speaking of unwanted phone calls

Last night I had a missed called on my phone. (Have I complained yet about my new purse, its horribly designed pockets, and my resulting inability to ever getting my cell out of it before the call goes to voicemail? Well, that's the gist.) Anyway, it was a local number, and a very familiar local number, as in "that used to be a number I knew by heart years ago, but whose?" So I didn't return it immediately, but instead waited for the voicemail to pop up.

It was my ex-sister-in-law J (whom I have mentioned several times lately I guess), calling from her home phone, rather than her cell as she usually would. Oh, yeah, that's whose number that is! Calling from her home phone seemed like it portended bad news, and indeed it did. My ex is in the ICU at one of the big Boston hospitals. J had gotten a phone call Thursday night from some woman who'd said, "You don't know me, but I'm So n' So, a friend of S's..." Who knew he had a new girlfriend? Certainly none of us! She told J that S had a kidney stone and was in one of the piddly local hospitals. J was kinda, "Uh, yeah, okay, thanks." It was a kidney stone, not a life-threatening emergency, and her brother hadn't spoken to her in like two years.

Well. Yesterday almost as soon as she walked in the door from work, her phone was ringing off the hook and there were a bazillion messages. S had to be transferred into town because he was septic, the girlfriend didn't have J's cell number, and she'd had to sign all the permissions to have him intubated and so forth because they couldn't get ahold of the family, and she was "very uncomfortable with that." J said she'd go down today to see him and find out what was going on. (Because she didn't rush to his bedside or alert all the relatives at the kidney stone news, she is now apparently the Heartless Bitch Sister.)

So she was calling to let me know and to ask if I wanted to go with her. I said I had to work. Which is true. But, um, am I supposed to want to go see my ex-husband whom I haven't spoken to in 3 1/2 years in the ICU? I've been trying to work up to feeling bad for him, but, really, my dominant emotional reaction is, "Oh Jesus Christ, please don't die, because if I have to put D through a wake and a funeral, he's gonna totally decompensate from the stress."

I suppose that's really evil of me. I mean I loved that man for ten years, hated him for two, then had some kind of friendship with him for another ten or so until it all faded into complete indifference with flashes of disgust. I suppose I should feel something about him being really, really sick. I dunno.

J's supposed to call and leave me a message today when she finds out more. Let's hope for D's sake, if nothing else, that it's good news.

xoxo