Just Breathe

by Susan Wiggs

  The city itself was part of Jack’s blood and bone. While most people believed life was a movable feast, Jack could not conceive of living anywhere but the Windy City. Long ago, in the dead of a brutal winter, when she hadn’t seen the sun or felt a temperature above freezing for weeks, she had suggested moving somewhere a bit more temperate. He’d thought she was kidding, and they had never spoken of it again.

  “I’ll build you your dream house,” Jack had promised her when they got engaged. “You’ll learn to love the city, you’ll see.”

  She loved him. The jury was still out on Chicago.

  His cancer—that had been a surprise, too. They had made it through, she reminded herself every single day. But the disease had changed them both.

  Chicago itself was a city of change. It had burned to the ground back in 1871. Families had been separated by the wind-driven firestorm that left nothing but charred timber and ash in its wake. People torn from their loved ones posted desperate letters and notices everywhere, determined to find their way back to each other.

  Sarah pictured herself and Jack stepping gingerly through the smoldering ruins as they tried to make their way back to each other. They were refugees of another kind of disaster. Survivors of cancer.

  Her front tire sank into a pothole. The jolt sent an eruption of mud-colored slush across the windshield, and she heard an ominous thud from the backseat. A glance in the mirror revealed that the fax machine had done a swan dive to the floor. “Lovely,” she muttered. “Just swell.” She pressed the wiper fluid wand, but the ducts sputtered out only an impotent trickle. The warning light blinked Empty.

  Traffic crawled in a miserable stream northward. Stuck at a stoplight for the third cycle, Sarah thumped the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. “I don’t have to sit in traffic,” she said. “I’m self-employed. I might even be pregnant.”

  She wondered what Shirl would do in this situation. Shirl was her alter ego in Sarah’s comic strip, Just Breathe. A sharper, more confident, thinner version of her creator, Shirl was audacious; she had a screw-you attitude and an impulsive nature.

  “What would Shirl do?” Sarah asked aloud. The answer came to her in an instant: Get pizza.

  The very thought brought on such a craving that she laughed. A craving. Maybe she was already showing signs of pregnancy.

  She veered down a side street and punched in “pizza” on her GPS. A mere six blocks away was a place called Luigi’s. Sounded promising. And it looked promising, she saw when she pulled up in front of the place a few minutes later. There was a red neon sign that read, Open Till Midnight and another sign that promised Chicago’s Finest Deep Dish Pizza Since 1968.

  As she pulled up the hood of her coat and made a dash for the entrance, Sarah had a brilliant idea. She would take the pizza to share with Jack. His meeting was probably over by now and he’d be starved.

  She beamed at the young man behind the counter. The name Donnie was stitched on the pocket of his shirt. He looked like a nice kid. Polite, a little shy, well-groomed. “Pretty nasty out there,” Donnie commented.

  “You said it,” she agreed. “Traffic was a nightmare, which is why I took a detour and ended up here.”

  “What can I get you?”

  “A thin-crust pizza to go,” she said. “Large. And a Coke with extra ice and...” She paused, thinking how good a nice cold, syrupy Coke would taste. Or a beer or margarita, for that matter. She resisted temptation, though. According to all the fertility advice books she’d read, she was supposed to keep her body a temple free of caffeine and alcohol. For many women, alcohol was often a key factor in conception, not a forbidden substance. Getting pregnant was a whole lot more fun for people who didn’t read advice books.

  “Ma’am?” the kid prompted.

  The “ma’am” made her feel old. “Just the one Coke,” she said. Right this very minute, a zygote might be forming itself into a clump of cells inside her. Giving it a shot of caffeine was a bad idea.

  “Toppings?” the kid asked.

  “Italian sausage,” she said automatically, “and peppers.” She glanced yearningly at the menu. Black olives, artichoke hearts, pesto. She adored those toppings, but Jack couldn’t stand them. “That’s all.”

  “You got it.” The boy floured up his hands and went to work.

