A Wilderness of Mirrors (a historical novel about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy)

[jodi daynard]

Gwen sat on her daughter's twin bed, staring at herself in a mirror they'd attached to the back of the door. It refracted the room's ambient light and gave the illusion of space. It also multiplied the flower decals Sophie had stuck on the walls and the Janice Joplin poster above her bed.

Their realtor had called it a one-bedroom, but they all knew that was a lie. It was really a studio with a walk-in closet. But Gwen had been desperate to leave the Victorian townhome she'd shared with Jeremy down in Grammercy Park, and this place was the first thing she found.

In hindsight, the signs of infidelity were everywhere--on Jeremy's fragrant coat, in Jeremy's smile--but Gwen was blind to them. For a while, her eye had not been on Jeremy at all but on the country at large. She had reported on the riots in Omaha the previous spring, when violence erupted after George Wallace announced his run for the presidency. By June, the riots had reached Newark, leaving twenty-six dead. And, somewhere in there, she had traveled to New Orleans to cover District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation of President Kennedy's assassination. Garrison was convinced, along with a growing number of others, that Oswald did not kill Kennedy despite the Warren Commission's claims.

Her eye was on these stories, not Jeremy. And she wrote in a blind heat, too, against deadlines that made conventional time irrelevant. At the Associated Press, it was always news-time somewhere.

Sophie, her fifteen-year-old daughter, had gone to an anti-war march that morning, and Gwen had let her go. Recently, she had begun missing school and hanging out with the college kids up at Columbia. Gwen thought maybe it was a way to cope with the family's breakup, which Gwen had not yet fully explained, in part because Sophie had not challenged Gwen's lie that they had fought about Gwen's job. And Gwen, also to her surprise, found herself loathe to tell Sophie the truth. Not to protect Jeremy so much as to protect her daughter, which might actually amount to the same thing.

Gwen made a cross-eyed face in the mirror, laughed at herself, and finally stood up. She found her sneakers, grabbed her purse, and left the apartment. On the landing, she lit a cigarette and headed down the stairs, because the elevator was impossibly slow. 

Sophie had been cooking their meals ever since they left Jeremy. Simple things, like Campbells chicken soup and a salad, or burgers on English muffins. Sometimes, they ordered a peperoni pizza or Chinese. But today, Gwen's conscience bit at her, and she planned to have dinner on the table when Sophie returned from the march. 

The day was sunny but cold. Gwen turned left on 101st Street, wanting to avoid the protesters. She stepped on something that oozed out from beneath her foot. The sanitation worker's strike had ended, but remains were everywhere, spilling out from trash cans: dirty diapers, chewed lamb chops, scattered green peas, cigarette butts. Paper plates skidded down the sidewalks carrying soggy pizza crusts that look like bloated fingers.

At 74th Street, Gwen dodged several honking yellow cabs to cross Broadway. A young mother wearing a velvet equestrian hat careened past her pushing a huge blue stroller. An old woman using a grocery cart as a walker passed by, her head a pink cactus of jumbo curlers. A closer look revealed that her fuzzy pink coat was actually a bathrobe. 

Beneath Fairway's awning, someone who looked like Seiji Ozawa carefully chose apples from an outdoor bin. Suddenly, the famous conductor turned, and his shiny black hair swept across his shoulders as he flashed her a sweet, boyish smile. 

Gwen caught up with the protestors heading up Broadway half an hour later. College kids held hand-drawn signs that read, "Hell, No, We Won't Go!" and "What For? Stop the War!" Black students protested both the war and oppression: "Give money to the ghettos, not the war machine!" They were loud but not violent. She didn't see Sophie anywhere. 

By this point, her arms strained under the weight of two heavy grocery bags. Gwen skirted around the edge of the crowd for the final sprint home, took the stairs two at a time, and unlocked the door just as the phone began to ring. She dropped the groceries in the doorway and ran to pick up the phone. 

"Mom?" she heard her daughter's fretful voice. "Mom, I need you to pick me up."

"Why? Where are you?" I just passed the march. I thought you were with them."

There was a brief pause. Then Sophie said, "I'm in jail."