The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (16 page)

“Mr. and Mrs. Divine,” Hicks says evenly, glancing first at my father and then at my mother, “we’re looking … everywhere, and at everything.” He feels flop sweat gather in his armpits, and is glad he’s wearing a sport coat. “And on that score, what about Molly’s … mental health?”

I can’t imagine that my parents have ever once considered any aspect of my health that wasn’t physical. I got braces and every appropriate inoculation, took jars of vitamins, and left for college with birth control and a fact sheet about chlamydia. My mother and father are born midwesterners whose set point is caution and optimism, one foot solidly planted in each camp. If anything, they’ve always thought that Lucy was their
meshuggener
, their nut job, not me.

“Excellent,” my father guesses. “Molly’s ‘mental health’”—he drags out the words—“was exemplary.”

“Molly would never hurt herself,” my mother adds, picking the world’s most obtuse euphemism, “if that’s what you’re getting at. Never. Obviously, someone meant ill to my daughter, but if you think she brought it on—blaming the victim? Outrageous.” As she tenses, I notice that her carefully applied foundation has settled into delicate vertical lines around her lips. I long to reach out and pat it back in place. “Maybe our daughter was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s what I think. I always told her she shouldn’t be riding that bike alone….”

She did. I never listened, just as I ignored her when she’d told me to major in education, stay in Chicago, join Hadassah, wear pastels, and not rush to marry Barry.

My mother stares into the middle distance. I can see that she pictures me as I looked at twelve—scrawny, all legs and arms—and wants to reach out and hold that child and breathe in the scent of her newly washed hair and well-scrubbed skin.

“Claire, honey, what is it?” my father says to her, and covers her hand with his large paw. She only shakes her head, dabs away a tear, and takes a deep breath.

“Detective, I can’t go on just now,” she says. “Please, let’s have lunch.”
I’d rather they were talking about my death
, she thinks.
Why couldn’t it have been me?

The conversation dwindles away as the three begin to politely peck at their bagels and all four kinds of fish, picking up speed as the meal progresses. They are ready for apple cake—baked by my mother, to mitigate the excess ethnicity—when Lucy blasts through the front door. She hangs her bulky white fox-trimmed parka in the front hall closet, kicks off her Uggs, and walks in green stocking feet to join them, while she shouts, “Hi, everyone—I’m here.” She kisses each parent hello. “I’m Lucy,” she says, extending her hand to Hicks and meeting his eye. Her hands are a miniature version of my father’s, broad and capable.

“Hiawatha Hicks.”

He’s got to be kidding
, Lucy thinks. She almost succeeds in keeping a straight face as she wonders if he has a sister, Minnehaha. Ha, ha, ha. “Sorry … traffic,” she says, failing to recover self-control before both of my parents show a pulse of embarrassment. “What did I miss?” Before Hicks can answer, she loads up a bagel, including a substantial slice of Bermuda onion, which the others have politely avoided along with difficult questions.

The detective is young and good-looking, Lucy notes, and no gumshoe. He’s wearing decent leather oxfords that have escaped slush stains. She registers that his skin is a rich milk chocolate and his hair short and recently barbered. She can’t pin him down as either Puerto Rican or African American. A more exotic cocktail, she decides.

“So, your name—someone liked nineteenth-century American poetry, huh?” As Lucy rips into the bagel, she catches our mother’s eye
and shoots a look that says,
What’s with the food? This guy probably wants sausage and eggs
.

“Fortunately, Mr. Longfellow’s not around to ask for a licensing fee,” Hicks answers. Nobody laughs, so he moves on to the shock-and-pity approach. “The truth is I never got to ask about the whole name saga. I was eight when my mother was killed in a car accident. I was raised by my grandmother.”

My parents and Lucy are too blue-state to ask about a father. None of them is as riveted by Hicks’ sad story as they might usually be, because there’s something bigger and grimmer that’s crept into the room: death. Hicks’ declaration has lifted the black veil, and my mother sucks in her breath so fast she almost pants. Now they can get started. “Shall we have coffee in front of the fireplace?” she suggests.