  Sarah felt a faint tug of regret. She should at least get black olives on half the pizza. But no. Especially during his treatment, Jack had become an extremely picky eater, and just the sight of certain foods turned him off. A big part of cancer treatment was all about getting him to eat, so she had learned to cater to his appetite until she practically forgot her own preferences.

  He’s not sick anymore, she reminded herself. Order the damned olives.

  She didn’t, though. What no one told you about a loved one getting cancer was that the disease didn’t happen to just one person. It happened to everyone around him. It robbed his mother of sleep, sent his father to the neighborhood bar each night, brought his siblings jetting in from wherever they happened to be. And what it did to his wife... She never let herself dwell on that.

  Jack’s illness had stopped everything for her. She’d put her career on hold, shoved aside her plans to paint the living room and plant bulbs in the garden, squelched her longing for a child. All of that had gone by the wayside and she had parked it there willingly. With Jack fighting for his life, she had bargained with God: I’ll be perfect. I’ll never get angry. I won’t miss our old sex life. I’ll never complain. I won’t wish for black olives on my pizza ever again, if only he’ll get better.

  She had held up her end of the bargain. She’d been uncomplaining, even tempered, utterly dedicated. She hadn’t made a peep about their sex life or their lack of one. She hadn’t eaten a single olive. And presto—Jack’s treatments ended and his scans came back clean.

  They had wept and laughed and celebrated, then woke up the next day not knowing how to be a couple anymore. When he was sick, they had been soldiers in battle, comrades in arms fighting their way to safety. Once the worst was behind them, they weren’t quite sure what to do next. After surviving cancer—and she didn’t kid herself; they had both survived the disease—how did you start being normal again?

  A year and a half later, Sarah reflected, they still weren’t sure. She had painted the house and planted the bulbs. She’d rolled up her sleeves and plunged into her work. And they had resumed trying for the baby they’d promised each other long ago.

  Still, it was a different world for them now. Maybe it was just her imagination, but Sarah sensed a new distance between them. While he was sick, Jack had days when he was almost entirely dependent on her. Now that he was well, it was probably natural for him to reassert his independence. It was her job to allow that, to bite her tongue instead of saying she was lonely for him, for his touch, for the affection and intimacy they once shared.

  As the aroma of baking pizza filled the shop, she checked messages on her cell phone and found none. Then she tried Jack, but got his “out of service area” recording, which meant he was still at the work site. She put away the phone and browsed a well-thumbed copy of the Chicago Tribune that was lying on a table. Actually, she didn’t browse. She turned straight to the comic strip section to visit Just Breathe. There it was, in its customary spot on the lower third of the page.

  And there was her signature, slanting across the bottom edge of the last panel: Sarah Moon.

  I have the best job in the world, she thought. Today’s episode was another visit to the fertility clinic. Jack was hating the story line. He couldn’t stand it when she borrowed material from real life to feed the comic strip. Sarah couldn’t help herself. Shirl had a life of her own, and she inhabited a world that sometimes felt more real than Chicago itself. When Shirl had started pursuing artificial insemination, two of her papers had declared the story line too edgy, and t
hey’d dropped her. But four more had signed on to run the strip.

  “I can’t believe you think it’s funny,” Jack had complained.

  “It’s not about being funny,” she’d explained. “It’s about being real. Some people might find that funny.” Besides, she assured him, she published under her maiden name. Most people didn’t know Sarah Moon was the wife of Jack Daly.

  She tried dreaming up a story line he would love. Maybe she’d give Shirl’s husband, Richie, bigger pecs. A jackpot win in Vegas. A hot speedboat. An erection.

  That would never fly with her editors, but a girl could dream. Mulling over the possibilities, she turned to the window. The rain-smeared glass framed the Chicago skyline. If Monet had painted skyscrapers, they would’ve looked like this.

  “Regular or Diet Coke?” Donnie broke in on her thoughts.

