The Life Before Her Eyes

by Laura Kasischke

  But who?

  The Virgin Mary?

  Sister Beatrice?

  It had pleased and surprised Diana that morning to see how well the skirt still fit, and that her legs looked polished and perfect The janitor had looked them over slowly when she entered Our Lady of Fatima with her daughter at 7:45. And Sister Beatrice had glanced at them, too, her lips a thin white line.

  Diana sat at the very edge of the child-sized chair she'd been given to sit in, and managed to pull the skirt about halfway down her thighs.

  When Emma came back into the classroom, she was followed by Sister Beatrice, who straightened the collar of Emma's white blouse as if she were Emma's mother—though she did not look maternal. She looked like a crow that had mothered a little girl.

  Neither Emma nor Sister Beatrice looked at Diana. They both had their eyes turned toward the Virgin Mary—or was it the blackboard, or the clock above the blackboard, ticking and institutional, with a red second hand that seemed to be moving too fast?

  Sister Beatrice said to Emma, "We're going to drop this matter, Emma. Often there's no explanation for evil, and no way to locate its source."

  They drive until they've gotten to the outskirts of Briar Hill.

  There the subdivisions melt into swamp; the swamps turn to cornfields. There are pastures full of sheep who stand stone still, staring at the ground. Some of the sheep have been sheared, and they have stripes and Xs of blood on them.

  The girls pass a country church. It's all red brick and stained glass like a church out of an old book, with a cemetery behind it, circled by a black wrought-iron fence. The gate, with its black sword tips, is open.

  "Let's go read the stones," one of them says. It's something she used to do with her mother, who'd studied literature in Scotland for a few years before she married her father and became a secretary in the philosophy department. But her mother had still liked old things, maudlin and haunted things, and sometimes she'd take her daughter to some of the older cemeteries in Briar Hill—the ones where the people were buried whose names were the names of streets and buildings now—and they'd wander among the graves.

  The girls park in the shade of the steeple, which is sharp and white with a dangerous-looking cross at the top, and they pass through the gate.

  Both are wearing shorts and summer tops with spaghetti straps. No bras. One of them wears her shorts low enough that the rose tattooed on her hip shows. They have dark eyeshadow on, and deep-mauve lipstick, and their skin is very white because they never go into the sun without sunscreen on. They've seen the effects of the sun on the faces of their mothers, and it won't happen to them.

  Under the girls' feet, the farmers and the German immigrants and their wives and children are bones and teeth in boxes.

  Neither girl has ever spent much time in the country. Never gone camping or spent the summer on a farm...

  The dead in this country churchyard could not have imagined these girls any better than these girls can imagine the dead.

  IT WAS A WINDY MORNING.

  The sky was full of purple clouds, which scuttled quickly overhead. Perhaps it would rain. Perhaps this would be the first afternoon thunderstorm of the summer. Perhaps it was tornado weather.

  Better today than tomorrow, Diana thought, when the third grade would be going to the zoo for their last day of school.

  The wind had blown a few light branches out of the trees, and they littered the neighborhood. When Diana ran over them in the minivan, they snapped like skinny bones.

  Emma had seemed happy when Diana kissed her good-bye in the classroom. Sister Beatrice had watched them part, and her shadow fell between them. Still, Diana's headache had passed before it even started, seeing her daughter smile.

  Emma had been smiling, and even before Sister Beatrice offered her exoneration, Emma had seemed back to normal ... a girl much more worried about her pigtails than her soul. Emma had known that Diana was meeting with Sister Beatrice, but both Diana and Paul had reassured her that they knew there'd been some kind of mistake.

  "You'll tell her I didn't write the story?" Emma asked.

  "Of course, honey," Paul had said. "You said you didn't write it, and we believe you."

  "I swear it," Emma said. "I swear it on my life."

  Emma had thrown herself into Paul's arms, and he'd looked at Diana over his daughter's shoulder.

