“Internalized?” I managed to ask, but I knew what she meant. I had sensed it on that day long, long ago.
“The first one,” Colette said, “was already gone into drawing, to externalizing. That attenuates color because the world around you holds color and competes with your own. The real power of color is internalized—it is the glow that makes you the sun in every gathering, the fire that warms … or burns. I wanted my child, my heir, to have the power of color as I do. This first one would not, therefore, I must have another.”
She said this as reasonably as I would discuss the need to change socks or sharpen a pencil. Replace one with the other, that’s all. That’s how it’s done.
I didn’t like to think what might have happened to little Mira if Colette had managed to draw forth another image and the House had maintained its bond with the first child. Doubtless, Colette would have disposed of a nine- or ten-year-old child as coolly as she had her father. Would she have felt more or less regret because that child was in some way herself? I didn’t know, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask.
As these thoughts went through my mind I felt a thickness in the air, a heaviness. My lion leapt with less power, the surrounding colors dimmed, just a trifle. I recognized what was happening in time to shake myself from my thoughts and concentrate on where I was. Too nearly had I fallen into the same trap as Colette had done. I had begun to live in might-have-beens rather than what was, to let my imagination build fantasies that could replace reality so thoroughly that I would never know when exactly I had been lost.
If Colette had seen the ripple in my personal reality, she did not comment. She continued to drive the carriage along the twisting dirt road, facing me as if we were chatting over tea and shortbread in the formal living room at Phineas House.
“Do you wish to come back?” I asked.
“Of course,” she replied with a scornful laugh. “Isn’t that why I’m driving this cursed nag along?”
“Things will have changed,” I said. “More than forty years have passed since you rode out last from Phineas House.”
“Forty years? Surely not!” She smiled a thin, contemptuous smile. “But then I forget. You claim to be my daughter grown old.”
“I am,” I said steadily. “Believe as you will, I am Mira, whom you called your daughter. What must I do to prove it to you? Shall I tell you things only an inhabitant of that house would know?”
Colette said nothing, but neither did she turn away. I began telling her. I told her things about herself, for she would not have noticed anything else. I described her private rooms, some of her favorite gowns, how she twisted her hair up and secured it with pins of amethyst and pearl. She listened as a cat is petted, luxuriating in the detail, knowing herself a worthy center of attention. She liked hearing what I said, but I could tell I was not convincing her.
So I switched the cadence of my tale, telling her instead some of Phineas House’s secrets. I told her about the silent women and where they dwelled. I told her of the family tree in the Bible, and of the additions made to it in her own hand. Lastly, I told her of the kaleidoscopes and teleidoscopes: where they were hidden, and some of their powers. For final emphasis, I lifted my hand and showed her the teleidoscope I carried, cousin to the one she still held in one hand.
Now indeed did I have Colette’s attention, and her gaze sharpened as she looked at me. I felt that now she saw me for the first time, and that her gaze was sorting through appearances, looking for correspondences between the child she remembered and the woman who rode alongside her carriage on a green-eyed, black-maned lion.
When she spoke, her tones were coaxing, but beneath the coaxing note was one of command. This was the voice she had used when she had some use for me, when she might trot me out like a warm-blooded doll to impress some caller with her maternal achievement.
“Come back with me, then, Mira, for I see now that you are indeed my daughter—my sweet reflection. Come back with me to the Phineas House of old, and we will make everything right again.”
I looked at her, and am shamed to admit that I was tempted, though I knew what she was offering me was dissolution. Still, would that be so bad? I could forget everything that had gone before, and there would be a fresh start, a new beginning in a world where I would not live for decades with the vague sense that I had failed my mother.
“Come with me,” Colette said soothingly. “In and out again we will go, then drive to a time when we can start afresh. The old world will vanish, a lesser probability, and we will make everything right.”
I rose then on the lion’s back, moving perhaps to join Colette in her carriage, in her mad dream, but I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror on her locket and saw myself. Vitality was draining from me, color fading. The vibrant woman of fifty was become a dull thing I hardly recognized as me.
Shooting Star shied. Colette grabbed the reins, and I looked around to see what had disturbed the placid bay. Wildcats were emerging from the dusty fringes of the road: spotted leopards and jaguars; tigers with erratic, zigzagging stripes; lions maned in night; lynxes with tufted ears; pumas with gold plush fur; cheetahs weeping dark tears. All of them had green eyes, eyes that glittered like emeralds and peridots, eyes like nothing in nature.
With them came memories. Balancing on a ladder, brush in hand, paint stippling the back of my hand as I shared a joke with Enrico. Standing beside Domingo, hearing the scratch of his pencil on paper as he made notes as to what colors we should next bring to the carousel brilliance that now adorned Phineas House’s deep green sides. Sitting in the walled garden, looking at climbing roses that may have been old in my grandmother’s day. The taste of coffee and a sweet roll heavy with pecans and mesquite honey.
Laughter in Domingo’s eyes as we shared some joke. The gentle pedantry in his voice as he told me something of the confusing history of this bifurcated town he loved so much. The calm command as he set his little band of painters about their varied tasks. The respect he engendered, the trust. In them. In me.
I saw now that the green-eyed wildcats were in some way Domingo’s gift to me. He had encouraged me to be the artist I had hidden from, hidden from, I thought because I feared who might find me through that talent, find me and make me go away as someone had made Colette go away.
Now I saw differently. I hadn’t been hiding from an anonymous someone. I had been hiding from the same person all my life. I had been hiding from Colette, Colette who loved me best as an extension of herself. I didn’t want to hide any longer.
With that realization Colette’s hold over me dissolved as does sugar in a glass of boiling water.
