The Storage Wife

I wake up on the floor of my own apartment with my cheek stuck to a flattened moving box and my mouth tasting like three dollar wine and bad decisions. The ceiling fan is doing that lazy wobble it does, clicking every fourth rotation, and the sun is already hammering through the blinds because it is day three of this heat wave and the AC unit in the window gave up on life sometime around midnight. I am thirty-four years old and I am lying on cardboard like a discarded appliance.

I lie there a while, listening to the traffic on the highway, trying to remember why I drank the whole bottle instead of half of it, and then it all comes back in one ugly wave. The auction. The bid. Ronald Steiner's little smirk across the podium. Ike pulling me into his office after with that face he makes when he is about to step on somebody and doesn't want to get blood on his shoes.

I get up, brush my teeth, and stand in the middle of my apartment surrounded by boxes I started packing two weeks ago when the rumors started. Half of them are labeled wrong because I labeled them while angry. One just says CRAP in letters big enough to read from the parking lot.

My phone buzzes on the counter. It is my sister, Vicky. I let it go to voicemail because I know what she is going to say. She calls back, because she always calls back, and I answer this time.

"Talk to me," she says.

"I got fired yesterday."

"I know, honey. Ike called the whole... well, word travels. I'm sorry. You want me to come over?"

"No. I want to go open a storage unit I paid eight hundred dollars for at a distressed sale last month and hope there's a Faberge egg in it."

She laughs, then stops laughing when she realizes I am not joking. "Celia. That junk sale? That's the one where the guy died and nobody claimed anything?"

"That's the one. I still have access until Friday. After that it goes to the facility. I figure I'll go dig through it today, find something worth flipping, and prove to Ike Ronnie that firing me was the dumbest thing he's done since he grew that goatee."

"Or you could apply at the other houses," she says.

"I could," I say, and hang up before we get into it.

I throw on shorts and a tank top, fill a water bottle, and drive out to the facility on the edge of town. It is one of those sprawling climate controlled places, endless orange corridors with roll doors on both sides, and the kind of lighting that makes everything look like a crime scene photo. The heat out here is a living thing. You can feel it pressing on the windshield.

At the front desk there is a kid, maybe twenty-five, fanning himself with a clipboard. I hand over my access card and he squints at it.

"Unit 47-C? That the estate one?"

"That's the one."

"Cool. Weird lot, that one. Lots of furniture. You need a dolly there's some by the bathrooms."

I thank him and walk the long corridor until I find it, and while I walk I think about the moment it all went to hell, because apparently my brain wants to marinate in it today. It was Wednesday. Big estate auction, good crowd, and I was running the podium like I have run it a hundred times. We get to the centerpiece lot, a signed folio set that Ike had been hyping for a month, and I open at sixty thousand like we planned. And then Ronald Steiner, who does not even work for us, who just shows up to bid for his own shop like some kind of vulture in a nice blazer, starts running it up on me. Every increment, instant, no hesitation, staring at me the whole time like he was enjoying a show.

We went back and forth and I rode it up to ninety-one before my phone bidder texted me to stop, and the hammer came down for Ronald at ninety-one five, and the whole room got quiet in that way rooms do when everybody knows something bad just happened to somebody. And then Ike walked up to the podium himself, which he never does, and took the mic out of my hand.

"Ladies and gentlemen, let's give it up for Ronald Steiner," he says, all smiles, and then he turns to me and his voice drops so only the front row and I can hear. "Clean out your desk, Celia. Today. We're going in a new direction."

A new direction. In front of two hundred people. I asked him, quiet, could we at least talk in your office, and he says, real loud, "Nothing to talk about, sweetheart. Younger crowd wants younger faces."

Sweetheart. Two hundred people. I stood there holding a gavel I no longer had any right to hold while Ronald Steiner beamed at me from the third row like a man watching his horse win.

So. Yeah. The wine made sense later.

