American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,228

one softly. “In it. Around it.”

“I told you so,” says the woman in the panama hat. “She made this for us. She is here. She never left us. She is coming back.”

“We must concentrate,” says one man.

“Yes,” says the woman in the panama hat.

They stare at the lens. Their eyes grow wide. Then a soft sound begins to seep through the room. It is not quite a whine, and not quite a hum, but it is of a frequency so strange, and so intense, that it makes Mona’s eyes water even though she can hardly lift her head. Though they are facing away, she is sure their eyes are fluttering like mad…

The surface of the lens ripples, as if it’s bending inward.

They’re singing to it, she thinks. Open sesame…

The humming intensifies. The tub of her blood appears to grow a little faint—as if it’s about to flicker, like the croquet ball in the film. But where could they be sending it?

Or, she thinks, are they bringing something here?

The lens continues to shift. Then it seems to grow transparent, and Mona thinks she can see bright, clean daylight filtering through its top…

“It’s working,” says one man.

“I know it’s working,” says the woman in the panama hat, irritated. “Quit talking and concentrate.”

Mona tries to watch as the lens seems to bring the image into focus, but something bumps into her from behind. “Hold on to these,” whispers Mrs. Benjamin’s voice. Something is shoved in between her buttocks and the chair, something flat and thin. With her tied hands, she feels something metallic and cold…

Mirrors? Maybe hand mirrors?

The people around the lens do not notice. Mona can see why—the mirror is changing, changing, until it’s as if there’s half of another room sitting at the end of the lens chamber.

Mona, whose breath feels very faint right now, squints as she tries to decipher what she’s seeing.

It’s a nursery. Bright morning sunlight pours through a floor-to-ceiling window. The walls are a faint yellow, the curtains have orange polka-dots, and there is a white crib just beside the window with a mobile hanging above it. Horses of many shapes and colors dangle from the mobile; it looks quite old, actually, which is strange because the rest of the nursery looks terribly new.

She’s seen that mobile before. She knows she has.

Actually, Mona thinks, the rest of the items in the nursery also look familiar. She bought things just like them, once. She’s positive that years ago she bought almost the exact same tree decal to stick in the corner of the room—though she never took it out of the packaging. She never got the chance. Mona’s also sure she picked out a shade of yellow paint so similar to the color of the nursery in the lens that you almost couldn’t tell them apart, though her paint job wound up only half finished. And she ordered that same model of diaper pail on the internet, one of those space-age ones with expensive technology to keep the fecal reek contained (because during her pregnancy Mona became hypersensitive to the scent of shit), though Dale wound up returning it for a refund.

After everything. After the funeral.

And now she realizes where she’s seen that mobile. It was hers, once—more than thirty years ago, when she was a baby. One her own mother used for her crib—though now the idea makes her stomach squirm. But just a few years ago she looked at it with Dale, and said—Maybe we don’t need a mobile for our nursery. Maybe we have a perfectly good one right here. And Dale, who wasn’t an idiot, knew what Mona meant, and agreed, and kissed her on the forehead.

Something begins to contract inside Mona. Are they torturing her? Is this some form of psychological warfare? Why would they ever want to see this place, this place that should have been but never was?

Then something shifts in the crib ahead of them.

There is a grunt, tiny and irritated.

It looks like a lump of fabric is at the bottom of the crib. It shifts again, rising up.

Mona recognizes the pattern on the fabric. It’s a pair of baby pants she bought when she first became pregnant. She remembers the pattern, because she thought, I wonder how well spit-up will come out of this…

She is seeing a child lying on its stomach in the crib, scrunching its knees and shoulders together so its tiny butt rises higher. It is waking up, slowly scrunching and unfolding and remembering its muscles,