The Life Before Her Eyes (25 page)

But then Sister Beatrice's black robes brushed her arm, and Diana could feel her hot breath close to her cheek. It stank ... her breath. It smelled as if something had rotted in her mouth.

"Why?" Diana asked her as she passed.

Sister Beatrice turned and looked straight into Diana's eyes, then smiled.

The smile was full of hate.

"Because I don't like you," Sister Beatrice said.

She stepped over the contents of Diana's spilled purse ... the coins, the tampon, the Baggie of marijuana.

"Why?" Diana asked.

But the nun kept walking. She reached the bottom of the stairs and began to walk faster, and from where Diana watched her, Sister Beatrice in her black habit looked like the shadow of a crow flying overhead, or a small and awful angel...

The avenging angel, the accusing angel, the angel who did not forget, who did not forgive, its shadow circling the world endlessly.

It's Saturday....

Nate Witt is at his job at Uncle Ed's Oil Change, so the girls are together without him for the afternoon. It's the end of April and everything has begun to melt. The smell of rot and fresh growth is in the air. The green swords of tulips and daffodils have made their way out of the earth.

The girls notice these as they go for their first walk through the neighborhood after so much winter. They're wearing tight jeans, black boots, short-sleeved shirts, and they've tied sweaters around their waists. One of the girls is wearing a silver ring that was given to her by Nate.

"I think you're going to be elected Mayqueen," she says to her friend.

"No fucking way," the other says. "It's you or Melissa Maroney, but I think it will be you—"

"Why me?"

"Because you're beautiful—"

"Not as beautiful as you." She means it. It's easy to say.

"Yeah, you are," her friend says, and nudges her with her shoulder. "Plus, I've got a reputation. No one gets elected Mayqueen at Briar Hill who's—"

"Well, it won't be me. Not now that I'm dating Nate. He's—"

"Oh, everybody loves it that you're with Nate. The born-again Christian and the biker boy."

The dark-haired girl laughs. "I don't know. Maybe. Probably Melissa."

"No," the other says. "Melissa's too
out there.
Mayqueen is usually some girl who's kept to herself ... a bit of a mystery ... not such a social butterfly."

"Well, I don't want to be Mayqueen."

It's a lie, and not.

They turn the corner near the Catholic girls' school. Our Lady of Fatima. It sits at the top of a hill. They've walked past it a million times on their way to other places. Sometimes the school yard is full of little girls in white blouses and plaid skirts.

One of the girls gasps.

At first she gasps because of what she thinks she's seen. Hundreds of little girls in stiff white blouses, but when she realizes it's something else, at first she thinks she's dreaming. The whole surface of the green hill is fluttering with something. It's dazzling, cumulative.

"What the hell?" she says, looking harder.

"Little crosses," the other explains.

"Why?"

"The unborn," the other tells her. "I saw the little girls putting out the crosses yesterday. And the pro-lifers..."

The other girl walks in the direction of the crosses. She's seen pictures of Arlington Cemetery, and it's like that—seeing that strange quiet from the sky—row after row of stiff white arms embracing the air, the emptiness and shadows.

There are hundreds—
thousands
?—of these small white crosses covering every inch of the hill. Plastic. White. Some have fallen over into the green grass, but most have been planted deeply enough in the ground that they're fluttering only a little in the breeze.

"Come on, let's go," her friend says, taking her elbow.

But her friend stands, still staring.

They're like a dream against the green. Stunning in their uniformity. The absolute conviction of their posture.

"Jesus," she says. "It's—"

"It's a statement, that's for sure," the other girl says.

And then the other girl notices that there's a name on every cross, on every one of the hundreds and hundreds of small white crosses on the elementary school lawn.

She bends down to look at one which is only a few inches from the toes of her black boot.

In a child's cursive, with a black Magic Marker,
Emma
is written there.

D
IANA SAW HER DAUGHTER FROM A DISTANCE AND
recognized her instantly. She was standing alone looking into the bars of a cage, her pink windbreaker tied around her waist.

