average, the hospital will lose three before the sun sets on this very day alone.
Molly is also full of fun facts about the terminally ill.
Did you know that life-long atheist Carl Sagan spontaneously made the sign of the cross only seconds before exhaling his final breath? Did you know that Winston Churchill drank a half-quart of gin and smoked a cigar on his death bed?
Exactly one floor below us is the birthing center where, coincidentally, Mol and I first slid on into this world some thirty-three years prior. Every time I come here now, she reminds me of this fact, as if in the end is the beginning and in the beginning is the end and all that great-circle-of-life stuff. But then, Molly isn’t joking. She’s still the boss; after all, she’s 45 seconds older than me. Before I leave, she insists that I lay the left side of my head down flat onto the mattress, so close to her I can smell her sour, bottom-of-the-lung-barrel breaths.
“ Can you hear them?” she whispers.
“ Hear what, Mol?”
“ At night,” she says, “when I’m alone, I press my head against the mattress and listen to the cries of the newborn babies.”
Then the blast of a horn and the flashing of bright halogen lamps through the pouring rain. Blinded by oncoming headlights I was the lost doe aimlessly wandering out onto a busy highway. A quick turn of the wheel to the right and Molly’s old Cabriolet was back on the right side of a road that I apparently owned.
“Drive much?” a snickering Molly asked, her ghost image plainly visible beside me in the shotgun seat.
“Drop dead,” I barked. But then realizing what I just said, I couldn’t help but laugh. Molly was already dead.
My heart pounded. So rapidly I considered pulling off onto the soft shoulder. But for now I just wanted to get home, get something to eat and go to bed early.
‘Listen,’ I heard Franny mumble inside my head.
“Listen for what?” I said aloud.
The word filled my ears with every swipe of the windshield wipers.
Chapter 3
I knew it was going to be a long night from the second I pulled into my apartment building parking lot. I attributed the pessimism to a fire-engine red Toyota pickup that occupied my designated space. Which of course meant that I would have no choice but to park in the visitor’s lot on the opposite side of the common.
It wasn’t the occupied parking space that irritated me. What irritated me was knowing that the Toyota belonged to my ex-husband, Michael.
I killed the Cabriolet engine and pulled the keys from the ignition. I would have gotten out immediately and braved the rain had my cell not begun to vibrate. I pulled the phone out of my knapsack and flipped it open. A new text had been forwarded to me. Thumbing the OK button, I retrieved it.
Remember
It struck me as odd. Did I remember who or what exactly? Baffled, I shook my head, reading the question again and again as if the answer would somehow reveal itself. But each time I read it, the question stayed the same. No answer appeared.
Thumbing OK once more I searched for a caller ID. A name, a phone number. I found neither.
Truth is, this wasn’t the first time I’d received a text that from some out of the blue Unknown Caller. Over the past few months I’d probably received two or three of them. Only difference was that in each of those, only my name appeared.
Rebecca
No caller ID. Only Unknown Caller and no phone number displayed, ever.
It felt more than a little creepy having only your name appear as a text, especially when you had no way of knowing who the sender might be. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but think that Robyn was up to one of her tricks. Playing games with my head purely out of boredom, even if she was getting ready for a date. If that was the case, I was not about to afford her even an ounce of satisfaction by responding to the messages or, for that matter, acknowledging their receipt in the first place.
So why not call the cops?
A very strange and irrational part of me could not help but think that maybe, just maybe, Molly could be trying to communicate with me. In all my grief, I could not help but think that maybe she was sending me texts from, well, let’s call it the ‘great beyond’.
As the rain steadily tapped the windshield I felt myself smiling-happy but sad at the same time. I closed the cell, chose to remain seated behind the wheel, tear-filled eyes staring out the windshield onto a brick apartment building. The rain and the tears obscured my vision, turning the stately buildings into something out of a Salvador Dali painting. Why was I just sitting there? Why did I feel like smiling and crying at the same time? I felt like I needed to breathe, get my act back to something resembling reality before facing Michael.
Remember
“I remember everything, Mol.” I whispered, as I shifted my eyes up toward the Cabriolet’s fabric top, as if I could see through it to heaven itself.
Wiping my eyes with the backs of my hands I exhaled, resolved myself to facing the reality of my ex- husband. I opened the car door, stepped out into the rain. Moving as quickly as possible, I pulled up the seat-back, grabbed hold of the knapsack and Franny’s canvas. Then, sliding out of the car, I made the mad dash across the green to my first floor garden apartment.
Chapter 4
I entered the ground floor apartment by way of the back terrace door. As expected Michael was seated at an antique wood desk that was situated up against the living room’s far wall. His round, mustached and goateed face buried in his laptop, left hand click-clacking away, right hand raised high overhead in the classic gesture of ‘Silence please’, but that I immediately interpreted as ‘Shut Up!’
I set Franny’s ‘Listen’ canvas down, leaning it up against the floor-to-ceiling bookcases to my left. Exhaling with serious attitude, I wiped the rainwater from my face, crossed my arms over my chest, and awaited permission to speak.
And waited.
When finally Michael came down on the Return key with a pile-driven index finger, I knew he’d completed his final sentence of the day. You could almost see the relief that seemed to pour out of his head like smoke through the ears. He sat back in a black chair that bore my undergrad crest: Providence College. He flexed his muscles as if he’d just gone three rounds with a young Mike Tyson instead of having completed a few new pages to his latest opus. Brushing back thick black hair, he then smoothed out his facial hair with thumb and index finger.
“Plenty hard writing today, Bec,” he spoke, baritone voice imitating big Papa Hemingway. “Best work ever though. Maybe beat up old Shakespeare with these words.”
Rolling my eyes, I retreated into the kitchen, grabbed two cans of Pepsi from out of the fridge and opened them. I headed back into the living room, setting Michael’s soda directly beside his laptop.
He rolled the sleeves up on his thick arms.
“Plenty good timing,” he said before taking a deep, slow, appreciative drink. “No more biting the nail until tomorrow. Dawn sharp.”
Biting the nail…
For anyone not in the literary know, that’s Hemingway-speak for ‘writing’. Or should I say, the agonizing, all consuming, existential, winner-take-nothing process of writing. In fact, my ex-husband Michael could be so full of Hemingway it made me want to run back out to the Cabriolet, rain storm and all. The only reason I put up with it
