When Rosie McMorrow was a student at St. Christopher's Roman Catholic School, she'd brought home report cards filled to the brim with 'A's. She looked up to the nuns and believed, with all her heart, that God loved her and mommy and daddy. He loved the whole world, for heaven's sake. Somewhere along the road, though, Rosie discovered that she'd mislaid her belief.

Or maybe her belief had just been chipped away, like shards of granite under a sculptor's chisel. Beginning the day her father was hit by an oil refinery tanker truck as he headed home one Tuesday morning from Murphy's Bar. Her mother had been forced to move herself and her only child out of their immaculate three bedroom bungalow into a creepy basement apartment next to the railway tracks. Rosie was in high school by then. Sitting in classrooms filled with pimply boys and preening beauty queens. Doing her homework listlessly in the dingy kitchen, alone, while her mother sewed dresses down the street at Hunter's Fabric Shop. Rosie dreamed at night that she was sleeping in the arms of a nun on a yellow school bus. She'd awake, shaken and edgy, convinced that she'd been pulled straight through glass into an alternative universe. Her marks at high school were dismal. Gray C's and D's that wouldn't get her anywhere in the world.

"Why don't you have any friends, Rosie?" her mother once asked.

"Don't know," Rosie shrugged. No use telling her that she was too embarassed to bring anyone into their dark, damp rooms whose walls thundered every time a train went by. Or that she couldn't even begin to explain to anyone why her mother took so many pills and drank gin. She just kept her head down, stayed out of everyone's way and resigned herself to waiting for whatever was going to happen next.

Rosie graduated on a Friday. She took the commuter train into Toronto first thing Monday morning and landed herself a job typing forms for an insurance company. Sixteen pay cheques, she promised herself. In thirty two weeks, mom and I can afford to move and life will become brighter.

But her mother missed out on the brightness. During the fourteenth week, Rosie came home from work and found her fallen, for the last time, on the living room floor. Surrounded by half empty bottles of Valium and booze.

Father Emmanuel droned on at the funeral mass. Rosie could not hear words. The sounds in her head that day were of crumbling rock …

Rosie lives alone now in a sunny one-bedroom apartment, above a twenty-four hour laundromat in a 1950s strip mall. The sounds that fill Rosie's apartment are the occasional slam of a dryer door and the gentle swish of dirty clothes in sudsy wash water. Rosie likes the sounds of laundry. They lull her to sleep at night.

Rosie has no friends, although there was a boy once. She met Garrett in the laundromat and didn't say no when he offered to carry her bag of clean clothes up to her apartment. They sat in the living room and talked about books. He'd read Jane Eyre. That, and the clear blue of his eyes, made her believe that what his hands were saying as he lifted her blouse and touched her lonely skin was the truth.

Garrett stayed with her and when he left her bed, late on Sunday afternoon, Rosie was happy. But he never came back. Not to the laundromat and certainly not to Rosie's apartment. Rosie finally came to grips with the real truth. In her circle, everybody left. She'd been abandoned by her parents, by Garrett and, ultimately, by God. The nuns had been lying. What a shame, she thought, that she hadn't figured this out sooner.

A speeding truck in the dark could end it all. Or a load of pills washed down with alcohol. But hopeless as things appear to be for Rosie, she is unable to completely let go of hope. A ray of sunshine snaking across her bedroom in the morning still makes her smile. She has a suspicion that something good will happen, sometime.

So Rosie adopts a ceaseless routine while she waits. Each weekday morning, she rides the train into Toronto to work and comes back again at night, content that they will keep giving her a bi-weekly pay cheque.

On Saturday mornings, Rosie rolls her laundry into a cloth bag and takes it down to the laundromat. While her clothes wash, she does her grocery shopping at the A&P across the street. In the ten years since her mother died, Rosie hasn't bothered writing out a grocery list - she buys the same food in order to prepare the same meals every day, every week.

Methodically, she walks home with her groceries, climbs the steep flight of stairs to her apartment and put everything neatly away in her kitchen cupboards. Then she heads back down the stairs to tend the laundry. While her clothing dries, Rosie picks up a copy of the weekend newspaper from the mall's variety store and reads it, slowly and carefully, making sure she appears engrossed enough in its contents that no on dare speak to her. She does not want anyone to interrupt her self-imposed detachment. Rosie believes that if she keeps her head down and stays out of everyone's way, she will become worthy. Happiness could be attracted by maintaining a carefully ordered, calm and uncluttered world.

