Red 1-2-3

8

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf collected the breakfast dishes and dutifully scraped the remains into the trash compactor before loading knives, forks, plates, and cups into the electric dishwasher. As usual, her husband had carefully sliced the crust edges away from his toast, using only the crisp center portion to sop up the runny eggs. She had seen these orphans on his morning plates for fifteen years, and although she thought it wasteful, and a part of her believed the crust was the best part of the toast, she never said anything to him about this eccentricity. Nor had she ever-even though she knew he would invariably do this when she put the plate in front of him-sliced the edges off for him before they sat at the table.

This morning she was late for the work that she more often than not disliked, and she knew she had a desk piled up with mundane duties that would drag on throughout the day. She imagined that after putting in her eight hours the list of to-do items clogging her calendar would be only modestly diminished. She envied her husband. Her workaday life seemed devoted to ever-increasing amounts of the deadly same, over and over. He, on the other hand, was the creative force in their relationship. He was the writer; he was special. He was unique, like no man she’d ever known, and that was why she married him. He provided vibrant color in her dull dirt-brown world and nothing made her feel better than introducing him to coworkers, saying, “This is my husband. He’s a novelist.” She sometimes berated herself by thinking that all she brought to their relationship was comprehensive health insurance and a regular paycheck and the occasional hurried bout in bed, and then she would dismiss this awful idea and persuade herself that even if it seemed like a cliché, every great writer needed a muse, and she surely was his. This idea made her proud.

She sometimes imagined herself to be willowy, slender, gossamer-dressed, which was the image she suspected an illustrator drawing a writer’s inspiration would create. That she was short and stocky, a little overweight, with mousy brown hair and a smile that seemed lopsided no matter how much pleasure she meant to express, was irrelevant. Inside, she was beautiful. She knew this. Why else would he have fallen in love with and married her?

And, after so many fallow years, so many literary fits and starts and frustration, to see him once again eager to lock himself away in the spare bedroom that he’d taken over as his writing studio, colored her day and made heading off to work less painful. She envisioned bundles of words, filling pages, relentlessly stacking up by the printer.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf often wished she had his imagination.

It would be nice, she thought, to be able to live in made-up worlds where you control the outcome of all the characters. You can make whomever you want fall in love. You can kill off whomever you want. You deliver success or failure, sadness or happiness. What a wonderful luxury.

It was not unusual for her to steal a glance at the closed door to the office, wondering what special world was taking form inside. Like Odysseus strapped to the mast of his ship, she longed to hear the siren’s songs.

She paused, standing at the sink. Water was running over her hands and she knew she should reach for the dishwashing soap and start the machine before leaving for her office, but in that second of envy, she felt a twinge on her left side, just below her breast. The sensation-it wasn’t even significant enough to call a pain-sent a shaft of fright directly through her, and she gripped the counter edges to steady herself as a rapid dizziness swept over her. For an instant she felt hot, as if an oven door within her had been opened, and she caught her breath sharply.

The only words she could think of were not again.

She slowed her intake, tried to force her pulse to return to a normal pace. She closed her eyes and cautiously did an inventory of her body. She felt a little like a mechanic working over a car engine with some mysterious failure.

She reminded herself that she had just the other day been in to see her doctor and received a completely clean bill of health. She’d gone through the routine of poking and prodding and answering questions, opening her mouth wide, feeling the electrocardiograph leads placed on her body and waiting while the machine chewed out an assessment. And when her doctor had smiled, and begun to reassure her, it had been musical, even if she hadn’t quite believed it.

No signs.

She almost said this out loud.

This was the trouble with having a faulty heart. It made her imagine that every twinge and every misplaced beat signaled the end. She thought to herself that she didn’t have an interesting enough life to be this paranoid.

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf reached over to a countertop drainage rack, where she had placed a few of the bigger pans that wouldn’t fit into the dishwasher. She lifted out a large skillet made of stainless steel and held it up in front of her eyes. She could see her reflection in the clean, polished metal. But unlike with a mirror, the portrait that stared back at her was slightly distorted, as if it was out of focus.

