Stranger With My Face Read online

  But I knew. I knew.

  Abruptly I flung open the door and lunged back into the hall. There were footsteps on the stairs above me. I caught my breath, afraid to raise my eyes, and then I looked up.

  The familiar figure in jeans and a paint-spattered T-shirt was only my mother.

  “Laurie, what’s the matter?” she asked as she caught sight of my face.

  “Someone’s been in my room!” I announced, meeting her at the landing. “Someone’s been in there going through my things!”

  “Oh, hon, I don’t think so,” Mom said. “Neal doesn’t do things like that, and Meg’s over at the Burbanks’. She called after school to say she was going to be playing with Kimmie.”

  “I didn’t mean to accuse them,” I told her breathlessly. “It was somebody else—somebody who—who—” I let the sentence trail away, because I didn’t know how to finish it. How could I say the words that had been in my mind: It was somebody who looks like me?

  “Now, dear, you know there’s been nobody here today but Dad and me,” Mom said reasonably. “Mrs. DeWitt doesn’t come to clean until Thursday. We can ask Neal—”

  “It wasn’t Neal.” I followed her down the stairs to the living room and then down the second flight to the kitchen. “I’m sure it wasn’t Neal.”

  “Oh, yuck,” Mom said, glancing around at the remains of breakfast. “I didn’t even rinse out the cereal bowls, did I? I just hate to waste that good morning light. There’s going to be so little of it from now on with the days getting shorter.” She plucked the bowls up and put them in the dishwasher. “Your father could at least have cleared the table.”

  “Do I hear somebody using my name in vain?” Dad called from the office. At the end of the afternoon he worked with the door open so he could hear Mom when she came down from the studio. My parents work in separate areas of the house all day without ever seeing each other, and at the day’s end they always have this big reunion.

  “Hi, Jim,” Mom called back, as pleased as though he had just gotten home from a long journey. “How did it go today?”

  “Oh, not too bad,” Dad said, emerging from the office hallway. “I managed to get the spaceship landed in Chapter Twelve. Alien invaders now slither through the back alleys of Chicago, spreading diseases the like of which you’ve never imagined. I stopped because I ran out of symptoms. I bet this one makes ‘Movie of the Week.’”

  “Dad,” I said, “did you see somebody go into my room today?”

  “Just you,” Dad said.

  “You couldn’t have seen me. I wasn’t here. I felt well enough this morning to go to school, and I only got home about twenty minutes ago.”

  “Really? That’s odd.” He wrinkled his forehead the same way Neal does when he’s perplexed. “Well, if you weren’t here, I couldn’t have seen you. You’re right about that. It must have been yesterday.”

  “Neal said you told him—”

  “I was mistaken, I guess. Had my mind on the new book. You know how I am sometimes.” He went over to the refrigerator and opened the door and got out a bottle of white wine.

  “While you’re in there, could you get out the hamburger?” Mom asked. “What I was complaining about was your standing here this morning, watching your eggs cook, when you could have been rinsing dishes.”

  “I wasn’t awake enough to think about that,” Dad said.

  He poured the wine into two glasses, and he and Mom sat down together at the kitchen table to talk about the events of the day, which was something that always bewildered me, because neither of them had been anywhere or seen anybody. I left them there and went back up to the living room. Neal was still drawing. He had completed the front view of his castle and was working on a picture of it from another angle.

  “I’m putting a dinosaur in the moat,” he told me without looking up.

  “That’s a good idea.”

  I sat down in a chair by the picture window overlooking the sea. Directly below me the water frothed white around the base of the rocks. A gull came circling in so close that its wing brushed against the glass, leaving a gray feather pinned there momentarily by the wind before a shift in air currents allowed it to slip away.

  I was scared.

  Someone had entered my life, and I didn’t know who. The conclusion I had come to earlier that afternoon after talking with Jeff now had to be discarded. The fact that my father, too, had seen a girl like me—in a place I had not been—was too much to be coincidence. Cliff House was not kept locked during the day. It was possible that someone could have entered. The girl who had been on the beach the night before might have ascended the stairs, moving in and out of my father’s sight as he stood, lost in his thoughts, planning the scene he was preparing to put on paper.

