Magic Hour

The song was a glimpse into a part of this girl’s true history; the first one they’d seen. More questions were unlikely to solicit answers. Julia knew what she needed was more primal than that.

She decided to sing along with the humming. “How I wonder what you are.”

The girl splashed around until she was facing Julia. Her blue-green eyes were so wide they seemed too big for her small, pointed face.

Julia finished the song, then planted a hand to her chest and said, “Julia. Ju-li-a. That’s me.” She grabbed the girl’s hand. “Who are you?”

The only answer was that intense stare.

With a sigh, Julia stood and reached for a towel. “Come on.”

To her amazement, the girl stood up and got out of the tub.

“Did you understand me? Or did you stand up because I did?” Julia heard the wonder in her voice. So much for professional detachment. This girl kept throwing curveballs. “Do you know how to speak? Talk? Words?” She touched her chest again. “Julia. Ju-li-a.” Then she touched the girl’s chest. “Who? Name? I need to call you something.”

Nothing but the stare.

Julia dried the girl off, then dressed her. “I’m putting you in pull-up diapers again. Just to be safe. Turn around. I’ll braid your hair. That’s what my mom always did to me. But I’ll be gentler, I promise. Mom used to pull so hard I’d cry. My sister always said it’s why my eyes tilted up. There. All done.” She accidentally bumped into the bathroom door. It shut hard; the mirror on the back of it framed the child in a perfect rectangle.

The girl gasped so loudly it sounded as if she’d just washed up on shore. She reached out for the mirror, trying to touch the other little girl in the room.

“Have you ever seen yourself before?” Julia asked, but even as she asked the question, she knew the answer.

None of this made sense. The pieces didn’t fit together. The wolf. The eating habits. The song. The toilet training. They were tiny pieces that made up the puzzle’s border, but the central image, the point, was unseen yet. Certainly she would have seen her reflection in water, at least.

“That’s you, honey. You. See the beautiful blue-green eyes, the long black hair. You look so pretty in that nightgown.”

The girl punched her reflection. When her knuckles hit the hard glass, she yelped loudly in pain.

Julia moved in beside her and knelt down. Now they were both in the mirror, side by side, their faces close. The girl was breathtakingly beautiful. She reminded Julia of a young Elizabeth Taylor. “You see? That’s me. Julia. And you.”

Julia saw when understanding dawned.

Very slowly the girl touched her chest and mouthed a sound. Her reflection did the same.

“Did you say something? Your name?”

The girl stuck out her tongue. For the next forty minutes, while Julia put on a tee shirt and sweats and brushed her teeth, the child played in front of the mirror. At one point Julia left long enough to get her notebook and digital camera. When she returned to the bathroom, the girl was clapping her hands and bouncing up and down in time with her reflection.

Julia took several photographs—close-ups of the girl’s face—then put the camera away. Notebook in hand, Julia wrote: Discovery of self. And documented every moment.

It went on for hours. The child stared at herself in the mirror long after the sky had gone dark and shown its cache of stars.

Finally, Julia couldn’t write anymore. Her hand was starting to spasm. “That’s it. Come on. Bedtime.” She walked out of the bathroom. When the girl didn’t follow, Julia reached down for a book. They finished The Secret Garden, so she chose Alice in Wonderland.

“Fitting, wouldn’t you say?” she commented to herself. After all, she was alone in the room when she said it, and equally alone when she began to read aloud. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, and ‘what’s the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’”

In the bathroom, the jumping stopped.

Julia smiled and kept reading. She had just introduced the white rabbit when the girl came out of the bathroom. In her pretty white eyelet nightgown with pink ribbons, and her hair braided and tamed, she looked like any little girl. The only hint of wildness was in her eyes. Too big for her face and too earnest for her age, they fixed on Julia, who very calmly kept reading.

The girl came up beside her, sidled close.

Julia stared at her. “Hello, little one. You like it when I read?”

The girl’s hand thumped down hard on the book.

Julia was too startled by the unexpected movement to respond. This was the first time the girl had really tried to communicate, and she was being quite forceful about it.