The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  But they also don't want to find themselves alone in the mall again, wandering through the ridiculous echoes of it.

  HOTTEST SUMMER ON RECORD, the headlines say.

  One of the girls can see the backyards of her neighbors from her mother's sliding glass patio door. There's an aqua blue pool foil of water down there. It shivers in the sunlight ... watery ribbons like brain waves being measured on the surface.

  The houses below her are empty all day.

  No one swims in that pool.

  There are no cars in the driveways.

  She can see it all from behind the sliding glass.

  "We could go to the public pool," the other one suggests from her end of the phone line.

  "No way. All those little kids."

  "But what if we get caught?"

  "We'll get yelled at."

  "I guess you're right. Nobody goes to jail for swimming in the neighbor's pool."

  "ARE YOU OKAY?" PAUL ASKED. "I'VE BEEN WORRIED sick."

  "I'm fine," Diana said, touching the place at her temple where the mirror had hit her. There was nothing there. Not even a tender spot. She was fine. She would be fine. The girl she thought she'd seen him walking with, the one with her hand tucked into his back pocket, now that she was here again, face-to-face with her husband, she knew she'd been wrong.

  Lately she was often mistaken about what she'd seen and what was really there.

  Hormones.

  Or maybe her eyes. Maybe she needed not only sunglasses but glasses.

  Maybe she should see a doctor.

  Paul smiled as if he were relieved.

  Then they heard the scream.

  It came from the kitchen—a piercing wail—and they both ran toward it. Paul got to the screen door first, and the door slammed behind him before Diana reached it For a moment she saw everything in the kitchen through the screen ... all of it broken up into molecules, all of it made up of microscopic pieces that could have been taken apart by a physicist and exploded or rearranged.

  Emma had dropped her Snow White backpack and was standing with her back to the kitchen counter. One hand was covering her mouth, and Diana could see her eyes. They were large and frightened.

  "What?" Paul yelled, taking Emma by the shoulders and shaking her gently. He sounded more annoyed than concerned, Diana thought.

  She hurried up behind him and pulled him away from Emma.

  "Sweetheart, what's the matter?" Diana asked. She took the hand gently away from her daughter's mouth. Her lips were still blue.

  Emma began to shake her head. "No," she said, and tears started in her eyes. "No, no, no."

  She pointed to the water and food dishes Diana had left beside the refrigerator for the cat Both dishes were empty.

  "What?" Paul snapped, also looking at the dishes.

  "I saw it," Emma said. She continued to shake her head. Her blond hair whisked in brilliant strands around her face. The sun was low in the sky outside, preparing to set, and it streamed in through the kitchen window over the sink and lit up each hair on Emma's head and also illuminated the billion specks of dust that swirled around them always, usually invisible—the galaxies and universes that surrounded them all the time, the vast stretches of stars amid which they breathed and ate without noticing at all.

  "It's not Timmy," Emma said. She began to sob and then sank to the floor, crossed her legs, and buried her face in her hands. She rocked back and forth, lit up from behind and surrounded by so many dry little stars, and wailed louder.

  Paul got down on the kitchen floor and pulled Emma's hands away from her face, then pulled her to her feet. Emma swung an arm at him, which hit him squarely in the chest. He held more tightly to her shoulders, and then she started to kick.

  "It's not Timmy!" she screamed. "Get it out of here. Get it out of here!"

  "Of course it's not Timmy," Paul shouted over her screaming. "Timmy's dead. It's just another black stray."

  He dropped Emma's shoulders and turned, narrowing his eyes at Diana accusingly. "Did you tell her that the cat was Timmy?"

  "No," Diana said defensively. "Of course I didn't tell her—"

  The cat sauntered into the kitchen then, looking at them calmly, unmoved by the commotion, and glanced down at its empty dishes.

  Emma cringed and covered her eyes with her hands again, screaming, "Get it out of here."

  Then, as if to taunt her, the cat padded across the kitchen floor to Emma, bowed its glossy head, and rubbed its ears against her ankle socks.