  It could have happened. But—why?

  If there was such a person—a Laurie Stratton look-alike—what was she doing here on Brighton Island now that most of the summer people were gone? Why had she come here? When had she discovered her resemblance to me? What did she want from me and from the people whose lives were a part of mine? Nothing had been removed from my room, I was certain of that. My possessions did not appear to have been tampered with. It seemed almost as if this person had come visiting out of idle curiosity, to see where and how I lived.

  Neal continued to draw. I sat in silence, struggling with questions that had no answers, while the sun sank lower and lower in the sky and the clouds began to soften and turn pink. After a while Meg came home. Her chirping voice came up the stairwell, describing the exciting first-day-in-third-grade events to the audience in the kitchen. Then Mom called Neal and me to the table, and we sat down to hamburgers and beans and what would have been a salad if Mom had gone down to the grocery store in the village, but was instead lettuce with some chopped onion sprinkled over it.

  “I lost track of time,” she explained, not really apologetically. “One minute it was morning, and the next time I looked the day was almost over.”

  After dinner my family played Monopoly at a card table in the living room. Any other evening I probably would have played with them, but tonight I was too upset to be able to concentrate. I needed to be alone to think, but I didn’t want to go to my bedroom.

  Megan was in the process of purchasing Boardwalk when I went down the stairs and let myself out the kitchen door into the night.

  Outside it was surprisingly light. The full moon that had lit up the beach for Gordon and Natalie the night before was at half-mast in the sky. After a moment or two of adjustment, I could see everything distinctly—the bushes, the sea oats, the sand path leading up from the road. The sound of the surf was very loud. I walked slowly along the side of the house to the point where the path stopped at the cliff ’s edge. There was no beach in front of Cliff House, just rocks, stair-stepping down tier by tier to the water. The highest of these were flat and dry and safe to stand on, but the lower ones were slimy with foam and seaweed. Once when he was very small Neal had slipped on one and taken a bad fall to the tier below. Between the rocks were crevices that led to hollows and caves where Megan liked to think mermaids lived. I knew better than to risk slipping down there, so I just stood, quiet, listening to the waves breaking against the base of the cliff. The longer I stood there, the brighter the moonlight seemed to become. The white, swirling water had a luminescent quality that was hypnotic. If I gazed at it long enough, I thought, I might actually see a mermaid.

  “Laurie?”

  The voice spoke directly behind me, and I almost jumped out of my skin. Strong hands closed upon my shoulders. With a gasp of terror I tore myself free—and spun around to find myself facing Gordon.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked me.

  “What do you think is the matter? You scared me to death!” My heart was pounding so hard I thought it might burst through the wall of my chest. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to talk to you,” Gordon said.

  “Then why didn’t you call?”

 
“I thought you might hang up on me, so I came over instead. I was just headed up the path to the house when I saw you standing out here on the rocks.” He was staring hard at my face. “Hey, something really is the matter, isn’t it? You’re not usually jumpy like this.”

  “No—really.” I drew a long breath and let it out slowly. “It’s just—well, it’s been a messed-up day.”

  “It has,” Gordon agreed. “Laurie, what I came over here to say was—well, I just want to tell you that it’s okay.”

  “What’s okay?”

  “Whatever it was that you were doing last night. Not that I’m happy about it or anything. I’m jealous as hell. But it was true, what you said on the boat this afternoon. I don’t have any right to give you a hard time when I was out there with Nat.”

  “Are you in love with Nat?” I asked him.

  “Of course not! She’s a pretty girl—I’d had a few beers—my girlfriend had stood me up—”

  “I didn’t stand you up!” I objected.

  “Let’s not fight about it, Laurie. The point is, neither one of us is completely innocent. We were both messing around a little. It wasn’t anything for me—just a couple of kisses. What about you?”

  “It wasn’t even that for me,” I said.

  “Who was the guy?”

