The Life Before Her Eyes Read online

  And she was attractive. Still blond, though now she used a rinse to resuscitate the blond of her younger years. She was fit and slender, long-legged and blue-eyed as ever. She'd been told rather often that she resembled Michelle Pfeiffer, the Michelle Pfeiffer of the late 1990s, the one Diana used to watch on the movie channel, wishing (in vain, she'd assumed then) that she would look that good when she was almost forty.

  And now she did.

  Not that appearances were all that important to her now. She had wasted so much time in her teens primping, piercing, dieting ... and that terrible tattoo, the rose they'd promised her wouldn't hurt but that nearly killed her as they sewed it into her skin, a permanent purple heart earned for naïveté in the face of a fad. She'd be buried, an old lady in a housedress, with that sexy teenage rose still blushing on her hip. Sometimes the thought of that made her sad; sometimes it made her laugh.

  She didn't worry much about her appearance anymore ... just enough to stay fit and wash her hair with Forever Blond once a week.

  She wore simple clothing. She liked silks and Asian prints, dangling earrings and bangles. Today she was wearing a pair of shiny black slacks and a turquoise blouse. The blouse was sheer, but she wore a black tank top under it. A thin silver chain around her neck. An armful of silver bangles that made music as she walked, steered, brushed her hair.

  Flat black shoes.

  She dressed her age and income level, but did it creatively ... a little exotic, like the artist underneath the soccer mom she was. She was, it always surprised her to be reminded, still sexy enough to be whistled at on occasion while crossing the street at a busy intersection. She hadn't expected that at forty. It was one of the many pleasant surprises of middle age.

  She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror.

  Her teeth were crooked, but her lips were pretty. She looked like the woman she'd wanted to be. Someday this will be your life, she used to think when she was a dreamy adolescent staring out the kitchen window of the apartment she shared with her divorced mother, fantasizing. Someday this will be your life, she thought to herself even now, as if it weren't, hearing her voice clearly in her own mind ... the voice of the woman she had become, the pretty mother licking lipstick off her front teeth, smiling politely at her own reflection.

  Summer...

  And all the longing and damp hope of spring had finally amounted to something. At home the peonies had ruffled up in the front yard like the sleeves of a fancy blouse—but sticky, sweet, crawling with little red ants.

  The grass was green as eye shadow, green as satin.

  The sky was a piece of hard candy.

  And the bees hovered around the honeysuckle like tiny golden angels playing trumpets.

  The lilies had just begun to open, and a breeze made out of perfume was passing from the pure centers of them into the world.

  Mr. McCleod is reading aloud from the textbook....

  He is fiddling with his glasses as he reads, and his hands tremble.

  Nicotine.

  Perhaps he's thinking of nicotine as he reads to the class about one-celled organisms becoming two.

  He hears the laughter of girls and looks up.

  From the opposite sides of the classroom, they've caught each other's eyes.

  They weren't trying to look at each other—they know better than that, know it will lead to uncontrollable laughter if their eyes meet across the room. But laughter is a vibrating wire strung between them. All they can do is avoid looking at one another, to keep from laughing. But as Mr. McCleod is reading, their eyes wander intuitively in the direction of Nate Witt—

  Nate Witt.

  The boy with the unfortunate name.

  Nit wit.

  The boy with the flat-green eyes.

  There are miles and miles of Astro Turf reflected in those eyes.

  He has a mean laugh and a habit of wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as if he's been boxing, as if he's just taken a punch to the jaw. He wears T-shirts with the names of bands and of baseball teams, faded jeans, and a pair of hiking boots every day. He's lean, with light brown hair, and neither girl has ever seen him laugh out loud, though they've seen him smile and smirk.

  Nate Witt sits slumped and oblivious in the center of the room ... stoned and openmouthed between them, and while they are trying to catch a glimpse of him from opposite ends of the biology classroom, they catch a glimpse of one another glimpsing at him and begin to laugh.

