The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (24 page)

know I was hasty,” Lucy insists for the umpteenth time, “but I meant no harm.”

“Lucy,” Mom says wearily, “hasty hardly explains it.”

“Okay, foolhardy, reckless, rash.”

“Can you explain yourself, please?”

I thought my mother might end that sentence with “young lady.”

“I still don’t know what was in my head,” Lucy says, “but you believe me, don’t you, that I didn’t mean to hurt Annabel or upset you and Dad?” Lucy’s never been as gifted at talking to my parents as I was; she’s never been able to charm them, ever. Every time she attempts to talk about the day she snatched Annabel, she sets her own trap.

All Claire Divine believes is that Lucy is certifiable. For exactly what, she’s not sure. They are on the way home from the office of Dr. Solomon, the safety net Lucy now jumps into four times a week at five o’clock in the afternoon. My sister rejected the first four therapists Oxford coughed up. She’d have passed on this one, too, if she hadn’t been afraid that if she didn’t start treatment, she’d be exiled to Camp Wounded Soul to suffer through seminars on how self-destruction is for dummies.
At least
, Lucy thinks, as she and my mother pull into the
driveway,
Daphne Solomon, M.D., has never once used the word
dysfunctional,
at least out loud
.

Lucy despises her current life, although she’s come to realize this is as good as it’s going to get. She’d had to negotiate with our parents, who acted as mediators with Barry, for permission to continue to teach. If it had been up to my husband, she’d have been exiled straight to Hazelden, a captive in a dungeon. To rehab what? she asked. For loving Annabel too much? Wanting a little quality time with her dead sister’s kid? Worrying about a child’s well-being? This is, of course, how she explained what has become known in my family as “the incident.”

Barry has agreed to let Lucy stay under Divine house arrest. Lucy is an upper-middle-class parent’s worst nightmare: a single, never-married, childless adult daughter returned to the nest, back in our old bedroom, as if she’s been grounded for smoking a joint. If Target sold GPS ankle bracelets, my parents would buy one and solder it in place. Instead, they chauffeur Lucy to her appointments and to her job in the city as if she were fourteen.

Their life has become more embarrassing, suffocating, and uncomfortable than the most hideous reality TV show. When they all sit down to eat or watch a DVD, there is a firewall between my parents and sister, preventing even the most mundane chatter. Lucy can look neither parent in the eye. Today she helps haul in the seven bags of groceries bought at Sunset Market, puts everything away, and excuses herself to read upstairs. Lucy feels like the world’s biggest loser as she stands in front of the bathroom mirror and searches for gray hairs. She plucked out her first one last month, and two more yesterday. By the time this nightmare is over, Lucy is sure, she will be silver-haired or bald.

“Fuck,” she says aloud, and goes to her twin bed and pounds a pillow. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

“Are you okay up there?” Mom shouts.

“Just dandy,” she shouts back.

If Lucy wasn’t cuckoo before—and she is convinced that she wasn’t, just extremely “concerned”—living in this suburban petri dish will take her right there. I haven’t worked myself up to sympathy, though I’m trying to travel the high road. I have chosen to pretend that Lucy is simply misunderstood. She doesn’t have a screw loose, she loved me
deeply, and her intentions are pure. I won’t let myself believe that my sister’s motives were those of a monster. I won’t.

I also know that if Lucy realized I was thinking all of the above, she’d say,
Molly, you are such a goddamn dope
. Which takes me to my real bottom line: the incident makes me furious. It was and is a phenomenal time and energy suck, utterly unfair to my parents and to Annabel, who is now denied the company of her only aunt. It has only deepened the rift between the Divine and Marx clans, making it almost impossible for my parents to have even the simplest conversation with their only grandchild, not to mention resurrect the social life they have put on hiatus. Mostly, it’s been a diversion that makes me worry that Hicks will go off on some tangent that moves him away from figuring out why despite the fact that I know from observation that he’s working 24/7, more or less, on the Molly Marx case.

But simmering at a slow boil—where will that get me? In the Duration we call people who do that Hornets. They buzz around, full of righteous indignation, and even other Hornets avoid them as if they have stinky feet. I’ve been talking about Lucy to Bob, my Dr. Solomon.

“Focus on the good memories,” he said yesterday, as he always does, when we took our evening constitutional. This is his one-size-fits-all wisdom to calm the brain and soothe the soul, his downward-facing dog of celestial advice.

I thought it was a pile of caca. “How do you find a good memory when your anger’s a riptide?” I asked.

“You’re angry about a lot of things,” he said. “You’ll have plenty of time to sort it out. Tease out a warm memory with your sister and focus on it.”

“Thank you, Angel of Death,” I said. He hates when I call him that.

“Molly,” he said, “do it. Dig deep. Find a happy Lucy thought.”

For days, it was like looking for my pulse, and then I remembered. It was two years ago. For our thirty-third birthday my parents had been wildly generous and blew us to a week’s stay at a posh Mexican fitness resort. They thought the adventure would help us bond.

For six days, we roomed together in a stucco hacienda that looked to be on loan from a miniature golf course. We rose at dawn, when the air was dewy and cool, and hiked the wildflower-covered hills, Lucy apace with the leader and I, naturally, at the tail end. After a breakfast
fit for two longshoremen, we sampled every class. Lucy’s favorite was Pilates, where she fell in love with a giant widget modeled after a medieval rack. In the afternoon, we played tennis. She won match after match, but I didn’t mind, hypnotized as I became by the
thwank-thwank-thwank
of balls hitting the rusty-red clay court, the quintessential warm-weather percussion.