  Emma opened her mouth, and this time nothing came out She sagged a little. She looked down at the animal rubbing its face on the top of her feet, at her ankles. It was purring wetly, and Diana thought Emma was calming down, that she was seeing the cat for what it was, or wasn't...

  But then she sank entirely, mouth still open, blue lips parted, dropping to the kitchen floor, and such a terrible cry came from so deep inside of her that Diana had to cover her ears.

  Dust

  BESIDE HER IN THE DARK PAUL COULD HAVE BEEN anyone.

  She could have been anyone.

  She'd changed the sheets after dinner, so there wasn't even the familiar smell of their bodies. Instead there was the scent of fabric softener, powdered flowers. Paul turned the light back on beside the bed and said, "Diana, we have to talk."

  Diana reached across his body and turned the light back off.

  "Diana," he protested.

  "We don't need the light on to talk," she said.

  Paul sank back into his pillow. In front of her eyes Diana saw flaming cups and saucers where the lamplight had branded stuttering images of itself on her retinas as she'd blinked into it.

  She closed her eyes and they appeared on her eyelids ... burning cups and saucers drifting backward into a dark garden of powdered flowers.

  A hellish tea party, a tea party in hell.

  "About today...," Paul started. "Did you see the girl—?"

  He interrupted himself. Diana said nothing. The bedroom ■windows were open. It was a warm night, full moon. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could see the moonlight sifting into their room through the window screen. The sheer white curtains had turned to ephemeral pillars in the stillness, filled with moonlight. From her studio where she'd shut him up for the night with his food and water, Diana could hear Timmy yowling to get out It was a cat's kind of night—balmy, bright, full of shadows and whispers and the smell of catnip in the breeze.

  "No," Diana said.

  Paul inhaled. She couldn't tell if it was an inhalation of despair or of frustration.

  "Well," he said, "I just didn't want you to think—"

  "I didn't," Diana said.

  Outside their bedroom window she thought she heard something like footsteps in high grass, but the grass outside the window wasn't high.

  It sounded like a horse eating hay, or a scythe in the daisies. But when Diana listened more closely, she realized it was just her husband, he'd already fallen asleep—his familiar steady breath beside her.

  They know as soon as they slip into it—the clean kiss of chlorine, the silence of the neighborhood in the middle of the afternoon—that it's the right thing to be doing, the only thing to be doing at this moment in their lives:

  The water seems to be made of silk and brilliance. They've never felt more naked, as if they've slipped not only out of their clothes but out of their skins.

  At first the girls splash and laugh, and then they grow silent.

  They float past one another slowly on their backs.

  One of them dives under, and the other watches her smooth flash under the water—blue, then blindingly white.

  IT HAD BEEN YEARS SINCE DIANA HAD FOUND HERSELF lying awake through the night, and it surprised her to realize that the night wasn't quiet. How, she wondered to herself, had she ever slept through one ... all the noises outside the house, and in it, above her, below her, on every side—inside her—as if the darkness were made of sound.

  Little wings agai
nst the window screens, animal feet in the grass, the faraway sound of a train—no whistling, just locomotion and a rusty rumbling—and beyond that, the freeway, the steady sound of tires and wind over tar. Someone drove down Maiden Lane in a car with bad brakes. As it came to a stop at the end of the block, there was a terrible screeching. And beyond that, the sound of people still awake in their houses all up and down the block, and the cumulative sound of block after block of people sleeping and awake. Blow-dryers, televisions, laughter, snoring ... it rose above Briar Hill as an undulating veil of white noise, and dispersed, then fell back to earth, some of it wafting away on the breeze, and some of it slipping through the window screen into the bedroom, which had its own noises—Paul's breathing, the settling of the floor—as did Diana's body. Heartbeat. Blood. Breath. She swallowed, and even the sound of that would have been enough to wake her if she'd been asleep.

  And behind all of it, Timmy...