One Friday evening, returning home from work, Rosie unlocks her apartment door and bends to pick up a folded piece of white paper from the floor. Frowning, she opens it. An eviction notice ordering her to vacate the apartment by the end of the month. Due to a planned re-development, there would soon be nothing left of the old strip mall but a pile of rubble which would, in its turn, be replaced by a larger structure - a new shopping plaza containing a fully-computerized bowling facility.

Rosie stands in her open doorway, staring into her living room. She had lined it with shelves filled to the brim with books. Their coloured spines glow in the late afternoon sunshine - crimson and pale mauve, grey, yellow and blue. Normally, they comfort her as expensive oil paintings re-assure the wealthy. That day, though, they do not calm her..

'Where will I go?' she wonders. 'How will I move my things?' She shuts the door and goes in to sit at the kitchen table.

Elbows on the table, head cupped in her hands, Rosie thinks for long hours into the night. This was not the positive development she had imagined would enter her world. It was not a solution. Wrong. So terribly wrong … Rosie hasn't shed a tear for a very long time and isn't quite ready to indulge in them now and when she finally goes to bed, it takes her a long time to get to sleep.

She awakens at an unfamiliarly late hour the next morning. In her bathroom, she stares at her reflection in the mirror. Her face is not beautiful but she didn't think she was ugly. Her eyes - deep brown rimmed by long, dark lashes tipped with blonde - stare back. Her skin is clear and pale. Rosie gently touches the feathery wrinkles around her eyes and around her thin lips. With a white cotton facecloth, she covers her face, scrubbs it hard. She feels restless, unsettled. And, she realizes, she looks old. Much older than thirty three. Rosie notices a change in her heart's rhythm. She looks just like her mother. The way her mother had been in the weeks before her death.

Without even thinking about doing her regular Saturday morning laundry or going grocery shopping, Rosie dresses. She grabs her purse and leaves the apartment without eating breakfast. In the hot morning, she walks along streets she hasn't walked since she was a good Catholic girl. Small trickles of dampness snake down her back beneath her T-shirt. She doesn't feel it and isn't even aware that her face, also, is streaked with moisture. Rosie cries silently as she walks and travels many kilometres before she finally stops. She stands on a street corner and wipes her eyes with a Kleenex.

She'd stopped right across the street from St. Christopher's church. In the church's parking lot, there were more than twenty tables set up, spread with junk - old two-slice toasters, heaps of clothing, worn toys, outmoded kitchen gadgets. When the light turns green, Rosie crosses to stand closer to the bazaar.

Behind one of the vendor's tables, stood a very old man with brown wrinkled skin, like a shrivelled winter apple doll. As he picked his teeth with a bent wooden toothpick, he gazed out over the parking lot through clear blue eyes. Wisps of sparse grey hair stuck out of his dirty, navy blue baseball cap. He looks straight at Rosie and grins.

"Come on over here," he calls, waving his bent toothpick. "Come on and see what I have for you!"

Rosie looks behind her, sure he was talking to someone else.

"You mean me?" she asked, looking back at the old man.

The old man nods. "You betcha, missie. Lookie here."

Behind his table, propped against a wire mesh fence that separated the church from a car dealership, Rosie sees a large painting framed in warm brown wood. As she comes closer, Rosie realizes that it is not a painting. It's a mirror, covered in dust. Rosie bends down to look at the mirror more closely. It was so clouded that nothing reflected off its dirty surface. She runs her finger across it, traces the sheer edges of a thin diagonal crack.

A small voice whispers inside of Rosie. This. This is what she has been so patiently waiting for, it insists. She stands uncertainly for a moment and then says to the old man, "I'll take it. How much?"

The mirror weighs too much for Rosie to carry alone. The old man offers to help her take it to the curb where Rosie flaggs down a taxi. For an extra $10 above the fare, the taxi driver - grumbling all the way up the stairs - carries the mirror into Rosie's apartment.

The mirror quickly mesmerizes Rosie. It dominates the apartment, leaning ponderously back against the centre bookcase. Rosie cleans it as best she can with paper towels soaked in Windex and sits in front of it, gazing into its cracked, murky surface. Saturday's sun goes down while Rosie remains spellbound in front of the mirror. She sits perfectly still, entranced by this strange new accessory, until she sees something moving. Wavy lines bobbed up and down, crossing and uncrossing. A low drumming reverberates in Rosie's head. She can't tell if the noise is coming from the mirror or if the mirror is merely reflecting the sound of her pounding heart.

