The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  But she'd never heard anyone mention the obvious, permeating aroma of sperm diat was released by the trees.

  Diana exhaled in disappointment when she saw the out-of-business sign in the store window.

  Since when?

  She went to the door, anyway, and tried to open it, but it was, of course, locked.

  She read the sign again.

  OUT OF BUSINESS

  Then she put her face to the glass door and peered in.

  It was dark inside, though Diana could see that it was still full of glass gifts. Apparently it hadn't been out of business long enough to sell off the inventory.

  She went over to this window at the front of the store, put her hands around her face to block the sun, and looked.

  The store seemed to be empty of people, but the glass inside appeared dustless. So many clear and fragile things. The light from the sun behind her caused her own shadow to fall inside the store and stretch from the window to a shelf full of exactly the kind of wine glass she'd wanted to have engraved for Paul.

  The wine glasses shone brightly, as if to taunt her.

  Everything in that darkness did.

  It was like looking at the complicated inner workings of a Swiss watch.

  Crystals and brilliance.

  Or the inside of a television. A computer. An ice cave. A pure heart A vacant mind. Heaven...

  Or a hospital laboratory. Hundreds and hundreds of tubes and vials, clean and scrubbed on the shelves.

  Then her shadow moved inside the store. It crossed the wooden floors and reached its hand up and took down one of the wine glasses from the shelf, then turned toward Diana with the glass in its hand.

  Diana began to breathe faster, but she pressed her face closer to the window until she could see what it was:

  Not a shadow, but a young woman. Her face stepped out of Diana's shadow into the light, and she, too, looked startled when she saw Diana.

  The young woman was blond and long-legged and looked enough like Diana to have been her if not for the space of two decades between them. Like Diana, she was wearing a short denim skirt. But she was also wearing a cropped T-shirt, and her midriff was bare. There was a ring in her belly button, and another just above her eyebrow.

  When she saw Diana, the young woman hurried from the shelf to the glass door and unlocked it There was the sound of bells when the door opened.

  "Ma'am? Can I help you?"

  The young woman was much more beautiful than Diana had realized before she saw her closely. Her skin was flawless in the bright light, and so pale that a cool blue vein could be seen at her temple. Her hair was the kind of flat, flaxen blond that looked like a sheet of water in the sun.

  "I was just surprised to see the store was out of business," Diana said. "I was hoping to have something engraved. One of those." Diana nodded at the wine glass in the girl's hand.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "We just closed, like two days ago. They hired me to, like, inventory and clean up."

  "Oh," Diana said. "No chance I could maybe just buy one of those?..." She nodded again at the wine glass in the young woman's hand. "It matches one I bought for my husband some years ago. Maybe I could have it engraved somewhere else."

  The girl looked at the wine glass and then at Diana. "Here," she said, handing it to Diana, "you can have it."

  "Oh, I—" Diana hesitated but she reached out to take the glass, afraid that the girl would let go of it, that it would smash between them on the concrete.

  "It's just a wine glass," the young woman said, as if Diana had mistaken it for something else.

  The girl's teeth were like a string of pearls, so perfect when she smiled. The teeth of someone who'd never sipped coffee or eaten cherry pie. Then she closed the door and locked it.

  Diana carried the wine glass carefully back to the minivan. It seemed so weightless and fragile in her hand, much more so than the one she'd had engraved years before. Maybe it wasn't a match. This glass felt like air, like nothing, in her hand.

  It didn't matter. She'd have it engraved. It was the thought that counted.

  Diana unlocked the passenger's side door to the minivan and placed the wine glass carefully down on the backseat. She had nothing—no tissue paper, no bubble wrap—to protect it with, but she thought she'd just leave it there for now, go to the bookstore and buy a newspaper, read the newspaper at the coffee shop, then come back and wrap the glass in the paper before she drove off to pick up Emma.

  She was just locking the minivan again, opening her purse to fish out a few more coins for the meter, when she saw him out of the corner of her eye.

  Paul.

  It wasn't a coincidence, of course. His office was only a block over from here in a huge white-pillared building called Angel Hall.

  He was walking in the opposite direction of that building and didn't see Diana. He was on the opposite side of the street. He was talking as he strode along the sidewalk ... moving his hands as he did when he was explaining something or was excited. It was one of the first things Diana had been attracted to ... one of the first things she'd noticed about him from the fourth row of the classroom where she sat watching and listening.

  Diana didn't bother with the coins. She looked both ways to make sure no cars were coming, although she was on a one-way street. Then she began to hurry across. She didn't call his name; she wanted to surprise him. She ran toward him across the black river of tar between one curb and the next.

  On the other side her husband was walking down the sidewalk with a girl.

  The girl had short blond hair, cut close to the scalp, and she was wearing a wraparound skirt that reached to about two inches above her knees. It was an exotic Indian pattern of flowers and spiky leaves, henna red with gold thread sewn through the flower petals. As the breeze lifted and parted it, even Diana, from the middle of the road, could see one bare thigh. And a tight black tank top. The girl had large, loose breasts. Her hair was so light and short it glittered, and Diana's husband was smiling, gesturing, looking straight ahead, while the girl with the glittering hair watched the side of his face.

