The Life Before Her Eyes (6 page)

Sixteen.

They've never heard of the Magna Carta, but they know the intimate secrets of the stars....

Not the stars in the sky...

Alanis Morissette, Leonardo DiCaprio, Madonna, Britney Spears.

"Nate's going to ask you out. He was looking at you today."

"No way!"

"Really ... he was staring straight at you."

"He was probably just staring out the window."

"Well, he was staring out the window, too..."

"My mother just said I have to empty the dishwasher."

"Call me back."

"Okay. Give me fifteen."

"Bye."

"Bye."

I
T WAS A BLESSING AND A CURSE, THE SOUNDS THAT HOUSE
made.

Like all the houses in the neighborhood, their house was over a hundred and fifty years old. Generations of families had lived and died in it.

Despite its echoes and groans, it was a solid house, painted a respectable farmhouse white. It was right in the middle of the nicest neighborhood in Briar Hill, the neighborhood in which the most successful of those associated with the university chose to live, and had since 1816.

Diana had seen black-and-white photographs of those first
academics living in the neighborhood when it was new. They were thin, formal people, it seemed. The clothes they wore looked stiff. They drove carriages instead of Volvos. Diana tried, but always failed, to imagine such people in her garden, in her dining room, in her kitchen at a table, studying their thick books by candlelight at night.

They were so long gone by now that they couldn't even be imagined. Who they were, what they'd known, the things they'd wanted while they were alive, the way they must have felt, as certainly as all people felt, that they would never die.

But here were their houses, still held up by their original hand-hewn beams, inhabited—how briefly!—by strangers.

It was a perfect house ... a dream house! And the fact that every footstep taken in any corner of it echoed through the rest of the house seemed a small price to pay for the perfection.

Maybe even a
part
of the perfection.

Paul and Diana, still in one another's arms, listened to their daughter's footsteps until they stopped at the upstairs bathroom.

"Paul," Diana said then, looking at his face, "I'm so proud of you ... the lecture."

"I have to admit I'm pretty damn pleased with myself," Paul said, grinning and narrowing his eyes, which were the twinkling blue of a boy's, though he was fifty-five years old.

Diana listened again. She said, "Do you hear Emma?"

Paul cocked his head in the direction of the stairs.

"Maybe," he said. "She's in the bathroom. We can still fool around."

He pulled her to him again, one arm locked hard around her hips. He looked behind him as if to double-check that no one was watching. Then he pulled her blouse out of her jeans and
slid his hand up her back, under her black bra to her breast, and squeezed it gently.

They heard the toilet flush upstairs—the sound of water rushing through their house, then away from it—and Paul pulled his hand out from under her bra.

"Look what you did," he said, adjusting the erection inside his khaki pants.

Diana laughed. Her heart was beating hard, like the heart of a teenage girl. They were both flushed.

"Enough of this for now," Diana said, handing Paul a wet sponge. "Go wipe down the table, you devil. We'll finish up this business later."

Paul winked as he left the kitchen, taking the sponge obediently with him.

Diana put the kettle on the stove to boil water for tea. It was a warm-weather tradition. After dinner she and Paul would sip cups of hot orange-spice tea on the front porch, rocking in the wicker rockers while Emma rode her bike up and down the block in the fading light, the streamers on her handlebars whipping as she zipped past.

It was part of the perfect life, the life Diana never for one second took for granted.

Perhaps when she was younger than she now remembered being, she'd imagined the perfect life to be that of a movie star, a lounge club singer. Or maybe she'd imagined a millionaire husband and a penthouse in Manhattan, a limousine taking her from one glamorous party to another. A closetful of sequins. Flashbulbs snapping in her face.

But even then she must have known that
that
wasn't it—

This
was it.

Love. Family. Security.

