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When Eva looks in the mirror, her skin seems like clay that someone threw over a wire structure and left to dry. It adheres to her bones too tightly to look natural. When she tilts her head under the harsh bathroom light, she thinks she can see flecks along her jawline where the clay has begun to flake away.
Her nose is too thin, her eyes too wide, her mouth an oblong slash. Whatever artist formed her didn’t spend enough time on the lips.
She looks too much like Kevin.
She touches the cool glass, her reflection’s fingers meeting her own, and then she tapes a black garbage bag over the mirror so she’ll never have to see it again.
When she visits him in prison, her first thought is, Oh dear, they’ve shaved his head.
He looks terrible with short hair. It’ll grow back, she knows — there’s plenty of prisoners around the cafeteria with long hair and scraggly beards. But still, to see it this short feels like a deliberate, nasty blow. They’ve made him ugly, she thinks irrationally. To punish me.
Because if there’s one thing she’s had to comfort herself through all this, through Kevin’s entire life, it’s that he’s beautiful — that she gave birth to a beautiful, angular, androgynous boy who shares her features, her thin nose and oblong mouth, but makes them seem somehow whole.
His skin is like clay, too, under the fluorescent lights. She touches his cheek and she’s surprised to find him warm beneath her hand. There’s a scar on the ridge of his cheekbone, a raised, purple wound which is only just starting to scab over. She can’t remember how he got it. During the massacre? During his arrest?
It looks just like the cuts he used to get when he first learned how to shoot, when he pulled the arrow back until the fletches grazed his cheek and sliced into his skin when he released the string.
She digs her thumbnail into the little red wound. His eyes bore into hers, dark and pleased. He doesn’t flinch.
“You’re all I have left now,” Eva says.
He grows taller in prison and a little broader across the chest, but as the years pass, he remains the same slim boy he’s always been. She wants to ask him if his pretty, bird-like looks get him in trouble, if the other men hurt him, if they ever hold him down.
She hopes they do. She suspects even Kevin can’t manipulate the men in here. There’s no way he’s still on top, but he exudes such confidence when she meets him — his posture relaxed, his eyes cool and flicking constantly to her lips.
She remembers how he used to beg her to hold him when he was a toddler, how he plunged his hand down her shirt to feel her breasts. She’d told herself, He remembers breast-feeding. That’s all it is.
Even now, she suspects that wasn’t true.
Her eyes are flicking to his lips, too.
She peels the black plastic back from the bathroom mirror. She looks at her eyes, her nose, her misshapen mouth, her clay-like skin. There’s some color in her cheeks again. She’s not sure whether she’s relieved to see it or disappointed.
She pushes her hair back from her face.
She kisses her reflection in the mirror.
All I have, she thinks. He’s all I have.