THE LAST BOY (53 page)

For Molly's sake, Tripoli pushed on with the search, but his heart was no longer really in it. It was history repeating itself, Watertown revisited. Even if Daniel was still alive, he certainly would not be coming back. Wasn’t it only once in a generation that people had a chance at enlightenment?

Tripoli returned to his regular routine as a city detective,
focusing on the cases assigned to him. In his off time, he started working on his house again, though he wasn’t quite sure why. He finished renovating the downstairs bathroom and began insulating and sheet-rocking the master bedroom upstairs. He replaced the worst of the leaky windows, weather-stripped the exterior doors, and then made the barn tight for the approaching winter so the animals would have adequate shelter from the wind.

On a Thursday night, one of the young goats disappeared. It looked as if it had broken free through the fence, and after that Tripoli kept the animals confined to the barn until he had time to reinforce the enclosure. From a neighbor, he bought enough hay to last the winter and hauled heavy sacks of cracked corn and wheat out from town.

A week before Thanksgiving, Molly's telephone service was cut and the power company sent her a final warning. Even by stretching it, she now had barely enough propane to last a week.

“You can’t live like this,” said Tripoli as she sat in her kitchen huddled in blankets.

“Danny,” was all Molly could utter.“My sweet Danny.”

“He's fine,” murmured Tripoli. “He's free. And he's where he wants to be. I know it. I just know it in my heart.”

“If only,” she said, biting her lip,“if only…”

Finally, Tripoli got Molly to agree to move out to his house. Her sudden willingness to leave the trailer took him by surprise. He came with a carload of empty cartons he had scavenged from the supermarkets and helped her pack her belongings. They boxed up all of Daniel's clothes. His favorite books. The microscope that Larry had given him. Then Tripoli helped her sort through the rest.

“Leave this,” he said, stuffing things back into drawers.“And this. I got plenty of egg beaters. And who needs more can openers? This broom is shot. And forget this vacuum—maybe the next people can
use it. Anyway, I got two.” Molly didn’t really care one way or the other. She just wanted to be certain they took all of Daniel's things. It took him a couple of trips to move everything; then he brought Molly out to the old farm house in Newfield.

“This is your home now,” he said as he led her in through the kitchen door.

It was the first time she had ever been there. He took her upstairs.“I’ve got two bedrooms finished,” he explained, showing her around. The place smelled of fresh paint and spackle.“You can have your own if you want. I’d understand. You could take the bigger one.” He opened the door for her.“The only trouble is that the good bathroom is downstairs. I haven’t begun to work on this one yet.”

Molly walked around dumbstruck, gaping up at the high ceilings, running her hand over the newly refinished chestnut staircase. It was smooth and sleek. Compared to her place, everything here seemed bright and polished. The effort he had gone to, she realized, had been for her. Finally she found words. “Thank you. You’re a good man,” she said, looking him deep in the eye for the first time since Daniel had vanished. “And you’ve always been. Putting up with me like you’ve done…”

“No…” he said waving away the compliment though it felt genuine and good.“Nah…”

“It's going to be a real downer having a lead weight like me swinging around your neck.”

“Sure, you’re a pain in the ass,” he said, pulling her to him with a smile. “But let's face it, you’re going to be living with a dumb, depressed cop. Hey, I got a great idea! We can just depress the hell out of each other. I mean really get into it.”

Molly had to smile. Then, in a more serious vein, she added, “Any time it gets to be too much and you feel like you want me to move, I want you to be truthful and just tell me.”

“And we’ll find you a nice trailer in the back of that park. Hey,
come on now. This is for keeps.”

He showed her around the property. Took her out to the barn. And there were the animals. Daniel's animals.

Thanksgiving came and they were invited over to Rosie and Ed's for the annual family bash. Molly kept trying to back out.

“I’m not up to facing people. Maybe next year,” she hedged.

Tripoli didn’t argue with her; but when the time came, he simply tossed Molly her coat and bundled her off into the car before she could really object.

The tiny house on Spencer Street was packed, the table longer this year than ever in the past. There were more cousins than usual, Molly noticed. Aunts and in-laws from out of town. Lots of kids racing noisily up and down the stairs. Rosie had trouble handling the dinner. She dropped a big casserole and Molly went into the kitchen to help her clean up the sweet potatoes and broken glass.