  Diana couldn't tell, this time, what the look conveyed.

  Did he blame Diana?

  Did he think, somehow, that Diana had, as Emma originally believed, written the story herself, slipped it into Emma's backpack, set her own daughter up for ... for what?

  And why in god's name would Diana have done such a thing?

  "Of course," Diana reassured Emma. She had the story, folded in fourths, in her hand like a permission slip, a doctor's excuse, an indulgence.

  But again ... for what?

  "Of course I'll tell her there was some terrible mistake," Diana said to Emma, "that you would never have written this story yourself."

  Now, without Emma, Diana pulled into the driveway, but she stopped short of the garage. Paul's bicycle wasn't propped up against the side of it, but this wasn't one of his teaching days, so Diana supposed he had gone to his office or to the library to do research. Maybe he was already planning his Alfred M. Fuller lecture for the fall.

  Diana opened the back door, which was unlocked, and stepped into the kitchen, kicking her shoes off as she went.

  The house was quiet.

  The breakfast things, as always, were unmoved.

  Outside, in the sky, a bit of yellow sun cracked through the purple clouds, and a bruise-colored light shone through the screen door. Diana turned on the radio over the refrigerator and began to tidy up.

  Dr. Laura was talking to what sounded like a very young man.

  "It's not fair, I don't think," he said.

  "What's fair?" the talk show host asked.

  He didn't answer.

  "She told me she was using birth control," he said.

  "Well," Dr. Laura said, "did you ever ask her what she'd want to do if the birth control failed?"

  "No," he said.

  "You should have," Dr. Laura said.

  "I'm too young to have a baby," he said.

  "That may well be," Dr. Laura said, "but you're having one now, so you'd better grow up."

  It sounded as though the boy were beginning to cry.

  Diana stopped and listened, holding a dish towel in her hand.

  The radio crying became louder and louder, then turned into what sounded like a howl—a newborn baby, or an animal in pain—and Diana dropped the dish towel and reached quickly for the dial on the radio, spinning it away from that station. But still, in the static, she could hear the howl, and something else....

  Laughter?

  A man's deep laughter?

  Then it was replaced by silence, the sound of electricity and stars.

  ***

  It's quiet here.

  No one is in the church behind them, and no cars pass by on the road. A few blackbirds scream from the trees, but they don't seem angry. They're just making noise to cut holes in the silence.

  The gravestones are aged and weathered, and the names on most of them have been washed away by time and rain.

  The grass, a lush lime green, whispers as they walk on it.

  Toward the back of the cemetery, the markers grow smaller, closer to the ground, and the girls bend down to read what's been chiseled beneath a little angel whose face is tilted upward and whose features have turned to soap through a century of weeping:

  Close your eyes and weep no more, Little John has gone before.

  Beside Little John's angel is a lamb guarding the grave of Little John's brother:

  Beloved infant of Sarah and Vaughn.

  The two boys were born years apart but died on the same day. April 29, 1888.

  The girls read the names and dates on the graves around them in silence, wandering.

&
nbsp; "They're all kids," one of them finally says.

  "Jesus," the other one says.

  WHEN ALL OF THE BREAKFAST DISHES WERE PUT AWAY, Diana headed upstairs.

  The yellow sun had been extinguished briefly by a swift cloud passing, and when Diana stepped into the bedroom, it was completely dark. She switched on the overhead light.

  At first she didn't gasp. One, two, three, four seconds passed before she realized what she was seeing, and then she inhaled sharp and fast and put her hand to her mouth. She leaped backward, and Timmy jumped from the bed, ran past her in a bolt of blackness, then down the stairs.

  Timmy.

  She was able in the split second before he was out of sight to see him clearly, and she knew it was Timmy.

  Not the Timmy of the last two years of his life, but the Timmy of her own youth. Fat and glossy and black.

  For a moment Diana couldn't move. She felt as if she'd been punched in the stomach—low, just above her womb—and the dull shock of it was absorbed by her whole body. It traveled in both directions along her spine....

