The Life Before Her Eyes Read Online Free Page A

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.
    But the bones ... Diana didn't know her daughter's bones the way she knew her skin. When Emma was a baby, her bones had seemed soft and lost inside her skin. Impossible to imagine. Like the skeleton of a cloth doll, like scaffolding inside a cloud.
    But now Emma was more like a toy poodle than a baby. A softness full of edges.
Muppet ...
who was Muppet? Diana remembered, suddenly, someone's dog in her lap, quivering and full of bones.
    Muppet.
    Muppet was Maureen's dog. He had gray fur and smelled like corn chips. Maureen used to take him in her lap and press her face into the fur. The dog had brown tearstains in the corners of its eyes, and when it wasn't quivering in Maureen's lap, it was lying on the floor and licking its penis or growling at the crack under the front door when people passed in the hallway of the apartment building where Maureen lived with her mother.
    Something ran into the road fast, and on four legs, and Diana swerved. A red blur—
    Fucking squirrel.
    Though she swerved, the squirrel ran straight under the minivan, and Diana instinctively closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw the squirrel dash straight up a skinny sapling on the other side of the street. The tree shivered with the frantic weight of it, and the squirrel seemed to turn in the branches and watch Diana drive away. That squirrel's death. It would be back.
    Diana exhaled, put her hand to the side of her face, and looked at Emma.
    Fucking squirrel.
    At least Diana hadn't said it out loud.
    "Squirrel," Diana explained. She was shaking. Her heart was beating hard.
    "Did we kill it?" Emma asked.
    "No," Diana said. "It made it to the other side."
    Emma nodded.
    She hadn't seen it. Maybe she didn't even believe that there had been a squirrel. Emma was the kind of child who would weep if she saw a dead raccoon at the side of the road. She'd
never been
in a vehicle that had actually struck and killed an animal. Diana could only guess what her reaction would have been.
    She drove a little slower.
    Her palms were sweaty on the steering wheel, and the green light hurt her eyes.
    Again she patted her daughter's cold knee.
    Emma didn't look at her.
    "Sweetie?" Diana said. "Look at me."
    Emma turned obediently to look at her mother. Those blue eyes.
    Whose were they?
    Hers?
    Her mother's?
    Diana felt she was being appraised by them, dispassionately but with clarity. The swearing, the swerving, it must have made quite an impression on little Emma, who had never sat so still and quiet on the drive home after school.
    Diana cleared her throat, still looking into her daughter's eyes, which were a paler blue than the sky, but made of the same substance as sky.
    "Honey," Diana said, "I'm sorry if I was acting funny, and said bad words. I don't know what was the matter with me!"
    She smiled at her daughter, and Emma smiled back. It was a small smile, but it indicated forgiveness. Diana felt