She told herself: You were beautiful once, even if this wasn’t true.

Then she searched for pain: None in the eyes. None in the corners of her mouth. None in that extra flesh that sagged around her jaw.

She pushed further. None in her feet. None in her legs. None in her stomach.

She held up her left hand and wiggled the fingers.

Nothing. No sudden shock of hurt plunging through her wrist.

As if entering a dangerous minefield, she began to mentally examine her chest, an explorer searching some unknown territory. She breathed in and out slowly, all the time watching the face in the steel reflection, as if it were someone else’s and would display some telltale sign that she could spot. There were experts who had studied facial expressions, and detectives who believed that by merely examining a face they could tell when someone was lying or cheating or even covering up some illness. She had seen these people on television.

But her breathing seemed regular. Her heartbeat seemed solid and steady. She touched her rib cage with her fingers, prodding it. Nothing.

And her face remained flat, without affect. Like a poker player, she thought. Then she slowly lowered the pan back to the drying rack. No. Okay. It was nothing. A little bit of indigestion. Your heart isn’t going to stop today.

She reminded herself to go to work-and to hurry, maybe even speed, to make up for the minutes lost to dying fears. “I’m leaving now,” she shouted. There was a small silence, then a muffled reply from inside the locked office.

“I might be out a bit doing some research, dear. Maybe late for dinner.”

She smiled. The word research encouraged her. She believed he was really making progress, and she knew enough to make sure that nothing she did would upset that fragile state.

“Okay, honey. Whatever you say. I’ll leave a plate for you in the microwave if you need to get home late.”

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf didn’t wait for a response, but she was happy. This sounded like the most mundane conversation any couple could have. It was so ordinary, it reassured her. The writer was working; and like the worker bee she considered herself, she was heading out to her job. Nothing as different as a heart attack could ever enter into a world so determinedly normal.

She drove through the faculty-and-staff parking lot twice before she found a spot near the back, which added fifty yards of rain and chill to her exposed travel. There was nothing she could do about this, so Mrs. Big Bad Wolf slid her car into the space, gathered her satchel, and maneuvered out of her door, trying to get a small umbrella raised before she got soaked.

She immediately stepped into a puddle, and cursed. Then she hurried across the lot, head down, making for the school administration building.

She hung her damp coat on a hook by the door and slid behind her desk, hoping that the dean wouldn’t notice she was a little late.

He emerged from his office-her desk guarded the entry-and shook his head, but not at her tardiness or at the lousy weather that was turning the school into a dark and dreary place. He had a file in his hand and he seemed dismayed.

“Can you send a message to Miss Jordan Ellis?” he said. “Have her come in this afternoon to see me during a free period, or maybe after her basketball practice?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Big Bad Wolf replied. “Is it urgent?”

“More of the same,” the dean said ruefully. “She’s doing poorly in every subject and now Mr. and Mrs. Ellis want me to referee their custody battle, which will only make matters significantly worse.” He managed a wan smile. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of these parents just left their children alone and let us deal with them?”

This was a familiar complaint and a prayer that never had any realistic chance of being answered.

“I’ll see that she’s here to see you today,” Mrs. Big Bad Wolf replied.

“Thank you,” he said, nodding. He glanced down at the sheaf of papers in his hand and shrugged. “Don’t you just hate it when seniors throw their futures away?” he asked. This was a rhetorical question, and one that Mrs. Big Bad Wolf understood didn’t need answering. Of course everyone hated it when seniors did poorly. They struggled in school and then got into lower-tier colleges, and that skewed the school’s Ivy League statistics. She watched as he retreated back into his office, still clutching the file, although eventually it, and all the confidential information it contained, would arrive on her desk for sorting away in a large black steel file cabinet in the corner of the room. It had a combination lock. 8-17-96. Her wedding day.