“Oh, Hope,” Ashley said, and Hope could hear the vacant echo of tears in her voice. “I think I have a problem.”

Sally was listening to the local alternative-rock station on the car radio when the late Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” came on, and for some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, she felt compelled to pull to the curb, where she listened to the entirety of the song frozen in her seat, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel with the beat.

As the music flooded her small sedan, she held her hands up in front of her.

The veins on the backs were standing out, blue, like the interstates on a travel map. Her fingers were tight, maybe a little arthritic. She rubbed them together, trying to regain some of the suppleness they once held. Sally thought that when she was younger, much about her had been beautiful: her skin, her eyes, the curve of her body. But she had been proudest of her hands, which seemed to her to hold notes within them. She had played the cello growing up and had considered auditioning for Juilliard or Berklee, but at the last moment had decided to pursue a more general education, which had somehow evolved into a husband, a daughter, an affair with another woman, a divorce, a law degree, and her current practice and her current life.

She no longer played her instrument. She couldn’t make the cello sound as pure and as subtle as she once could, and she preferred not to listen to her mistakes. Sally could not bear to be clumsy.

As she sat there in the car, the song began to wind down, and Sally caught a glimpse of her eyes in the edge of the rearview mirror and reached up and adjusted it so that she could look at herself. She was just shy of turning fifty, which some thought of as a milestone, but which she inwardly dreaded. She hated the changes in her body, from hot flashes to stiffness in her joints. She hated the wrinkles forming at the corners of her eyes. She hated the sag of skin beneath her chin and in her buttocks. Without telling Hope, she had taken a membership at a local health club and pounded away on the treadmills and the elliptical machines as often as she could get away.

She had taken to reading advertisements for cosmetic surgery and had even considered sneaking off to some fancy health spa, using an ostensible business trip as a cover. She was a little unsure of why she hid these things from her partner, but was smart enough to recognize that that in itself said all she needed to know.

Sally took a deep breath and turned off the radio.

For a moment, she thought that her entire youth had been stolen from her. She felt a bitterness on her tongue, as if everything in her life was predictable, established, and absolutely set in stone. Even her relationship, which in some parts of the country would have set people to whispered gossip across backyard fences and would seem exotic and dangerous, in western Massachusetts was about as boringly routine as the inevitable arrival of the seasons. She wasn’t even much of a sexual outlaw.

Sally gripped the wheel of the car and let out a quick, angry shout. Not quite a scream, more a bellow, as if she were in pain. Then she glanced around rapidly, to make certain that no passing pedestrian had heard her.

Breathing hard, she put the car in gear.

What’s next? she asked herself as she pulled back into traffic, aware that once again she was late for dinner. Some disease? She thought to herself that perhaps it would be breast cancer, or osteoporosis or anemia. But whatever it was, it wouldn’t be harsher than the uncontrolled anger, frustration, and madness that she felt ricocheting about within her and that she felt helpless to fight.

“So, the two women were having trouble?”

“Yes, I suppose you could say they were having trouble. But that wouldn’t begin to capture the moment that Michael O’Connell arrived in their lives, and how his mere presence redefined so much that was happening.”

“I get it,” I said.

“Really? It doesn’t exactly sound like you do.”

We were seated in a small restaurant, near the front, where she could look through the plate-glass windows out onto the main street of the small college town we lived in. She smiled for an instant and turned back to me.

“We take a lot for granted, in our nice, safe middle-class lives, don’t we?” she asked. She didn’t wait for my answer, but continued, “Problems sometimes occur not only when we least anticipate them, but at moments when we are least equipped to deal with them.” The edgy decisiveness in her voice seemed out of place on the fine, mostly lazy afternoon.

“Okay,” I sighed, “so Scott’s life wasn’t exactly perfect, although, on balance, it wasn’t that bad. He had a good job, some prestige, a more than adequate paycheck, which should have compensated at least some for middle-aged loneliness. And Sally and Hope were going through a difficult time, but still, they had resources. Significant resources. And Ashley, despite being well educated and attractive, was in something of a state of flux, as well. That’s more or less the way life is, isn’t it? How does it-”

She cut me off, lifting one hand like a traffic cop, while the other reached for a glass of iced tea. She drank before replying.

“You need perspective. Otherwise, the story won’t make sense.”

Again, I remained silent.

“Dying,” she said finally, “is such a simple act. But you need to learn that all the moments leading up to it, and all the minutes afterwards, are terribly complicated.”

11

Sally was surprised that the front door was wide open.

Nameless was plopped down by the entrance, not exactly sleeping, not exactly standing guard, but more or less accomplishing both. He picked his head up and thumped his tail at Sally’s arrival, and she reached down and stroked him once behind the ears, which was pretty much the extent of her connection to the dog. She suspected that if Jack the Ripper had walked in, with a dog biscuit in one hand and a bloody knife in the other, Nameless would have locked in on the biscuit.

She could just hear the final words of a conversation as she set her briefcase down in the small foyer.

“Yes…yes. Okay, I’ve got it. We’ll call you back later tonight. Don’t worry, everything will be okay… Yup. Later, then.”

Sally heard the phone being returned to its cradle, then Hope exhale and add, “Jesus H. Christ.”

“What was that about?” Sally asked.

Hope spun about. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“You must have left the door open.”

Sally eyed the running clothes and added, “Were you heading out? Or just coming back?”

Hope ignored the questions and Sally’s tone and said, “That was Ashley. She’s really upset. Turns out that she really has gotten sort of involved with some creep in Boston and she’s starting to get a little scared.”

Sally hesitated for an instant before asking, “What does sort of involved actually mean?”

“You should have her explain. But, as best as I understand it, she had a one-night stand with the guy, and now he won’t leave her alone.”

“Is this the guy who wrote the letter Scott found?”

“Seems to be. He’s making all sorts of We were made for each other protests, when they don’t make a damn bit of sense. The guy sounds a little out there, but again, you should have Ashley explain it to you. It will seem a lot more, I don’t know, real, maybe, if you hear it from her.”

“Well, my guess is this is really a mountain being made out of a molehill, but-”

Hope interrupted, “It didn’t sound that way. I mean, we both know she can be overdramatic, but she sounded genuinely disturbed. I think you should call her back right away. It will probably do her some good to hear from her mother. Reassure her, you know.”