The Glass Table

In the autumn of 2014, I walked into the Harvest House, a converted church on the outskirts of a small town in the Pacific Northwest. The stained-glass windows were boarded over, and the pews had been replaced with rows of cots. I was seven months pregnant, alone, and had nowhere else to go. My mother, a woman I hadn’t seen in a decade, had tracked me down after hearing about my condition. She offered me a place to stay, but her ‘help’ came with a litany of criticisms. She’d criticize the way I breathed, the way I walked, the way I picked the tomatoes out of my sandwich because the smell made me retch. She’d hiss, ‘You’re embarrassing me! Everyone is staring at you.’ She made me feel like a grotesque, like I was some kind of circus freak. And then one night, she threw a glass of water in my face and screamed, ‘You look like a bloated corpse!’ That was the last straw. I packed my bag and left her house in the middle of the night, ending up at Harvest House.

The shelter was run by a gaunt, pale woman named Sister Miriam, who had a habit of appearing silently in doorways. She assigned me a cot in the corner, near a shattered mirror that had been left behind by the church’s previous occupants. The mirror was cracked, and my reflection was broken into jagged pieces, each segment showing a different angle of my swollen belly. I tried to cover it with a blanket, but Sister Miriam said, ‘Leave it. It reflects more than you know.’ I didn’t understand then.

As the weeks passed, I noticed strange things. The other residents were a mix of the desperate and the broken, but they all spoke in hushed tones about ‘the girl in the mirror’ who would sometimes appear, standing behind you, mouthing words you couldn’t hear. I dismissed it as the usual shelter gossip, but then one night, I woke up to a cold draft. I saw a figure in the mirror, but it wasn’t my reflection. It was a young woman, gaunt, with hollow eyes, and she was holding a baby that seemed too still. She stared at me, and then she pressed her hand against the glass, leaving a faint smear. When I blinked, she was gone.

I told Sister Miriam about it, and she gave me a long, knowing look. She said, ‘That’s Esther. She was here before you. She had a baby, but it was stillborn. She couldn’t bear it, so she went into the forest behind the shelter and hung herself from a cedar tree. They say she still looks for her child, and if you see her, it means she wants you to help her.’ I laughed nervously, but deep down, I was unsettled. Over the next few days, I began to feel a presence. My baby seemed to sense it too, kicking harder at night, and I would have vivid nightmares of a woman whispering, ‘Give me my baby.’

Then, the shelter began to change. The glass in the windows started to frost from the inside, even though it was warm outside. The lights flickered, and the other residents grew paranoid, saying they heard crying in the walls. One man, a veteran with a shrapnel scar, claimed he saw a woman in the hallway, her neck at an unnatural angle, holding out her arms. He left the next morning, saying he would rather sleep under the bridge.

I should have left too, but I had nowhere to go. So I stayed, and I started to research Esther’s story. I found an old newspaper clipping in the shelter’s basement, hidden under a loose floorboard. It said Esther was a migrant worker who came to the town in the ’60s, pregnant and alone. The church, before it was a shelter, was a place of healing, but the pastor was a cruel man who believed that the babies of sinners were cursed. He refused to bless her or her child, and when the baby was born dead, he said it was God’s punishment. Esther’s spirit was said to have haunted the church ever since.

One night, I was alone in the dormitory, the other residents asleep. I felt a cold hand on my stomach, and I looked up to see Esther’s reflection in the cracked mirror, standing right behind me. Her lips moved, and this time I could hear her: ‘Help me. My baby is lost. They took him.’ I turned around, but there was no one there. In the mirror, she pointed to the floorboards. I knelt down, my belly heavy, and pried up a loose plank. Underneath, I found a small wooden box, rotted and covered in mold. Inside was the skeleton of a baby, barely formed, wrapped in a yellowed blanket with a name stitched in fading thread: ‘Samuel.’

I held the tiny bones in my hands, and I felt a surge of sorrow. I understood then that Esther wasn’t trying to take my baby; she wanted me to give her child a proper burial. I found a small patch of ground in the church’s overgrown garden, under a dying oak tree. I dug a shallow grave and placed the box inside, saying a few words, though I didn’t know the right prayers. As I covered it with dirt, a warm breeze swept through, and I felt a sense of peace.

The next morning, the frost on the windows had melted, and the mirror in the corner was clean, no longer cracked. Sister Miriam looked at me and smiled. ‘You did well,’ she said. ‘She can rest now.’ I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. But as I walked out of the garden, I noticed a new crack in the glass of the nearby window, and for a split second, I saw the reflection of a woman with a baby, but the baby was alive, and they were both smiling. Then it was gone.

I still live at Harvest House. My daughter was born three weeks later, healthy and strong. But sometimes, at night, I hear the soft cooing of a baby, and when I look in the mirror, I see Esther standing behind me, but now she looks peaceful, no longer reaching out, just watching over us. I know she’ll always be there, a guardian of sorts, but I can’t shake the feeling that she’s waiting for something. And I wonder, when my daughter grows up, will she see Esther in the mirror too? Or will she see something else? The thought sends a shiver down my spine, and I find myself checking the glass more often than I’d like, making sure my reflection is my own.