirror, I would have no memory of her for more than thirty years, until I bought the house called Wild Fell on Blackmore Island.