"Emma!"

But Emma didn't turn to look. Either she hadn't heard her mother calling her or she'd chosen not to answer.

Diana began to run.

This part of the zoo was called the Black Forest. It was landscaped with pine trees and rocks, and a small waterfall that made the sound of mechanical splashing into a cement basin. There were fairy-tale characters, plaster statues painted brightly but amateurishly here and there—a woodcutter, a witch with a gingerbread house, ogres and dwarves, Rapunzel with ropes of golden hair, Sleeping Beauty laid out on what appeared to be a stretcher, with her eyes closed, surrounded by tangled briars—and the paths were scattered with redwood chips. The smell of forest and water was dank and dry at the same time.

Inside the cages there were dens for coyotes, foxes, wolves, and although Diana couldn't see them, she could sense their eyes watching her from the darkness. If there was an owl in the owl cage, it was standing so still she couldn't see it.

"Emma!" she called again.

This time Emma looked up. "Mommy," she said, but didn't move.

"Mommy," she said again, and pointed to a place just beyond the wolf's cage, where the wolf was....

"
You're not going to believe it," one of the girls says to the other.

It's the end of April, and the cafeteria is humid with rain. Nate Witt has his arm around her. "I was elected Mayqueen. Mr. McCleod just told me."

The other girl stands up and puts her arm around her friend, who smells like chocolate milk and flesh. She presses her face into her friend's dark hair—her friend.

There's April in her hair. Motion and stillness. Wings and earth. There are tears, and there is ...
friendship.
There is velvet, and traveling, and distance, bones and blood, summer coming again as it always does,
love.

"Are you jealous?" her friend asks.

"Hell, yes," she says. But everything is inside her as she holds her friend, her
best friend,
in this embrace....

Tomorrow. Last year. Her own daughter. Her mother, and
her
mother...

Life seems suddenly—in the general din of the world and the cafeteria, in the last months of her senior year—very short and also very long. Eternal.

All
of it is inside her.

Her friend is smiling. Her friend's boyfriend is also smiling. They are both inside of her ...
family...
where everything else is and will always be. There's a place for both of them—just as there's a place for her heart, for her lungs. She can feel all of it inside her,
all
of it. Except for jealousy.

Where
jealousy
would be, there's nothing.

"Come on," her friend says. "If you're going to cry because I got elected Mayqueen, let's go to the girls' room, at least."

D
IANA LOOKED IN THE DIRECTION OF THE WOLF'S CAGE,
but it was empty. There was nothing other than a shadow moving around inside it, slipping between rocks, like the shadow of water.

Her breath was sharp in her lungs, she'd been running for so long...

When she finally reached her daughter's side, Diana sank to her knees and pulled her to her, smelled her golden hair, the side of her neck deeply, taking it in as if to memorize it—the crushed leaves and flour of her daughter, the whole melody of the baking aisle, the smell of the physical world and what was just beyond it, made of mercy and childhood and love—before she looked again in the direction of the shadow Emma was still watching with her wide blue eyes.

The shadow was moving around inside the cage, but the wolf was outside of it.

They're in the girl's room when they hear the first
dot-dot-dot
of semi-automatic gunfire.

It sounds phony and far away, and they keep doing what they're doing—brushing their hair, looking at their reflections in the girls'-room mirror...

Dot-dot-dot.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

"Want a LifeSaver?" one of the girls asks the other, then hands her the roll.

Her friend takes a piece of the chalk-white peppermint candy and puts it in her mouth. It tastes so clean it nearly takes her breath away.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

"What is that?" one of the girls asks the other. She stuffs
her hairbrush back into her backpack next to her anthology of English literature. She was supposed to have read the first chapter of
Daisy Miller
for a quiz that afternoon, but she hadn't even started.

Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock...

This time it's followed by a soft and gurgling scream.

"Shit," one of the girls says.

"What the hell—"

One of the girls starts toward the door, but the other grabs her elbow. "Don't go," she says. "What if?—"

"What?"

