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“Stay in.”

Holding up one hand, fingers spread: “For five more minutes?” He nodded. I sighed once more, rising to set the stove alarm, only to meet Simon on my way back.

“He okay?” he asked.

“Not too happy, but yeah, I guess. Keeps denying it ever happened, flipping negative to positive, like saying it’s gonna make it so. . . .”

“He always does that, hon. Like when he ran straight into the wall and said ‘I didn’t hit my head,’ remember? He’ll be fine.”

“Hope he’s not getting sick,” I muttered, or started to, since a second later the alarm went off. Simon didn’t bother answering, just went in and pulled the plug. “Okay, bud,” he told Clark, “looks like you’re all better, so we’re going to get you back to bed. We love you. You love Daddy?” Clark nodded. “How about Mommy?”

“I love Mommy.”

Simon glanced at me as if to say you see? I rolled my eyes. “You know that’s just mimicry, right?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” He moved to one side. “Can you dry him off? I’m gonna put fresh blankets on his bed.”

I nodded, letting Simon squeeze by so I could sit down on the toilet. Clark’s eyes flicked up at me, then back down at the draining water, as if he didn’t think much of the shift change but was too tired to protest. My mouth tightened, and I felt as if I wanted to laugh and cry simultaneously.

“Oh, bunny,” I finally whispered. “I’m sorry you got stuck with such a sucky mommy.”

At that, Clark actually did look at me full on: eye contact, that legendary holy grail of interactivity. “It’s time to kiss the mommy,” he murmured, and I laughed, dipping to do so, then reached for the towel. As I pulled it down, I realized his lips were moving as he splashed, mashing bubbles, singing so quietly I could barely hear it; I pushed the washroom door closed, filtering out the washing machine’s rhythmic clank, and tried to listen.

“. . . and outside in,” Clark sang, “this is how the world begins. Outside in and inside out, is how you blow a candle out.” The near-inaudible tune was strange, a lilting little minor-key ditty that sounded only vaguely familiar. “Inside out and inside out; Knock at the door, then turn about. Outside in and outside in . . .”

(there she stands so let her in)

“Huh,” Simon said, through the door’s half-open crack. “That one again.”

“Again?”

“He was singing it when you Skyped me from Quarry Argent.” I shook my head. “Okay, well. I don’t know what it is either, in case you’re wondering.”

“Sounds sort of . . . Wendish, going by Mrs. Whitcomb’s stuff. Or just creepy pseudo-Victoriana, take your pick.”

“Ain’t the Wiggles, that’s for sure. All right, bud—enough of that, time to step out. It’s over.”

Clark cracked a huge, shuddering yawn and stood up, wavering slightly; I folded him into my arms, the towel, pulling him onto my lap, no matter how much my pelvis complained at his weight. Rubbing his hair, I thought I heard him say a few more words, from under my armpit. “What’s that?” I demanded, pulling away. “Say again, Clark. What was—”

Lifting his head from my chest, he studied me, bags beneath his eyes like bruises. “Not over,” was all he said, however, before settling back down. And didn’t speak again, at least till morning.

A few days later, in and between other weirdness, I was taking a couple of minutes to square Clark’s room away before he came back from school—stack books according to size, soft toys on top of the Thomas the Tank Engine storage shelves, hard toys in their various bins, et cetera. Then something slipped beneath my foot, almost making me turn my ankle; I picked it up, cursing.

It took a second for me to recognize it as a toy my dad—Clark’s O.G., for “Other Granddad”—had sent over from Australia just before Clark was born, a plush purple bunny with a microphone in its belly; perhaps, in hindsight, where our favourite nickname for Clark got started. When you pressed a button on its back and held it down, you could record a message; press the bunny’s nose, and your own voice emerged from a speaker in its head, as though the toy was channelling you. One cancelled out the other, always, each new message recording overtop the last—no repeats.

That day, on sheer impulse, I pressed the playback button. Clark’s voice emerged, singing that same creepy rhyme he’d been parroting in the bath: . . . how you blow a candle . . . and outside out . . .

Same old same old, I thought. But then, halfway through, another voice joined in—or seemed to. And maybe it was an echo, the mechanism wearing thin; maybe it was a fragment of an old message with a new message laid overtop, the first longer than the second, spliced Franken-style. Maybe it was low batteries or phone bleed, radio waves even, not that anyone really uses radio anymore—

Yeah, maybe. Or it might have been a woman’s voice, dark and scratchy, breath-starved, each note a bare, reedy scrap of tone. Singing a third verse, one none of us had ever heard before, or since:

Inside, outside, more and more,

Every mirror is a door.

Outside, inside, mirrors break,

To look has been your first mistake . . .