Death and Other Interruptions

Chapter One

I was wearing the negligee Al bought me when he died. Or, to be perfectly accurate, I was probably naked when he died. I was wearing the negligee, though, when I found out that he was dead.

The cops came to my door, as they do in the movies, one short and pudgy, the other tall and muscular in the way that you know he works out in front of a wall of mirrors. I wondered briefly if the police department matches partners up according to ironic sizing, before it occurred to me to wonder why I even had police officers standing on my stoop. Immediately following this thought was the realization that I was wearing nothing but a lacy black slip, but there wasn't much I could do about that now. The cops kept their eyes perfectly trained to my face. They must have noticed the negligee enough to avoid looking at it, but they didn't show it. It occurred to me that I wasn't really all that concerned. I wondered if I should be.

"Are you Jennifer Shore?" asked the shorter one.

Has your body ever gone completely numb, all at once? It's not that you don't feel anything, but that you're suddenly aware of a vague tingling in your fingers and toes, and everything in between disappears. Your head feels light and heavy all at once, and you're afraid you might faint and wonder how you're still standing.

But I was still standing, and they were still looking at me, waiting for an answer. And now I was concerned.

"I am," I responded, remarkably composed. I mentally congratulated myself on finding myself in a potential crisis situation and acting calm, as I always suspected I would if the situation arose. Even if I didn't feel particularly calm.

"Are you the wife of Ali Stefford?" asked Muscle Cop.

Their eyes didn't waver from my face. I wondered if they'd been given a course in cop school on what to do if confronted with a half-naked woman on the job. If so, they must have both gotten A's. I considered asking them, then my brain snapped back to the moment.

"I'm his fiancée," I corrected them, nervous now. "Is he okay? Did he do something wrong?" I peered out the door like I expected him to be standing to the side, in cuffs and sheepishly hanging his head.

"I'm afraid we have some bad news," said Chubs. "You might want to sit down."

It all seemed so rehearsed I felt like laughing. Then I scolded myself for thinking that when something was clearly wrong. I'd never been one to show sadness in the appropriate ways; at the funeral of my favorite aunt, I spent the entire burial shaking with laughter into the shoulder of my sister, who pretended not to be horrified. Days later I woke up sobbing and didn't stop for an hour.

I took the advice of Chubby Cop and walked to my sofa. They followed me in, looking grim and slightly uncomfortable now that they didn't have my face to focus on. One stared resolutely at his clasped hands while the other looked around the room until I settled into the cushions. Their eyes flew straight back to mine as soon as I was seated.

I was oddly relieved. They wouldn't take this long if the news was really bad, right?

It was Muscle's turn to speak. He took a breath. "There was an unfortunate...incident today at the school your fiancé worked in. There was an explosion in one of the classrooms."

Incident? I thought. And then, "worked"? Past tense?

"Worked?" I asked.

Muscle looked pained. I bet he was wishing he went to medical school like his mother wanted him to. Or law school. Or whatever it is mothers told their children to be when they grew up instead of being a policeman in the line of fire.

Chubs jumped to the rescue, a bit too eagerly in my mind. I put him down as my less favorite of the two.

"We're sorry, ma'am," he said. "But your fiancé was one of the victims." Victims. That means dead. Right? My head was light again, and now it was also buzzing loudly. I had to focus my vision again and again to stop them from blurring over. What was happening? I was in lingerie. Al was coming home soon. Why were there cops in my living room? Dead.