Tonight they'd drink tea that tasted sweet and bitter at the same time, and in the morning she'd scramble eggs for Emma, drive her to school. A little later she'd go to the community college where she taught. It was the same community college her mother had attended when she was newly divorced and trying to imagine a life for herself, a life with improved computer skills and an associate's degree in something marketable, and bearable.

The irony of that never escaped Diana when she pulled up and parked her car in the faculty parking lot and carried her books and drawing pens into the college.

All those nights she'd been left alone or with her mother's boyfriend or a teenage baby-sitter while her mother went off to night classes at the mysterious college, which was going to change their lives ... Diana was a teacher there now.

The computer skills and the associate's degree, of course,
hadn't
changed their lives. Diana's mother had stayed in the same low-paid clerical position in the philosophy department at the university until she retired.

But those nights...

The teenage girls who baby-sat would let her eat Pop-Tarts for dinner. They'd talk on the phone until Diana fell asleep in front of the television.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
would turn the material world into a place full of magical evil. Diana dreaded that place while understanding too fully that she was already in it.

The baby-sitters would toss the blankets over her, and then she would be wide awake in the dark. When she'd hear her mother's keys jangling outside the apartment door, a hot fluid would spill inside her chest.

"Why do you always cry when I come
home?
" her mother would ask. "Other kids cry when their mothers
leave.
"

Diana always knew, as she parked her minivan in the shadow of that college, that something had happened to her for which she needed to be eternally grateful. Something having to do with luck, with grace. She knew, too, that she'd done things to get this life, to have it ... choices she'd made, words she'd uttered ... images of them in her mind, faded like newspapers left on the front porch of people who'd left town without notifying the paperboy, left in the rain and the sun. Most of the time she couldn't even remember what these sins were, only that they'd been, and now they weren't, and now this life—this perfect life—was hers.

The kettle began a piercing scream, and Diana hurried to the stove and turned the gas off under the water, snuffing the crown of blue thorns and the scream at the same time. But then she heard above her another cry. This one was weaker, farther away. A cry followed by, "
Mama.
"

"Paul?" Diana called. "Emma?"

She hurried out of the kitchen. The sponge she'd handed Paul was on the dining room table, but he was gone.

She ran to the stairs and hurried up them. She stumbled, grabbed the railing, which was polished and slippery in her hand.

"Emma?" she called again.

Her daughter's bedroom door was open, but Emma wasn't in it.

The bathroom door was open, too, and Diana could see Paul's shadow in the hallway, a long shadow cast by the bright fluorescent light—a feature left over from the seventies, that unearthly tube above the sink. They kept meaning to change that fixture but never got around to doing it.

"Oh, honey," she heard her husband mutter. "Oh, sweetheart."

Diana could hear Emma whimper beyond him, a whimper that came from the painful brilliance....

She pushed past Paul into the bathroom, where she saw her daughter crumpled near the toilet, head resting against the porcelain tank, her white blouse and plaid skirt splattered with blood. Blood gushing from her mouth. Blood soaking her blond pigtails.

Diana lurched forward, unable to scream, dropped to her knees beside her daughter, thinking,
I have to stop the bleeding, I have to stop the bleeding—

Then Emma reached over and touched Diana's hand with hers.

It was cold and clammy, her daughter's hand, and Diana gasped and pulled her own away.

That hand—it felt like clay.

There was a smell—cinnamon, nutmeg, curry, or?—

"She's sick," Paul said, looking at Diana pointedly. "Poor thing," he said. "All that linguine."

"Oh," Diana said. "Oh no," she said. She put her hand to her own neck. It seemed to her that the fluorescent tube above the sink surged, briefly, then became even brighter.

"Let's get you cleaned up, honey," Paul said to Emma, reaching past Diana to help his daughter to her feet.

Diana was still on her knees. Frozen in time, in place...

But what time? What place?

It seemed to her that her skin was slipping around on her like that light. Like a gown that was too large, shedding itself brilliantly down her arms. She put her hand to her forehead and tried to
pull herself together.

