Mirror Image

through them. “If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t have been on that plane.”
    “Hey, man.” Those two words exhausted Van’s repertoire of commiserating phrases. He refreshed Irish’s drink, lit another cigarette, and silently passed it to the grieving man. For himself, he switched to marijuana.
    Irish drew on his cigarette. “Thank God her mother didn’t have to see her like that. If she hadn’t been clutching her locket in her hand, I wouldn’t even have known the corpse was Avery.” His stomach almost rebelled when he recalled what the crash had done to her.
    “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad Rosemary Daniels isn’t alive. A mother should never have to see her child in that condition.”
    Irish nursed his drink for several minutes before lifting his tearful eyes to his companion. “I loved her—Rosemary, I mean. Avery’s mother. Hell, I couldn’t help it. Cliff, her father, was gone nearly all the time, away in some remote hellhole of the world. Every time he left he asked me to keep an eye on them. He was my best friend, but more than once I wanted to kill him for that.”
    He sipped his drink. “Rosemary knew, I’m sure, but there was never a word about it spoken between us. She loved Cliff. I knew that.”
    Irish had been a surrogate parent to Avery since her seventeenth year. Cliff Daniels, a renowned photojournalist, had been killed in a battle over an insignificant, unpronounceable village in Central America. With very little fuss, Rosemary had ended her own life only a few weeks after her husband’s death, leaving Avery bereft and without anyone to turn to except Irish, a steadfast family friend.
    “I’m as much Avery’s daddy as Cliff was. Maybe more. When her folks died, it was me she turned to. I was the one she came running to last year after she got herself in that mess up in D.C.”
    “She might have fucked up real bad that one time, but she was still a good reporter,” Van commented through a cloud of sweet, pungent smoke.
    “It’s just so tragic that she died with that screwup on her conscience.” He drank from his glass. “See, Avery had this hang-up about failing. That’s what she feared most. Cliff wasn’t around much when she was a kid, so she was still trying to win his approval, live up to his legacy.
    “We never discussed it,” he continued morosely. “I just know. That’s why that snafu in D.C. was so devastating to her. She wanted to make up for it, win back her credibility and self-esteem. Time ran out before she got a chance. Goddammit, she died thinking of herself as a failure.”
    The older man’s misery struck a rare, responsive chord in Van. He gave the task of consoling Irish his best shot. “About that other—you know, how you felt about her mother? Well, Avery knew.”
    Irish’s red, weepy eyes focused on him. “How do you know?”
    “She told me once,” Van said. “I asked her just how long you two had known each other. She said you were in her memory as far back as it went. She had guessed that you secretly loved her mother.”
    “Did she seem to care?” Irish asked anxiously. “I mean, did it seem to bother her?”
    Van shook his long, stringy hair.
    Irish withdrew the wilting rose from the breast pocket of his dark suit and rubbed his pudgy fingers over the fragile petals. “Good. I’m glad. I loved them both.”
    His heavy shoulders began to shake. He curled his fingers into a tight fist around the rose. “Oh, hell,” he groaned, “I’m going to miss her.”
    He lowered his head to the table and sobbed brokenly while Van sat across from him, nursing his own grief in his own way.

Four
    Avery woke up knowing who she was.
    She had never exactly forgotten. It was just that her medication, along with her concussion, had left her confused.
    Yesterday—or at least she guessed it had been yesterday, since everyone who had recently come within her range of vision had greeted her with a “good morning”—she had been disoriented, which was understandable. Waking after having been comatose for several days to find that she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, and couldn’t see beyond a very limited range would confound anyone. She was rarely ill, certainly not seriously, so being this injured was shocking.
    The ICU, with its constant light and activity, was enough to hamper anyone’s mental process. But what really had Avery puzzled was that everyone was addressing her incorrectly. How had she come to be