  “Oh, regular,” she said. Jack could use the calories; he was still gaining back the weight he’d lost during his illness. What a concept, she thought. Eating to gain weight. She hadn’t done that since her mother had weaned her as an infant. People who ate all they wanted and stayed thin were going to hell. She knew this because they were in heaven now.

  “Pizza’ll be right out,” the boy said.

  “Thanks.”

  As he rang her up, Sarah studied him. He was maybe sixteen, with that loose-limbed, endearing awkwardness that teenage boys possess. The wall phone rang, and she could tell the call was personal, and from a girl. He ducked his head and blushed as he lowered his voice and said, “I’m busy now. I’ll call you in a bit. Yeah. Me, too.”

  Back at the worktable, he folded cardboard boxes and sang unselfconsciously with the radio. Sarah couldn’t remember the last time she had experienced that kind of floating-through-the-day, grinning-at-nothing sort of happiness. Maybe it was a function of age, or marital status. Maybe full-grown, married adults weren’t supposed to float and grin at nothing. But hell, she missed that feeling.

  Her hand stole to her midsection. One day, she might have a son like Donnie—earnest, hardworking, a kid who probably left his dirty socks on the floor but picked them up cheerfully enough when nagged.

  She added a generous tip to the glass jar on the counter.

  “Thank you very much,” said Donnie.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Come again,” he added.

  Clutching the pizza box across one arm, with the drink in its holder balanced on top, she plunged outside into the wild weather.

  Within minutes, the Lexus smelled like pizza and the windows were steamed up. She flipped on the defroster and made her way westward through winsome townships and hamlets that surrounded the city like small satellite nations. She glanced longingly at the Coke she’d ordered for Jack, and another craving hit her, but she tamped it down.

  Twenty minutes later, she turned off the state highway and wended her way to a suburb where Jack was developing a community of luxury homes. She slowed down as she drove through the figured concrete gates that would one day be operated by key card only. The tasteful sign at the entrance said it all: Shamrock Downs. A Private Equestrian Community.

  This was where millionaires would come to live with their pampered horses. Jack’s company had planned the enclave down to the last blade of grass, sparing no expense. The subdivision covered forty acres of top-quality pastureland, a pond and a covered training arena, lighted and lined with bleachers. The resident Thoroughbreds and Warmbloods would occupy an ultramodern, forty-stall barn. Bridle paths wound through the wooded neighborhood, the surfaces paved with sand to reduce impact on the horses’ hooves.

  In the late-afternoon gloom, she saw that all the work crews had gone for the day, driven away by the rain. There was a Subaru Forester parked at the barn, but no one in sight. The foreman’s trailer looked abandoned, too. Maybe she had missed Jack and he was heading home. Perhaps he’d had an attack of conscience and left his meeting early to be with her at the clinic, but had gotten stuck in traffic. There were no messages on her mobile, but that didn’t mean anything. She hated cell phones. They never worked when you needed them and tended to ring when you wanted peace and quiet.

  The unfinished houses looked eerie, their skeletal timbers black against the rain-drenched sky. Equipment was parked haphazardly, like giant, hastily abandoned toys in a sodden sandbox. Half-full Dumpsters littered the barren landscape. The people who moved to this neighborhood would never realize it had started out looking like a battle zone. But Jack was a magician. He could start with a sterile prairie or a reclaimed waste disposal site and transform it into Pleasantville. By spring, he would turn this place into a pristine, bucolic utopia, with children playing on the lawns, foals gamboling in the paddocks, women with ponytails and no makeup and thigh-hugging riding pants heading for the barn.

  Darkness deepened by the minute. The pizza would be cold soon.

  Then she spotted Jack’s car. The custom-restored GTO was the ultimate muscle machine, even though legally, it belonged to her. When he was ill, she’d bought it to cheer him up. Using her earnings from the comic strip, she’d managed to save up enough for a lavish gift. Spending her life savings on the car had been an act of desperation, yet she had been willing to give anything, sacrifice anything to make him feel better. She only wished she could spend her last cent to buy him back his health.