"I don't know." She drops her friend's elbow.

"It's just a prank. It's probably Ryan Asswipe..."

Dot. Dot—

T
HE WOLF WAS PACING OUTSIDE THE OPEN DOOR OF THE
cage, looking confused, as if someone had just opened it, just let him out at that moment, as if for the first time in his life he'd found himself on the other side.

Diana screamed, and when the wolf heard it, he looked up, sniffing at the air, then turned to look behind him, as if at his own shadow, which seemed to startle him, and he began to growl.

Low at first, like a tape recording starting slow, then speeding up, and then faster and louder. It was impossible to tell whether the growling came from the world or from the shadow—or, it struck Diana as completely possible, that the growling came from inside herself....

Emma didn't move.

She didn't seem to be breathing, though her nostrils were flared and there were tears in her eyes.

They never hear the door to the girls' room open.

They never hear his footsteps.

One of them is whispering the Lord's Prayer ...
forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those...
when the other says under her breath, "Maybe he's gone. Maybe we ought to go for help."

The other nods yes, then opens her eyes. She opens them slowly, looking up first, then down at the linoleum floor and the space between the floor and the stall door, and then she cries out.

It's so brilliant, that cry, that the other girl looks down at her hands and sees her life like a small marble roll out of them, tinder the stall door, past the shoes Michael Patrick's wearing—white Nikes with blue lightning bolts on the sides, laces untied—too far and too quick to get it back.

T
HE WOLF BARED HIS TEETH.

He was about twelve feet away, but Diana could see and smell him. He was a wild animal. No one's pet. She'd seen him before—the blue eyes, the howling in the next room—but that was something else, that was before he became this, before he began this life.

His teeth were white. His gums were pink But he'd never been bathed except by the rain that fell on his cage. He'd lived his whole life in that cage. He smelled like salt and breath, and his fur was matted, especially on his back. There was blood on
the fur on his face. He lifted up his muzzle and sniffed the air, sniffing them—then took, in their direction, one slow gray step, then crouched.

"So," he says too loudly, and both girls flinch...

"So," he says more softly, as if sorry to have startled them. "Which one of you girls should I kill?"

"M
OMMY,
" E
MMA SAID AGAIN, AND THEN SHE WHIMPERED.

And it was the sound of her daughter's voice that woke Diana up to herself.

"Mommy..."

For a second Diana could actually see the light from the sun pouring itself into the air, floating in front of her in fluid strands, weightless as hair.

This
was the moment she'd been born for. The moment she'd been allowed to grow into the martyrdom of middle age for, and become a mother. The moment in which she gave up
herself—the bells and the bracelets, and the pyramids and planets, all the things of the world she'd seen and never see...

One of the girls swallows. "Please," she whispers, "don't kill either of us."

She keeps her eyes open. For a moment, she smells her dog, Muppet Muppet just in from the rain, quivering against her chest like a muscle made of affection.

Michael Patrick smiles.

"Oh, but I'm going to kill one of you," he says, "so which one should it be?"

The other girl sobs. It's warm, and foil of water. She remembers Mr. McCleod telling the class that the heart is 95 percent water and that the brain...

She can't remember, but she knows it's water, too. Warm water. Salty water. The mind, the soul, memory ... all of it floating in that water. Time, and love, and terror, swimming through a body made mostly out of tears.

She swallows the tears, closes her eyes, sees her mother standing in the doorway, wearing a white nightgown. Her mother's eyes are wide. Her face is creased from sleep. She's half awake but ready to run through the doorway, to shake her daughter awake, calling out her name. Then she sees her father at Circuit City selling a stereo to a student. (Briefly, without knowing why, he thinks of her.)

Behind Michael Patrick the mirror, which the two girls only moments ago stepped out of, shines clean and empty, except for his back reflected in it.

All these years, they both marvel, they'd never even really noticed him—an ugliness moving among them. A darkness opening doors, locking his bike to the bike rack, wearing a backpack full of more darkness, closing his spiral notebook on the words inside it.