“I’m just a little at loose ends these days,” confessed Rosie as Molly stooped down to help her scrape up the mess.

Using the dustpan as a shovel, Molly came eye-to-eye with her. Rosie, who had always been so round and busty, seemed thin and hollow-cheeked, a shell of her old buoyant self.“You don’t look so good,” she said finally.

“And I don’t feel so great right now, either,” she admitted. “Here, you can just toss the glass in this.” She held out a paper bag and Molly dumped in the shards.

“You ought to go see a doctor,” insisted Molly as she hunted for the broom.

“Yeah. Sure. Soon as I get some time,” said Rosie, but Molly suspected she didn’t mean it. With Ed working but still without insurance, the Greens were too poor to afford medical care, too rich for Medicaid.

Molly took over helping Rosie serve the dinner. Then Rosie's
elderly aunt, Betty, came into the kitchen to lend a hand, too. And so did her cousin, Gloria. Between the four, they got the dinner quickly on the table. Everything was there. Everything but the sweet potatoes.

The platters traveled down the long table, people helping themselves. At the far end, the twins sat propped up in baby seats next to Ed who was trying to keep both mouths busy with mashed bananas. The boys seemed large for their age, very alert and exceedingly active. Their big, dark eyes kept eagerly following the other children, and they reminded Molly of Danny when he was that age—the way she would have to aim a spoon at the moving target that was his mouth.

Molly remained subdued through the meal. Later, she took one of the babies from Ed and sat next to Rosie on the sofa. Studying the child's tiny fingers, she found herself gripped with an intense longing.

“Whatta you thinking about?” asked Rosie.

Molly turned to her and smiled wanly.“Oh, just about how nice little babies are. Just look at this wonderful, perfect, little hand.”

Driving back out to the farm in Newfield, Molly sat quietly in the car recalling that previous, bleak Thanksgiving and how she had spent it alone imagining Danny's bones being gathered up by the police and submitted for DNA testing. But this, in its own cruel way, was worse, far worse. Without the old man, Daniel didn’t have a chance. And this time it was her doing! There was no one else in the world to blame.

Without the lights of the city, the countryside seemed blanketed in unrelieved darkness. There was little to see but what was revealed by the cone of headlights: cold pavement with a light dusting of snow, naked trees, stretches of wind-whipped fields and blank emptiness. They drove on past a caved-in barn, a lone trailer with a bare porch light, an ancient truck without wheels abandoned at the edge of the road.

“I’ve made so many mistakes,” whispered Molly in the darkness
of the car.“What I wanted was for Danny to fit in. Fit in,” she reiterated bitterly.“How could I have been so dumb?”

Tripoli didn’t know what to say. At least she was finally talking. Since they had moved from the trailer and packed away Daniel's things into the attic, she hadn’t uttered his name. Tripoli reached over and took her hand, held it as they traveled home together.

Molly spent her days fixing up the house. First she cleaned, giving the place a thorough scrubbing. The house had been long neglected; the kitchen was coated with an ancient layer of grime that predated Tripoli's occupancy; sometimes it took the flat blade of a spackling knife to peel up the layers of grease. But she kept at it. When the room felt sufficiently clean, she started painting, first the kitchen walls, then the worn faces of the cabinets.

Outside the farmhouse the weather seemed ever more chaotic. Some days it was so cold that it was painful just to venture out for a quick armload of wood. Then, overnight, the temperature would start to rise and by noon it would be fifty, sometimes even sixty degrees. The snow would melt and Molly would be out in shirt sleeves cleaning up dead branches in the yard, only to wake up the next morning to see that a heavy snow storm had hit during the night.

Each evening, when Tripoli came home from the station, he found the kitchen table set and a warm meal waiting. He would quickly tend to the animals, and then they would sit down to dinner. Molly made him soups with potatoes and leeks, spicy risottos, pastas with eggplant and mushrooms. She even started baking her own bread. It was all wonderfully tasty, all vegetarian—just terrific.

