Page 56 of How to Fake a Haunting

Joe lowered the mirror until its base rested in the water.

It floated there, and for a moment, I swore I could see the water through the mirror, the way its surface became liquid, a rippling pond, its secrets unknowable in the darkness.

But then it was neither mirror nor water.

It was water pooling on a sheet of glass, and beyond that, a vast expanse of night air.

The mirror was the windshield of a car.

Rain drummed against it, making everything beyond it reflective and disorienting.

My hands were no longer dangling at my sides but curled around a steering wheel.

I felt the strain of trying to see the road through the rain-pummeled windshield, and something else too .

. . the dizziness of it. The gleeful reveling in the feel of being slightly out of control.

With a jolt, I realized that, in whatever vision I was having, I was drunk.

“How was it?” My mouth produced the words, and someone from the back seat answered me.

“Fine.” The voice of a girl.

“Did you dance with anyone?” I asked. “Luca McAllister, maybe?”

“Ugh, Mom, no. It’s eighth grade, not high school. No one actually dances with anyone they like. I hung out with my friends.”

“So, you like Luca?”

“Jesus, Mom, no. Can you just, like, drive? Why were you so late picking me up anyway?”

I didn’t answer her, but I knew, despite feeling my feet on the floor of my living room while my four-year-old daughter watched an iPad in her backyard playhouse, that I would one day have a fourteen-year-old daughter who had a crush on a boy named Luca from her class.

And that on the night of her eighth-grade Winter Ball, I would be late picking her up because I’d been at the office.

Not headquarters for the Preservation Society of Newport County, but a rinky-dink office for a rinky-dink museum I’d gone to after the Preservation Society had proven too time consuming and high-stakes as Bea had gotten older.

I knew, the way I knew Joe, Morgan, and Callum surrounded me, that I’d informed the rinky-dink museum caterers to leave the extra champagne in my office at the end of a gallery showing and proceeded to drink all of it before closing up.

I knew drinking to intoxication was not new in this future life of mine, but rather a common escape from the doubts and insecurities of being a single parent.

I knew it was a way to anesthetize myself after recently losing my father to a heart attack.

I knew it was something I did but did not analyze and hardly even acknowledged, and that while the recycling bin did not overflow with wine bottles every week, it was certainly full by the time the truck came for it every two weeks.

I didn’t know, but I saw Beatrix, and I started to argue as I drove faster and faster in the rain.

I saw her yell and kick the seat in front of her.

I saw myself jerk the car into the other lane, rage tingling in my fingers and inflaming my tongue into angry words and accusations.

A rage that I understood had been buried upon marrying Callum and ignored even further after embarking on a crazy plan with my best friend ten years earlier to haunt him into oblivion.

We’d forced him to leave because I believed things would be better, that everything would be in my control, that I’d have the power to direct the future.

To ensure Beatrix’s safety. Her happiness. Her fulfillment.

But nothing was in my control. Least of all the car as it slid on the rain-slicked highway across two lanes.

It hit the median with a tortured screech of glass and metal and flipped down the embankment.

I saw the car’s interior brighten as the windshield faced the sky, then darken as it plummeted toward the earth.

I saw the approaching trees, the unforgiving rocks.

And then, for the briefest of moments, I saw my daughter’s face in the rearview mirror as she would look at fourteen, beautiful and grown-up, but also stark and stretched with terror.

I heard the horrific crunch of metal anew and the unfathomable twist of steel.

I heard the screams. Mine and hers. Then I heard nothing. Saw nothing but darkness.

No, not darkness. Thin light through the slit of an eyelid.

I smelled gasoline leaking out of the wreckage.

The alcohol in the acridity of my vomit.

The blood. So much blood. Every ounce of my beautiful daughter’s blood laid bare, exposed to the air.

There was no question as to whether the life had gone out of her.

She was still, empty. I heard the guttural wail of agony as I fractured with the knowledge of it, the pain that was more than pain.

The pain that was a true and unending hell.

I felt the physical pain too. The pain of injuries sustained and, surprisingly, the lack thereof.

The bottom half of my body was numb. My hips, legs, and feet as twisted as the hissing, steaming steel.

Bones pulverized. Connections between essential aspects of myself severed like frayed marionette strings.

I felt the bite of the glass shards still clinging to the window as I dragged myself from the ruined vehicle, the lightless cocoon that might as well have been a barren womb, for my daughter had ceased to be while inside it.

And how had that happened? How had she gone from me, from this world?

Someone who was whimsy and effervescence?

Me, I thought, both now, where I stood, trembling, and in the future, utterly leveled and eternally damned.

The “how” was because of me. She died because of me.

Not Callum. Not Callum. All this time, I thought I needed to get her away from him.

But I’d had no idea of the horrors the future could hold.

The horrors I could allow it to hold, if I lost myself in this moment in my living room, surrounded by my alcoholic husband and a pair of ghost hunters and staring into a haunted mirror, and never found myself again.

I stayed in the vision long enough to feel the heat of the explosion and smell the burning flesh, long enough to hope for death without absolution.

I felt myself pull back from the vision, from the mirror, with a gasp so violent it knocked me backward. I hit the couch and rolled onto the floor, where I lay, sucking in air. Morgan knelt beside me.

“Lainey, are you okay? What did you see?” She stood. “Joe, is he okay? Can you get him on the couch?”

I didn’t need to look up, to question Callum, to know what our catoptromancy session had shown him.

If the tortured wraith was me, from the future, then the corpse specter was the ghost of the Future-Callum.

It was absurd, how unsurprising it was, when you came right down to what the mirror must have shown him: If Callum didn’t stop drinking, he would die.

I curled onto my side, gasping like a fish, my body humming with the memory of the pain, my mind recalibrated from the knowledge. There was only one final consideration, one more question I needed to ask, a question that had been posed before, albeit in fiction, when it came to ghosts:

Were these the shadows of the things that Will be, or were they shadows of the things that May be, only? Was the tortured spirit my fate, or could I still do something to avoid becoming her? To avoid causing the death of my daughter?