  Now that he was well, the car remained his prize possession. He only drove it on special occasions. His meeting with the client must have been an important one.

  The black-and-red car crouched like an exotic beast in the driveway of one of the model houses. In its nearly finished state, the home resembled a hunting lodge. On steroids. Everything Jack built was bigger than it had to be—wraparound deck, entryway, four-car garage, water feature. The yard was still a mud pit, with great holes carved out for the fully grown trees that would be installed. Installed was Jack’s word. Sarah would have said planted. The trees looked pathetic, like fallen victims, lying limp on their sides with their withered root-balls encased in burlap.

  It was pouring harder than ever when she parked and killed the headlights and engine. A gaslight on a lamppost faintly illuminated a hand-lettered sign: “Street of Dreams.” There were at least two river rock gas fireplaces that she could see, and one appeared to be working, evidenced by a deep golden glow flickering in the upper-story windows.

  Balancing the Coke on the pizza box, she opened her push-button umbrella and got out. A gust of wind tugged at the ribs of the umbrella, turning it inside out. Icy rain battered her face and slid down inside her collar.

  “I hate this weather,” she said through gritted teeth. “Hate it, hate it, hate it.”

  Rivulets of water from the unplanted yard ran down the sloping driveway and swirled away in muddy streams. The nonfunctioning sprinkler system tubes lay in a tangled mess. There was no place to walk without getting her feet soaked.

  That’s it, she thought. I’m making Jack take me home to California for a vacation. Her hometown of Glenmuir, in Marin County, had never been his favorite place. He favored the white sand beaches of Florida, but Sarah was starting to feel it was her turn to choose their destination.

  The past year and a half had been all about Jack—his needs, his recovery, his wishes. Now that the ordeal was behind them, she let her own needs rise up to the surface. It felt a tad selfish but damned good all the same. She wanted a vacation away from soggy Chicago. She wanted to savor each worry-free day, something she hadn’t been able to do in a very long time.

  A trip to Glenmuir wasn’t so much to ask. She knew Jack would balk; he always claimed there was nothing to do in the sleepy seaside village. Battling her way through the wild storm, she resolved to do something about that.

  No locks had been installed yet on the prehung doors of the huge, unfinished home.

  She smiled as she pushed open the front door and sighed
with relief. What could be cozier than sitting in front of the fire on a rainy afternoon, eating pizza? Quite possibly, this house was the only warm, dry place in the neighborhood.

  “It’s me,” she called, stepping out of her boots so as not to muddy the newly finished hardwood floors. There was no reply, just the tinny sound of a radio playing somewhere upstairs.

  Sarah felt a twinge of discomfort in her belly. Cramping was a side effect of IUI, and Sarah didn’t mind. The fact that there was pain lent an appropriate sense of gravitas to her mission. It was a physical reminder of her determination to start a family.

  Shaking off the raindrops, she padded in stocking feet to the stairs. She’d never been here before, but she was familiar with the layout of the house. Though it wasn’t obvious to most people, Jack worked with only a few floor plans. The massive size and luxurious materials aside, he built what he unapologetically called “cookie-cutter mansions.” She had once asked him if he ever got bored, building essentially the same house, over and over again. He had laughed aloud at the question.

  “What’s boring about netting a cool million on a tract home?” he had countered.

  He liked making money. He was good at it. And she was lucky, because so far, she was terrible at it. Each year when they filed their income tax return, he would look at the revenues from her comic strip, offer her a generous smile and joke, “I always wanted to be a patron of the arts.”

  At the top of the stairs, she turned toward the sound of the radio, her raincoat brushing against the machine-turned banister. “Achy Breaky Heart” was playing, and she winced. Jack had terrible taste in music. So bad, in fact, it was actually endearing.

  The door to the master suite was ajar, and the friendly glow of the fire glimmered across the freshly carpeted floors. She hesitated, sensing...something.

  A warning, beating like an extra pulse in her ears.