  “I’ve told you over and over. There wasn’t any guy.”

  “You want me to believe you were out there alone? That you’d break our date and miss the summer’s best party just to go wandering the beach by yourself ?”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” I said wearily. “You’re the one who said let’s not fight. Did you come over here to make up or not?”

  “I don’t know now. You’re making it so tough.” He put his hand under my chin and tilted my face up toward his. “Do you still want to be with me, Laurie?”

  “I—I guess so,” I said shakily. Jeff ’s words flashed through my mind—he’s got you on a string—he snaps his fingers, and you jump.

  “That’s what I wanted to hear.” He lowered his head, and his mouth came down onto mine, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore whether he believed me or not, whether he had been with Natalie, whether he was pulling strings and snapping fingers—all that counted was that this was Gordon, my Gordon, and he was here now with his arms around me, and things between us were all right again.

  We stayed for a long time out there in the moonlight. I didn’t realize how long until I went inside to be greeted by the sound of my father’s keyboard clicking away on its evening stint. The living room, as I passed it, was dark and empty, the Monopoly game long over.

  I paused at the door to the kids’ bedroom. The moonlight fell across Neal’s pillow, painting his sleeping face with silver. His lips were parted, and he was breathing through his mouth with a whistling sound. In the bed across from him, Megan was lying crosswise, her feet thrust out from beneath the covers.

  I went in and gently pulled her into a more comfortable position and drew the blanket over her. She came partly awake and reached up to touch my cheek.

  “I saw you there—outside my window,” she murmured sleepily.

  “Oh, you did, did you?” I exclaimed, taken aback. “You were spying on me?”

  Meg mumbled something indistinguishable and rolled over onto her stomach. Then abruptly she raised her head.

  “You were up so high,” she said clearly. “How did you get there?”

  “I was—what?”

  “High,” she said, and sank back on her pillow and was immediately asleep.

  I shook my head, bewildered as always by the directions eight-year-old minds can go in, and more than a little irritated by the thought of my sister standing at the window, absorbed in the sight of Gordon and me making out. Tomorrow, I told myself, she and I are going to have a good, long talk.

  I left their room and continued up the stairs, passing the open door to my parents’ room, where Mom lay in bed, reading.

  “Night, hon,” she called to me as I went by, and I called back, “Good night.”

  The next few steps brought me to the short hall leading to my own room. I moved along it gingerly and stopped in the doorway. The moonlight streamed through the east window to lie upon my bed, just as it had upon Neal’s, and the rest of the room was sunk in shadows. I shivered slightly and reached around the door frame to switch on the overhead light.

  Of course, there was no one there. Had I really thought there would be? Everything looked absolutely normal. The aura of the foreign presence I had sensed so strongly that afternoon seemed to have faded. I stepped into the room, feeling more comfortable than I had expected to, but I left the door standing open to afford contact with the rest of the house.

  I became aware of how terribly tired I was. The illness the night before and the long day filled with so much tension and confusion had left me drained and exhausted. I pulled off my clothes, let them lie where they fell, and got a nightshirt out of the dresser drawer. I put it on and picked up my brush, and then decided to bypass this nightly ritual.

  Glancing across, I saw myself reflected in the sliding glass doors that led to the balcony. I stared at the reflection, wondering as I often did what it was that attracted Gordon. Why had he chosen me over Natalie and Darlene and Mary Beth and the others? The girl in the glass gazed back at me with wide, dark eyes. Her hand held a brush, half raised to her thick, black hair, and her body was slim and straight beneath the thin material of her summer nightshirt. As I watched, the full mouth began to curve upward at the corners, as though this mirrored Laurie was pleased at what she saw.

  It was not until I had turned off the light and climbed between the sheets that I realized what had been wrong with the picture.

  The mouth on the reflected face had not been my mouth.

  I had not been smiling.

