The Life Before Her Eyes (21 page)

"Diana."

Before she recognized the voice—which was husky, insistent, the voice of someone trying to wake her from a very deep sleep, from an ocean of sleep, trying to call her back to the surface or pull her out from underneath the million shining windowpanes of a coma—she screamed.

And the screaming had been like a cold wind, like a cold broom inside her, sweeping her out, a whole blizzard kicked up by a whisk broom, a deep coldness that even now in the burning shower she couldn't reach.

"Diana," he'd said, and taken her by the shoulders and shaken her harder than he needed to ... was she still screaming?

"Diana! Stop it; stop it!"

She could smell wolf. Clean fur and blood on his breath. Snow White in her glass coffin, devoured by a wolf...

No, that was Little Red Riding Hood.

He'd pressed his whiskered muzzle next to her ear and whispered softly, "It's okay. It's okay. It's okay..."

Paul.

Her hand, which she'd pressed to her neck, came away with three stripes of blood across the palm. She held it to his face, which was gentle with sadness. He wasn't going to kiss her back to life or eat her like a wolf. This wasn't a fairy tale. How could she have forgotten—as she had forgotten birds, forgotten crickets, forgotten sleeplessness—that this, too, came with middle age?

The braided daughter ... the clapboard house ... the handsome husband.

But how could she have forgotten all the rest?

All those years, all those men walking through the zoos and parks and malls holding the hands of their wives while they looked at the legs of the girls walking by.

Of course, he was going to leave her for a younger woman.
How could she have forgotten?

And then she'd started to cry, a pure glare filling up her eyes, a brightness like rhinestones or water glistening on the far edge of the horizon, and he held her.

"It's okay," he said again.

But why was she crying?

What was she grieving?

The boy moving between the girl's legs with his mouth, with his tongue?

The sun rising behind them?

Her dream life full of cups and curtains, furniture, appliances, walls?

Her daughter's golden braids?

Her husband's cool blue eyes?

Summer, full of roses?

"Stop," he said, patting her on the back.

But she couldn't stop. Though it was all still there—the minivan, the rake, the garden, the plastic pony, the dream house, which contained her dreams as well as her things—it was going to be over. She could smell it on him. Her husband was in love with a younger woman ... a girl. She'd known it They'd told her...

If he'll leave his wife for you, someday he'll leave you for...

Who?

A student?

Or was the girl she'd seen him with even younger than a college student? A girl just out of high school?
In
high school? A girl who'd seen him walking across the commons ... a girl he'd
seen ... toffee and a cup of hot chocolate because she was so young she didn't drink coffee ... a girl he'd glimpsed, and who'd stolen him, as Diana had, with her youth, her fresh beauty?

Diana's eyes cleared. Over her husband's shoulder she could see the shadows of the trees in the sun coming up and how they projected black and orange tongues on the white clapboard of their house. She blinked, then looked at Paul, who looked old in the morning sun, like a man with fewer years ahead of him than he had behind him, like a man who, out of a desperate fear of death, had decided to leave his wife.

He held her weakly.

"It's the last day of school," Diana said. She pushed him away gently. "I have to take Emma and her friends to the zoo. I have to take a shower."

He let her go, nodding.

She said nothing else, and he never brought himself to say what it was he'd come to tell her. But in the shower, the coldness wouldn't wash away. When Diana stepped out of the shower, her skin prickled and the bathroom was full of steam, which she stepped into as if it were a cloud, or thought, or the future, and she wrapped a white towel around herself and looked in the mirror.

There was no reflection there until she'd wiped away a circle with her hand.

Then, in that circle, Diana saw her own face.

Flushed but familiar.

Aged, but
her face...
the face she wore when she was seventeen.

***

September comes.

One of the girls picks the other up in the morning on the first day of school. On the drive through Briar Hill, which glows fiercely under the purple velvet of the morning sky, they're quiet. Neither girl has been up this early in the morning since the beginning of June.