As each afternoon wound down, we treated ourselves to hot stone massages or had sturdy little Mexican ladies wrap our fried muscles in seaweed. Toxins banished, we napped in hammocks, spent the evenings enthusiastically beading bracelets we knew we’d never wear, and snoozed through lectures like What Does a Woman Really Need? Magnesium! By nine-thirty, we collapsed without even opening the beach books we’d lugged on the plane.

Somewhere between kick-boxing and Aerobics with Soul, the pampering and the meditating, we became confidantes. “I got dumped again,” Lucy said on our last night. We’d turned off the light and the fragrance of jasmine and honeysuckle blew gently through opened shutters.

“Who was he?” I asked. I was aware she’d been seeing someone, but she hadn’t mentioned a name and I knew that if I played
Meet the Press
, I’d be decapitated.

“You can call him dickhead.”

“What happened?”

“Married.”

“I thought you were too smart for that.” She didn’t say a word for a few minutes following that remark, and I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep, until she started speaking in a soft, unfamiliar voice.

“At first it was just hot, dirty sex and I got off on being part of a covert operation—when we’d finally get to see each other, we’d rip each other’s clothes off. We’d meet at my place and every few months go away for the weekend. Remember my trip to South Beach?”

I did: the Delano Hotel, stone crabs, mojitos, underwater music, poolside bungalows. Lucy described it so vividly I thought I’d been there myself. “That was three years ago.”

She sighed. “I’d see other guys, but gradually I let myself get totally into this sonofabitch, waiting by the phone, telling lies to my friends, acting unglued if he cancelled at the last minute, which usually he did.”
She sat up in bed and wrapped her arms around her strong, tanned legs. “Christ, it’s humiliating to tell you all this.”

“Don’t stop now.”

“He kept saying he was going to leave his wife and move in with me. Can you believe I, Lucy Divine, bought that sack of shit?”

I was holding my breath. “What happened?”

“So two weeks ago, Jessica—she’s another teacher—was at the hospital visiting her cousin who had a baby. And guess who was there looking through the glass into the nursery?”

“No!”

“She recognized his face from a picture she’d seen on my desk.”

I heard Lucy sniffle. It was too dark to check for tears.

“Jessica took me aside the next day, saying she’d been up all night debating whether to tell me. I drove straight to the hospital.” She paused. “David and his wife had had a boy. Looked just like him.”

My stomach turned over. “Oh, I’m so, so sorry, Luce,” I said. “What a jerk—”

“Molly, shut up,” she snapped, back to the real Lucy. “I don’t need your pity. Got that?”

In the shadows, I stared at my sister, whom I realized I hardly knew and might never know. “Fuck you, Moosey. I won’t shut up,” I said, and threw a pillow at her head. “You let yourself care for someone. What’s so bad about that? If you did it over, do you honestly think you’d do anything differently? The heart wants what the heart wants.”

“Who are you, Woody Allen?”

“I love you, that’s all,” I said. I don’t think I’d ever told her that.

Lucy said nothing. Then I heard her voice, muted and fuzzy, a Xerox of a Xerox. “I always feel judged by you, Mrs. Marx with the perfect life.”

“Perfect life?” I said incredulously, in a raspy squeak. I decided not to react to “judged” because she was right—I had judged her for more than thirty years.

“The darling toddler, the successful husband, the perfect part-time job, the huge apartment, the blond hair, the size six hips.”

Of course she saw it that way. “I’ll grant you Annabel, but Barry …”

“Trouble in paradise?” she said. Too quickly.

I’d walked into a Lucy ambush. I didn’t want to betray Barry, but the sisterly thing would be to share. “Barry is a great dad, but sometimes
he barely notices I’m around, and when he does, it’s to criticize. He questions every decision I make. That is, when he hasn’t ruled unilaterally and I get to decide on something.”

“What did you expect? Do you actually believe all those drunken speeches grooms make at weddings about how flipped-out in love they are and how their wife is their ideal woman, an angel on earth?” I believe she followed this question with a snort.

“I think he sees other women,” I said.

She had the decency to wait a moment before saying, “We all think that.”

Mom and Dad, too? “But Lucy, there’s more.” I hesitated. “The thing is, there’s this other guy.” I didn’t give one detail, certainly not Luke’s name. “I never meant for it to happen.” Even I realized I was speaking every cheater’s native language, cliché. “But for a long time now, I’ve been meeting him at his apartment.” I left out Nantucket, Amsterdam, Santa Fe, Yellowstone, and the Mall of America.

“
You
have a lover?”

“I guess you could call him that.”

She laughed. “For midwesterners, we are a fucked-up pair.”

I thought that was a fitting note on which to end the conversation. I didn’t want to tell Lucy more; the details would, like an oil spill, pollute my real life. But as I had almost given in to sleep she said, “Molly, I think you should stop this thing with the other guy. The heart may want what the heart wants, but you could get hurt.” She had flipped off the glib Lucy and become someone reflective and wise. “Like me.” She sat on the side of her bed and tapped me on the shoulder. “I say this because I love you.” The two of us started to cry—noisy, gulping sobs—and neither of us fell asleep for a good hour.

We slept late and missed not only the hike that morning but the van to the San Diego airport. And this, I told Bob, was the happiest memory I would ever have of my sister.

re you and the ladies off to the land of very important paintings?” Luke asked.