“Come on, Jake, ” says Eddie.
“No, I don’t want to.”
“It’s not about what you want, and you know it. We’re supposed to see. If we can’t stop him, we can at least do what we came here to do. Now come on!”
Heart heavy with dread, his stomach clenched in a knot, Jake comes along. As they approach Roland—the guns look enormous on his slim hips, and his unlined
but already tired face somehow makes Jake feel like weeping—the gunslinger knocks again.
“She ain’t there, sugar!” Susannah shouts at him. “She ain’t there or she ain’t answering the door, and which one it is don’t matter to you! Leave it! Leave her!
She ain’t worth it! Just bein your mother don’t make her worth it! Go away!”
But he doesn’t hear her, either, and he doesn’t go away. As Jake, Eddie, Susannah, and Oy gather unseen behind him, Roland tries the door to his mother’s room and finds it unlocked. He opens it, revealing a shadowy chamber decorated with silk hangings. On the floor is a rug that looks like the Persians beloved of Jake’s mother . . . only this rug, Jake knows, comes from the Province of Kashamin.
On the far side of the parlor, by a window which has been shuttered against the winter winds, Jake sees a low-backed chair and knows it is the one she was in on the day of Roland’s manhood test; it is where she was sitting when her son observed the love-bite on her neck.
The chair is empty now, but as the gunslinger takes another step into the room and turns to look toward the apartment’s bedroom, Jake observes a pair of shoes—black, not red—beneath the drapes flanking the shuttered window.
“Roland!” he shouts. “Roland, behind the drapes! Someone behind the drapes!
Look out!”
But Roland doesn’t hear.
“Mother? ” he calls, and even his voice is the same, Jake would know it anywhere
. . . but it is such a magically freshened version of it! Young and uncracked by all the years of dust and wind and cigarette smoke. “Mother, it’s Roland! I want to talk to you!”
Still no answer. He walks down the short hall which leads to the bedroom. Part of Jake wants to stay here in the parlor, to go to that drape and yank it aside, but he knows this isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. Even if he tried, he doubts it would do any good; his hand would likely pass right through, like the hand of a ghost.
“Come on, ” Eddie says. “Stay with him.”
They go in a cluster that might have been comic under other circumstances. Not under these; here it is a case of three people desperate for the comfort of friends.
Roland stands looking at the bed against the room’s left wall. He looks at it as if hypnotized. Perhaps he is trying to imagine Marten in it with his mother; perhaps he is remembering Susan, with whom he never slept in a proper bed, let alone a
canopied luxury such as this. Jake can see the gunslinger’s dim profile in a three-paneled mirror across the room, in an alcove. This triple glass stands in front of a small table the boy recognizes from his mother’s side of his parents’ bedroom; it is a vanity.
The gunslinger shakes himself and comes back from whatever thoughts have seized his mind. On his feet are those terrible boots; in this dim light, they look like the boots of a man who has walked through a creek of blood.
“Mother!”
He takes a step toward the bed and actually bends a little, as if he thinks she might be hiding under it. If she’s been hiding, however, it wasn’t there; the shoes which Jake saw beneath the drape were women’s shoes, and the shape which now stands at the end of the short corridor, just outside the bedroom door, is wearing a dress. Jake can see its hem.
And he sees more than that. Jake understands Roland’s troubled relationship with his mother and father better than Eddie or Susannah ever could, because Jake’s own parents are peculiarly like them: Elmer Chambers is a gunslinger for the Network, and Megan Chambers has a long history of sleeping with sick friends.
This is nothing Jake has been told, but he knows, somehow; he has shared khef with his mother and father, and he knows what he knows.
He knows something about Roland, as well: that he saw his mother in the wizard’s glass. It was Gabrielle Deschain, fresh back from her retreat in Debaria, Gabrielle who would confess to her husband the errors of her ways and her thinking after the banquet, who would cry his pardon and beg to be taken back to his bed. . . and, when Steven drowsed after their lovemaking, she would bury the knife in his breast . . . or perhaps only lightly scratch his arm with it, not even waking him. With that knife, it would come to the same either way.
Roland had seen it all in the glass before finally turning the wretched thing over to his father, and Roland had put a stop to it. To save Steven Deschain ‘s life, Eddie and Susannah would have said, had they seen so far into the business, but Jake has the unhappy wisdom of unhappy children and sees further. To save his mother’s life as well. To give her one last chance to recover her sanity, one last chance to stand at her husband’s side and be true. One last chance to repent of Marten Broadcloak.
Surely she will, surely she must! Roland saw her face that day, how unhappy she
was, and surely she must! Surely she cannot have chosen the magician! If he can only make her see . . .
So, unaware that he has once more lapsed into the unwisdom of the very young—Roland cannot grasp that unhappiness and shame are often no match for desire—he has come here to speak to his mother, to beg her to come back to her husband before it’s too late. He has saved her from herself once, he will tell her, but he cannot do it again.
And if she still won’t go, Jake thinks, or tries to brave it out, pretend she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’ll give her a choice: leave Gilead with his help—now, tonight—or be clapped in chains tomorrow morning, a traitor so outrageous she will almost certainly be hung as Hax the cook was hung.
“Mother? ” he calls, still unaware of the shape standing in the shadows behind him. He takes one further step into the room, and now the shape moves. The shape raises its hands. There is something in its hands. Not a gun, Jake can tell that much, but it has a deadly look to it, a snaky look, somehow—
“Roland, watch out!” Susannah shrieks, and her voice is like a magical switch.
There is something on the dressing table—the glass, of course; Gabrielle has stolen it, it’s what she ‘II bring to her lover as a consolation prize for the murder her son prevented—and now it lights as if in response to Susannah’s voice. It sprays brilliant pink light up the triple mirror and casts its glow back into the room. In that light, in that triple glass, Roland finally sees the figure behind him.
“Christ!” Eddie Dean shrieks, horrified. “Oh Christ, Roland! That’s not your mother! That’s—”
It’s not even a woman, not really, not anymore; it is a kind of living corpse in a road-filthy black dress. There are only a few straggling tufts of hair left on her head and there’s a gaping hole where her nose used to be, but her eyes still blaze, and the snake she holds wriggling between her hands is very lively. Even in his own horror, Jake has time to wonder if she got it from under the same rock where she found the one Roland killed.
It is Rhea who has been waiting for the gunslinger in his mother’s apartment; it is the Coos, come not just to retrieve her glam but to finish with the boy who has caused her so much trouble.
“Now, ye trollop’s get!” she cries shrilly, cackling. “Now ye’ll pay!”
But Roland has seen her, in the glass he has seen her, Rhea betrayed by the very ball she came to take back, and now he is whirling, his hands dropping to his new guns with all their deadly speed. He is fourteen, his reflexes are the sharpest and quickest they ‘II ever be, and he goes off like exploding gunpowder.
“No, Roland, don’t!” Susannah screams. “It’s a trick, it’s a glam!”
Jake has just time to look from the mirror to the woman actually standing in the doorway; has just time to realize he, too, has been tricked.
Perhaps Roland also understands the truth at the last split-second— that the woman in the doorway really is his mother after all, that the thing in her hands isn’t a snake but a belt, something she has made for him, a peace offering, mayhap, that the glass has lied to him in the only way it can… by reflection.