  I barely slept that night. For a long time I lay trembling beneath the covers, trying to tell myself that what I had seen could not have been real. Perhaps a warp in the glass, an angle of the light, a trick of my own eyes had altered the image. Perhaps I had smiled without realizing it. I had not been thinking about my expression as I stared at the reflection in the sliding door. I had been thinking about Gordon, about the fact that we were back together, that we had survived our first big misunderstanding without a breakup. I might have smiled at that thought, right? It would have been a natural thing to do.

  Except that I knew I hadn’t.

  I thought of going down to the bedroom below and pouring the whole story out to Mom. Her company would be comforting, but what could she tell me? “You’re imagining things, honey. A reflection is just that—a reflection. It does only what you do. You know that.” She would shrug off the situation the way she had that afternoon when I accosted her on the landing. “Oh, hon, I don’t think so,” she had said then, and tonight she would say it again, except sleepily, her mind already tuned down from the high energy level it reached in the mornings to the gentle, drowsy, relaxed plateau brought about by white wine and nightfall.

  And what could I tell her that wouldn’t sound ridiculous? What was it I wanted her to believe? That there was someone on the balcony, brushing her hair and smiling in at me? “So let’s go look,” she would say sensibly, getting out of bed and reaching for her robe. “If there’s somebody there, we certainly need to know about it.” But there was no one there. I knew that already. From my bed I could see every inch of the balcony illuminated by moonlight, and it was empty.

  When I did doze off at last, my sleep was fitful and filled with dreaming. They were strange dreams that seemed to overlap, running one into another and fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, meaningless in themselves but building toward a whole picture. In one dream Gordon and I stood on a rock at the cliff ’s edge, and as I reached up for his kiss, I saw far above me Meg’s face framed in her bedroom window. Her mouth kept opening and closing as though she were trying to shout a warning, but the roar of the surf was so loud that I could not hear. T
hen, suddenly, the rock beneath my feet tipped sharply. I grabbed for Gordon for support, but he stepped back away from me, and my hands closed upon empty air. Then I was falling, falling, for what seemed to be a million miles, to the cold, churning water below.

  Except, when I entered, it was not cold at all, but gentle and warm, and I did not have to struggle to keep afloat, for it held and rocked me. There was someone swimming beside me. At first I thought it was Gordon, but then I realized that it was someone much closer, someone who moved as I moved and stopped and rested when I rested. The rocking continued, and the water was gone, and it was my mother who was rocking me—but, no—it was not my mother—but a woman with long, dark hair hanging loose over her shoulders, and worried, deep-set eyes.

  “Can you see me?” asked a voice by my bed.

  I opened my eyes. The moon had risen now above the level of my window, and the room was very dark.

  “You do hear me, though, don’t you?” the voice asked, and although I knew I had never heard it before, it was as familiar to me as my own.

  “Are you the one with my face?” I whispered.

  “I came first,” she answered with a little laugh. “It’s you who have my face.”

  “Who are you?” I asked her.

  “You must know that. We are the two sides of a coin. We floated together in the same sea before birth. Didn’t you know I would be coming for you one day?” There was a movement by my pillow. I felt the air stir against my face, and something as slight and soft as the breast feather of a gull brushed my forehead.

  The next thing I knew, I was blinking at the ceiling, and the room was bright with sunlight.

  The voice in my ears was Neal’s.

  “Mom says to get a move on, Laurie,” he was saying from the doorway. “If you don’t hurry up, you’re going to miss breakfast.”

  This day was just as beautiful as the one before it. I dressed and ate and went with the kids to the ferry, and the breeze that struck my face as we left the shelter of the dunes should have been fresh enough to sweep the cobwebs away for anyone. But the dreams would not loose their hold on me. They lay upon me like a heavy blanket I couldn’t shove off or wriggle my way out from under. When I saw Gordon waiting for me at the landing, there flashed through my mind not a vision of his face bent to mine in the moonlight, but a picture of him as he had been in my dream, jerking back from me as I grabbed for him to keep from falling. When I stood with him by the railing on the bow with his arm around my shoulders, it wasn’t the blue water I saw stretching away to the mainland, but the thick, dark water that had held me afloat and rocked me.