  Yowling.

  Timmy, angry in the darkness, scratching at the studio door with his claws, locked up and wanting to get out.

  How long had it been since she'd found herself lying awake all night?

  Insomnia ... like birds. She had forgotten about insomnia. What else had she forgotten to add to the world as she observed it in middle age, in this strange threshold in which she found herself waiting now? Crickets?

  Crickets.

  The second she remembered crickets, they were back. The incredible electric hum of them in the summer night. The trilling rhythm of them filling up the whole night as if night were a terrible machine made out of a million insects, all calling to one another with their wings.

  Diana sat up.

  The sound of the crickets drowned out everything else, even the sound of her own breathing.

  The sound of the crickets was the sound of everything else. How had she forgotten them, or where had they gone, where had it gone—the whole lifetime of summer nights filled up with the trilling of crickets? Of insects?

  Butterflies...

  Surely she'd remembered butterflies. She knew she'd seen one the other afternoon. Emma had chased a black one out of the yard. Butterflies were insects—although when she was four years old Emma had insisted that butterflies were flowers.

  And moths.

  Diana had heard moths outside the window screens before she remembered crickets. Before she'd remembered crickets she'd remembered moths and hadn't even realized that she'd forgotten them, the thin filaments of their bodies, the way their wings seemed made of paper and also made of flesh.

  And hadn't she seen a june bug clinging to the trunk of a tree in the front yard last summer? It had been brown and shiny, but when Diana looked more closely at it she could see that it was just a shell, a bug's shed skin. The june bug itself had crawled away and left a transparent amber self behind, still clinging.

  But spiders; when was the last time she'd seen a spider? In her mother's apartment they used to make their ways somehow into the bathtub in the summer and climb the tile to the ceiling, sew webs in the corners of the shower walls.

  And flies.

  Flies had little razor-shaped wings and iridescent eyes.

  And beetles, waddling along with their shells on their backs, cracking under her shoes whether she meant to step on them or not.

  Hadn't Mr. McCleod told them once how many different kinds of insects there were in the world? Hadn't it been staggering, the number and variety—a number too large to comprehend and therefore impossible to file away in the mind?

  Bees! She knew she'd seen bees. You couldn't remember roses and not remember bees.

  You couldn't remember summer and not remember roses....

  Paul rolled over and pulled the sheet and quilt with him, and Diana was left exposed to the darkness in her white summer nightgown, which looked so white in the moonlight that it seemed to be made of moonlight.

  She got out of bed.

  She'd go to her studio.

  She might as well draw. There was no sense lying awake all night. Now she remembered insomnia.

  They dry themselves and hurry back into their clothes, then run giggling down the strangers' driveway to the sidewalk, back into the wavering wall of heat that is an August afternoon.

  Back to the apartment, where they eat Doritos and drink Seven-Up. The taste is sweetness and light, like water extracted with syringes from flowers.

  The air-conditioning feels cooler now that they've been in the water and emerged from it. They turn the radio on. Jewel is singing a song that was popular a few years before...

  "Who will save your soul?"

  Her voice is like a length of silk thread taken up by a thin, bright needle.

  One of the girls has goose bumps. They're both wearing spaghetti-strapped tops and cutoffs. The one who's cold pulls an afghan over her legs. It's something that her dead grandmother crocheted two decades before—olive green, forest green, and orange, with terrible geometric shapes all meeting in an ugly swirl at the center.

  She's never liked the afghan, into which her mother sometimes sobs when she's missing her own dead mother.

  The girl feels sad ... the song ... the cool water gone. Next year they'll be seniors, and then what? Where will they go? Who will they become?

  As hard as she tries she can't imagine it:

  Dormitories, pizzas, her mother's apartment empty of her. When she gets past graduation ... wearing a black gown, like a witch or a nun, on the football field ... she sees a yellow sign. It says YIELD, or NO OUTLET, or PED XING, and her imagination grinds to a halt.

  She clears her throat and asks her friend, "Have you been baptized?"