  And then the pain lodged itself in her head, which she held in both hands, closing her eyes tightly before she opened them again to the quiet orderliness of the bedroom she shared with her husband.

  Roses on the wallpaper.

  White curtains on the windows.

  She sat down on the hope chest she'd been given by her mother when Diana announced her engagement to Paul—the one her mother had filled with bedsheets and dish towels in the months before they were married.

  It was solidly built of wood, and now she kept sweaters in it. Sweaters and nighties...

  Then she realized, of course, that it was some kind of mistake.

  Some cat, some neighborhood cat, had gotten into their house.

  Maybe Paul had left the back door open when he took out the garbage that morning.

  And then she started to laugh—harder than she'd expected to laugh. She laughed until the tears fell onto her pink cashmere tank top.

  Timmy had been buried in the yard.

  Timmy was dead, was ashes.

  By now, less than ashes.

  And then there was the quick stab of it, the memory of Timmy collapsing slowly in her arms after the veterinarian administered the shot. The way Timmy had relaxed into himself in the most terrible, total way imaginable, in a way that didn't make Diana feel in the least that death would come as a comfort, come as a sleep, but that it would, instead, be a complete annihilation of everything—the self, the soul, the world...

  Remembering Timmy like that made Diana swallow the laughter and tears and put her hand, again, to her head, where the ache had returned, completely concentrated now at her right temple, an entirely cold and brilliant pain.

  But whose cat was that, and where had it gone?

  Diana started down the stairs.

  She had to hold tightly to the railing because the sun had not yet emerged from the cloud and the stairwell was utterly dark, as dark as night.

  "Here, kitty-kitty-kitty," she called, as she had always called to Timmy, but in a weak and wavering voice.

  Suddenly rain began to pound on the roof. A hard, full rain. And when she got downstairs, Diana couldn't see. She turned on all the lamps as she went, looking around—under the couch, behind the chair.

  Timmy—or the cat who resembled Timmy, the one who had gotten into their house somehow—wasn't there.

  Again she called.

  But Timmy had never come when he was called.

  Timmy was the only cat she'd ever had. Maybe all cats were that way.

  Diana went into the kitchen. By now she was rubbing her eyes. Could she simply have imagined it? Could she have seen a cat that wasn't there? Was there some cluster of cells in her brain that had Timmy imprinted on them? Had they fired randomly at some sensory trigger? Perhaps the smell of rain about to fall?

  She turned the light on in the kitchen, and he yowled.

  Timmy. He was standing in the kitchen by the refrigerator in the place where they'd kept his dried food and water. He nudged the edge of the refrigerator as he'd always done, rubbing his face against it affectionately, then he looked casually up at Diana.

  "Timmy?"

  She reached down and scratched behind his ears.

  Timmy purred, dry and loud.

  Light and Shadow

  "DIANA," PAUL SAID OVER THE TELEPHONE WHEN SHE reached him in his office.

  Timmy was ended up on her lap, fast asleep.

  She'd opened a can of tuna fish for him, and he'd wolfed it, licked the bowl until even the aftertaste of tuna would have been long gone.

  Diana held the phone to her ear with one hand, and with the other she petted the cat.

  "Diana," he repeated, "black cats do tend to resemble one another, you know."

  "I know," Diana said. She knew it had sounded defensive, so she laughed. "It's just strange, the resemblance. And how did he get in?"

  "Are you sure it's a he?"

  "Yeah," she told him, "I checked."

  "He could have gotten in a million different ways. Most likely one of us left the door open this morning. Or we might have some gap between the basement and the front porch. Something we never noticed. Maybe he got in through the attic."

  "I know," Diana said.

  And it was true.

  She did know.

  There had to have been a million gaps in the foundation of a house this old, holes in the roof, places where something could sneak in and out without being seen. And the cat—the cat, though it bore such a resemblance to Timmy—the cat was not Timmy. No one needed to tell her that. Timmy...