“Great,” my father announces, although the question has been pitched to Hicks. They decamp to the living room, which is overrun by family pictures: twin girls with hair in pigtails, cut short, and grown long; graduation pictures, pre- and post-orthodontia; camp snapshots; bat mitzvah portraits; my parents’ vacation photos, my mother’s right arm always strategically placed around my father’s waist to obscure his love handles. There are at least ten photos of Annabel, including the most recent in a silver frame. My daughter wears one of my old smocked Florence Eiseman dresses. The dress is blue, the Molly color; Lucy always wore red.

My parents huddle, holding hands. Facing them, Hicks and Lucy square off like prizefighters.

The room, paneled in cherry, radiates warmth, and Hicks admires it. “Mr. Divine,” he says, “please tell me where you were when you got the news.”

“Already at work,” he says. “I get there early. Claire—my wife, that is—called that morning the minute she heard from Barry.” He squeezes my mother’s hand.

“I could hardly make out a word he said,” my mother adds. After decades of marriage, they are vinaigrette, no longer simply oil and vinegar, and don’t even notice that they finish each other’s sentences.

“Claire knew from Barry’s voice that it was bad,” he says.

“Annabel, I thought—something had happened to our baby girl.” My mother’s eyes flood, and my father pulls her to his barrel chest. I,
too, wish I could feel the familiar comfort of his slightly sweaty protection.

“So I came home, to be with Claire,” he says. His voice started off big but has already shrunk. “We got to New York by eight.”

“By then we knew the worst,” my mother says. “For a few hours, Barry let us think there was hope, but he called us right before we boarded to tell us the real story.” She remembers how she spent the flight, staring blindly at the unresponsive heavens, which quickly faded to black. Was I floating in the cosmos like an errant balloon, an unmoored soul? It was a bad dream then, and far worse now—for all of us.

Hicks patiently listens while my parents account in excruciating, small-print detail the most unimaginable day of their life, when, defying every law of nature, their daughter had died, possibly by someone’s hand. That the hand might be her own they cannot imagine. Did a stranger lure a foolish me to a remote spot by the river? Was I meeting someone I knew and thought I could trust? Did I simply lose control of my bike? Was I so momentarily insane that I deliberately rode toward the water, perhaps to try to drown? (This last theory is tossed out by Lucy.) They talk until it seems they must be spent, but suddenly the timbre of my father’s voice downshifts and darkens, a thundercloud ready to burst.

“What I need to know, Detective,” he says, his face dangerously red, “is that you’re going to catch the goddamn sonofabitch who did this.”

Lucy winces, but he goes on.

“There’s a murderer out there,” my dad yells. “My daughter’s dead. Gone. Our granddaughter’s lost her mother. Our lives are shot to hell. Nothing in this family will ever be the same. There’s a fucking monster somewhere, and you, my friend, have got to find him. Am I making myself clear? Do I have your word that my daughter Molly’s death won’t be just another crappy little unsolved case that gets a week’s cursory attention before it’s shelved for something bigger and flashier?”

Hicks listens. He does not respond.
This guy isn’t done yet
, Hicks knows.

“Are you going to turn yourself inside out to find the scum bucket who did this?” With each short blast, my father’s voice gets louder, as if
someone’s pressing the volume button on the remote. He doesn’t feel better for having made his point.

“I hear you, Mr. Divine,” Hicks says, awed by this father’s pain.
I want to find the killer
, he says to himself.
If there was one
. “Sir, you have my word.” And then he turns to Lucy.

She looks nothing like the pictures of Molly. Bigger, taller, tougher. Her mouth is wide, and the lips are sensual and full—fuller than most white women’s—and red-stained, as if she’s just sucked on hard candy. Probably prefers Chapstick to lipstick. Bitten nails. Starter crow’s feet, not unappealing. Wild hair—the kind that defeats a comb, two shades richer and darker than cider. She’s a woman who will improve with age, he predicts, as long as gravity is kind to those breasts, too motherly for his taste.

“Lucy, where were you that day?” he asks.

My sister feels he says this with menace, but she tries not to let her hostility crash in a heap at his feet. “Out of town,” she answers. Neutral voice, not giving anything away. Hicks’ face suggests that she continue, and Lucy does. “It was Presidents’ Day weekend. I wanted to snowboard, and some of the other teachers were going to Wisconsin. I started driving there, but then I got Mom’s call, so I reversed directions and came home. I flew to New York the next day—first plane out.”

A no-alibi alibi
, Hicks thinks.

