American Elsewhere

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT




The midday sun bakes everything, anything. It is so bright it has baked the blue out of the sky, the red out of the earth. The very air shimmers as if to get out of its way.

Mona sympathizes as she drives. She feels blackened, burned, both inside and out. She has walked through fire, now she is filled only with ash.

When she arrives at the mesa she sees things are much as she expected: Gracie, Parson, and her daughter sit on the shady side, under a shelf of rock. Gracie’s eyes are bright, bright red, veined and wet like peeled pomegranates. Her daughter sleeps in Gracie’s arms. The child’s fat cheeks make her lower lip jut out as though she is pouting over some recent slight.

Parson is waiting for her, as is someone else: a young girl of about ten, with mousy brown hair and yellow tennis shoes. She looks up at Mona with a piercing gaze, and she slowly stands as if this action normally causes her great pain.

“Mrs. Benjamin,” says Mona.

“Hello, dear,” says the little girl. “You’ve done quite wonderfully.”

“So that is you in there?”

“Yes. It is a bit unwieldy being so… short. But I manage.”

“It all worked?” Mona asks Parson. “You all got here safely?”

“We did,” says Parson. “Though some of us are the worse for wear.” He looks back at Gracie. “She has lost everything.”

Mona walks to Gracie, stoops, and holds her hands out. Gracie takes a moment to register this, then looks up at Mona and slowly holds out the sleeping child. Mona takes her and says, “You did a good job taking care of her, Gracie.”

Gracie stares into the stone. Her cheeks are so lacquered with tears it’s hard to see if she’s still crying. Any new ones simply dissolve and run down her face in a sheet.

“Thank you,” says Mona. “I really do thank you, Gracie.”

She sits down and holds her child in her arms. She stares at her daughter, and, without even knowing it, bends over to shelter her from the heat.

“What happened to Mother?” asks Mona.

“The wildling,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “He took her body, back to… wherever he resides. I do not know why, but I do not really wish to find out. I feel the answer would be unpleasant.”

“Then it’s over?” asks Mona. “It’s really all over?”

“Nothing is ever truly over,” says Parson. “At least, in my experience. But Mother’s efforts here do seem at an end.”

The little girl wakes and looks at Mona, then spies Mona’s watch and begins picking at it with her thumb and forefinger. “You want that? Here. Here.” Mona unclasps it and hands it to the girl. She holds it out as a fisherman would his prize, and smiles in glee and disbelief. “My goodness,” whispers Mona. “Isn’t that something.”

She revels in this maternal moment for a while, basking in the presence of her child like the warmth of a fire.

“What will you do with her?” asks Parson. “Keep her? Raise her?”

“Could I?” asks Mona.

“There is nothing stopping you.”

Her daughter’s interest in the watch wanes. She flops over, rests her head on Mona’s chest, and heaves a great sigh. “She’s tired. She’s had a long day.”

She thinks, I don’t have anywhere to put her to sleep. Then, with a shrill of fear: I don’t even know what name to say when she wakes up.

Once more she remembers the look on the face of the Mona in the lens.

“But she’s so beautiful,” says Mona softly, as if arguing with someone. “She’s even more beautiful than I thought she would be…”

“She is quite terribly pretty, yes,” says 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 blank. Again, when Mona nears it she can feel it is like a door still slightly ajar.

“Are you quite sure about this?” asks Parson.

“Do it,” says Mona. Her daughter bows her back, tired of being held for so long. “Just do it.”

“We’ll need your help,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “You will need to give a push. But I think I’ve given you enough training on this, yes?”

Mona nods. The two of them start to hum, or the things inside them do. Mona faces the mirror. Her eyes search its depths. It suddenly does not seem flat, but concave, like she’s staring into half of a bubble, or maybe a tunnel…

Mona feels something give way in the mirror. And an image begins to solidify in the glass.

A yellow nursery, with polka-dotted curtains.

How she wanted that life in the mirror. How she dreamed of it.

“You can cross, if you want,” says Parson. “This is, after all, your own time, just slightly different.”

Mona looks at him, and he nods toward the silvery image. She takes a breath, and walks toward it.

She expects to feel something, as if she’s jumped into a lake or parted a veil, but there is nothing. It’s as if there’s just a hole in the world, and this pleasant nursery lies on the other side.

There is the fragrance of laundry sheets and diapers and Lysol and fresh bedding. Everything is neat and tidy; all the tiny little clothes have been properly put away; and unless she’s mistaken, there are lines in the carpet from a recent, vigorous vacuuming. Something inside her swells to see all this.

Mona wishes she knew what time it is over here; she thinks it’s just minutes after the child was originally stolen, but she isn’t sure.

She walks to the crib. The baby begins squirming, already anticipating being forced to sleep.

Do it now, or you’ll never bring yourself to do it again.

She lays her child in the crib and kisses her on the head. “Thank you for showing me that I would have been a good momma,” she whispers. “Your own momma might be kind of scared for a while. But don’t worry. She’ll get over it. It might take her a while, but… but I know she always gets over it.”

Mona begins to back away.

She knows this is the right decision, so why is she crying so much? Why does it hurt so much to accept how things are?

The child sits up and squawks a tiny protest.

Mona begins to walk back through the mirror. As she does, she hears a voice in the hall—her voice—say, “Wendy? Wendy, is that you?”

And she thinks: Wendy. Her name is Wendy. What a good name.