The Life Before Her Eyes (3 page)

She inhaled after what seemed like a long time and smelled something familiar but out of place in the air ... the smell of the baking-supplies aisle at the grocery store. Spices, flour, crushed dry leaves.

I am in hell.

It could have meant,
I'm in love with a married man. My husbands cheating on me. I'm a shoplifter, a heroin addict, a pathological liar ... guilty conscience, physicalpain, mental illness, spiritual crisis. I'm in hell.

What difference did it make? Whatever it was, she didn't want to hear it.

Maybe, she thought to herself, maybe she was tired of the radio altogether ... these bodiless complaints traveling on the breeze, over lakes and playgrounds and cemeteries, to ask for help from strangers. So many souls in pain. They were all in hell, Diana thought, except that...

"Mommy?"

Diana hadn't seen her come out of the double doors or run down the green hill, but there her daughter was beside her in the front seat, looking prettily fresh, out of breath, utterly innocent.

"What's wrong, Mommy?" Emma asked.

Her eyes were pale blue and wide. Diana could see herself in them, looking twenty years younger than she was. No wrinkles in those little pools, no laugh lines. Just two tiny watery faces that had once belonged to her.

Diana looked away, shifted into reverse, glanced behind her in the rearview mirror.

"Nothing," Diana said. "You just scared me, that's all."

Emma said nothing. She looked at her own bare knees.

Diana pulled into the street, trying to drive slowly, but the two tons of steel and upholstery she was maneuvering out of the school's circular drive seemed only vaguely under her control. She'd never been a good driver, though she'd also never had an accident. Only terrible caution accounted for that. Back when she was a teenager, when she should have been learning to drive, she wasn't allowed to take driver's ed, because the semester it was offered she'd been caught with a Baggie of marijuana in her purse at school.

It was a red suede purse with a bit of fringe, and when her homeroom teacher, Mrs. Mueler, made her open it so she could look inside, it held the Baggie of marijuana, two tampons, a condom, a pack of matches, and a little billfold with a twenty in it.

Mrs. Mueler had smelled pot on her—that sweet weediness that lingered in Diana's long hair. She was fed up with girls like Diana, who was sent to the principal's office, but that wasn't enough for Mrs. Mueler. She demanded a list of restrictions, and driver's ed was one of them.

Finally it had been Diana's best friend, Maureen, who'd taught her to drive. Maureen had an old Honda Civic her father had given to her, and Maureen let Diana drive it around and around in circles in the mall parking lot on Sunday nights in the summer. Diana was just getting the hang of driving when—

"Shit!" she gasped, and slammed on the brakes and the horn at the same time.

She'd come within inches of the bumper of the minivan in front of hers, which had stopped suddenly to avoid hitting a little girl who'd dashed into the drive.

CHOOSE LIFE,
a sticker on the bumper said.

"Jesus Christ!" Diana shouted.

"Mommy," Emma said. There was no judgment in it, just surprise.

Diana looked at her daughter.

Emma. Briefly, she'd forgotten. Emma's face was a parody of a pretty girl's, shocked. Rosebud pout. Pink cheeks. Her mouth was open. It was a dazzling little cave, dark red but glittering with pearls.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," Diana said. "I..."

She'd never sworn in front of her daughter before. It was one of her personal, cardinal rules. Her own mother had never watched her language around Diana. She'd felt free to yell, "Asshole!" at other drivers while Diana rode beside her in their battered Ford, to say, "Fuck you," to phone solicitors before she slammed down the receiver, to call Diana's father a bastard to anyone who would listen, including his daughter.

Throughout Diana's youth she herself had cursed reflexively, thoughtlessly, and it had been one of the many things that had brought trouble upon her, or so it had seemed to her
after
the trouble, after she'd emerged from that staticky white space where she'd lived with her guilt and regret for a long time, pondering the trouble and what it was she'd done to bring it upon herself....

So, profanity was one of the first to go when she began to shed her bad habits. She'd not even sworn out loud to herself in ... what?...A decade? Two?