I shake it off and unlock the roll door on 47-C, and it comes up grinding and squealing, and a slab of hotter-than-hell air rolls out at me like I opened an oven. No climate control in this wing, apparently, or the unit's own vents are dead, because inside it is a hundred and ten degrees of still, thick air and dust.

The unit is crammed. I mean crammed. Furniture stacked to the ceiling along both walls, a chaise lounge with a sheet over it, dressers, a grandfather clock leaning against a wall like a drunk uncle, boxes everywhere, some labeled in faded marker, most not. A single bare bulb burns overhead. Somewhere down the corridor another roll door is open and a radio is playing, some guy singing along to it badly.

"Okay," I say out loud, to nobody, because I talk to myself when I work. "Eight hundred bucks. Find me something."

I start at the near wall, because that is what you do, you start somewhere. The first three boxes are books, water damaged, worthless. Fourth box is kitchen junk, chipped mugs, a roasting pan with something in it I decide not to look at closely. Fifth box is Christmas ornaments, and half of those are broken glass, and I cut my thumb on one and stand there sucking on it in the heat, sweating through my tank top, hair stuck to my neck.

The despair arrives right on schedule, right about box six, which is a box of picture frames with no pictures in them. Because that is what my life is now, apparently. A woman with an auctioneer's eye and no podium, digging through a dead stranger's junk in a sauna, cutting herself on ornament hooks.

By noon I have moved maybe a quarter of the small boxes and found nothing. Not a sterling mark, not a maker's label, not one thing my eye can flip. The heat is making me sloppy and mean. I kick a rolled rug, which was a mistake, because it unrolls and knocks over a stack of lampshades, and I swear loud enough that the radio guy down the hall stops singing for a second.

The big pieces are what's left. I pull the sheet off the chaise lounge and dust flies up and I cough and wave it away, and under the sheet the thing is actually gorgeous, some kind of velvet, deep green, carved wood. Okay. Okay, that is something. I drag it toward the door, and behind where it stood, against the back wall, there is a shape I missed.

A mirror. Big one, standing on its own, dark wood frame carved with stuff I can't quite make out in this light, and the glass is so clouded with grime it looks like dirty dishwater. It is easily five feet tall and heavy as sin, and when I lean it out from the wall I have to catch it with my knee to keep it from going over.

"Hold on, hold on, you big bastard," I say, wrestling it upright, and I wipe my forearm across the glass just to see what is under the grime.

What is under the grime is a reflection that does not move when I do.

I freeze. Dust hangs in the air between me and the mirror. The radio down the hall has gone quiet or I just can't hear it anymore over my own heartbeat.

"Hello, Celia," the reflection says.

I take three steps back and hit the chaise lounge with the backs of my legs and sit down hard on velvet that I now own, technically, along with whatever the hell is standing in that frame looking at me with patient dark eyes and a small, polite, terrifying smile.

"Okay," I say, and my voice comes out thin. "Okay, that's... no. No, I'm still drunk. That's it. That's the wine."

"You're not drunk," he says, in a voice like warm oil, like the low end of a cello. "And you're sweating, and you're hurt, and you've had a terrible week. I watched you work. You talk to yourself, did you know that? I like it."

The bulb overhead flickers. My mouth is dry, and the cut thumb is throbbing, and every rational part of me is screaming run, but I have never once in my life run from a thing I could sell, and some stupid, buried, auctioneer part of my brain is already whispering, oh my God, nobody else has anything like this.

"Who are you?" I manage.

The smile widens, just a little.

"My name is Loren Spock," he says. "And I have been waiting for someone like you, Celia, for a very, very long time."

I grab the nearest thing with a handle, which is a tire iron off the floor, and hold it up like that will do anything against a man made of glass. He looks at the tire iron and then back at my face, and his expression is so fond it makes my skin crawl.

"What are you going to do with that, hit me and break the mirror?" he says. "Go ahead. See how you feel after."

