Excerpt: Flying East

It was almost as soon as she lost her job, within two or three days probably, that Nina noticed something was wrong between her and Alex. At first she told herself it was just her. She was depressed, maybe, a little, over being unemployed. Over the economy, over her prospects for finding regular employment as a reporter and writer anywhere else, of the probable need to get involved with all the effort involved in freelancing if she was going to make money again in her chosen profession. The thing was, Nina didn't feel depressed. If anything, she felt elated. Not manic. She toyed for a little while with the idea that she was having some sort of polar opposite reaction and becoming manic instead of depressed in the face of difficulty. She didn't know if that was something that happened to people, but why not? Brains were strange, and mental health was a tenuous thing.

But Nina didn't feel at all unstable. In the weeks after the layoff, she felt relieved and free and ready to move on with her life. Ready to move on from Alex.

That was it, really. Losing her job made Nina feel that she had been stagnant before, and now she was ready for a change. But she was absolutely convinced that she wouldn't have felt that way back as recently as April. In April, she would have looked for change with Alex. She would have started planning trips they could take together during all his school breaks now that she had more time. But what happened in reality was that she wanted to get away from Alex. So while of course she would never have wished for her mother to have a heart attack, it was a relief to have a reason to get away.

So here she was. 3000 miles or however far it turned out it really was away from Alex, with a little time to think. Nina didn't really want time to think. She just wanted to feel. She wanted to feel freedom and see if it was what she really wanted.

But first there was Mom to think about. Nina felt terribly selfish for how much time she was putting into a long inner monologue about the dissolution of her marriage when her mother was lying in a hospital bed, but there it was. At least her inner thoughts were inner, and nobody else knew how self-centered she was being. And really, wasn't everyone self-centered? She didn't imagine that Mom would actually want her to be obsessed over worrying about her anyway.