American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,253

hard thing for you to be—isn’t it, Mona?”

“How… how could you ever know what makes me happy?”

“I know a lot, dear,” says her mother. “Mothers always know more than people think.”

“You don’t know me.”

She smiles. “Yes. Yes, I do.” She raises her finger, and taps the air…

… and ripples radiate outward, as if she’s tapped the surface of a pond, and as things ripple they change…

Mona becomes aware of a change in height. She looks down, and sees she is, without a doubt, a little girl of about nine, sitting on the couch beside her mother. But now it’s her mother’s house in Wink, the rambling adobe ranch house. It’s the perfect image of how it looked in the film Mona found, shining with Mid-Century chic and little New Mexican additions. It’s mid-afternoon, and the sunlight through the windows is purer than snow.

Her mother remains the same: red, smiling, perfect. “You wanted this,” she says. “And I can give it to you. You can grow up here, with me. And we can do it right this time. We’ll have Christmases, and Thanksgivings, and I’ll help you with your homework, every night…”

Mona is silent. It hurts to hear this, for this is exactly what she has wanted all her life. But it does not feel right.

“What’s wrong?” asks her mother.

“This isn’t what I want,” says Mona. “Or at least what I want now. I’m not a little girl anymore, Momma. This all… and this all happened so long ago.”

“But it could happen now. It could happen the right way.”

Mona doesn’t answer.

“Do you want more?” asks her mother. She reaches up again and taps the air, and it ripples, and then…

Mona is sitting on a front porch. It’s unmistakably Wink, the sky bursting with a magnificent sunset, and though the house isn’t familiar there’s a cup of tea on a coffee table before her. She somehow knows immediately it’s made just the way she likes it—half-and-half and Splenda.

She looks around, and in the same way she knows this house is her own. She must live here. She has lived here for years.

She looks down, and sees she is no longer the nine-year-old Mona: she is twenty-five, maybe thirty. She hears a door open down the street, and turns. It’s her mother. They live on the same street, apparently. Her mother walks out the front door, smiling, her hair slightly gray, eyes bearing a few more wrinkles, though she is still clad in the dazzling red dress. “It could be like this,” she says as she walks down the sidewalk to her. “We’d spend years together. You’d become your own person, but I’d never be far.” She walks up and rests her arms on the top of Mona’s porch rail. “We’d have tea in the afternoon, and bake pies, and gossip, becoming friends. We’d play cards, I’d tell you tales, and we’d read the paper together on weekend mornings. And I’d always be on hand if it got difficult.”

“If what?”

Mona’s mother, smiling like a magician with a particularly good trick, nods toward the front yard.

Mona looks up.

There is a tree in her front yard. And, hanging from the lowest branch, there is a tiny pink swing.

Mona shuts her eyes, and looks away.

“I’d help you when she cries all night,” says her mother’s voice. “I’d watch her while you nap in the bedroom. I’d show you how to deal with a blowout—which is what we’d call it when diapers overflow.” She laughs a little ruefully, as if she’s dealt with plenty of those in her time, and Mona has to remember—She hasn’t. She’s making this all up. All of this is made up. “I’d always be on hand to tell you what she can and can’t eat, and tricks about storing bottles, and teething. I’d always be there for you. For her.”

Mona shakes her head, and says, “No. No.”

“No what? Why no?”

“I lost my baby, Momma.” Mona feels her cheeks are wet. “I did. It’s hard, and I wish to Christ it hadn’t happened, but it did.”

“But you could have her back. You have her back now.”

“But is she really mine? You want her for your own reasons, I know that. Would I get her back after you do what you need?”

Her mother does not answer.

“So what would you give me when this is all over? A real girl? My real daughter? Or another version of her, stolen from God knows where?”

Mona’s mother does not react to this, nor does she really answer her.