"You first. Talk. What are you, how are you talking, why do you know my name."

"My name is on a label on the back of my frame, in old pencil. You have not looked yet. You will. As for the rest, I am bound to this glass. Bound, Celia. Made by a woman in 1921 who did not want to lose me, and whose method of not losing me was worse than losing me." He says it lightly, like he is telling a story at a party he has been to a thousand times, but his hands, I notice, are pressed flat against the inside of the glass, palms out, like a kid at a window. "Her name was Marguerite. She is dust now, or nearly. I felt her go, about eleven years ago. That was a bad decade."

"That's insane. That's completely insane, and I need you to know I know that."

"Of course it is. And yet." He lifts one shoulder. The reflection lifts its shoulder. The dust motes drift between us like nothing at all is happening. "You cut your thumb about an hour ago. Ornament hook. It is still bleeding a little, if you are wondering, and I can smell it from here, and I would give a great deal to have you press that thumb to the glass right now, though I suspect you would rather press the tire iron."

I look down at my thumb. It is indeed still going, a slow little red line, and something about him knowing that makes my stomach drop and also, I am ashamed to write this, does something else, something lower, that I am not going to examine while I am holding a weapon.

"Stay where you are," I say, and I step forward anyway, slow, the way you approach a dog that might bite, and I press my bleeding thumb to the glass.

Nothing happens. That is the thing. Nothing happens, and also everything happens, because the moment my skin touches that surface I feel it, faint, like warmth coming off a sidewalk at dusk, like something on the other side pressing back. He makes a sound. I have heard a lot of sounds in my life, auction halls are full of sounds, and I have never heard anything like the sound this man makes when I touch the glass. It is short and it is broken and it is honest.

"Oh," he says. "Oh, Celia. Do that again."

I pull my hand back like the mirror burned it. "What the hell was that."

"That was the first thing I have felt in fifty-one years." His voice has come apart a little, the warm oil gone thin. "People have owned me, Celia. Nine owners, ten if you count the estate sale, and they dusted me and hung me and priced me and some of them, early on, tried things I will not describe, but glass is glass. I feel pressure. I do not feel touch. Your touch went through. I felt your pulse. I could count it." He puts his hand where mine was. "Sixty-eight beats a minute. A little fast now."

"Okay, stop. Stop counting my heart, that is creepy, that is objectively creepy."

"It is the only interesting thing to happen to me since 1975," he says, and the smile comes back, crooked now, human somehow, and God help me I laugh. One bark of a laugh, in a storage unit, alone with a haunted mirror, and he grins like I handed him a winning lottery ticket.

"So what do you want," I say, because I have sat through enough estate auctions and enough after-auction drinks to know that when something wants something it starts being charming. "Nobody waits fifty years to have a conversation. What do you want from me, Loren Spock."

"Honesty. Good. You are honest, I watched you argue with the radio." He leans back from the glass, and for the first time I can see him properly, the bulb catching him, dark hair, white shirt with the collar open, sleeves rolled, build like he works, face that is not pretty-boy handsome but is the kind that ages well, the kind my mother would call trouble. "I want out, Celia. That is the whole of it. I want out of this glass, and there is a way, and it requires you, and I will not lie to you about what it costs, because the last woman I trusted was Marguerite and look where that got me."

"What way."

"That is a conversation for when you are not holding a tire iron and bleeding on my floor. It is late. You have been fired, you cried twice over those ornaments, I am sorry, that was rude to mention." He says it gently and my face goes hot. "You are exhausted and frightened and people agree to things when they are both. Come back tomorrow. Clean, fed, sober, if you can manage it. Bring nothing. Decide nothing."

"How do I know you'll still be here?"

"Celia." He presses both palms flat to the glass again. "Where would I go?"

I want to tell you I was cool about it, that I walked out with my head on straight and locked the unit and drove home and slept like a baby. What I actually did was drag the chaise lounge back in front of the