  With one hand the girl played self-consciously with an earring—a long beaded and silver thing. Her other hand was tucked casually into the back pocket of Paul's jeans.

  First, Diana felt the breeze of it.

  Then she saw a glint of sun on chrome.

  But she ignored it, and kept walking.

  The minivan was traveling the wrong way down the one-way street, and it was speeding, which was why Diana never saw it. She heard it first—the squealing of the brakes, the blast of the horn—and smelled burning rubber before she felt it ... something bright exploding against her temple. It sent her flying in the direction from which she'd come. She saw her purse in the air and watched the slow explosion of it—coins and credit cards and blood—land at the curb near her husband's feet.

  Part Four

  Birds

  WHEN SHE OPENED HER EYES AGAIN, DIANA WAS LOOKing into Paul's.

  Behind him an overweight woman who'd been weeping was holding her own upper arms, rocking back and forth. Both the overweight woman and Paul were on their knees.

  "Where is she?" Diana asked.

  "Who?" Paul asked. "Diana. Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

  Diana felt the side of her face, the place where she'd felt the brightness enter her. She expected to feel blood or pain, but there was nothing.

  "Can you sit up?"

  Diana sat up and looked around.

  The minivan that had grazed her looked exactly like her own except that the rearview mirror on the passenger's side had been shattered, and on the bumper there was a sticker that Said CHOOSE LIFE.

  The overweight woman had a purse that looked like Diana's in her lap.

  "Oh, thank god you're all right," the woman said.

  A small group of students was standing on the side of the street Diana had been trying to reach.

  There were about six of them. They were thin and wore dark makeup a
round their eyes. Goths. Diana remembered Goths. In the hierarchy of students at Briar Hill High, Goths had been the lowest, but Diana had always felt an affection for them ... the way they pretended not to hear the insults hurled at them by Jocks and Preps in the hallways, the way they stuck together like a flock of crows in the cafeteria.

  Whether these students were boys or girls, Diana couldn't tell. They were all thin and wore black jeans, black T-shirts. "Who are they?" she whispered to Paul, but he didn't turn to look. He just helped Diana to her feet, brushed off the back of her denim skirt. The overweight woman stood up, too. She handed Diana her purse.

  Diana looked at it.

  It was a tan suede thing with a silver clasp.

  Diana could have sworn she'd seen blood explode from it when the purse hit the curb, but now there was no blood.

  "I gathered up your cards," the woman said. "I think everything's in there."

  Paul was holding on to Diana's arm, but she pulled away from him.

  She wanted to talk to the students on the other side of the street, the ones who had been waiting for her—to ask them what had happened, what had they seen?—but when she looked again, they were already gone.

  "Let go of me," she said to Paul sharply.

  "Diana," he said, "you need to sit down. Come on. You've had a shock"

  "I said let go of me," she said.

  The overweight woman looked from Diana to Paul. She had dry red hair but perfectly smooth skin and very green eyes. She radiated bumbling kindness, like a comical goddess. Her cheeks were still wet with her tears. She said to Paul, "Should we call an ambulance?"

  Paul shook his head.

  "I'm not afraid of being ticketed," the woman said, and she began to weep again. "This is my fault I deserve to be in jail."

  "No," Paul said, not looking at the woman. "She was just grazed. It was just the shock."

  Diana looked at the woman, then at Paul, and said, "I just want to get out of here."

  "Here," Paul said, taking her arm again.

  "I said let go of me,"

  He did, and she turned to walk away from him. He called her name to her back, but she ignored him. The keys to her minivan were inside her purse. She fished them out When she'd unlocked the driver's side, she got in and turned the keys in the ignition, backed up carefully, pulled out of her parking space, and drove away. In the rearview mirror she could see Paul and the overweight woman still standing in the street, which had remained somehow emptied of traffic. They watched her go.

  Diana trembled as she drove, and her vision was blurred.

  It seemed to her that the parked cars, the pedestrians, the storefronts and speed limit signs were being passed at an incredible speed, but when she looked at the speedometer, she saw that she was driving only twenty-five miles an hour. When a woman pushing a stroller stepped off the curb, Diana swerved, honked, and missed hitting the baby in the stroller by what seemed to her to be only inches—though she could see the mother's face clearly as she passed, and the mother looked calm, curious, but unconcerned—and the lurching as she swerved sent the wine glass Diana had left in the backseat flying onto the floor of the minivan.

  She glanced behind her.

  The stem had cracked neatly away from the bowl.

  When she looked in the rearview mirror again, Diana could see the mother watching her drive away. That mother was younger than Diana and closer than she appeared, fading and miniaturized in the mirror.

  They take turns sleeping over at each other's mothers' apartments.

  One girl sleeps on the inflatable mattress on the floor at the foot of the other girl's twin bed. Mostly they lie awake in their places in the darkness and talk. Sometimes they start to laugh so hard they have to put pillows over their faces so they won't wake one of their mothers, asleep in the next room...

  She has to go to work in the morning.

  They laugh about Nate. The day they saw him outside the CD shop. How they'd been too nervous and awed to stop, to say a word to him.

