John Lutz - The Ex

A sad laugh that surprised her broke through her sobs. “You sure are a comfort.”

“I guess I’m not much help. This kind of thing throws me. I’m sorry, Mol.”

She reached up and squeezed his hand gripping her shoulder. “It’s okay, David. I’m just all…I don’t know. Things are so screwed up lately.”

Then she began sobbing harder. It made her furious that she couldn’t stop. Within a few minutes she’d set off Michael, who began to wail.

Molly wiped at her eyes and saw David lean back against the sofa. His body slumped and he clenched his eyes shut. He looked haunted and years older.

She tried to get some work done the next day but couldn’t. David had gone to work as usual, but he still looked strained and tired. She doubted if he was getting much accomplished either.

She’d kept Michael home. He slept most of the day. Slept so much, in fact, that she’d become worried and phoned the doctor, who’d told her it was probably Michael’s way of dealing with Bernice’s death. Molly wasn’t to worry about him unless signs of physical illness or prolonged depression appeared. It was difficult to notice signs of depression in someone when they were asleep, she thought. But she didn’t mention that to Michael’s pediatrician.

Molly had sat at her desk, her work spread before her, waiting, but she’d barely touched it. She’d spent most of the day gazing out the window-rather, at the window. At nothing. Not even at the bluebottle fly that buzzed against the pane and crawled along the window frame. Her focus was inward. On grief and mortality.

Julia had agreed to come to the apartment and baby-sit Michael that night, while Molly and David were at the mortuary. This was the only night for visitation. Bernice’s funeral was scheduled for the next morning.

Molly began dressing for the visitation early, before David got home from the agency. She’d taken a long, cool shower, then chosen her simple navy blue dress to wear, with matching shoes. Her only jewelry would be her wedding ring.

David came home and kissed her hello. He acted very subdued and put on his charcoal suit, a white shirt, and gray and maroon tie.

Dressed for mourning, they sat on the sofa in the living room, waiting for Julia. Michael was asleep again. The TV was on CNN, but the sound was little more than a murmur. Neither Molly nor David moved to increase the volume. In near silence they watched a tearful woman interviewed in the rain, then tape of a military plane crash that had occurred last year and been caught with a bystander’s video camera. Molly watched the sleek jet fighter skim low over what looked like a runway, then dip a wing that caught the ground. The plane pinwheeled and disappeared in an orange fireball. The backs of spectators’ heads could be seen as they moved toward the crash site, then the tape went black.

The phone rang.

David sprang to answer it before it woke Michael.

Molly watched his brow knit and his expression darken as he listened to whoever was on the other end of the connection.

“All right,” he said. She recognized that tone of voice, the one he used when he was trying not to show irritation. “Sure, that’s the breaks. And you’re positive she’s okay? All right, yes. No, really, we can work something out. Sure. Okay, good luck.”

She waited while he hung up the phone.

“Damn!” he said. “This is just what we need!”

“Who was it?” Molly asked.

David glanced at the phone with loathing, as if it were a snake that had just sunk fangs into him. “It was Julia. She said she can’t baby-sit Michael tonight. She just got a call that there was a fire a few hours ago at her mother’s house in Brooklyn.”

Molly tried to feel something. She knew that under ordinary circumstances she would, but tonight she felt nothing. Her emotions had been frayed and numbed by Bernice’s death. Now more tragedy for Julia. Julia’s mother.

Then a rush of shame almost made her blush. She wasn’t the only one in the world with grief.

“Is her mother okay?”

“Yeah,” David said. “Nobody was hurt, thank God. But this leaves us without a baby-sitter, and we’ve got to get to the funeral parlor within an hour.”

Molly felt a twinge of guilt at being secretly relieved that she wouldn’t have to view Bernice’s body. Or maybe the body wouldn’t be on display, a custom Molly despised. She realized she didn’t even know Bernice’s religion. Either way, Molly had had enough of death and didn’t want to visit with it this evening. “There’s nothing we can do about the situation, David.”

“Of course there isn’t!” he said angrily.

Her grief and the way her life had been knocked off center the last few weeks welled up in Molly. Tears were hot in her eyes. She damned herself for her weakness, but she began to cry.

David approached her cautiously and laid a hand on her shoulder. The hand felt like a bird that had lighted there and might any second fly away He was unsure of her reactions these days. Well, so was she.

“I’m sorry, Mol.” he said gently. “I get frustrated, angry, and I say things I don’t mean.”

Molly didn’t trust herself to try to speak, so she nodded. She managed to stop crying and wiped her eyes with her fingertips. Hell on the makeup. “That’s not why I was crying,” she said, only half lying. “I just thought about Bernice being gone. It doesn’t seem real. I should have remembered, death is something people learn to look away from.”

Even me, she thought.

“I don’t like to admit she’s gone, either,” David said. He removed his hand from her shoulder and glanced at his wristwatch. “Maybe we could take Michael with us.”

Molly was horrified. “No, David! We’re not taking a three-year-old child to a funeral home where someone he loves is laid out.”

“People do, Mol.” he said with a gentleness that surprised her.

She refused to be anything other than adamant. “People, maybe. Not us. Not our child!”

David couldn’t quite throw off his irritation. “We don’t have a lot of choice. The funeral’s tomorrow. This is the only night for visitation.”

“Michael’s sleeping,” Molly said. “Dreaming God knows what, but at least he might have some relief from his grief. I’m not going to wake him up and take him to see Bernice’s-I’m not going to do it!”

Someone knocked three times loudly on the door. It occurred later to Molly that it was almost on cue. As if it were the result of eavesdropping.

She and David exchanged glances, then David crossed the room and opened the door.

Deirdre was standing in the hall.

David stepped back and she moved in.

“I heard about your baby-sitter,” she said. “I just came down to tell you I’m sorry. I feel for you. I know how awful it must be-”

She stopped talking and regarded them more carefully.

“Did I come at a bad time?”

Molly looked off to the side. “Christ!”

David bowed his head and looked embarrassed. Molly could have kicked him.

“We were about to leave for the funeral home,” he said, “when the woman who was going to watch Michael for us called and canceled.”

Deirdre glanced around. “Where is Michael?”

“He’s asleep.”

“Well heck,” Deirdre said, “I’ll watch him for you. How much trouble can he be if he’s asleep. He won’t even know you’re gone.”

It made sense, but Molly didn’t want it to happen. She felt almost panicky. “David, I-”

“It’ll be okay, Mol.” He glanced again at his watch, frowning. “He’s sleeping, like Deirdre said.”

Deirdre smiled and flipped her hair back off her shoulders. “I’ll just curl up on the sofa and watch television.”