John Lutz - The Ex

“And you still don’t agree that Deirdre tried to kill me.”

“No,” he said thoughtfully, and no doubt honestly, “I can’t agree with you on that. And you said yourself you didn’t see whoever was in the basement. Whatever happened, Mol, I’m thankful you weren’t seriously hurt.”

Molly smiled resignedly. Changing the way he thought was like trying to claw through a stone wall. “You think she was just trying to scare me?”

“I don’t think she was there, Mol.” He reached across the table and held her hand. “Do you realize you’re accusing someone of attempted murder?”

“I realize more than that. She did try to kill me, David. And I think she might have succeeded in killing Bernice so she could get closer to us through Michael. If she’s the woman I saw in the park, she’s in great physical shape, an athlete. She’d have the lung capacity to hold Bernice underwater until she drowned. Bernice would have been struggling, panicking, using up oxygen fast.”

He stared at her in astonishment. “My God, Mol! That’s wild speculation. You shouldn’t be saying it.”

“I’ve smelled my scent on Deirdre, seen her on the street in a dress that’s missing from my closet. Seen how she looks at you. She wants you again. She wants Michael. She wants my life and I’m in the way.”

David shook his head, gazed out the window for a moment as if gathering his thoughts, then looked at her. He still had on his glasses from when he was reading the pamphlet, and he seemed to be focusing on her with an effort spurred by intense curiosity. “Do you really think she’s sneaking into our apartment and pilfering your cosmetics and clothes?”

“Yes, I think so.” She sipped from her water tumbler, then put it down and stared into it. The water was trembling gently, its ice-cluttered surface tilting this way and that against the sides of the glass. But she could see all the way to the bottom and pick up the cream color of the table. She wished her future were as clear. “If she wants to steal my life, why wouldn’t she steal my green dress?”

David apparently considered her question rhetorical, because he didn’t attempt an answer. “The only way she could be getting in is from the fire escape,” he said, “through the window we keep propped open for Muffin. If it will make you feel more secure, I’ll nail it so it can’t be raised any farther than six inches.”

Molly continued staring into her glass. “David, when I came here to meet you, I was followed.”

He sat back and said nothing. She knew what he must be thinking: Here’s something new. How would he cope with it?

“How can you be sure?” he finally asked, his voice wary.

He was on Central Park West, then on the subway, then behind me as I was walking here. I sneaked looks and saw him several times, saw his reflection in a shop window.”

“Him?”

“Yes. A man. Tall, with red hair. Sometimes he’d be behind me, sometimes on the other side of the street.”

She could hear him breathing hard, trying to assess this latest development.

“You joking, Mol?”

“I wish I were,” she said to her ice water. “I know how this sounds. Don’t you think I know how this sounds? Well, I know exactly. You’d like to send me back to Dr. Mindle.”

“Do you know who this man is?” He was clearly frightened and puzzled by her state of mind. “I mean, have you ever seen him before?”

“No and no, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t real.” She looked up at him abruptly, which seemed to startle him. “I know what you think-that I’m going crazy.”

He squirmed in his seat. “No, no, Mol! I think you’re a case of nerves, and I don’t blame you. Hell, everything that’s been happening lately, I’m not the calmest guy in town myself.”

Molly had his support, she knew. He was on her side. Yet he couldn’t seem to believe any real ill of Deirdre, couldn’t believe his wife entirely. The tug of war he must be feeling, that he was helping to instill in her, was confusing. There were moments when she sometimes took his side, when she thought this whole period of discontent and fear might really be her fault. She absently inserted a finger in the cold water and trailed it in a circle, creating ripples that sometimes overran the glass’s rim.

“Lately I wonder about myself,” she said. “I can’t help it. I know that’s what she wants, but I can’t help it.”

David stared at her in such obvious sympathy and pain that her heart ached. “Maybe you should go back to Dr. Mindle, Mol.”

Her anger stirred. “Don’t be absurd. I don’t need an analyst.”

“Half the people in this city are in some kind of therapy,” David said with a glance out the window.

“The other half roam the streets talking to imaginary companions.”

He squeezed her hand and gave her a strained smile. “I’d like for us to stay in the first half, Mol.”

The waiter brought their burgers and beer and laid everything out on the table. There were heaped french fries, almost burying those tiny containers of slaw that looked like the miniature paper cups dentists gave you when they instructed you to rinse. The food’s pungent aroma stirred Molly’s appetite then almost simultaneously made her nauseated.

“I love you, Mol.” David said, when the waiter was out of earshot. “I really do love you.”

He didn’t add that he was concerned for her sanity. That was kind of him, she thought. He was a genuinely kind man and in so many ways a good husband. But something was wrong between them, something was secret and festering.

She smiled sadly at him.

“Possibly you do, David. Yet you ordered onions on your hamburger.”

Deirdre had told Chumley she wasn’t feeling well. As she expected, he urged her to take the afternoon off. He’d been trying to coach her to increase her skill in double-entry bookkeeping. She’d become bored within minutes.

After buying a knish and a can of Diet Coke from a street vendor, she sat on a stone wall and ate lunch, then took a cab home. She didn’t like riding the subway. It was too crowded, not to mention the way those assholes stared at a woman. She almost wanted one of them to try something.

Besides, it hadn’t been that long ago when one of them had set off a fire bomb in a subway car. The bomb had detonated in a station, but it might have gone off when the train was in a tunnel and caused even more death and injury. The idea of being trapped in a tunnel to die of smoke inhalation or burn to death made Deirdre shudder. There would be nothing she could do about it other than to suck in the smoke or flames and make death as quick as possible. She didn’t want that to be her final and uncontrollable destiny

She entered her apartment and changed to jeans and a blouse, leaving her shoes off. After settling down in front of the TV to watch CNN, she became restless. Wolf Blitzer appeared on screen, talking about impending legislation that had to do with foreign aid. Maybe it was his name, but with his beard that never looked as if it had quite grown all the way out, he always seemed to Deirdre like a man in the early stages of transforming into a werewolf. Not that she believed in such things. Or needed to, like some people. There were plenty of very real threats and injustices in the world without worrying about the inventions of writers.

Blitzer was pointing to a bar chart with a pen or pencil. She found that she couldn’t sit still; a wild animal seemed to pace inside her chest.

When Newt Gingrich appeared on camera to be interviewed in front of a bookshelf lined with obviously phony books, she switched off the TV, stood up, and stretched to loosen stiff limbs and eager muscles. Standing tall with her head back, her arms extended straight up, she could almost feel the rough-textured ceiling with her eyes as she peered at it between the widely spread fingers of each hand.