  Diana had watched for years with her own eyes as Timmy had aged and decayed. She'd been right there with the veterinarian when the injection was given. She'd been holding Timmy. This cat in her lap was not that cat.

  "Are you keeping it?" Paul asked.

  The question sounded strange to her. Are you keeping the cat. Surely he meant we....

  "If no one comes looking for him, if no one puts an ad in the paper, I don't see why—"

  "That's fine," Paul said. "I was just asking."

  "It'll be nice for Emma."

  Paul said nothing.

  "When will you be home?" Diana asked.

  He told her he'd be home early. He was having trouble working. He'd see her that afternoon.

  ***

  Driving back into Briar Hill, they stop at a roadside fruit stand.

  An old man and his old wife are selling California peaches.

  The old man has skin like leather, but the old woman is draped in a brown shawl, and she wears a man's fishing cap low on her face. What they can see of her skin looks perfectly smooth. The skin of someone who has avoided the sun all of her life.

  The old man doesn't look at the girls. He simply takes the money they offer him for the peaches, and points at the bushel baskets and says, "Take your fruit."

  The old woman watches them from under the brim of the khaki fishing cap.

  One of the girls can feel the old woman's eyes on the rose tattoo on her hip.

  A pickup pulls up at the corner, turning left onto the country road, and two boys inside it whistle and shout out the window.

  "Baby! Hey!"

  They could be shouting at either one of the girls, but the one with the rose tattoo on her hip cannot look up from the bushel basket of peaches. She feels something warm, like tears or blood, smooth itself out from her throat to her hips.

  The boys, whistling.

  The old man and woman scowling.

  The bushels of fruit in the sun—ripe.

  A small cloud of fruit flies hovering almost invisibly over the fruit.

  The sun like a burning Earth overhead.

  But why would she dress this way—the shorts, the tattoo, the spaghetti straps, the gold ring in her belly button—if she didn't want to be looked at?

  The girls eat the peaches in the car.

  The taste is blindingly sweet, but the jui
ce runs all over so that everything the girls touch until they wash their hands will turn to sweetness and stick to the tips of their fingers.

  AFTER A WHILE TIMMY JUMPED OFF HER LAP.

  He leaped up onto the couch then and curled to sleep in his favorite spot—a place where the floral pattern had been worn away from years of sleep and restless kneading.

  Timmy was an outdoor cat, so he'd had his claws. Every piece of furniture in their house, and every rug, still bore Timmy's marks.

  Diana stood up from the chair. She was feeling good again. Something had been returned to her ... changed, but hers. He was purring and snoring when she left the living room to go to her studio, and she closed the kitchen door behind her when she left the house.

  Outside, the rain had stopped, but there was still the distant rumbling of thunder, sporadic flashes of lightning near the horizon. The air smelled like tin. It was steamy. There were worms lying bloated on the driveway.

  Inside the garage it was dark, but once Diana had climbed the stairs and opened the door to her studio, she turned on the light, and she saw the sketch of the two teenagers, the one she'd drawn the day before, still on her drawing board.

  It was one of her favorite moments, the one in which she approached a drawing she'd recently done but which she hadn't looked at closely yet, hadn't really seen. She'd been away from it for a day, so looking at it now was like looking at a stranger's piece, or like something one of her students had drawn. It was the only time when she could be critical and admiring of her own work.

  And this work was pretty good.

  There was a sense of composition in it. Neither too centered nor too symmetrical, but not lacking those qualities, either.

  The boy and the girl were near the right corner of the drawing, almost as if the artist were seeing them out of the corner of her eye. The informality of the girl's arm flung across her eyes was perfect. Unposed. Real. And her cigarette in the other hand was the right, unsentimental touch. The girl was beautiful, and so was the boy. His arms were thin. The girl's breasts lay flat against her chest as most girls' breasts lie, in this position, no matter how young and firm their bodies are.

  And the light was right.