The Frame on Ashwood Lane

The last time I saw my mother alive, she was staring at the antique mirror above the bureau in her hospice room. It was July, and the air was thick with the smell of lilies and antiseptic. She had been fading for weeks, her heart a failing engine, but her eyes were clear that afternoon. ‘Who are those people?’ she asked, her voice a dry whisper. I turned, expecting to see the reflection of the nurse or the chaplain, but the room was still. ‘What people, Ma?’ I said. She pointed with a trembling finger. ‘There, in the glass. Two women and a man. They’re just talking, like they’re waiting for something.’ I went to the mirror, but all I saw was my own worried face and her sunken one. ‘It’s your angels,’ I told her, though I wasn’t sure I believed it. ‘They’ve come to take you home.’ She smiled then, a peaceful smile that hadn’t touched her face in days. The next morning, she called my Aunt Rita and told her she’d seen her angels, that she was ready to go. She passed eight days later, on a Tuesday, with my hand in hers.

After the funeral, I had to clear out her house on Ashwood Lane. It was a small, clapboard bungalow with a sloping porch and a rhododendron that never bloomed. I boxed up her clothes, her cookbooks, her collections of thimbles and carnival glass. The mirror was the last thing I took. It was heavy, with a gilded frame that had flaked in places, and the glass was wavy, as if the world inside it had been slightly melted. I hung it beside my bed in my apartment, thinking it would be a comfort, a piece of her.

For weeks, I avoided looking at it directly. I would catch my own reflection in the periphery and feel a pang of grief. But one night in early September, a friend came over to help me sort through a box of old photographs. I had set the mirror on the floor, leaning against the wall, because I hadn’t yet decided where it should go. As we went through the pictures, I heard a faint hum, like a distant refrigerator, and I glanced up. There, in the mirror, was my mother’s face. Not old and withered, but the way she looked when I was a child—bright-eyed, with her hair loose around her shoulders. She was standing behind me, her hand raised as if in a wave. My breath caught. I blinked, and she was gone.

I told myself it was a trick of light, a memory projected, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. I took a picture of the mirror with my phone, just to prove it was empty. When I looked at the photo later, there she was again, but this time she was clearer, and she was smiling. I must have shown that picture to my aunt a hundred times. ‘It’s her,’ I said, ‘she’s letting me know she’s okay.’ And for a while, that was enough.

Then, about a month later, I saw the man. It was past midnight, and I was sitting on the edge of my bed, unable to sleep. The mirror hung on the wall across from me, and in its dim oval, I saw her again, but this time she wasn’t alone. The two women and the man from the hospice room were there, standing behind her, their faces indistinct. They were talking, their mouths moving, but I couldn’t hear them. My mother turned to me, and her expression was not peaceful. It was urgent, her eyes wide, as if she were warning me. I grabbed my phone and took a photo, but when I looked at it, the mirror showed only my own reflection, pale and sweaty. The image was there one moment, gone the next.

I tried to rationalize it. Grief does strange things to the mind. But the mirror became a focal point. Every time I passed it, I felt a cold draft, and I could swear I heard muffled voices, like static from a far-off radio. The picture I had taken became my talisman; I kept it in my pocket, peeking at it to reassure myself that my mother was at peace. But the more I looked at it, the more the details began to change. Her smile seemed to strain, and the two women and the man appeared to be moving, closing in around her.

One night, I woke to a sound like paper crumpling. The mirror was glowing faintly, a sickly yellow light, and in it, I saw a scene I did not recognize. A room with peeling wallpaper, and my mother sitting in a chair, but her face was blank, like a mask. The two women and the man stood around her, and they were not angels. They were gnarled, with too-long arms and eyes that were too dark. They were chanting something I couldn’t hear, but I felt it in my teeth. My mother lifted her head and looked at me, and her lips moved: ‘Don’t trust the photo.’

After that, I couldn’t sleep. I covered the mirror with a sheet, but I could still feel its presence, like an eye in the dark. I called my aunt, and she told me that on the night our mother died, she had been muttering about ‘the ones in the glass,’ saying they weren’t angels, but that they had promised to take her somewhere better. She had also told my aunt to make sure I never brought that mirror into my home, but the instructions were lost in her fever.

I wanted to destroy it, to smash the glass and burn the frame, but a part of me was terrified that doing so would harm my mother’s spirit. And deeper still, I felt that the mirror had chosen me, that it hungered for attention. I took the photo out of my pocket, and I saw that the mirror in the photo now showed a different reflection. The room was darker, and my mother was gone. In her place stood a man with hollow cheeks, and he was smiling at me. The two women were right behind him, and they were pointing at the camera, pointing at me.

It’s been three years since that summer. I still have the mirror, hidden in a closet, wrapped in black cloth and bound with twine. But sometimes, late at night, I hear a faint tapping, like fingers on glass, and the smell of lilies drifts through my apartment. My mother’s face appears in the corner of my eye, and she mouths words I can never quite read. I know now that those were not angels, and that my mother was not sent to watch over me. She is trapped in that mirror, and she is trying to free herself. And if I ever give in and look again, I’ll see her on the other side, waiting for me to join her.