The voices faded into silence, the great wheel of faces stopped, and there was only one image left in the mirror. It was her own face, and the mouth that moved was her own mouth, and the words that came out were uttered by her own voice: “God help me.”
Memory stabbed at her with agonizing thrusts. She remember the bars, the phone booths, the running, the strange streets. She remembered Terola and the odd, incredulous way he looked just before he died and the acrid smell of the coffee boiling over on the stove. She remembered taking the bills from her own money clip and then thinking later that they’d been stolen. She remembered the cat in the alley, the rays from the night air, the taste of rain, the young man who’d laughed because she was waterproof...
“Give me the knife, Helen.”
In the mirror she could see Blackshear approaching, slowly and cautiously, a hunter with a beast in view.
“It’s all right, Helen. Don’t get excited. Everything’s going to be all right.”
A pause, and then he began to talk again in a low persuasive voice, about doctors and hospitals and rest and care and the future. Always the future, as if it was definite and tangible, rosy and round like an apple.
She stared into the crystal ball of the mirror and she saw her future, the nights poisoned by memories, the days corroded by desire.
“It’s only a matter of time, Helen. You’ll be well again.”
“Be quiet,” she said. “You lie.”
She looked down at the knife in her hand and it seemed to her that it alone could speak the truth, that it was her last, her final friend.
She pressed the knife into the soft hollow of her throat. She felt no pain, only a little surprise at how pretty the blood looked, like bright and endless ribbons that would never again be tied.