Briar Hill High looks the same, and utterly changed. The bricks look as if they've been washed, and the grassy slope on which it rests is so freshly cut that the tracks of the riding mower's wheels stand out brightly against the bristling green. The windows shine blankly ... no fingerprints, no smudges, no dust. And the students climbing out of cars in the parking lot are wearing new clothes, looking around. The ghosts of those who graduated the year before are still there—Amanda Greenberg swinging her legs from the trunk of her father's BMW; Mark Twitchell, spitting on the sidewalk; Bob Blau, wearing a black sports coat and pink nail polish; Sandy Ellsworth, with her head bowed, taking one last drag from her joint, behind the wheel of her beat-up Thunderbird, her white blond hair full of electricity and light—but in less than a day they'll be gone.

"Oh my god," one of the girls says, "there's Nate."

She parks carefully but quickly between a Jeep and a black Buick Riviera.

"He
shaved
his
head.
"

They look at each other with opened mouths, then burst into laughter.

They look again.

"Jesus. Am I seeing things, or does he have a stud in his lower lip?"

"Yes!"

Again, they laugh. The car window is unrolled and Nate Witt, who's only a few yards away, turns to look in the direction of the laughter, and the stud in his lower lip catches light. The girls quickly swallow their laughter and wave politely at him.

He smiles ... a dangerous, amazing smile.

Mayqueen.

It should have seemed like another lifetime, a century ago, but it didn't. She could still feel the precarious weight of the tiara on her head, held there with bobby pins stuck deeply, painfully, into her blond hair.

She'd worn Maureen's white dress, the one Diana had helped her choose at Prom World only a few weeks before. She'd had it taken in because Maureen was bustier than she was, but the dress hadn't been shortened, the length was just right. They'd been the same height.

"No," Diana had said, shaking her head. "I can't—"

But Maureen's mother had taken her by the shoulders and said, "
Please...
Do it for Maureen. I can't bury my daughter in her prom dress," and so Diana wore it.

She remembered how Mr. McCleod's hands trembled as he helped her onto the float, which was a mass—a surreal mass—of real and tissue-paper roses, some of which she and Maureen had made themselves at the kitchen table in her mother's apartment, some of which had been donated from florists all over the country, sent in memory of the victims and in honor of the survivors.

They shivered in the breeze.

A sigh rose from the bleachers as Diana stepped up.

"You're the most beautiful Mayqueen Briar Hill High has ever had," Mr. McCleod whispered to her...

The sky was perfectly, sharply blue, and the smell of the real and unreal roses drifted in a wave over the football stadium. Diana looked up, and the sun was so brilliant overhead it seemed to light up the very atoms and molecules between them and the rest of the universe—tiny rhinestones. When she looked out she saw her parents sitting next to each other in the bleachers.

Were they even holding hands?

Both of them were crying.

They'd handed the microphone to her, and Diana had let go of the string of white helium balloons she was holding in her hand, releasing them.

"These are for you, Maureen," she'd said, and they'd all looked up into the sun to watch them float through the air, lighter than the air, lighter than anything else in heaven or on Earth.

The linoleum is waxed, and its gold flecks are bright under the hundreds of pairs of new shoes hurrying to their first classes as the bell rings...

The sound of it is shockingly loud.

Had it always been that loud?

"Good luck," one of the girls says to the other. They have different first-hour classes, and they have to say good-bye.

Though they've only been best friends for half a year, it's hard to part in the hallway, to let go of the summer they've spent with each other. For weeks it will still
seem
like summer, but then the leaves will change and the sun will spin away, growing higher and lighter in the sky over Briar Hill.

It's hard to part in the hallway, to imagine one of them without the other in the world, taking notes, thinking thoughts, waiting for the bell to ring.

"See you at lunch,"one of the girls says wistfully to the other. Then she leans in and whispers, "You look awesome."

"So do you," the other says.

They hug each other briefly.

D
IANA LEANED IN MORE CLOSELY TO HER REFLECTION IN
the mirror.