  "In the fall," one of the girls says—the one who is still a virgin—"in the fall I'm just going to walk straight up to him and say, 'How about going for a drive with me, Nate?'"

  "Go, girl," the other says. But it makes her nervous, this innocence in her friend. There's more to it, she wants to tell her. There's...

  They laugh about Mr. McCleod. The teenage skeleton he's in love with. They laugh about Sandy Ellsworth, who came to school so stoned one afternoon that during gym she started up a conversation with a punching bag.

  "No way!" says the one who wasn't there.

  "I swear to god. She bumped into the punching bag, and she turned around, and she was, like, Watch where you're going, asshole. I was here first,' but then she started to mellow out and she was, like, Do you know what we're supposed to be doing right now?' and she just stood there like the punching bag was going to answer."

  "Wow," the other one says. From where she lies on the floor, the ceiling of her friend's bedroom is glossy with darkness, and far away. She can hear her friend's poodle, Muppet, snoring quietly on the twin bed above her. "Wow. That girl is going to have a serious brain cell shortage when she's middle-aged."

  "If she lives that long."

  The subject of Sandy Ellsworth's future makes them think about their own.

  They try out different ones—colleges, husbands, children, careers.

  The names of the children change from one future to the next.

  Tricia, Allison, Emma, Irene ... girls.

  Jeffrey, Kyle, Cody, Logan ... boys.

  But none of the names ever seems quite tight.

  Nor do the futures. Though there is one out there waiting for each of them, two futures tucked away somewhere with their names on them—futures which, when they come, will seem right, will seem like the inevitable futures, the ones everything they'd ever thought and done had led them to blindly—right now they can't begin to imagine them.

  DIANA PULLED UP IN FRONT OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA just as the school bell rang.

  The orange double doors burst open, and a chaos of windbreakers and pumping legs flew out. In the colorful fragments, Diana couldn't see her daughter, but it was often that way. She'd stare at the pieces of this scene on the hill outside her daughter's elementary school until Emma's image emerged from it, sharp-angled and perfectly clear, running toward the waiting minivan.

  Diana watched.

  Here and there she could make out the face of a little girl she recognized. A girl with terrible red hair and skin so pale she looked as if she'd been dug up. A blond girl with glasses, a girl who'd once come to the house to play with Emma before she'd narrowed her friends down to only Sarah Ann Salerno and Mary Olivet, who were both dark.

  The blond girl, Diana seemed to remember, couldn't eat ice cream because she was allergic to milk products. Diana had run out to the store to buy Popsicles...

  Now that blond girl stumbled and fell on the concrete steps that led down the hill, away from the school.

  Diana inhaled sharply. The girl had only fallen down one step, and she appeared to be unhurt, but it could have been worse. Those stairs, Diana realized, had no railing. They were dangerous. Something ought to be done ... a strict rule that the girls could not run down those stairs after school. She would speak to Sister Beatrice about it right away.

  When the little blond girl tried to stand back up, another girl, running past her, knocked her back down, and the blond girl's backpack slipped down her arm, and a book and some pencils spilled out.

  When the little blond sat up to try to retrieve one of the books, another girl bumped into her, and she fell forward again, and suddenly there were even more girls pouring out from between the double doors, chattering and skipping and running down the concrete steps, oblivious to the one who'd fallen. She'd never seen so many girls exit the school at the end of the day. Where had they come from? The little girl who'd fallen would be trampled.

  Diana got out of the minivan and started to hurry
toward her. Was she imagining it, or did the child have blood on the side of her face now?

  She ran into the sea of little girls, against the tide of little girls galloping and screaming down the concrete steps, oblivious. She tried to be gentle as she pushed them out of her way, hurrying toward the blond girl who had by now been knocked to her side, who wasn't moving at all.

  There was blood on her face.

  She was only a few feet from the girl when an older, taller girl smacked directly into Diana, and it knocked the wind out of her. She put her hand to her chest and had to stop running, had to stand, without breathing, on the steps as the girls parted around her, not even glancing at her.

  Diana swallowed, trying not to panic. She knew that the breath would come back. This had happened before. Once, she'd been running on the playground, chasing another girl, and she'd tripped and fallen down flat in the grass...

  It had seemed to her then, lying in the emerald grass unable to breathe, that she lived a whole lifetime waiting for her breath to come back. That time, she hadn't known that it ever would come back. A small group of children had gathered around her, and their faces were pale and featureless and inconsequential above her. There was nothing they could do, Diana realized. They, like her, were made of nothing more material than clouds. If she couldn't catch her breath again, they would simply disappear....

  Diana looked up at the sky now, as she had then, and it was full of glitter.

  It was as if it were snowing in the middle of June.

  Or was she looking so closely now, in this moment between one breath and the next, that she could see the atoms, see the molecules out of which everything had been made?

  Then the glitter seemed to shake itself out like a sheet in the breeze, and Diana's breath came back to her in one cool stab that entered her like light and was scented with yeast, curry, cloves ...life. When she looked up to the place she'd been trying to reach on the concrete stairs, there was no one there.

  All of the girls had gone, and the blond girl who'd fallen was also gone.

  "Mommy?" she heard Emma say.