Each reflection offered her a different perspective of herself. In some, her side part, flipped across the front was magazine worthy. In others, it was a bad hair day from an 80s B movie. Her face was squat laid over the house across the street – the one hidden by a large, stone fence, but looking out into the dark woods her glasses were skewed on an angle. Everywhere else illusions of lights danced in the window obscuring the dark night outside or Diamond’s face.
It wasn’t just the windows. The polished glass in the kitchen. The large swaths of angular, sculpted metal. With a large enough price tag, anything can be art. Every room in the house could fit into either category – a private gallery or a fishbowl.
Abject terror pinned her to the spot. Everything was coming for her, but nothing was moving. Dark clouds of gray seeped out of the fireplace – its tendrils reaching for her. The door opened itself to the night, no matter how many times she checked the locks. The single serving coffee maker winked as she stilled closer to death.
Diamond had been named after what her mother wanted most in this world. What her father and all his millions refused to give her. Something clear, bright, flawless. Multiple homes, multiple businesses, the best from every catalog all shared together. Her father didn’t cheat. He didn’t drink. He rarely swore. He had wooed her mother with no family name, no past, no future, no money. He pursued her before he knew what she was worth, acknowledging only how much she was worth to him. Everything.
After he made her fall in love with him, Diamond’s father made his money. More money than he would have known what to do with – the kind of money that would have bankrupted him before the IRS could every fully document all of it had it not been for her mother.
But he wouldn’t buy her a diamond.
She was their diamond. Her mother’s actually. Clear, bright, flawless. What her mother was to her father. A future. Everything.
The glass panes tickled chills up Diamond’s back. Her spine chilling to the cold. More afraid of finding the warm finger tips of a stranger than the frozen fingers of the glass itself. Almost. Whispers from the wooden railings, the cabinets, the floor boards. Snickers from the curtains all taking silent bets on her death. Red, velvety and thick panels, like ribbons of blood next to the embossed gray. Those were the ones she believed would trip her, should she ever be able to move. To run away.
Not that she sat in that room. But they could see her as clearly as she could see them.
The cold tile like a ring of salt. Offered her a false sense of protection. At least until the cold managed to twist its way up her legs. A bar with high stools, her back to the wall of glass windows and doors to the sunroom and patio. Her spot in the kitchen – to eat breakfast, to sit with her morning coffee and day planner. The numbing touch of smooth marble, blissful against her skin in the morning. Paralyzing at night. The grip of something worse than death.
Weights of stealthy man passed through the corridors, woven like a corn maze in the fields of Indiana. Her father had built it. Diamond had wondered who had come. Invisible shadows darker than a moonless midnight moved through her like she wasn’t sitting here. Like she hardened beyond that of her namesake, melding in the process to the countertop.
Her father had built this house for her mother. Furnished it for her. Everything in this house was by his design. The juxtaposing textures reflective of them. Of their love – of his love. Diamond hadn’t been here until they were gone. Neither were here now. Neither would ever be here again.
It was clear, at least with the curse of hindsight, what his intentions had been. Just like the house was bright during the day. The sun rising up through the back yard, between the forest. The sun setting into the neighbor’s secluded house across the front yard. It was almost perfect. Almost. Ravaging across the tip of a tongue, nails scrapping up against the epidermis – clawing. Almost perfect, just slightly crooked. As if everything was perfectly laid out, just a few degrees further than center. Like a childproof lid on an aspirin bottle than needs to be pressed down and twisted slightly before it can be opened freely.
As if in laying the house out those few degrees, opened something inside of the Earth that was never mean to be let out. Like the Diamond reflected in the surface of the WiFi enabled oven wasn’t actually her own reflection but her mother’s. The distortion not from the tiny details imprinted in the glass, but from one part of her mother’s fragmented soul who stood behind Diamond, trying desperately to touch her. Her mother whose corporal form had endured strips of skin routinely peeled back from her face. Whose blood soaked into the wood used to replace the shelves in the custom cabinetry. Who couldn’t say for certain if she was trying to connect with her daughter or destroy her.
Not everything about her father’s grand plans was flawless. The smell of burning electrical wire wrapped itself around Diamond’s throat. Suffocating her more than her fear. It happened. Always happened 8 am, 8 pm. Three electricians were unable to say where it came from. The same time. The same place. Never anywhere else in the 7000 square foot monstrosity Diamond tried to call home. Just in her high top chair at the bar in the kitchen. The elongated neck of the faucet stretching out Diamond’s face to look so much like her mother. The work of shadows and science drawing a thick rope around her neck. Just like the smell, Diamond could count on the phantom sizzle in her ear, the rush of salvia to her mouth. At night she could almost feel the current of the house running through her.
In the mornings she would check whatever was plugged into the outlet above the baseboard heater. Then Diamond would laugh it off. Fidgeting with the necklace she wore draped over her neck. A present, wrapped, left behind. A small fractured diamond fastened into a cheap tin setting. The card from her father to her mother. “From all those years ago.”
She would finger that necklace. The heaviness of it warming her heart. How blissful ignorance was, not knowing where that necklace had been for all the years of her life, of her parent’s marriage. Of how years of darkness had tinted the white gold, reducing it to tin. A fairy tale of love and wistful romance refabricating the unholy token as much as years of stomach acids and later glucuronic, oxalic, and citric acids had done before. She would hold it out, look down her own nose – remembering her mother’s nose, her mother’s face, as she laughed at herself. Chalking it up to too much coffee. Making social plans for as many nights in a row as she could. Anything to keep choosing to stay another night, another month, another year, another lifetime. Assuming she made it through the darkness of night. Of the house.