westward immediately. Now, she crawled the truck back as if she were a
teenager again, trying to sneak in after curfew. Her watch ticked the time,
after three in the morning.
She felt it, all the fatigue of the day flushing through her system
and settling at the soles of her feet, turning them to lead. She meant to
push on to California, see that film of blue ocean and dump the body
there. But something held her back.
She gripped the body under the armpits and heaved it closer to
the edge of the truck wall. She had never seen herself from behind, not
even in pictures. The part of her hair came to a point at the back of her
head that swirled out in ripples like a stone swirls out ripples of water on
the surface of a lake. She pressed the pad of her left index finger against
the point, softly, as if her touch could make the skull crack. It wouldn’t
really matter; the alien was already dead. But it had her face after all, it
had this swirl of hair. She didn’t want it to crack.
Gently, she cradled the alien and walked to the edge of Brown’s
Pond. The water glistened in the faint moonlight like a huge vat of black
ink. She thought of Edith doing the same thing years before, spattered
with blood, shaking in fear, in relief and triumph.
The first thing Sylvie did after her mother came home from her
accident was take off the older woman’s shoes, so Sylvie unlaced the alien’s
boots now. Her mother had desired a clone, a healthy clone, to hug her
when she could have desired anything in the world. A slight wind tugged
at Sylvie’s braid. She set the boots on the grass, stacked neatly together.
The second thing she did was take off her mother’s shirt. The
alien’s shirt whipped away on the breeze, made a sound like snapping and
landed ten yards away. It crumpled like a fallen flag, something vibrant
put to rest. Her mother had desired a clone for Sylvie, a version of herself
that could deal. The black water of the pond shushed like the highway,
like the blood coursing through Sylvie’s ears.
The third thing she did was take off her mother’s pants. Sylvie
unbuckled the alien’s overalls and slipped them off the prone body until
it lay completely naked. When her mother could have desired health, she
didn’t. She had desired instead another version of herself that could take
better care of her, better care of her than Sylvie.
120