The City of Mirrors

She hung her coat on the hook by the door. “What’s a submarine?”

Hollis closed the book and removed his reading glasses—another new development. Little half-moon lenses, cloudy and scratched, set in a black plastic frame: Sara thought they made him look distinguished, though Hollis said they made him feel old.

“Apparently, it’s a boat that goes underwater. Sounds like bullshit to me, but the story’s not bad. Are you hungry? I can fix you something if you want.”

She was, but eating felt like too much effort. “All I want to do is go to bed.”

She checked on Kate, who was sound asleep, and washed up at the sink. She paused to examine herself in the mirror. No doubt about it, the years were starting to show. Fans of wrinkles had formed around her eyes; her blond hair, which she now wore shorter and pulled back, had thinned somewhat; her skin was beginning to lose its tightness. She’d always thought of herself as pretty and, in a certain light, still was. But sometime in the midst of life she had passed the apex. In the past, when she’d looked at her reflection, she had still seen the little girl she’d once been; the woman in the mirror had still been an extension of her girlhood self. Now it was the future she saw. The wrinkles would deepen; her skin would sag; the lights of her eyes would dim. Her youth was fading, easing into the past.

And yet this thought did not disturb her, or not very much. With age came authority, and with authority came the power to be useful—to heal and comfort and bring new people into the world. You’ll be in our prayers, Dr. Wilson. Sara heard words like these nearly every day, but she had never become inured to them. Just that name, Dr. Wilson. It still amazed her to hear someone say it and know they were speaking to her. When Sara had arrived in Kerrville, three years ago, she’d reported to the hospital to see if her nurse’s training could be of any use. In a little windowless room, a doctor by the name of Elacqua quizzed her at length—bodily systems, diagnostics, treatments for illness and injury. His face showed no emotion as he responded to her answers with marks on a clipboard. The grilling lasted over two hours; by its conclusion, Sara felt like she was stumbling blind in a windstorm. What use could her meager training be to a medical establishment that was so far ahead of the homespun remedies of the Colony? How could she have been so naïve? “Well, I guess that about covers it,” Dr. Elacqua said. “Congratulations.” Sara was knocked flat; was he being ironic? “Does this mean I can be a nurse?” she asked. “A nurse? No. We have plenty of nurses. Report back here tomorrow, Ms. Wilson. Your training starts at oh-seven-hundred sharp. My guess is twelve months should do it.” “Training for what?” she asked, and Elacqua, whose lengthy inquisition was a mere shadow of things to come, said, with unconcealed impatience, “Perhaps I’m not being clear. I don’t know where you learned it, but you know twice as much as you have any right to. You’re going to be a doctor.”

And then, of course, there was Kate. Their beautiful, amazing, miraculous Kate. Sara and Hollis would have liked to have had a second child, but the violence of Kate’s birth had inflicted too much damage. A disappointment, and not without irony, as day by day new babies traveled into the world beneath her hands, but Sara was hardly entitled to complain. That she should have found her daughter at all, and that the two of them should have been reunited with Hollis and escaped the Homeland to travel back to Kerrville to be a family together—miracle was hardly the word. Sara was not religious in the churchgoing sense—the sisters all struck her as good people, if a bit extreme in their beliefs—but only an idiot would fail to feel the actions of providence. You couldn’t wake up each day in a world like that and not spend a solid hour just thinking of ways to be grateful.

She thought rarely of the Homeland, or as rarely as she could. She still had dreams about it—though, strangely, these dreams did not focus on the worst things that had happened to her there. Mostly they were dreams of feeling hungry and cold and helpless, or the endlessly turning wheels of the grinder in the biodiesel plant. Sometimes she was simply looking at her hands with a feeling of perplexity, as if trying to remember something she was supposed to be holding; from time to time she dreamed about Jackie, the old woman who had befriended her, or else Lila, for whom Sara’s complex feelings had distilled over time to a kind of sorrowful sympathy. Once in a while, her dreams were flat-out nightmares—she was carrying Kate in blinding snow, the two of them being chased by something terrible—but these had abated. So that was one more thing to be thankful for: eventually, perhaps not soon but someday, the Homeland would become just one more memory in a life of memories, an unpleasant recollection that made the others all the sweeter.