  "Is there a problem, girls?" Mr. McCleod asks.

  Both girls try to go expressionless, and shrug.

  "No," one of them says, though her eyes are wide and wet and she has to bite her lips.

  "No problem," the other says, raising her shoulders and letting them drop.

  There's laughter sliding all around her like an electric dress.

  Mr. McCleod puts his face back in his book and continues to read.

  BACK HOME ... THE HONEYSUCKLE. SHE HAD A LOVELY little garden waiting for her behind the house. A set of silver wind chimes dangling from a drainpipe under the eaves of the garage. In the breeze the wind chimes sounded like music made out of little girls' dreams ... charm bracelets, porcelain dolls, the kind of teacups so delicate and thin that if you held them to the light you could see through them.

  Whispers

  AT EXACTLY 2:30 DIANA GLANCED AT HER WATCH.

  In five minutes they'd open the doors of her daughter's elementary school and let the little girls scamper back into the world. Deep at the center of herself she could feel the engine that kept her minivan idling. It purred on every side of her and over and under her ... a great humming motor at the heart of her small universe. She was afraid she'd fall back to sleep, so she turned on the radio.

  It was only static at first The whispers of the dead, she thought in a flash, not knowing why she thought it And then she adjusted the dial until she heard the voice of her favorite talk-show shrink.

  "Of course she means it!" Dr. Laura said. "Drunks always mean they're going to quit."

  "So ... you think I need to see what she actually does?" the caller asked.

  "Exactly. And don't count on anything. Thank you for your call."

  There was a second of silence, the click of the caller being disconnected, and then Dr. Laura addressed the radio audience.

  "Don't call me," she said, "and ask me whether your spouse is going to quit drinking. How should I know? I'm not God. Ask your spouse, and then—and this is the most important thing—ask yourself."

  Diana felt a wisp of something—a little white feather, the kind stuffed deep inside a decorative pillow—brush her face with smug relief. Her husband didn't drink—or philander or gamble or take drugs. Never in seventeen years of married life had she felt the urge to ask anyone, especially not someone on the radio, for even the smallest scrap of advice.

  "Hello, you're on the air," Dr. Laura said.

  Again, a second of dead silence.

  "Hel-lo? Are you there?"

  "Ma'am?"

  The caller was either an older boy or a woman with a very deep voice—a voice that sounded as if it were coming from the end of a long tunnel, a tunnel made of porous stone or cement, something that soaked up sound.

  "Y-hes?" Dr. Laura said in a singsong that indicated impatience. "How can I help you?"

  "I ... I don't need help."

  The voice was not hollow or breathy, but neither did it seem physical. The voice sounded like a recording of a recording played back at a too-slow speed.

  "Well, then," Dr. Laura said, "why are you calling my show?"

  There was a low grinding. Again the sound of a cassette tape played backward or too loosely, followed by machine grinding, and then the voice, faster and unnaturally bright, said, "I am in hell."

  Diana exhaled as if she'd been punched, and she put her hand to her chest.

  She looked up toward the hill, but the girls were still inside the school. Where were the other mothers? There was no one in the semicircular drive exce
pt herself...

  Winter turns to spring, and everything melts.

  The water in the drinking fountain in the high school hallway is nauseatingly warm, like human fluids.

  Ryan Haslip puts his sister's bikini on Mr. McCleod's skeleton, and Mr. McCleod seems amused.

  They have never seen him amused.

  Someone puts a rose between the skeleton's bared teeth, and, along with the bikini, Mr. McCleod lets it stay.

  IT COULD HAVE MEANT ANYTHING, BUT DIANA MCFEE felt a bright flash at the side of her face as if she'd been slapped fast by a cold hand, and she snapped the radio off.

  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.

  Heartbeat

  SHE'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 a
nd 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.

  IT WAS BREATHTAKING, THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN JUNE.

  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.