“She looked at her own image and removed the bandana, shaking down her hair, not fixed in a braid today but with a sticky twistiness still in it.

As her voice had come out of her startled mouth younger than she was, she looked younger in this antique, forgiving mirror. It was slightly tipped; she looked up into it, pleased that the flesh beneath her chin did not show.

In the bathroom mirror at home she looked terrible, a hag with cracked lips and a dented nose with broken veins in her septum, and when, driving in the Subaru, she stole a peek of herself in the rearview mirror, she looked worse yet, corpselike in color, the eyes wild and a single stray lash laid like a beetle-leg across one lower lid. As a tiny girl Alexandra had imagined that behind every mirror a different person waited to peek back out, a different soul. Like so much of what we fear as a child, it turned out to be in a sense true.”