She swerved around the minivan in front of her own and into the road. The driver, who was the mother of one of Emma's friends, honked angrily. In the silence inside herself Diana heard her own younger voice say, "
Go to hell,
" before she'd taken even a single second to think about it.

S
HE'D CALMED BACK INTO HERSELF BEFORE THEY EVEN
turned the corner to their neighborhood, which was a bright tunnel of green glass that afternoon. She was breathing evenly, and her heart had slowed to its normal
thrum-thrum, thrum-thrum.
She was herself again. Diana McFee. Wife. Mother. Content
woman-of-a-certain-age.

The phrase amused her. She couldn't remember where she'd heard it, or why it had stuck in her mind. But now it was
her...
mother to a lovely little girl, wife of a respected professor, the woman she'd dreamed of becoming, whether or not she'd known it was her dream.

Perhaps, for a while, she'd had a different dream. Maybe she'd dreamed of being a model. She'd had the legs for it. And the high cheekbones. The teeth ... she could have had them fixed. When she was young, she'd go into department stores
and the sales people would say, "You should be a model," and she'd think,
Maybe someday.

But time had passed with the sound of doors closing behind her—car doors, revolving doors, sliding glass doors, automatic doors—and she realized that the dream of being a model or a movie star was the kind of dream you might be able to take out of high school with you, driving a red convertible fast into your twenties. But after thirty, those dreams were dead.

That red convertible. You couldn't be a forty-year-old woman driving a red convertible.
This
dream—the silver minivan, the daughter, the sparkling clapboard house—was the dream worth having.

When Diana McFee drove past Briar Hill High School, as always, she didn't look in the direction of the memorial to the victims, the bronzed angel with its wings spread and bearing the names of the twenty-four students and two teachers who had been killed....

Both girls are half asleep in the droning of Mr. McCleod's voice as he reads from the textbook to them.

Next to Mr. McCleod, the skeleton hangs in her absurdity, wearing a green bikini, holding a rose in her grim smile.

Twenty-two teenagers in the room, and no one makes a sound. Outside, it's pouring rain strangely icy for May, and it makes the classroom smell like the humid, private alcoves of the human body—crotches, underarms, the place where the shoulder meets the neck.

Never again in their lives will twenty-two strangers know one another as intimately as they do in this classroom. Passengers on a ship lost at sea for four years.

One of the girls rouses herself from her half-sleep and writes a note to the other. The note is about Nate Witt:

What's his best body part?

The note has to pass from Ryan Haslip to Melanie Burt to Nate himself, who passes it over to Michael Patrick without seeming, for even a second, to imagine that the note concerns him, concerns the great charge he sends off in two directions from the center of that classroom where he slumps and stares at the ceiling and thinks his brooding, magnetic, mysterious thoughts.

Lips,
the other writes under her friend's question, and the note begins its journey back.

Mr. McCleod looks up from his textbook and sees Michael Patrick handing a folded piece of paper to Diana Allen.

He rises from his gunmetal desk and intercepts the note before Diana Allen can take it from Michael Patrick's hand.

Mr. McCleod's yellow fingers unfold it, trembling. He reads the note, tucks it into his shirt pocket, returns to his desk, to the open book on it, and begins to read from it again.

He says nothing about the note.

Mr. McCleod, however, has blushed.

I
T WAS BREATHTAKING, THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN
J
UNE.

The shade trees that lined Maiden Lane were hundreds of years old. They leaned gracefully over the road like brides bent under the weight of their veils, and the sun pouring through them cast a strange green light that was only here and there broken by a blinding crack of brilliance. Those cracks left dark black slashes across Diana's vision until she blinked a few times or rubbed her eyes.

She needed sunglasses, she thought. In the Midwest it was never until summer that one thought to buy a new pair of sunglasses.

"Honey-bunny?" she said to Emma, who'd been riding beside her in silence, staring out the passenger's side window.

Diana patted her daughter's knee.

It was an oddly cold, sharp knee. Emma was so little, yet she was growing swiftly. It was as though her bones were growing too fast for her flesh to keep pace, as if they were close to being exposed beneath the soft, stretched skin. That skin was so familiar to Diana, it might as well have been her own. In a way, it was her own. Emma had come out of her body wearing that skin one afternoon eight years before.