It was just a headache. She recognized it then. It was the way her headaches arrived. It had been months since she'd had
one, but now she remembered ... the sense of being lifted by pain and brightness away from her body. If she took codeine now and lay down with an ice pack on her temple, by morning she'd be all right.

Emma reached out again and grabbed her mother's hand.

"I don't feel good, Mommy," Emma said weakly.

Diana opened her mouth but couldn't speak. Her own pain was shocking, an electrode at the base of her brain, at the tenderest place, the place where she felt love, had pleasant dreams, stored all the small happy moments of her childhood. A hot white branch inserted into that vulnerable place.

Her daughter's hand gripped her own too hard. It also hurt. Diana tried to pull her hand away, but her daughter just held on more tightly.

"Mommy," Emma said. "I'm sorry I threw up."

"It's okay, baby," Paul said to Emma.

He put the plug in the bathtub drain and started to run warm water into it.

"It's okay, Emma. Isn't it, Mommy?" Paul asked.

He looked at Diana with what she thought was disapproval.

All Diana could do was nod and move her lips as if she were saying yes.

B
OTH
E
MMA AND
D
IANA FELT FINE IN THE MORNING.
There'd been a brief but violent thunderstorm in the middle of the night, and it had left the earth wet. Although Diana told Emma that she could stay home from school, Emma insisted on going. There were only two days of the third grade left that year, and it was Emma's "share day." She'd written a story about one of her dolls—Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth—and was going to take the doll to school and read the story to her class.

On Sunday Diana had typed the story for Emma on Paul's computer, then printed it up on Monday in big bold letters that Emma could read easily. The story Emma told was that Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth had been an orphan living in a convent until Emma found and adopted her. Emma loved Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth, the story professed. The doll's
favorite food was Froot Loops. The story ended,
She wants to be a mommy when she grows up.

The only part of the story Diana had changed was a sentence that read, "Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth HATES math tests and BORING science."

It had seemed a bit inflammatory to Diana. Already Diana felt that Sister Beatrice was a bit suspicious of Paul and herself—the academic and the artist—although Emma was certainly not the only non-Catholic at Our Lady of Fatima Elementary School, the only all-girls school in the area. As the Briar Hill public schools had grown larger and wilder over the years, with regular drug busts and a few isolated but stunning acts of violence, more and more parents were sending their children to the few private schools in town, and Our Lady of Fatima had had a boom in enrollment the likes of which it hadn't seen since the fifties. Emma was certainly not the only non-Catholic, but she might have been one of the few with no religious affiliation at all.

Paul had no interest in religion. He was interested in
thought. Where does the brain stop and the mind begin? If there is such a thing as evil, can there be such a thing as free will?

And although Diana had interest in religion—a vague sense she'd always had, especially at dusk, that there was a presence she might have been able to communicate with if she knew the right words or could find the right place—she had no direction in which to point the interest. Her own mother had never even mentioned religion, and if she'd held any beliefs about what happened beyond this world or what happened after it, she'd kept them to herself. Church, the Bible, Jesus—from the distance at which Diana had caught the occasional glimpse of them—had seemed exotic and vaguely threatening. Secrets.
Rituals. Mysteries. She imagined fog, red velvet, the smell of the baking aisle at the grocery store—black pepper, brown sugar, oregano. Those scents were ones she'd associated with the strangeness of religious belief ever since she'd seen, on one of those Sundays, a little girl in a white lace dress and veil in that aisle at the grocery store, holding the hand of her mother, who was picking out spices.

The girl was no older than Diana herself. But Diana was wearing overalls and a checkered blouse. She'd been going through a farm-girl phase because of a Disney video her mother had bought for her and which she watched every night while her mother read magazines. The heroine of the movie wore overalls, milked cows, and chewed on long pieces of grass, and Diana wanted to be
her...

Until she saw this other girl in the baking aisle.

Diana must have been staring, because the little girl looked at her from behind the veil and said, "I had my first communion today."