Read Online Remember Mia by Alexandra Burt - Free Book Online Page B

six out of ten. Then the lights alternated from the middle scale all the way to the top. The phone went silent and so did the baby monitor. The phone rang again, slicing the air with determination. I ignored Mia’s cries emanating from the baby monitor and wiped the tears that were running down my neck, trailing inside my sweater. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was midnight.
    The gurgling baby monitor turned into a whimper, the whimper into a howl, and the howl into a full-blown bellow. The lights remained at the very top of the display window, until one last gurgle drifted off into the distance. Then there was silence.
    I left the study and went through the bedroom into Jack’swalk-in closet. A masterpiece of built-in shelves constructed of maple wood and hardware of brushed steel, next to mine, separated by a wall, both accessible by individual doors. Jack’s dress shirts, arranged by color, immaculately pressed, aligned on one wall, his shoes along the other. I looked up at the top row of storage shelves, reachable only with the attached rolling ladder.
    Reluctantly I passed the full-length mirror, a shadow of Jack appearing, checking his designer suit, belt, and shoes, playing a cruel trick on me.
    As I stepped closer, a figure stared back at me. The woman was a stranger, a mere visitor who looked at me in anger. I considered her, even tried to force a winsome smile on her, yet her opaque eyes seemed empty, like doll’s eyes. Not one of those pretty dolls with an elaborate dress and curly hair, no, less than that, really more like a rag doll with crooked button eyes attached by only a wisp of thread. A thief of a woman, so powerful and potent that she made off with my prized possessions, my composure, my sanity, my joy, and the part of me that was a mother. Unable to lift my gaze off her, a familiar yet lesser twin almost, an inferior replica of myself, we stared at each other, contemplating if we’d met each other but I couldn’t place her and she wasn’t sure of me, either.
    That night, in Jack’s closet, surrounded by immaculately pressed shirts and shoes shined to perfection, I fell apart into millions of little pieces. The walls closed in, wrapped themselves around me. I felt threatened by my own skin, by the cars driving by, the honking cabs, and the sirens. The ticking clock—I could clearly hear the ticking all the way from the other end of the apartment—held a message for me that I was unable to decipher. No longer was there a difference between the mundane and the bizarre. I saw the world through a magnifying glass, and my mind was about to explode and spatter whatever was left of my lucidity all over Jack’s starched shirts and polished shoes. I was a bloated corpse and I needed relief. I needed to make sense. But was sense something one can make?
    White noise on full blast. A voice escaped the subdued grain of the maple shelves, and unlike mine, it made sense.
    The box
, it said.
Where is the box?
    The box that didn’t fit with the rest of the items in the closet?
    Yes, that one.
    The box that was old and torn, which I noticed every time I hung up his clean clothes, that he moved from the overhead storage one week to a lower shelf the next?
    Yes, the old yellowed photo box with reinforced metal holes, rectangular and flat, larger than a shoe box.
    Am I supposed to look for it and open it?
    Yes, look for it. Then open it.
    I pulled the ladder to the far corner of the shelf, its metal balls sliding along the tracks, humming like a swarm of hornets. I kicked off my shoes and climbed up.
    There it was. A quite unremarkable and ordinary cardboard box. I managed to climb down the ladder without dropping it, sat it on the floor, and knelt next to it.
    The box was cumbersome to open; the lid had to be lifted on both ends simultaneously. I recognized the castle logo in the lower right-hand corner: Rosenfeld, Manhattan—one of the largest wedding gown stores in New York, maybe even the country. I