  "Sure," her friend says. "When I was a baby, but again when I was going to the Pentecostal church. We went on a retreat Pastor Mallory baptized me in a little creek that ran through the woods where we were camping. It was just after I was born again."

  Born again.

  They've never talked about that. Though they've talked about sex, their periods, their fantasies, their fathers, all the secret painful things, they've really never talked about God. No one ever really talked about God. A whole lifetime could pass by, and God would never be mentioned, or death.

  From behind the pulled shades there's a hot breath sneaking through the imperceptible spaces between the windows and their frames.

  IT WAS LARGE, THE NIGHT.

  It seemed to be empty, but as soon as she turned on the back porch light, hundreds of moths swarmed out of the darkness and began to circle the bulb.

  Where had they been before she turned on the light? What had they been doing until then?

  They thrummed dully against one another with their dusty little wings made of—what?

  A kind of skin like toilet tissue, the same thinness that covered every living thing, the thin film that existed between the earth and the sky, one moment and the next. What else?

  Diana stepped into it, the night, closing the door quietly behind her so as not to wake up Paul or Emma.

  As soon as the house was behind her, she felt calm again. The grass was dry but cool on her bare feet. She could smell roses. It was quiet...

  The noises that had kept her awake were still there, but they were muffled by the enormity of the world. The sky, black but full of stars—she looked directly up at the Little Dipper, which was like a spoonful of diamond dust—was high, unfathomably high. Plenty of room for everything.

  She looked from the sky to the backyard.

  Emma's plastic pony was shining whitely in the night.

  Diana felt it return her gaze with its blank eyes. It seemed ready to say something ... something Diana knew she wouldn't want to hear. All the years that the thing had spent outside staring into the side of the garage, the weather, the night, the nothing. It couldn't move, and it couldn't disintegrate. Made of plastic, it would last forever.

  What would forever mean to something without brain waves, or respiration?

  Forever. An eternity of insomnia. Diana looked back at the pony, and�
��a trick of the eye—in its contrast to the darkness, it seemed to move.

  She looked away, stepping out of its line of vision. She hurried over to the garage and rolled up the door, which groaned like a stone being rolled from a cave. A hot breath exhaled from it, smelling of gasoline, and Diana walked through it, the cement slab strangely cold against the soles of her bare feet, and she climbed the stairs to her studio.

  From behind the door Timmy must have heard her coming, because he'd quit yowling. Now he was purring.

  Diana could sense his impatience. He wanted out of there, whether it was safe and full of places to sleep and food to eat or not. The second she opened the door Timmy dashed past her, down the stairs, and out of the garage. A soft darkness hurrying out to join the larger, softer darkness.

  By the end of August, the hot wet blanket of humidity that's been lying over Briar Hill for two weeks finally lifts.

  One of the girls has been given a car by her father, who's moving to California with his wife and son. It has no air-conditioning, so they keep the windows rolled down, and their hair is ratted and wild by the time they get wherever they're going.

  It's ending quickly.

  Summer.

  Soon they'll be back behind their desks—the smell of Pine-Sol on the shiny surfaces—stating into Michael Patrick's or Mary Olivet's back.

  They take the car to the zoo.

  Why not?

  Who says teenage girls can't go to the zoo?

  One of them hasn't been there since she was a child, holding her father's hand as he pushed the stroller of his newer child and talked to his newer wife. She remembered only the hand, the way it kept slipping out of hers when he had to readjust the direction of the stroller he was pushing ... that and a lion sprawled out on a rock, yawning, lifting its lazy head up to look at her, then dropping back into its nap.

  The other girl had come to the zoo the summer before with an older man who kept exotic pets. He bored her with facts about wolves and lynxes and bought her a snow cone. The animals seemed to recognize him, she thought. In the snake house he put his hand up her shirt when no one was looking. He kissed her hard enough to make her lower lip bleed, near the monkey pit. She was already pregnant, although she didn't know it then.