American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,259

Mrs. Benjamin.

Mona sniffs. She wants to walk away and to walk away now, because if she did she’d never revisit this decision and wouldn’t she be better for it? But she can’t help herself, and she says, “Parson—those alternates… the way things could have been…”

“Yes?”

“Are they… real?”

“Real in what sense?”

“I don’t know. In any sense. Or are they, like, ghosts? Echoes?”

“Well, the people in those alternates think themselves as real as the people here do. They have no reason to think otherwise. To themselves, they are real. After all—how real is the child you hold in your hands?”

Mona shakes her head. “God. God, damn it all.”

She has wanted this so much. For so long, this was all she wanted. And now she has it, with what amounts to the waving of a magic wand…

She wonders what she would be giving up were she to raise the child as her own. Would this be, in some distorted way, as if she were buying something? So many people in Wink did the same—they got to live their dream just by giving up one little thing, like an exchange. Mona looks at Gracie, and wonders if she ever saw a creature so violated and so abused in her life, a child whose parents traded away her health and sanity and dignity so they could live in peace and quiet…

The child’s tiny fingers probe the collar of Mona’s shirt with incredibly delicate movements as she drifts back to sleep.

How broken she felt when she lost her daughter. Is it possible that somewhere, in one of the strange sisters of her own time, the same thing is happening again? A grieving mother, wondering where her child is, and left feeling incomplete, as if suffering a monstrous amputation?

But she’s mine, thinks Mona. I love her. I would be good to her. I would be so good, maybe even better because I lost her once before…

It feels as if something is gripping her intestines, twisting and twirling them into one big knot.

“I don’t want to lose you again,” she whispers to the little girl. The child takes a deep breath in, and sighs it out. Tiny lungs, functioning perfectly. Her lips mime suckling. “But it wouldn’t be right, would it. You… you have a momma. They took you from her. And if I keep you I’d be part of that, and I can’t do that to her. I can’t do to her what happened to me. And I would know. I would know I’d done it. It would be inside me every day, every time I looked at you, and it would poison me. It’d poison me and it’d poison you and it would all just wind up wrong. I just… I mean, damn it, sweetheart. I just wanted to give you all the love I never got. Just a chance to put things right. I was gonna spoil you rotten, girl. I was gonna work my fingers to the bone for you. But that’s different from… from just having you. Having you is different from loving you. And I love you. I do. So I don’t think I can keep you, honey. I just don’t think I can. I want to. More than anything in the world, I want to. But I love you, so I can’t.”

She imagines desperate protestations—No, Momma, don’t send me away again… “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You won’t ever know how sorry I am. You won’t… hell, you won’t even know me, you’ll never even know that this happened. But you can’t do that to someone. You can’t make them something they’re not. Because then they’re just… window dressing. Just a face in a picture. And you mean so much more to me. So, so, so much more to me.” She kisses the child on the cheek. “But I want you to know that I love you. Someone out there loves you. I don’t know what life will hold for you, if it’ll be a good one or a bad one. But you are loved. Loved beyond words. Loved here, and… and I’m sure the momma over there loves you, too. I’m sure she does. I do, so she must. She must. How could she not?” Then, more quietly: “How could she not.”

Mona bows her head to touch her brow to her child’s. She listens to the tiny breaths for a moment. “Now come on.” She sniffs, and stands, though her legs wobble. “Let’s go home and see her.”

The lens is