The Ex

struggle. An old woman dressed in rags glanced at her with gloomy hostility from where she sat cross-legged on the grass, her wispy gray hair a wild tangle, a misshapen plastic trash bag of personal possessions lying beside her like the black and foreboding burden of her life.

Molly reached the park bench where she’d decided to end her run, then made herself take a few strides past it. Discipline. Finally she stopped running and walked in a slow circle, hands on hips, a medium-height, thin woman with a heart-shaped face described as sweet more often than beautiful. She was a bit wide through the pelvis, with breasts she sometimes imagined would fit neatly into teacups. David had told her that about her breasts once, not in any way un-complimentary, while they were making love.

She spat off to the side. Not very ladylike, but she’d breathed in a gnat or some other minute insect as she’d passed the bench. Probing around the inside of her dry mouth with her tongue, she decided the insect was gone but she needed something to drink, and soon. She stood for a while bent over, still with her fists propped on her hips, then straightened up and used the bottom of her faded Phantom of the Opera souvenir T-shirt to wipe sweat from her face.

She let out a long breath and looked around. The office workers and the man on the bike were gone. The old woman was still glaring at her, as if finally she’d found the one responsible for her situation.

Molly felt a pang of pity for the homeless woman, then a thrust of fear as she saw that no one else was around.

The woman stirred on the grass, then began to rise, old bones and sinew demonstrating surprising dexterity and strength.

This was silly, Molly knew. She was a twenty-seven-year-old woman in good shape, maybe a bit winded from her run, but she could still easily outdistance this ancient and decrepit derelict. She had nothing to fear.

Yet she was afraid.

Not of the old woman, she realized suddenly, but of something she couldn’t quite identify.

A man walking a pair of black poodles on short leashes came into sight from among the trees near the lake. He was moving directly toward Molly and the old woman.

The woman gathered up her bulging plastic bag and, with a final scathing glance at Molly, began shuffling away in the opposite direction. She and the man walking the poodles passed within ten feet of each other without seeming to notice, on the same planet but not in the same universe.

When the man passed Molly, he looked over at her and smiled, then strolled on. She heard him speak sharply to one of the poodles that was interested in something in the bushes and had strained the leash pulling to the side. With a firm tug on the thin leather leash, he drew the desperately curious dog back near him and continued walking.

Molly, seemingly alone now in the sun-dappled park, was still uneasy, and still unsure why. It was as if an unremembered nightmare were plaguing her with a residue of terror. She felt isolated and vulnerable. She hurried toward the brighter sunlight and the sounds of traffic drifting from beyond the trees near Central Park South, breaking into a jog as the shadow of a cloud closed in on the trail and trees around her, darkening grass and leaves.

It occurred to her then that since beginning her morning run she’d had the vague, unaccountable sensation that something was behind her, stalking her.

She remembered the woman who’d been badly beaten while jogging in the park, the victim of a wilding, as it was called. A stockbroker or financial consultant or some such thing. Running along as Molly had been, thinking of stocks or her love life or treasury bills, maybe a friend she was meeting tomorrow for lunch-then all of that had almost ended permanently for her at the hands of cruel strangers.

Fear passed like cool air over the backs of Molly’s forearms and the nape of her neck, causing her to hunch her shoulders.

Ridiculous, she told herself. As ridiculous as being afraid of a poor, harmless old woman innocently taking in the sun, perhaps the only friend left for her.

What must it be like, Molly wondered, nearing the end of life and without a human friend?

Without love.

Then her sense of isolation ended abruptly, along with her fear. She was out of the park and on the sidewalk, surrounded by more people than she could count, within twenty feet of hundreds of vehicles streaming past, even a horse-drawn carriage heading into the park.

In the middle of New York again.

The middle of her life.

At the edge of the park, Deirdre stood watching.

4

It was hot in Manhattan, but still a glorious day. David Jones pushed open the doors of the Hand Building on Third Avenue and stepped out onto the crowded sidewalk. Horns blared as the traffic signal at Third and East Fifty- fourth flashed green, and nothing larger than a deliveryman on inline skates was able to budge because of the gridlocked intersection. David began to walk, glad not to be in one of the yellow taxis baking immobile in the sunlight, caught in a web of progress gone mutant and mad.

He was an average-sized man, fit but not yet muscular despite his regular workouts at Silver’s Gym on East Fifty-sixth. With his lean features, unruly sandy hair, and round-lensed glasses with their fragile brown frames, he looked much more the intellectual than the athlete.

Thirty-seven his last birthday, and still the supervisor of the fee reading department at Sterling Morganson Literary Agency, he was beginning to wake up nights worrying about not progressing in life. Not to where he wanted to be, anyway. His job paid reasonably well; it was simply that David had been working at it longer than he’d planned. He’d expected that by this time he’d be an authors’ representative at the agency and positioned for an eventual executive position on the board. Morganson had promised advancement but so far hadn’t delivered. That was one of the reasons David worked out so hard and diligently at Silver’s; an extra five pounds on the bench press, an extra push-up or sit-up, gave the illusion of advancement in life, even if all he really had to look forward to with certainty was another day of overseeing the critiquing of would-be authors’ manuscripts, which were usually sent back with kind and encouraging letters explaining why they were unsalable, but maybe next time, if the author learned from his or her mistakes and built on the invaluable experience of having written a novel. Yes, maybe next time.

His musing had soured his mood, and it was too beautiful a day for that. He decided to eat lunch at a sit- down deli three blocks away.

It was a nice walk. No one tried to sell him a Rolex watch or stuck a beggar’s cup in his face, burdening him with the guilt of the healthy and employed. A man with a huge dog wearing a kerchief around its neck was holding a sign asking for donations to buy booze for the dog. David thought that one was worth a dollar. It had to be a soul- smearing experience, begging in New York, even if you were working a scam.

He’d finished building his salad and was standing in line to pay the deli’s cashier, when a woman spoke to him as if he were an old friend and she was surprised, though certainly not shocked, to run into him here.

“Well, David! Hello!”

The amazing thing was he didn’t know right away who’d spoken. Not quite recognizing the voice, though it was disturbingly familiar, he turned around, smiling, ready to bluff recognition if necessary.

It wasn’t necessary.

“Deirdre…” He said her name softly, his breath snatched away by whatever he was feeling. What was she doing here? Deirdre, his ex-wife, who lived in Saint Louis, a thousand miles away. You shouldn’t be here, was all he could think. He almost actually uttered the words.

But there she was, standing behind him in line, wearing a gray, businesslike blazer and black skirt, slightly older now, but still, he had to admit, attractive. Almost as tall as his five-foot-ten, her head a mass of red hair he knew was unnatural, her smile bright and wide in a face that had grown somehow stronger. Her green eyes were sparkling with pleasure and something else beneath brows that seemed lighter than when she and David had lived, slept, and made love together. Her wide, full-lipped mouth was exactly the same as he remembered, a feral mouth