Dying Breath - Wendy Corsi Staub

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you really expect that from him?

      Too bad Hallmark doesn’t make “To My Estranged Wife on Mother’s Day” cards.

      Back at the stove, she ladles the hot chicken soup into a Tupperware container. She’s going to need a couple; there’s so much left over.

      Once upon a time, she—being a model wife and mother, of course—made this whenever Mike or Tess came down with a cold. There’s something so comfortingly familiar, so homey about the distinct savory scent of chicken soup.

      Maybe that’s what I’m craving now, more than the soup itself, she tells herself. Comfort. Familiarity. Home.

      There was a time when she believed this two-story brick Colonial would fit the bill. A time when she, like Mike, believed that by moving to this affluent, desirable suburb, they could somehow reclaim whatever it was that had gone missing. The trust. The security.

      Not the love, though. Never the love. That was always there, right from the start. Through everything, there was never a doubt in her mind that she loved Mike, that he loved her.

      We still do.

      That’s what makes all of this so damn hard.

      As she inhales the fragrant steam wafting up from the Tupperware container, she begins to feel vaguely light-headed.

      Dizzy.

      Oh, God.

      Oh, no.

      Cam closes her eyes and finds herself abruptly staring at the unfamiliar, tear-streaked face of a child. A girl.

      And now, mingling with the milky aftertaste in Cam’s mouth is the unmistakable, familiar taste of terror.

      Not her own.

      It’s the girl’s—the girl is in danger. She’s far from home, Cam senses. Afraid.

      And so it has begun again.

      Plugged into her iPod, Tess sits at the desk in her room, blatantly violating one of her mother’s dozens of rules.

      No music while doing homework. And no TV, no phone calls, no Internet unless it’s homework-related, and even then, only with explicit permission.

      Dozens of rules? Ha! More like hundreds, when you think about it.

      Tess is definitely thinking about it, instead of about her English homework on a Shakespearean tragedy.

      If she was to write it all down to prove a point—which is tempting—the list of things Tess is forbidden to do would dwarf the list of things that are allowed.

      Homework, healthy food, sleep, exercise…that’s about all that has Mom’s stamp of approval lately.

      As a result, Tess’s life is agonizingly boring.

      Especially when she compares it to her friends’ lives.

      She taps her yellow pencil—which she just overzealously sharpened to a needle point—against the blank lined notebook page before her, where she’s supposed to be writing an essay about Shakespeare’s theme of fate versus free will in Julius Caesar.

      No wonder she can’t focus. What does she know about free will?

      Everyone at school has more freedom than Tess Hastings has; as a result, their lives are much more interesting.

      You’d think now that Dad has moved out, Mom would relax the rules to make up for screwing up Tess’s life, instead of the opposite.

      That’s the way it works with other parents. Her friend Morrow Exley said her mother stopped enforcing curfews after the divorce, and Lily Chen, whose parents split when she was a baby and who has had two stepfathers since, has never had a curfew at all.

      Neither Morrow nor Lily has to earn their spending money doing chores around the house like Tess does. Morrow’s mother has a live-in maid; Lily’s, a live-out housekeeper. Tess’s mother has a bimonthly cleaning service and a live-in slave: a fourteen-year-old daughter who picks up all the slack.

      Granted, if Mom didn’t enforce the rules, Tess would probably keep things orderly by choice. She’s always liked to clean and organize. But the house never needed as much of her attention as it has lately.

      Not that Mom was ever a neatnik—but lately, she’s gotten really lazy. She spends an awful lot of time resting, dozing off in front of the television or even, Tess suspects, taking afternoon naps. Lately, Mom’s always upstairs when Tess gets home from school, and Tess has noticed that the bed is usually rumpled.

      There could be another reason for that, but she doesn’t even want to consider it.

      “I guarantee you one of them is having an affair,” Morrow said, rolling her dark blue eyes when Tess told her and Lily about the separation that awful day in March. “My dad was having one.”

      “My mom was, too, when she got divorced the second time,” Lily put in. “Like, six months later, she was already married to the other guy. Who she eventually left when he cheated on her. With my cousin, no less.”

      “My parents aren’t cheating on each other.” Tess was disgusted at the sordid state of affairs—literally—in her friends’ lives.

      “Then why are they getting divorced out of the blue?”

      “They’re not. They’re just…”

      “Let me guess, having a ‘trial separation’?”

      “Right.”

      “Yeah. That’s the first step,” said Lily, who’s been through it enough times to know. She tossed her long black hair. “But, hey, join the club. Hardly anyone’s parents are together, anyway.”

      “Plus,” Morrow added, “just think: now your mom will be too wrapped up in herself to bug you about stuff all the time.”

      That was it. No surprise from her friends, no advice, no sympathy.

      Tess wanted to cry, but instead she took her cue from Morrow and Lily, pasted a big stupid grin on her face, and acted like her parents’ separation was no big deal.

      But it is.

      Even now, thinking about it, she feels miserable. So miserable that she’d rather think about Julius Caesar’s tragedy than about her own.

      She looks back at her annotated text again.

      Focus. Fate versus free will.

      Tess writes:

      Because Julius Caesar believed that “Men at some time are masters of their fates”—

      Wait—Caesar didn’t say that about fate. The quote was from Cassius, talking to Caesar’s friend Brutus, right?

      She checks the text. Right.

      Tess rewrites:

      Caesar continuously ignored the omens of his impending death.

      Now what?

      She should give specific examples of the omens.

      Flipping back through the text, she comes up with a bunch: ominous storms, lions in the streets, sacrificial animals that are dissected and turn out not to have hearts…

      It’s pretty creepy stuff, Tess decides, writing it all down.

      And what about his wife’s foreboding dream about his statue covered in blood? And the soothsayer who warned him to “Beware the Ides of March”?

      What are the Ides of March again?

      Tess flips through her notes.

      Oh—March 15. The day Caesar was assassinated.

      Which also happens to be the day Tess’s father moved out.

      She misses him desperately. The house feels hollow

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