Mirror

He was thin.

Thin in a way I recognized and didn't. Still tall — but the height propped the clothes up now instead of living in them. He stopped halfway down the stairs, hand on the rail, and looked at me for a long, long time, and then produced a classic, infuriating, quintessentially Lucas opening line:

"You shouldn't have come."

"Mm," I said. "I also shouldn't have quit, shouldn't have rerouted a continent, and shouldn't have stood in the rain outside your door. I have a long list of shouldn'ts. Would you like to review them one at a time?"

He laughed. The laugh cost him two coughs. Behind me, Old Yang pulled the front door gently shut and was gone — leaving the whole house to the two of us, and to the invisible thing that had been standing in the room for half a year.

We sat in the living room. The harbor filled the window. Someone had set out tea in advance — Chinese green, and I recognized the tin: a gift to Old Yang from the Qingdao partners. Lucas sat wrapped in a blanket in a rattan chair — the rattan chair; I had seen it in a dream. I looked at him and couldn't find the first question. He chose it for me.

"Daisy," he said. "Let me ask you something. I already know the answer. I need to hear it out loud."His eyes settled on my face. "Last year, on the boat, you told me you've had a dream since childhood. Grey sea. Low houses. White flowers."

"Yes."

"Last month," he said, very slowly, "did you dream of a house. A rattan chair. Sunlight coming in from behind. Me, sitting in it — and then—" he paused, gathering strength for it, "—and then I looked toward you."

The world went silent. The gulls, the wall clock, my own breathing: muted.

"How do you know that," I heard myself say.

"Because it was my dream," Lucas said. "Word for word. The same night, I dreamed I was sitting in this chair and knew someone was watching me. I guessed it was you. So I smiled in that direction." He watched the blood leave my face, and said, gently, "You received it. That's why you're here."

For the next hour, he told me the story he'd guarded all his life — the one his father had ordered him to guard even from me.

He said: there is a kind of person who sleeps with their eyes still open — open onto other times. His family's word for it is mirror. 镜. A mirror reflects a person; people like them reflect days that haven't come yet. His family had run maritime trade for four centuries, and the world had always said the de Jongs' luck ran unnaturally good. It was never luck. It was generation after generation of men who could see, at night, where the storm would turn and where the price would land.

"The dreams aren't prophecy," he said. "Closer to a reflection on water. It shivers. It breaks. But stare long enough and you learn to recognize what it is. That's the training, actually — 磨镜, they call it. Polishing the mirror. You grind the water flat."

"So when you were six," my voice was shaking now, "you ground your water flat, and you saw what?"

He didn't answer right away. He looked at his own hands.

"This chair," he said at last, calm as a man reading tide tables. "And myself, at exactly this age, sitting in it. There is only one thing our kind can never see — or there was. A mirror can't reflect a mirror, Daisy. Set two mirrors face to face and the middle is empty. My father can't see my road. I can't see his. So that day in the café, when I saw you—"

He raised his head.

"Everyone in that room was dragging their tomorrows behind them like luggage. Except you. You were clean. Nothing there. For the first time in my life I couldn't see through a person. Do you know what that's like? Quiet. I'd resigned myself to living inside other people's futures forever, and then you walked in like a window with the shutters down." He smiled a little. "I assumed you were simply special. Until the boat. Until you told me your dream."

"The grey sea," I said.

"The sea outside my front door," he said. "The white flowers. The field I grew up in. Daisy — you're not unreadable. You're a mirror. And a kind none of us has ever seen: you don't reflect the days. You reflect us."

The tea had gone cold. Beyond the window the sky lowered, and the harbor lights came on one by one. One question was still standing in the middle of the room where we could both see it. I asked it anyway.

"Your illness," I said. "When you were six — after the chair. What else did you see?"

Lucas looked at me. The last of the light lay along his face.

"I saw that you would ask me that question," he said. "And I saw that I wouldn't have the heart to answer it."

His family spent four hundred years polishing mirrors to get a clear look at tomorrow.

And he told me that the day we met was the first time in his life he'd gone blind — and the first time he'd opened his eyes.