The Mirrored Room
“I thought you had a call,” Charlie states without asking, her voice hoarse from what felt like hours alone.
“What call?” Bill asks.
“The important one you had to make that took precedence over seeing the house,” Charlie says, uncaring in the fact that she is making a scene in front of the Agent.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bill replies rationally, seemingly unaware of the tension that Charlie was racked with after the way they left off in the front of the house. Looking at him for what was really the first time since she entered the room, Charlie realizes his confusion is genuine. He didn’t know what she was talking about.
Charlie then glances at the Agent, trying to find any recollection of the moment she was sure occured out front. She is just met with a blink and a smile. This woman just can’t be real, Charlie thinks to herself.
“Let’s just drop it then,” Charlie says. She hopes in this comment her white flag is apparent.
As Bill and the Agent continue the conversation she must have rudely interrupted, Charlie takes the moment as an excuse to look around her favorite room. Moving away from Bill’s figure blocking her direct view of the mirrored wall, Charlie makes her way to the windowed wall that overlooks the pack porch area. To the dense trees out back with the wooden stairs leading down through their center. To an untrained eye it looks as if the descending path might go on forever. Charlie knows it just leads to a street that falls behind the house.
The conversation between her husband and the Agent is a dull roar in her ears as she takes in the room. What was once a quirky sitting room, adorned with pink and red couches and chairs, each corner filled with a potted fern and an angel from her Grandma’s collection, is now starkly empty. No longer the brown rug pads her feet, but instead, under her shoes is the bare tile that she forgot came with the house. Without all the decorations and furniture she loved so dearly as a kid, the room just feels cold.
Coming to this house Charlie had hoped to feel the haunting of love and adoration that her childhood was filled with. Never seriously considering buying it when it went on the market Charlie had just known that she needed to go back after all these years. It’s only now, however, standing in the middle of the room she loved most in her childhood, did she realize she had set herself up for disappointment. Charlie hadn’t rewinded the clock. If anything she made it even more apparent it could never really go back.
“We’re going to move to the lower level of the split now,” Bill says, cutting through Charlie’s thoughts. How he was able to do this Charlie has no idea — her thoughts strangling herself to the point she was drowning in them. She breaks through them herself and finds it in herself to reply.
Go
Upstairs
“I think I might check the upstairs by myself,” Charlie replies. Unsure why she wants to be alone at the moment but regardless is pursuing.
“Okay,” Bill replies. Although clearly quizzical, Bill doesn’t press, something that catches Charlie off guard. Instead of questions why she needs to be alone — what Charlie would expect him to do — Bill turns and walks down the stairs.
Charlie takes the stairs on the left, two at a time. At the landing she turns right without a second thought and goes to her Grandparents’ bedroom.
Go Downstairs
“Sure.” Charlie walks across the room back to the entrance she had come in at the beginning of the tour. Instead of going back through the front door like she really wanted to, Charlie follows Bill down the stairs, trailing behind the two people that surely had no validity in leading her through the house.
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There are only four steps down to get to what Charlie’s family used to call the family room. Charlie takes the final step onto the lush carpet at the bottom of the four steps to the lower level. She feels the tick of the clock above the fireplace that is no longer there.