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.”
Molly shook her head. “No, really-”
“Don’t you worry,” Deirdre said. “He’ll be snug as a slug in a rug.”
David shifted his weight nervously. “We’re gonna be late, hon.”
Molly was beaten, resigned. “All right,” she heard herself say in a defeated voice. “All right…”
David nudged her toward the door, and Deirdre followed.
“Anything I need to know about how the TV works?” she asked.
“No, it’s easy,” David said. “The remote’s right there on the table.”
When they were in the hall, Deirdre leaned against the doorjamb, smiling at them. “Don’t you worry, you two. Everything’s gonna be just fine here.”
“We won’t be gone long,” Molly said. She realized it had sounded almost like a warning.
“Be gone as long as it takes,” Deirdre said. “And please, don’t worry.”
She closed and locked the door, still smiling as she thought back on this evening.
After a moment, Deirdre went to the window and watched Michael and Molly climb into the back of a taxi. As the cab pulled away, she could see Molly’s pale face as she craned her neck to glance worriedly out the rear window. Like a ghost watching her life recede.
Deirdre tiptoed into the bedroom and stood gazing for a long time at the sleeping Michael. He was frowning in his sleep, his closed eyelids pulsating as he dreamed. He looked so much like David when he frowned. She closed the door softly and went back to the living room.
This might be my apartment, she thought. My life. David might be my husband, Michael my child. Destiny had decided otherwise, but destiny could be manipulated. Fate could be tricked.
Sitting down on the sofa, she aimed the remote at the TV and pressed the power button.
My favorite button, she thought with a grin.
After tuning to a Roseanne rerun, she sniffed at the sleeve of her blouse. Then she walked into Molly and David’s bedroom and chose a perfume from the array of bottles on Molly’s dresser. She dabbed some on her wrists. You never could tell who might show up at the door unexpectedly-maybe even Molly and David, returning home with changed minds about attending Bernice’s visitation.
Deirdre touched her fingertip to the bottle again and pressed it here and there to her blouse. She bent her left elbow and held the material of the blouse’s cuff to her nose.
Better, she thought, smiling at herself in the mirror as she replaced the cap on the bottle. Hardly detectable. Though she was sure neither Molly nor David had noticed. It was something only she’d be aware of, because she knew and they didn’t.
She’d returned from Brooklyn only an hour ago, and she still smelled like smoke.
23
The next morning, a cab pulled to a halt at the curb where the taxi had picked up Molly and David the previous night. The sun hadn’t yet burned away the clouds and it was a softly lighted, hazy morning, not yet oppressively warm. Passersby on West Eighty-fifth stepped along with energy and enthusiasm; their posture and expressions were unlike the heat-intensified weariness they would display at the end of the workday.