The Life Before Her Eyes Read Free Page B

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