Molly started avidly reading the daily newspapers Tripoli brought home from work. The papers were peppered with stories about the extreme fluctuations in the weather patterns and the continued speculation about the effects of global warming. Of course, it got her thinking about Daniel, who was never far from her thoughts.

“The warming,” he had said, the day of the tornado, gazing up at the big yacht perched on the top of West Hill.

“But
how
did you know?”

“I could feel it.”

Molly wondered if she, too, could learn to sense the coming weather. Could anyone? Was it somehow there if you simply opened your mind's eye, as Wally Schuman had written?

For the first time since moving out to the farm, Molly picked up her journal, read back through it, then started writing in it again. She wrote about her hike with Daniel through the ancient gorge near Taughannock Falls and how he had known about the ice-age glaciers that had created this remarkable topography, about the Indians who had farmed this land and tended apple orchards. And she recalled his ominous warning about what appeared to be transpiring in the world around her.“Unless we do something,” he had warned,“something terrible is going to happen to us.”Was it already in progress? she wondered.

“What's that you’re writing?” asked Tripoli one evening, coming up from behind her as she sat hunched over her notebook.

“Oh, it's nothing,” she said, quickly closing the book.

“Come on, let me see.”

“Oh, it's just some random thoughts,” she said, stuffing the book into a drawer.

“I just hope to God you’re not writing about me or our sex life,” he said with a wink.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said with a faint smile.

On Daniel's sixth birthday, Tripoli decided to pay up Molly's lapsed insurance. He also got her car relicensed, inspected, and back on the road. “It's not good to be just stuck out here brooding,” he said, gently. “Maybe you want to get out a little bit.”

Molly thought about Daniel's birthday. She had missed his fifth and now this one, too. Two birthdays in a row that poor Danny was
without his mother. It got her thinking about his birthmark, and she dug out the photos of Matthew that Tripoli still hung on to. Enlarging the image with a magnifying glass, she all but gasped when she saw the striking similarity.

Molly mustered up the courage to face people again. The city was busy with last-minute Christmas shoppers. The downtown was strung with colored lights and decorations, and there were bell ringers in front of the bank and the sheepskin store. She picked up supplies from Bishop's hardware, and then went to Wegman's to relieve Tripoli from the task of grocery shopping. After her long absence, it seemed strange to be in traffic, to see people bustling around the stores, to bump into the students that clogged the aisles and checkout lines. Life continued to move on, she realized, with or without her. She could either become a part of it again, or remain aloof. A hermit, she thought, and then laughed sadly.

“I’m back driving my car,” she wrote in her journal.“Maybe it's good for me to get out, but the car suddenly feels as big as a boat. I’m just another person adding to the problem. What I wonder about is, what can I do now to lessen the harm that I’ve done? What would Danny want me to do?”

Molly finished painting the living room and then started on the dining room. Tripoli's farm house, she thought, was really a gem in the rough. The frame was constructed of heavy hand-hewn timbers, and the high-ceilinged rooms all had old chestnut trim and wainscoting. A handsome wooden staircase with beautiful hand-carved spindles led to the upstairs rooms, some of which were almost palatial in size. After years in a tiny trailer, it felt as though she were living in a mansion. And all the house needed, she saw, was some stripping and painting and polishing to bring out its inherent beauty.

In fact, the more she threw herself into work, the better she felt. Her strength was returning and she was gaining back the weight she had lost. And with these changes, the ardor she had felt for Tripoli
slowly returned. She came to look forward to their lovemaking in the evenings after dinner or in the early mornings when they embraced in a state of blissful half-sleep. One Sunday they stayed in bed the entire day. They made love in the morning and then Tripoli brought her breakfast. They lounged in bed, reading the Sunday paper, then made love in the afternoon. Then did it yet again in the early evening when the sun had gone down and the stars twinkled through the bedroom window. Long after their lovemaking had exhausted them, Molly continued to cling to him as though, in the velvet darkness of winter, she were trying to absorb him.

“Do you think we’re setting a record?” asked Tripoli with a laugh.

“Hush,” she said, planting her fingers on his lips as if they might lose the moment.“Don’t talk. No words. I just want to feel you.”