The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (40 page)

If Mystery Man was involved in my death, Lucy keeps wondering, wouldn’t an NYPD detective have sniffed him out on his own by now and hung him by his thumbs until he confessed? She speculates that Hicks has gotten to this guy and that Hicks doesn’t think he did it. In that case, why sully my reputation? The person she wants most to protect is Annabel. Why should her niece ever have to think of her parents as anything less than deliriously happy? Why not keep that fiction going?

From her pocket, Lucy withdraws the photograph of Luke and me.
At least you look happy, sister
, she thinks.
I hope you adored this man—and he adored you back. Wherever and whoever this fool is, I hope he still does
.

Lucy turns back to the park and gazes in both directions.
Molly, this is where you took your last breath—I wish I knew where, exactly
. She walks to the water’s edge, presses her lips to the image of my smiling face. She thinks about tearing the picture in two and keeping the half with me. “No, you two should be together,” she concludes, and tosses the photograph into the Hudson.

“Let there be peace,” she murmurs. “Let there be peace.” She bends over, puts her crossed arms on her knees, and hangs her head, weeping.

The picture bobs in the waves and floats rapidly downstream in the murky water. Lucy turns away from the Hudson, but I watch the photo as if it were flesh and blood—Luke terrified, running for his life, a man escaping.

s the photo sinks in the Hudson, I ring with emptiness that falls short of an emotion, because a feeling would be alive, even if—especially if—it smolders with heartbreak and anger. I am a shadow, a dried leaf, a shriveled stalk, a hollow gourd. I am a lost hope, a broken promise, a memory, an unspoken phrase. Mother Nature has cleared her throat and I am … gone.

I can’t stay and watch Lucy as she walks away from the river. Why didn’t she show some good sense, abort today’s mission, and have coffee with Sigmund and Hamlet’s owner, then go home with him for sex, short ribs, and the rest of her life? They’d join a food coop, pop out twins—little brown-haired boys, one named Louie for our grandfather and the other Jake, because it’s Lucy’s favorite name—and live happily ever after, going off to Australia each winter and Italy in August. Lucy would coach Louie and Jake’s soccer team, start her own nursery school, and be a very good and beloved wife and mother.

I turn. Bob is in my face. I gasp, scream, and pound his chest. “Dammit, people are imbeciles, aren’t they? Life makes no sense.”

“It’s time,” he says quietly, grabbing my wrists to restrain me.

“Time for what?” Was there an obligation I’d missed?

“Time to move on,” Bob whispers.

“What are you talking about?” I plead. Just yesterday I watched Annabel learn to write her first shaky
A
, tilting like a crooked chalet. I was there when Brie and Hicks rented a car to drive to a country inn. They plan to snowshoe—that is, if they get out of bed. I checked on my father after his physical—he has to go on Lipitor, but his blood pressure’s fine. Oh, and the doctor wants him to drop twenty pounds. I watched my mother plant a quince branch in potting soil covered with velvety moss—she’s coaxing spring into arriving early this year, and hopes to be rewarded soon with delicate white buds. I even sat next to Barry and Stephanie and a thousand other screaming sports maniacs at a Knicks game, until I decided that if I was in the mood for torture, there’s C-SPAN.

“You have to ask what good your powers are doing you, Molly,” Bob says. “Longing for a life that’s over, seeing other people making love and chocolate chip cookies and mistakes … Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“But I’m not ready to end this. You told me my powers would last until—until they’re terminated. Why should I be the terminator?”

I hear my own fear. My plan was to wait it out and pray that my abilities would continue—not forever (who’d want that?), but at least until the mystery of my death is solved and, far more importantly, until Annabel grows up. But when does that happen these days? After she gets into college or turns twenty-one or graduates or starts to work or lives in her own apartment or is married or has a child? I don’t want to go AWOL now.

“Having powers doesn’t mean you need to use them,” Bob says in the voice of the pediatrician he’d hoped to become.

Perhaps we can negotiate. “Okay, let’s say I take a break.” Not giving up completely, a hiatus. “Then what?”

“I’d say it’s a deal, and that it’s time for you to meet someone,” he says. “I’ve been watching you—”

No kidding. Does he think he’s invisible? Bob’s on every corner, Brother Starbucks of the wild blue yonder. “Who’s this someone?”

“Don’t be so suspicious. You’ll see soon enough.” Bob, always preaching patience.

As I wait, the days unroll into a long ribbon of nothing. I skip the
trip to Serenity Haven. Thou shalt unveil without me. Mostly I obsess about Annabel. How did the school carnival go? Has she progressed to B? Did Delfina take her for a haircut? Not bangs, I’m hoping. Not with her curls.

My mind drifts. Will Stephanie convince Barry to go to Venice, hoping he’ll propose? Will Brie like Hicks’ mother’s Sunday dinner? Will Mama Hicks like Brie or be appalled that her son is with a white woman? Will Isadora try to get Brie back? The trip to Japan my parents cancelled—will they reschedule? Might Lucy replace her futon with a grown-up couch? Adopt a cat? Will Kitty switch dermatologists?

Who’s Luke with now—the blonde he met who resembles me more than my own twin or the skinny, surprisingly smart model with the curly black hair and breathy lisp? Will Hicks solve my case, with or without Detective Gonzalez’s intuition? My old life is the world’s best soap opera, viewing audience of one.