Although Rosie isn't aware of what time it was, it happens in the early hours of Sunday morning. The pattern of moving lines disappear, giving way to a slow clearing of the mirror's surface. The sound in Rosie's head changes from drumming to clanging. Bells go off in her brain. The noise hurts. She closes her eyes against the intense, stabbing pain until it fades away, leaving a residue of faint electric crackling in the air. She opens her eyes. The mirror is now unclouded, its covering suddenly crystalline and shimmeringly clear.

There is an eerie silence, broken only by Rosie's sharp intake of breath. There is a picture in the mirror. A room. It is not her room, not a reflection of her apartment. It is a stranger's room, full of large pieces of furniture - overstuffed wing chairs, a love seat upholstered in heavy fabric, mahogany end tables and lamps with ornate shades.

There iss no one in the room. It is very tidy, perfectly appointed as if arranged for display purposes by an interior decorator. A porcelain vase filled with pink and white roses sits on a table in one corner of the room. Just past the table, there is a closed door.

Nothing else happens for many hours. Late on Sunday morning, Rosie drags herself away from the mirror. She follows her persistently growling stomach into the kitchen where she toasts two pieces of bread and eats them standing at the counter.

She pours a large glass of milk and takes it into the living room. Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the mirror, Rosie drinks the glass of milk and resumes her intense examination of the stranger's room. The door inside the room is now ajar. A pair of reading glasses were now resting on one of the end tables.

Rosie breathes deeply and slowly. She stares very hard at the mirror. She hears the sound of footsteps - steady, measured footsteps. The sound stops. With a sharp creak, the door opens. A young man walks into the room.

The man does not look up from the open book he holds in his hands. He kicks the door shut behind him, walks over to sit in one of the wing chairs, reaches for his eyeglasses.

Rosie gasps. The man puts on his glasses and looks up. His gaze bores straight into Rosie's. He puts his book down on the table, stands and walks toward her. As he comes closer, Rosie moves back until she feels her bottom touch the rear wall of her living room. The man peers through the mirror, a frown creasing his face. His clear blue eyes sweep the expanse of Rosie's living room.

"Hello? Who's there?" he asks.

Rosie holds her breath. Trying to make her trembling body very small, she presses harder against the wall and wills herself to be very still. More than anything, she desperately wants to scream, to run.

Not having received an answer to his query, the man shakes his head and moves away from the mirror. Rosie hears him mumble to himself but can't understand his words. The man begins to walk out of the room. Rosie slumps and whispers, "Wait."

The man stops. Turns. "Rosie?"

Wide-eyed, Rosie answers, "Yes?"

He walks closer and places his palm against his side of the mirror. "Touch me."

Rosie slowly approaches the mirror. Lifts her hand and presses it against the mirror. She feels liquid heat.

"I've been waiting."

"Who are you?"

The man smiles. "Your saviour. Kiss me."

Rosie closes her eyes and kisses the man in the mirror. She feels rain in her hair, on her face, under her feet. When she opens her eyes, she is standing on tapestry and can smell roses.

"But … how …? I'm wet …"

"Come with me, Rosie," the man says, putting his arm around her shoulder. "We'll find you a towel."

"I'm dreaming."

"No. You have just walked into your truth. It's always been here. Waiting." And he takes her through the door into a sunlit hallway. "You just weren't looking in the right place, that's all."

When the corporation that owned the strip mall was unable to reach Rosie by telephone to learn her moving date, they sent one of their staff over to check the apartment. No one answered the repeated, heavy knocks at Rosie's door.

They discovered that Rosie's employer had filed a missing person's report. A constable was present when representatives from the corporation entered her apartment. There were toast crumbs on a plate in the kitchen and half a glass of soured milk on the living room floor in front of an old mirror. The police dusted for prints, interrogated all of the neighbours. But no one knew anything. Rosie was never seen again. She became a cold case. Her belongings were sold off at auction and the building was torn down.

In a basement crawl space, several blocks away from the Bowlerama, there is an old mirror with a brown wooden frame, two thin cracks creasing its dusty surface. Waiting.