The Late, Lamented Molly Marx

by Sally Koslow

  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.”

  Hicks is all ears.

  “She and I weren’t the type to write little poems about our every feeling, you know. Like I have to tell you that we are—were—very different.”

  “Keep going.”

  “My point is, I can’t say I’d have blamed her if she played around.”

  “Uh-huh,” Hicks urges—too obviously, it seems to me. As if Lucy needs encouragement.

  “She was too damn trusting. If you ask me, to a fault.” Which no one would accuse me of, Lucy thinks. “Molly was the big-city girl, but she could be alarmingly dense.”

  Hey. Rewind. I always had to take care of you. Did you forget?

  “Oh well, I’m talking out of my ass,” she admits. “Probably wasting your time.” Lucy turns the key in the ignition. “If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m not the crown jewel of the Divine tiara,” she says. “Molly is my mom’s clone, and my dad idolizes my mother. End of story. But, God damn it, I did love my sister. I loved her.” I wait for Lucy to cry. Not today. I may as well wait for the Pope to get married.

  No one speaks for several blocks. As they turn into the drive, Hicks says, “I’ll need the names of the friends you were going to meet that day to snowboard.”

  Lucy twitches ever so slightly. “Of course,” she says. Ten minutes later, after goodbyes all around, she’s on the road.

  Hicks is not so lucky. His driver, once again, gets lost. By the time the man arrives, the wind is whipping snow into a tango and his return flight has been cancelled along with every other airplane flying east.

  “I won’t hear of a hotel,” my mother says.

  Which is how Detective Hiawatha Hicks came to spend the night under a faded lavender duvet in the twin bed that was mine, his head on my down pillow. Drifting into sleep, his last thought is of Lucy. He dreams of his first-grade teacher, who placed him in the slow group and was convinced he might never learn to read.

  Nineteen

  FUNNY BUNNY

  even months after Annabel was born, I was four pounds over my pre-pregnancy weight, which had been only five pounds over my lifelong goal, a number I glimpsed once on the scale fifteen years ago after a camping trip where the nightly entrée was—I’m fairly certain—squirrels. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t mind what I saw. My hips were a tad wider, my belly even less flat than before, but my breasts appeared no worse for having nursed—I was glad I’d invested in two hundred dollars’ worth of bras engineered by the likes of NASA.

  “Guess who’s paying me a visit?” I said to Brie one morning when she’d called en route to a trial.

  I hated that on the first beat she answered, “Luke,” and laughed. “Why?”

  “Because he’s an old friend,” I said as I patted a mask over my face. It smelled of apricots and vanilla and promised to make each pore invisible.

  “Right,” she said, the way that means “I’m not buying it.”

  “Luke’s sweet. He sent Annabel the most exquisite antique rocking chair.” It was two feet tall, with original paint the pale yellow of sweet butter. It awaited my daughter like a throne. I could picture her when she was older, reading as she quietly rocked, identifying with Cinderella, lusting after glass slippers, and starting to plan her wedding.

  “And I assume you wrote a lovely thank-you,” Brie said. She knew I believed the ghost of Emily Post would stomp on my head if within a week of receiving a gift a sincere, original acknowledgment was not in the mail.

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve fulfilled your social obligation. Why are you letting him come over?”

  “He wants to see the baby, not me.” Even I didn’t believe me.

  “You know how I feel. It’s a mistake to let him near you.”

  “You’re not giving me credit,” I said, feigning indignation.

  “Call me a realist,” Brie said lightly. “Luke’s always been crazy about you, and you’re a little bit lonely and misunderstood.” She hummed something that sounded like a dirge.

  “Hey, everything’s good here,” I protested. Despite the fact that Barry was working exceptionally long hours, she knew I felt we were once again on terra firma. No missile launchings. No “promises” bouncing off walls.

  “I’ll shut up—you’re a grown-up,” she said, to my relief. “Give him a big, sloppy kiss for me.”

  “Highly unlikely,” I said with my goodbye.

  Luke was due in ten minutes. I washed my face. My pores stared back at me, still good-sized pixels. I dabbed on the tiniest bit of makeup and thanked God for inventing black boot-cut jeans. Annabel, all sixteen pounds of powdery innocence, was sleeping in her cool, darkened room. I’d put her down an hour earlier, and if I knew my daughter, she’d wake up merrily right after Luke and I ate lunch. On the kitchen counter, our meal waited—richly gold curried chicken salad, heirloom tomatoes layered with buffalo mozzarella and basil, a few small sourdough rolls, and one formidable fudge brownie, takeout artfully arranged on my second-best dishes. White wine was chilling along with a pitcher of iced green tea garnished with cucumber slices. I wanted Luke to think I’d made an effort, but not too much.

  There’s no reason to be nervous, I told myself. Whatever you once felt for Luke is an aberration, buried under layers of life. Good, solid, fortunate life. I thought of my father’s credo: Make mistakes—just don’t keep making the same goddamn ones. There was no reason that philosophy couldn’t apply now, except that a more cynical brain worm was wiggling for attention: If you get to live your life over, make the same mistakes, only sooner.

  I fluffed the living room pillows and rearranged the roses. That still left a few minutes to mindlessly scan the arts section of the Times before the doorman called to announce that Mr. Delaney had arrived. On the way to the door I checked my reflection. The woman I saw was trying. I hoped only I noticed this.

  “For you,” Luke said, offering a large bouquet of deep p
urple anemones, an ear-to-ear grin, and the graze of lips on my cheek. I liked that he didn’t wear cologne. He didn’t need it. “And for the other lady …” From a large shopping bag he pulled out a package wrapped in pale pink paper, tied with a floppy orange silk bow.

  I placed the gift on the coffee table. “The other lady needs to finish her nap or she will make a very bad impression,” I said as I hung Luke’s size forty-four long Burberry next to Barry’s forty regular.

  Luke’s hair was shaggier than I remembered, and I had an impulse to brush it away from his eyes. Perhaps he’d lost weight—his cheekbones punctuated his face like parentheses. He was wearing a V-neck sweater the color of wisteria, which on most men would have been a questionable choice. On Luke it deepened the blue of his eyes.

  “I’m glad to see your home hasn’t become a toy showroom,” he said in a sly, familiar tone. “My brother and sister-in-law apparently hold a major stake in Fisher-Price.”

  Since I’d stuffed the rest of her possessions in closets, only one basket of Annabel’s most presentable playthings was in sight. “Come back in another year and then you can judge me,” I said. Annabel had already acquired an obscene number of gaudy plastic contraptions that did everything but burp, and her drawers overflowed with clothes, half of which she’d outgrown before wearing. I was embarrassed by how the Marx family was single-handedly bolstering the gross national product, but was unable to say “Enough,” especially to Kitty, my parents, Lucy, or Brie.

  “She looks like you,” Luke said, picking up a photograph of Barry and me in our Sunday-cozy robes. We were hugging a freshly scrubbed, two-month-old Annabel.

  “Especially if you can picture me buck naked.” The minute those words slipped out they seemed 200 percent too intimate.

  Luke followed me into the kitchen, where I put the flowers in a vase. A few minutes later we sat down to lunch. He gave me an update on his recent shoots—Santa Fe, Prague, Sydney—and the studio he’d bought in Dumbo with a partner, Simon someone. I waxed proud about what a great sleeper Annabel was, how I’d discovered at least ten new cable television channels, and why I’d decided, after considerable debate, to stop making my own organic baby food.