I try to manufacture some willpower that would prevent me from dropping in below. A deeply embedded vein of superstition helps me not to cheat, and as interesting as Down There is, Bob has not just tantalized my imagination, he’s gotten me worried. What if the person he says I’ll be meeting is from within my own circle? Let’s say Kitty topples during a headstand in yoga class, breaks her neck, and we have to be roommates. Or even worse, what if Lucy or Brie or my parents or—don’t go there, Molly—Annabel arrives? I freeze-dry myself so I do not have to consider any of these unspeakable options.

On the fourth day, Bob reappears. He is not alone. A tall man is at his side.

“Sam, this is Molly,” he says. “Molly, Sam.”

“But—but—but what are you doing here?” I’m jabbering. I’m also being rude.

“I’m asking myself the same question,” this Sam says. “Who
are
you people?”

“Molly’s going to be your guide,” Bob says. He gives Sam the same rigmarole he once spoke to me. Relocation, the Duration, powers, up, down, don’t cheat, blah, blah.

“What happened to you, Sam?” I say, because I shouldn’t be thinking about myself now. This poor guy is in that first posttraumatic stage
I remember well: shock, disbelief, and trying to figure out why he can’t find his pulse. “Try to remember.”

Eventually he speaks. “I was thinking about this woman I’d just seen, lost in a long riff about what it would be like if we have coffee and I talked her into spending the day with me. There was something about her—the openness of her face, the kindness of her eyes … Then one of my dogs broke off his leash—we’d been walking in the park—and ran across Riverside Drive, and I started to chase him. Next I was under an SUV whose driver was on his cell phone.” It spills out in a rush. “That’s as much as I know.”

“What was your dog’s name?”

“Sigmund.”

“Are you a professor?” I ask.

“No,” he says, looking at me as if I forgot to switch on my brain.

“A shrink?”

Please don’t tell me I treated this woman
, Sam thinks.
Is there some special hell for Freudians where you have to listen to patients drone on for all of eternity, my mother this, my mother that?
“I’m an analyst,” he says. He mentions the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

I can tell I’m supposed to be impressed.

“Why do you ask?” he adds.

“You look like a shrink, that’s all, which might come in handy here.”

“Where the hell is
here?
” Sam runs his hand through his full head of chestnut hair, which for a dead guy looks remarkably healthy.

“Oh, I’ll explain everything, but first I have a few questions.” I check to see if Bob is lurking. He’s not, but to be safe I lower my voice. “Sam, the woman you were thinking about when your accident happened—what was she like?”

His smile turns him handsome, gap between his front teeth and all. “Gorgeous,” he says, looking away, as if he’s seeing her this very minute. “And one thing that struck me was I’d guess she’s the kind of female who’d never think of herself that way. Almost my height, brown eyes that drill into you, right past the lies. Magnificent eyes. The minute I looked into them I had this tingly sensation that we were supposed to be together. Fuck, I was dying to follow her.” He shifts his gaze
to me and doesn’t speak for a few minutes. “You know, if a patient were telling me this story, I’d have told him he should have gone after the woman. When you meet someone and know she’s it, don’t stand there like a tree. All your happiness can depend on how you react to one fucking impulse. You have to pay attention.”

Why did Bob think I’d be the right match for Sam? I have no idea of what to say next. I’d like to ask if his dogs survived, but he probably doesn’t know, and the image of Sigmund—or was it Hamlet?—writhing in the street is more than I can bear. “Relax, Sam,” is all I can think to say. “You’ll have plenty of time to sort this out. As we like to say in the Duration, keep breathing.”

He laughs, and I know we’ll get along.

“Love your accent, by the way. Australian?”

“South African.”

Damn.

“You sound like her,” he adds. His voice is dreamy, like he’s just woken up, which in a way he has. “Are you from Chicago?”

“We have to talk.”

ucy was the athletic one. She left me in the Illinois dust as she kicked and served and swung like a boy, and she wasn’t just chosen first for every team but invariably anointed captain. Best all-around camper, Lucy Divine. Below a sad-eyed elk head, a plaque still hangs in the rec hall at Big Beaver Lake Girls’ Camp, which I permanently boycotted once I learned the boys’ camp’s anthem about the girl Beavers across the lake. The end of camp was no big loss, because while I liked the lanyards and weenie roasts well enough, team sports skinned my knees almost as much as my ego. Riding a bike, though, was different—a ticket to freedom that required swatting fewer mosquitoes, memorizing fewer rules. From the time my father liberated my red-hot Huffy from its training wheels, I made that sucker fly.

“Moosey, wanna ride today?” I’d say every summer morning.

Biking never got old, but my bikes did, and every three years, my parents bought me a shiny replacement, a tradition I kept going. My current model was a yellow hybrid worthy of Hermès, recently purchased in honor of turning thirty-five. I was eager to take it out and see if the bike lived up to the salesman’s hyperbole. Annabel was out with
Delfina and Ella, and riding would give me a chance to think through the corner I’d backed myself into with Luke. I brooded best on wheels.

I switched into cotton big-girl panties, because a bike and a thong went together, as Barry liked to say, like a dyke and a schlong, and layered on a jersey and the padded pants that gave me an even bigger bustle-butt. As I found my backpack and gloves, the phone rang.

“Barry?” I said.

“Yes, your irresistible husband. Why so surprised?”

“Because I usually have to leave three messages before you call back,” I answered with immediate regret; I could hear Dr. Stafford, in her patrician tone, reminding both of us that few relationships improved with sarcasm, which she—given to food metaphors—likened to a heavy hand with cayenne pepper.

“What’s for dinner?” Barry asked.

This dear new Barry, who cares if we’ll be eating fish or chicken, home-cooked or takeout, couldn’t possibly be connected to Chanel Mommy
, I told myself.