“Color is the great magic,” I said aloud. “You taught me that years and years and years ago as you sat before your mirror.”
Colette looked frightened now, and slapped the reins across Shooting Star’s back. The already terrified mare bolted, fleeing as she had fled for over forty years. My lion loped alongside, easily pacing the carriage. The flood of wildcats joined us, rippling fur in shades of golden brown, toasted tan, honey warm, and the fluffy white of clouds. The dusty road was beaten to oblivion under this host of velvet paws, and I welcomed relief from the drought stricken landscape.
“Child of a rainless year,” I said aloud. “That’s what you called me. I never understood why the rains didn’t fall, not until now. Shall I tell you?”
Colette tensed, and said nothing, but I knew she listened.
“Rain washes away artificial color. Water, too, was the first mirror, the first thing in which any living being glimpsed its reflection. You have an affinity for mirrors, for reflections, don’t you? So in learning of them, you learned also of water.
“But water is unpredictable; water washes away what you would keep. Standing water gives back the sky, but the falling droplets make the rainbow, splitting white light into color. You wanted the mirror. The rainbow you feared. Some say there’s a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, but it’s also a bridge by which gods come to earth—a guide to unimaginable riches, but full of unpredictable power.
“You don’t like anything that’s unpredictable, as living things are, and when you drew forth a child from the mirror, you sought to make it predictable—a child without water, child of a rainless year.”
I knew I spoke nonsense, but I knew also that what I said was right in a fashion that had nothing to do with logic.
“You lock things within your mirrors. I can set them free. Ever since I knew the manner of my birth I have feared that I am you. I’m not, am I? I’m your reflection, your opposite. Therefore, if you bind the color, I exist to set it free.”
I gripped the lion between my knees, feeling myself balancing upon his broad back with perfect ease. I shaped a brush out of air and desire, and used Colette as a palette. With the red of her lips I drew roses and poppies along the roadside. From the folds of her skirt I pulled the colors I needed to adorn a drought-seared tree with the clusters of purple blossoms, transforming it into a lilac bush alive with spring glory. A jeweled ring upon her finger gave me sapphire blue, but there was nothing I could use for yellow or green.
Then with a joyful laugh I realized I was trying too hard. The shining black of Colette’s hair, like the shine of a raven’s wing, held every color in its iridescence. Here was green, here yellow, here a hint of shining indigo. I chose my hues with abandon rather than care, painted as I had wished to paint, painted as I had denied myself since those years when fear rather than delight was what I associated with my art.
All around us my brush brought forth a jungle garden that Rousseau might have rejoiced to paint. Shooting Star had ceased running to graze on the verdure, and the great cats were lazing or yawning or climbing up trees to chase the violently colored birds and sleek brown monkeys. I set the unpredictable rainbow across the sky as my signature, and returned my attention to Colette.
She sat as she had sat, bolt upright in her carriage, her hands upon the reins, but those hands were still, and the reins slid limp to puddle at her feet. She was transformed, and for the first time I saw a likeness between us.
At my soft word, the lion knelt. I dismounted. Then I dipped my hands into a pond, holding them up dripping, keeping the liquid within motionless, so that it would give back a reflection.
“Will you look in the mirror now, Mother?” I asked. “Will you see yourself free of illusions? I can even take you home—but to the Phineas House of my day, my time. I have a life of my own, now. There is no returning me to the mirror and drawing forth another.”
Colette moved her head stiffly, side to side, viewing the jungle that surrounded her. Vines surged up, embracing the carriage, bringing forth blossoms like giant morning glories, adorned in dewdrops that gave back sparks of shattered light.
“I see that,” she said. “You are no longer my Mira.”
“Look in the mirror,” I urged. “Accept what is … it isn’t bad at all.”
Colette bent her head, unable to a resist a mirror, though I could tell she dreaded what she would see. She gazed at her reflection, seeing a Colette whose hair was pale, whose lips were pastel pink—not bloodred, and not nearly as full as she had always drawn them. She saw a Colette whose skin was unadorned with shading and shaping, so that the lines of her features were recognizable as the same—though I’ll admit slimmer—than my own.
Colette drew in her breath in indignation.
“This isn’t me.”
“Colette, it is. It’s you. You know it. You may have viewed this face as the blank canvas on which you did your art, but it’s not. It’s the reality. The other is the illusion. Look at me if you won’t believe it. I’m your reflection. Your mirror.”
She looked up from the water then, and deep into my eyes. I’d never realized that she, too, had those heat-haze eyes, grey with just a hint of blue. The cosmetics with which she had adorned them had brought out the blue, as well as giving them a far more exotic shape and dimension.
“No …” she hissed. “That’s not me.”
With a sudden jerking motion, Colette reached into the rainbow I had left as my signature on the sky, grasping as if she could take the color back into herself.
The rainbow wriggled in protest, opening a mouth like a viper’s, complete with curving fangs that dropped venom that caught the light, splitting into an infinitude of other rainbows. But the rainbow did not pierce her with those fangs. Instead its mouth stretched wider and wider, sucking Colette up and in, absorbing her into its colors as she had once absorbed its colors into herself. I watched until I could no longer sort Colette from the colored droplets of mist. I watched for a long time after, then I turned away.
I don’t know where Colette went after the rainbow swallowed her, whether she dissolved into the rainbow, or was carried across some bridge to a realm of the gods where she might be appreciated in the fashion she felt she should be. I don’t remember how I got home again either.
All I remember is staggering back to my bedroom to the sound of rain beating against the roof. When I woke the next morning, I rose and went to look outside. The ground was still wet. A bay mare was browsing on the side lawn, and the wildcats had returned to the window frames.