But her reflection had become obscured by breath.

Still she looked unflinchingly at herself.

It was something she'd been proud of ... proud that aging hadn't come to her as anguished change. She'd known the very moment she'd crossed over the threshold from maid to matron, and she'd done that, as she did this now, as bravely as she was able.

It hadn't been her wedding day, and it hadn't been when she'd had the baby. It was later. She'd been ... what? Thirty-three? Thirty-four? She was driving to work, having just dropped Emma off at preschool. It was winter. A dusty snow was blowing its feather boas across the street. She'd pulled up to a four-way stop. Although there were no other cars at the intersection, there was a girl waiting there to cross the street.

A redhead. Probably about eighteen. A college student maybe, or a high school senior.

She was wearing a silver down jacket and headphones, and she was nodding and smiling to some music that only she could hear ... a deeply secret smile, the smile of someone who was young, who'd never been anything but young. Before she
stepped into the street, the girl looked up directly into the windshield at Diana, but her expression didn't change.

Surely their eyes had met, Diana thought. Diana thought she saw a faint flicker of recognition pass over the girl's face, but she was so deeply inside her own music, her own amusing thoughts, that Diana was nothing to her.
That was me,
Diana thought
I was that girl once. I thought no one else had ever been that girl or ever would—

The past tense surprised her. When she finally passed through that intersection, she was a mature woman.

She began soon after that to call her younger female students "Honey." She started wearing expensive blouses instead of bright colors. She threw away her small collection of ankle bracelets. She bought a one-piece bathing suit so that when she took Emma to the pool in the summer, no one would see the rose tattooed on her hip.

The mirror steamed again, and Diana let the white shadow of her own breath creep slowly across her face.

The cafeteria is deafening....

Silverware on the linoleum, quarters emptying into the vending machine's silver tray. Someone is pounding a table with a fist, and it sounds like a series of small explosions. The shrieking laughter of a girl. A boy making electric guitar sounds in his throat. Standing in the cafeteria line, Rita Smith, looking larger and more unpleasant than she had the year before, shouts, "Get that away from me," at a boy who's tossed a plastic black tarantula in her direction.

One of the girls slips quickly into the empty chair beside the other girl, who has been sipping chocolate milk from a tiny carton and waiting.

"You're not going to believe it," she says before she says hello. She looks into her friend's chocolate-milk carton. It looks sweet and dark in there, and a thirst for chocolate milk—
that
chocolate milk—rises in her. She looks away from it and says, "He's in my homeroom—"

Her friend looks up.

"Nate?" she asks.

"Nate," she answers. "He sits right next to me."

"No way! Get out of here!" her friend says. "Did you talk to him?"

She shrugs, smiles. "I said, I like your lip thing.'" She points to the place on her own lower lip.

"And what did he say?"

"He smiled."

"Nate
smiled?
"

"Nate smiled," she says.

W
HEN
D
IANA CAME OUT OF THE BATHROOM AND WALKED
barefoot through the hallway, still wrapped in a towel, she saw that Emma was sitting up in bed. She wasn't smiling.

"Where's that cat?" Emma asked.

Diana tried to smile. She said, "Honey, I put him in my studio for the night. There's no reason to be afraid of the cat."

Emma said nothing. But she looked as though she'd found out some secret of Diana's—had read her diary, had read her
mind
—and wasn't pleased, though she had new power because of it.

Emma said, "I want that cat to be
gone.
"

Diana pretended not to have heard her and kept walking.

T
HE THREE GIRLS SAT IN THE BACKSEAT OF THE MINIVAN
while Diana drove.

Sarah Ann Salerno was wearing a sundress and a little embroidered sweater over it. The sweater was white, and the roses were sewn with fat pink yarn all up and down the sleeves. It was, Diana thought, a very ugly sweater, but something someone had taken a great deal of trouble to make.

"I like your sweater, Sarah Ann," Diana said into the rearview mirror at a miniaturized reflection of the little girl.

"Thank you," Sarah Ann said.