American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,64

She began to think about the phrase start a family more and more: it was like start a car, suggesting that there was a preassembled apparatus and you could just hop in and hit a switch and off you would go. Or as if there were a cheap-suited huckster who, once you had a ring on your finger and a mortgage sucking off dollars from your bank account, could fix you up with the right kind of family and you could drive it off the lot today. It was a creeping feeling she had when reading the magazines, as if they were saying, “This is how one births and rears a child,” and they’d brook no other suggestion. You had to look exactly like the picture in the magazine, otherwise you were doing it wrong.

And none of that seemed right to her. She didn’t want this to be a product, a commodity, something that had to look like what was advertised on the fucking box. This was her one chance to give love she’d never gotten herself, and she didn’t want it to be turned into something she was being fucking sold, just buying the Motherhood Experience, one internet purchase at a time.

Her life and her child were the only things she’d ever really had. And she made herself promise never to forget that.

It was eight months into the pregnancy when it happened. Eight months of nausea, of swollen feet and fingers, of nosebleeds and blurred vision and exhaustion; eight months of little wiggles and shimmers down in her belly, the poke and prod of tiny limbs; eight months of black-and-white photos of the slumbering stowaway growing inside her; eight months of mounds and mounds of impossibly tiny clothing. And then when she was on her way back from the grocery store she passed through an intersection with the blessing of two green lights, and yet just as she trundled through she caught a blur of red in the corner of her vision—just the tiniest blur, like the flit of a hummingbird’s wing. Then she felt her head snap back and her arms go limp, and in that moment her world shattered.

The entire earth seemed to buckle up and throw her car several feet to the right. She blacked out briefly. When she came to, with screams and tinkling glass and the hiss of machinery in her ears, she looked through what was left of her driver’s-side window and saw the crumpled front of a red Ford F-150, its windshield sporting a frost-rimmed, gaping hole on the right side, created when the driver—unbuckled, drunken—had been ejected through the windshield like a man shot out of a cannon, his face pushed back through his brain as he dove through the glass.

And all she could think was—Where did that come from? Where did that come from?

Then the ambulance and the parade of lights, some red and blue, some cold white. So many white flashing lights, light after light after light, and pokes all along her side as they put pins in the bones of her left arm… and then there was Dale, seated beside her bed with his big hands clasped before him, his face the color of a currant and his eyes dripping tears, and he said, honey, honey, she didn’t make it.

And Mona said, Who? Who didn’t make it?

And Dale said, Our little girl. She died. He killed our little girl.

And as Mona understood who this she was and realization dawned in her sputtering, bruised brain, some little shelf under her heart collapsed and she caved inward, crumbling to pieces and falling down the big, dark mine shaft that occupied the space where her daughter had once peacefully slept.

Dale kept talking, but it didn’t matter. Mona was walking through the hallways of her mind, turning off lights, shutting off switches, locking doors, shutting everything down, down, down, until all that was left was the barest fundamentals.

Shut down. Turn it all off.

Make yourself empty, and drift.

After the funeral Dale held her hand and said she’d be all right. He said they’d get through this. He was wrong on both counts.

She wished so badly to have known her at least a little before she lost her. Much in the same way, Mona knows, that she wished to have known her mother before she excused herself from this world.

Why is it, she thought, that people always leave us just before we know them?

After her marriage fell apart, her old lieutenant came by to