But the bones ... Diana didn't know her daughter's bones the way she knew her skin. When Emma was a baby, her bones had seemed soft and lost inside her skin. Impossible to imagine. Like the skeleton of a cloth doll, like scaffolding inside a cloud.

But now Emma was more like a toy poodle than a baby. A softness full of edges.
Muppet ...
who was Muppet? Diana remembered, suddenly, someone's dog in her lap, quivering and full of bones.

Muppet.

Muppet was Maureen's dog. He had gray fur and smelled like corn chips. Maureen used to take him in her lap and press her face into the fur. The dog had brown tearstains in the corners of its eyes, and when it wasn't quivering in Maureen's lap, it was lying on the floor and licking its penis or growling at the crack under the front door when people passed in the hallway of the apartment building where Maureen lived with her mother.

Something ran into the road fast, and on four legs, and Diana swerved. A red blur—

Fucking squirrel.

Though she swerved, the squirrel ran straight under the minivan, and Diana instinctively closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw the squirrel dash straight up a skinny sapling on the other side of the street. The tree shivered with the frantic weight of it, and the squirrel seemed to turn in the branches and watch Diana drive away. That squirrel's death. It would be back.

Diana exhaled, put her hand to the side of her face, and looked at Emma.

Fucking squirrel.

At least Diana hadn't said it out loud.

"Squirrel," Diana explained. She was shaking. Her heart was beating hard.

"Did we kill it?" Emma asked.

"No," Diana said. "It made it to the other side."

Emma nodded.

She hadn't seen it. Maybe she didn't even believe that there had been a squirrel. Emma was the kind of child who would weep if she saw a dead raccoon at the side of the road. She'd
never been
in a vehicle that had actually struck and killed an animal. Diana could only guess what her reaction would have been.

She drove a little slower.

Her palms were sweaty on the steering wheel, and the green light hurt her eyes.

Again she patted her daughter's cold knee.

Emma didn't look at her.

"Sweetie?" Diana said. "Look at me."

Emma turned obediently to look at her mother. Those blue eyes.

Whose were they?

Hers?

Her mother's?

Diana felt she was being appraised by them, dispassionately but with clarity. The swearing, the swerving, it must have made quite an impression on little Emma, who had never sat so still and quiet on the drive home after school.

Diana cleared her throat, still looking into her daughter's eyes, which were a paler blue than the sky, but made of the same substance as sky.

"Honey," Diana said, "I'm sorry if I was acting funny, and said bad words. I don't know what was the matter with me!"

She smiled at her daughter, and Emma smiled back. It was a small smile, but it indicated forgiveness. Diana felt a rush of something as fast and reflexive and helpless as that squirrel in the road. It had to do with love, of course, but love for her daughter didn't come in rushes. This had to do with the great, unexpected
mercy
of love. That tiny, unemotional but infinitely pardoning smile on her daughter's face...

She swallowed, and the feeling passed.

"Mommy," Emma said with her usual brightness. "Don't forget about the zoo. You're driving aren't you? Remember? The whole third grade is going to the zoo."

"Oh, my gosh," Diana said. "I almost did forget. When?"

"Not tomorrow," Emma said. "The next day. Friday. Our last day of school."

Emma leaned over and pulled a Xerox of a permission slip out of her Snow White backpack. Right under her name,
Emma McFee,
which Diana had written on her backpack in indelible black ink, Snow White had a little bluebird perched on her finger. It was an image that was burned into Diana's brain from her own girlhood. It had seemed to her, at Emma's
age, the very image of purity, of girlhood ... to be able to hold a bird that close to your face and to speak to it in such a hushed sweet voice that the bird would be enchanted, that the bird would lean closer to hear your soft song instead of flying away.

Even then it had been an old image. It had already endured much, but here it was on her daughter's backpack, born again.

At the bottom of the permission slip, which Diana had already signed—she recognized her own handwriting, loopy and girlish, which hadn't changed since she was in junior high—it said
I can drive
beside a box that was to be checked off by the willing parent, who was, in this case, Diana.