I have a sudden urge to flee this overheated room and zoom in on Annabel with my afterlife babycam. When I checked on her earlier this morning, she was sniffling. Has Barry tutored her in nose blowing? Encouraged her to drink tea with honey? I used to be able to coax Annabel into taking a few swallows, especially if I used one of my grandmother’s flowered teacups and set the tiny table with the blue faux Wedgwood doll dishes. But no, I feel this is where I need to be, planted like the evergreen sentinel out front.

“Mr. Hicks,” Lucy says in her voice of natural authority, assuming you are four. “Where are you, for real, with Molly’s case? Do you have any suspects?”

Lucy is someone who wants what she wants and doesn’t give up, Hicks thinks; a woman for whom a defect can become a strength, and strength a defect. “It’s a bit premature for suspects,” he says. “That’s why I’d be interested in hearing from you on that score.”

“The obvious,” she says. “The husband, for starters—”

“Lucy!” my mother trumpets, as if her daughter had announced that their guest has farted. “You are talking about our son-in-law.”

“Mrs. Divine,” Hicks says calmly, “Lucy’s right.” His brown eyes pin my sister. “What do you know?”

I hear inhales and exhales, and Hicks thinks that she knows nothing but can’t get past hating that poor schmuck Barry. She probably would have hated any man her sister married.

“It troubles my parents, Detective,” she says finally, “but it was a marriage … with problems.” My father looks out the window. Sugary snowflakes are continuing to fall.

“Big enough problems for it to get this ugly?” Hicks says.
Ugly?
Talk about understatement. “This violent?”

“Maybe,” Lucy says. “My sister put up with a lot of”—she looks at our parents and amends her language—“garbage.” Still, our parents glare at her. “But it’s not for me to say,” she says, sinking into the corner of the couch to make the retreat complete. They are back to silence souring the air.

“What I want to tell all of you,” Hicks says, “is that in cases like this, don’t expect a red carpet to unroll and lead us back to the cause of death.” While he elaborates, his eyes catch a photo of three generations of Divines—aunts, uncles, cousins, us—taken at my grandparents’ fiftieth-anniversary party. Lucy and I are fourteen. Everyone is smiling into the camera except my sister, who looks accusingly at me. I had never noticed this before—I’d always been focused on myself, horrified by my dotted dress from the girls’ department, while Lucy got to wear a black sheath in a woman’s size. Now I’m wondering what I might have said or done to piss her off.

“Detective Hicks,” Lucy says as he winds down, “want to take a drive? Check out the ’hood?”

My parents wince at her attempt at humor.

“I wouldn’t be putting you out?” he answers, writing off her comment as nervousness, glad to spend time with her.

“C’mon, let’s go,” she says, dangling car keys and offering the smile she reserves for auto mechanics and her best students.

Hicks postpones his driver’s arrival by ninety minutes. Lucy begins the Molly Divine Memorial Tour, swinging past Ravinia, the site of
my first make-out session, followed by the homes of three former boyfriends and finally Highland Park High School. Her voiceover proclaims that I was an A-minus student who was in charge of prom decorations and insisted on an unfortunate
Blue Lagoon
theme. In my defense, I was hoping to capture the azure of a Bahamian sea, but under lights the color of turquoise eye shadow, everyone simply looked late-stage tubercular. As both Hicks and I are beginning to worry that the point of this meandering drive is for Lucy to render me solid-gold average, she says, in a voice as rehearsed as a novice trial lawyer’s, “I keep wondering if Barry had a girlfriend who …”

“Who what?” he says.

“It’s a feeling I have, that someone meant Molly harm,” she says. “Maybe that person was Barry, or someone Barry knew.” She slows the car and parks on a side street. Night has almost cloaked the town in blackness, and through barren trees snow steadily falls. “My parents would freak if they heard this—they thought Molly was an angel even before she died. Not that I’m judging, but my sister may have had another man in her life.”
Besides that schmuck husband
, she thinks. “Maybe you can find him.”

In the dusk, her face looks hard. “This guy, did you meet him?”

“Never,” she says. “I only heard about someone once, and it was before Annabel was even born. Could have been a big nothing, over years ago. Or maybe she made it up, to make me feel like less of a loser, you know, like shaving your head because your sister’s going through chemo.” Lucy laughs nervously and alone. “I feel disloyal even mentioning this, like I’m besmirching my dead sister’s reputation.”