Free Wilderness by Dean Koontz

1
    My mother claimed that in any mirror I had used, she could see my face rather than her own, my face and my singular eyes, and she could not thereafter have the mirror in the house. She shattered it and swept up the pieces without daring to look at them, because she said that somehow every shard contained a full image of my face, not merely a portion of it. She could hardly tolerate the sight of me even occasionally, and she most often looked past me or at something else altogether when we were in conversation. Consequently, seeing my countenance replicated in a multitude of jagged fragments of silver-backed glass, she nearly came undone.
    Although my mother drank and used some drugs, I believed she told the truth about the mirrors. She never lied to me, and in her troubled way she loved me. Because of her beauty, I thought that she, perhaps more than some other women, must have been anguished to have brought into the world someone of my appearance.
    Encircled by a vast forest, we lived in a cozy house at the end of a long dirt road, miles from the nearest neighbor. By some means she would never discuss, she’d made all the money that she would need for a lifetime, though in acquiring it, she had also acquired enemies who would have found her had she taken refuge anywhere but in a place as remote as that where she had settled.
    My father had been a romantic who loved the idea of love more than he loved her. Restless and certain that somewhere he would find the ideal for which he yearned, he left before I was born. Mother named me Addison. I share her last name, which is Goodheart.
    On the night of my birth, which followed a difficult labor, a midwife named Adelaide delivered me in Mother’s bedroom. Adelaide was a good country woman and God-fearing, but at the sight of me, she would have smothered me or broken my neck if Mother hadn’t been able to draw a pistol from a nightstand drawer. Perhaps because she worried about an attempted-murder charge or because fear motivated her to escape that house under any terms, the midwife swore never to speak of me and never to return. As far as the world was concerned, I was born dead.
    I could use only the mirror in my small room, a full-length looking glass on the back of my closet door. Occasionally I stood before it to study myself, though less often as the years went by. I couldn’t change my appearance or begin to understand what I might be, and time spent in self-consideration gained me nothing.
    As I grew older, my mother found herself less able to tolerate my presence, and I was denied the house for days at a time. She was a woman of hard experience, as tough as she was lovely, and until I came along, she’d been as fearless as anyone could be without being foolish or reckless. She detested herinability to adapt fully to my presence, her failure to control the anxiety that she could relieve only by banning me from the house now and then.
    Soon after sunrise on a day in October, a few weeks after my eighth birthday, she said, “It’s so wrong, Addison, and I despise myself for it, but you’ve got to get out, or I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe for just a day, maybe two, I don’t know. I’ll put the flag out when it’s okay for you to come back in the house. But right now
I don’t want you near me
!”
    For a flag she used a dish towel hung from a hook on a porch post. Whenever I was banned from the house, I checked every morning and again in the late afternoon to see if the flag had been hung, and every time that I saw it, I was elated. For me, at least, loneliness was a terrible hardship, even though it was the basic condition of my existence.
    When not permitted in the house—which included the porch—I slept in the yard if the weather was warm. In winter, I slept in the ramshackle garage, either on the backseat of her Ford Explorer or on the floor in a comfortable sleeping bag. Each day she left food for me in a picnic hamper, and I did not want for anything