Dying Breath. Wendy Corsi Staub

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СКАЧАТЬ clutching the back of his head.

      Cam can’t bear to see him like that, can’t bear to listen to the unnatural, keening sound.

      Stop, she commands her overimaginative, gifted brain, lifting her head and shaking it back and forth. Stop doing this to me.

      Mercifully, the boy’s voice gradually grows fainter. The image begins to fade.

      Cam breathes deeply to calm herself.

      There. That’s better.

      She sits up in her chair.

      Sips some tepid tea from the mug on her desk.

      Slowly, her breathing returns to normal.

      That was a bad one.

      They usually are. Bad like a nightmare that grips you when you’re having it…

      And ends when you wake up.

      But lately, the hallucinations stay with her. She doesn’t forget them the way you would a nightmare. They seem more real than ever before. Why?

      Who knows? It’s hard enough for Cam to believe she’s capable of creating such emotional drama out of thin air—let alone comprehend how and why she does it.

      Lord knows she’s got enough to worry about without her mind being cluttered by imaginary people in trouble.

      Her promotion from Assistant to Associate Editor is on hold until the next fiscal year begins. Mike’s been laid off for almost a month. They’re running out of money.

      That’s real stress.

      That’s what she should be worrying about.

      Not daydreaming, or hallucinating, or whatever one would call the unsettling visions that pop up in her head.

      Maybe I should go see someone about them, she thinks—same as always, whenever she comes out of one of these episodes.

      Then—no. No way, she tells herself—same, too, as always.

      She can’t go see a shrink. They can’t afford it, and anyway, what would Mike do if he realized he was married to a crazy person?

      Probably the same thing Pop did, all those years ago:

      Make himself scarce.

      I can’t lose Mike. I need him. I love him.

      She can barely remember her parents’ married era. Not that Ike and Brenda Neary had ever divorced, though they often spoke the word.

      Spoke? Ha. Screamed it.

      Back then, they still lived in Camden, a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia and Mom’s hometown, for which she named her second daughter. Obsessed with glamorous old Hollywood and lingering girlhood dreams of becoming an actress, Brenda had named her firstborn after her favorite movie star, Ava Gardner.

      The irony: the real Ava Gardner lived a long, gilded life. A different brand of irony: once thriving Camden, New Jersey, has steadily deteriorated into poverty, urban blight, and staggering crime rates, notoriously dubbed the “most dangerous city in America.”

      Cam dimly recalls her mother’s face, her voice, her tears. Not much more than that, though. On the rare occasions her father was around, there were arguments and accusations—usually ending with her mother hysterical and Pop slamming the door behind him as he left.

      Then came the day that her mother was the one who left—for good. Cam was three years old; Ava a college freshman at NYU. When Ava arrived at their small Camden apartment, summoned in the crisis, she gently told her little sister that they’d never see their mother again.

      Pop protested.

      But as it turned out, Ava was right.

      “Don’t worry, baby girl,” Pop reassured Cam that night, holding her close as she sobbed. “I’ll take care of you. Lean on me. You can trust me.”

      “But you always have to leave.”

      “Not anymore. I never will. Never again. I promise. Not unless I take you with me.”

      And that was what he did.

      And she leaned on him. Trusted him.

      Yet in all those years the two of them spent together on the road, or down the shore, or in between gigs—somehow, she never found the nerve to tell Pop about the visions.

      Nor can she bring herself to tell her husband.

      Or, God forbid, her friends or coworkers.

      Cam wonders sometimes if she might have eventually confided in her big sister. But she never had the chance.

      Ava’s “tragic accident,” as everyone chose to call it—her “falling” to her death at NYU’s Bobst Library—happened less than a year after Mom left.

      As for Cam, she has no choice but to deal, silently and alone, with her hallucinations whenever they strike, reassuring herself that she has no reason to fear something that exists only in her imagination.

      November

      The day’s weighty stack of mail in her hand, Cam sinks her bulky form onto the maroon brocade couch.

      Ahhh…

      That’s better.

      Much better than the hard plastic seat someone offered her on the downtown number six train a little while ago. Not that it wasn’t preferable to standing, as she’s been forced to do lately more times than one might expect.

      As Cam told her husband just the other day, it’s amazing how invisible an eight-months-pregnant woman can be, on board the subway in New York City.

      Mike—the sort of guy who gives up his seat not just for pregnant women but for any random passenger who might need it—was predictably outraged.

      “You need to start taking a cab home from work,” he decided—as if they could possibly afford the rush-hour meter fare between the magazine’s offices on East 46th and their apartment on the unfashionable fringes of Chinatown.

      “Okay, I’ll take a cab, don’t worry.”

      “No, you won’t. You’re just humoring me. I can tell.”

      “Well then,” she said, “how about if I promise to take a cab on nights when I’m so wiped out that I really don’t feel up to the subway?”

      That would be every night—if she meant it.

      Of course, she didn’t.

      Mike has been treating her like an eggshell throughout her pregnancy, but Cam can handle the physical symptoms. Just as she can handle the fact that she and Mike are pretty much broke, same as always, even now that he’s working again.

      So she’ll have to suck СКАЧАТЬ