The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (43 page)

I will always be Annabel’s mother. I will always be Annabel’s mother
, I repeated over and over again. My last thought before I closed my eyes.

ternity is an endless comfort, settling like a baby’s breath or a sweet dusting of confectioner’s sugar. In the Duration, I fly through time like a jet does clouds. Time piles up in snowdrifts, pristine and endless. We do not measure in days or decades. We do not measure time at all.

“Back then”—such bad form to say
alive
—“did you think much about death?” Bob asked once. “Did you have nightmares? Premonitions?”

Sam did. As a shrink, he lived in people’s heads, one of the world’s most consistently terrifying places, tangled by twisted relationships and moth-eaten regrets. Patients would depart his office and, as surely as they exhaled with the relief he afforded, Sam would repeat the captured anxieties in his sleep, working through the puzzles of their hearts.

Worries? Certainly I had them. Worry was my ring tone; I heard it all day long. But authentic nightmares? Rarely. I ruminated about worst-case scenarios, mostly. Yes, too many of them did come true. Yet when I try to recall these problems burning holes in my happiness, my memory feels thick and lumpy as oatmeal.

Sam and Bob are still part of my expanding circle, which gives new meaning to “it takes a village.” Jordan, Stephanie’s son, is here now, the fatal victim of a heli-ski accident in the Bugaboos. He was gazing at grand granite spires, and
kaboom
. Gone.

Afterward, Stephanie was never the same, the only good that came from that tragedy. She’s become tortured by thoughts of divine retribution, which has made Barry’s life tricky. A daughter of Great Neck, Stephanie Lipschitz Joseph Marx has taken a turn toward freakishly
frum
. She now keeps glatt kosher, covers her short gray hair with a wig, and believes this headgear looks like the real McCoy Stephanie refuses to get in the car on the Sabbath. This makes it hard for Dr. and Mrs. Marx to get to his honeymoon gift to her, a soaring glass and steel weekend retreat on a beach on Long Island. Whenever Stephanie’s not looking, Barry smuggles spareribs into the cathedral-sized kitchen.

Still, the two of them are almost 100 percent monogamous. If Barry has schtupped anyone else these past twenty-some years, his wife doesn’t know or doesn’t care. It helps to have so much money she could use it to wipe her tears. That and the anger management classes, which Dr. Stafford insisted Barry take: he and Stephanie were having a joint session in Dr. Stafford’s office and Barry threw a book at Stephanie and shouted, “Shee-it, I wouldn’t piss in your mouth if your teeth were on fire.”

Barry blames Stephanie for … something. He doesn’t know the half of it, nor does anyone else.

Narcissa arrived soon after Jordan. Diabetes. Delfina badgered her about how big she’d gotten—for her son’s wedding she had to sew two emerald green bugle-beaded dresses together—but Narcissa never listened. I love how Narcissa and Jordan have grown to love each other. She took that loose-limbed, frizzy-haired teenager to her ample bosom, and I often see the two of them laughing and singing, he spanning octaves in his Roy Orbison imitation, Narcissa in a sweet soprano that belies her size. Jordan has followed Narcissa to the Born-Agains. What a friend he has in Jesus!

My father’s here now. Choked on a thick, juicy steak, medium rare, the day after he ran a marathon with Lucy. Not the worst way to go, although he was only seventy-four, with silver hair curling over his neck like a movie director. “Daddy,” I repeated about a hundred times when
he and I were reunited, holding on to each other for what we used to call dear life. “Daddy, Daddy …”

“Molly, sweetheart,” he responded. “You were robbed, honey.” But I shushed him. In the Duration, we don’t question when people fall short of their Biblical three-score and ten. We leave the judging for the living. What was, was.

My father couldn’t wait to tell me about the Molly Marx trial, hung jury and all. The hideous mess, I learned, was dissected to the point where anyone with an IQ beyond 95 would happily commit corporate reports to memory rather than be tortured with another nanosecond of breathless tabloid coverage. But because the players were photogenic, worldly, and white, producers and editors ran with the story instead of, say, reports of limbless, brain-injured soldiers returning home from Iraq.

“The trial became a Rorschach,” my father said. “One day I logged onto AOL and could have voted for who I believed was guilty. By the way, sixty-eight percent of women polled found your friend Luke innocent.”

He always calls Luke my “friend,” as if the two of us never shared more than a strawberry soda and a taxi.

“I was offered a cameo in the made-for-television movie,” he adds. “To play a crusty old detective. Can you believe the bad taste?”

I can. It’s been a long time since I was an invisible looky-loo sticking my nose into life below, but I hear things. I hear a lot. What I wanted my dad to talk about, though, was Annabel. Did she really grow up to be brilliant and beautiful and almost five-nine?

“Oh, yeah. She got Kitty’s figure, your mother’s face, and Lucy’s height.”

“Too tall to dance Clara in
The Nutcracker?
”

“Well, that, and she gave up ballet for basketball.”

“Didn’t she get anything of mine?”

“Yes, darling. Your wonderful hair.”

Did he not know that I owed my blondness to chemistry? Then I saw a twinkle.

“Annabel got your smile, that way you lit up every room. You can’t not love that girl. She’s you all over again.”

“Why did she go to college in Scotland?” I had it on good authority
that she’d been accepted to Princeton—the director of admissions arrived here after she was gunned down by an alum whose child she’d rejected.

“To get away,” my father said, “from strangers pointing fingers, from the squabbling between Barry and Stephanie. And she took Jordan’s death hard. Those two kids would always be standing together off to the side, heads together, like ducks on their own private ice floe.” He stopped talking and simply gazed into my eyes. For a moment, I could feel what it was like to be whole and alive.

“But life is funny,” he said.

Isn’t it?

“If Annabel hadn’t gone to Scotland, she’d never have met Ewan. At first your mom and I were upset. We thought your little Annie-belle was searching for some kind of father figure. But Lucy came to her defense. She was right.”

She often was.

“When she got married, Annabel might have been a child herself—nineteen, a baby—but Ewan is exactly what she needs.”

“Tell me about her wedding. Did you and Mom go?”

“Of course! Your mother found Ewan very dashing in his kilt. There were so many candles I thought that old pile of a castle might melt, but your daughter said she wanted it to look like
The Age of Innocence
because Lucy swore it was your favorite movie.”

My first thought is that my sister keeps my flame alive as if I’m Princess Diana. My second: is Martin Scorsese still directing?

“Each toast was better than the next,” my father said, and broke into a pretty fair Scots accent. “Here’s tae us; who’s like us?” he said, answering his question with “Damn few—and they’re a’ deid.” Then he looked around and the two of us roared in laughter as only those in the Duration can.

’d stopped going below when I recognized my visits as cruel and unusual punishment, self-flagellation making me sadder, angrier, and lonelier. I learned to simply float within the Duration, and allowed my memory to wash away. If I ever knew exactly how I died, I gradually forgot more than I had ever learned or remembered. I stopped searching for answers and started searching for peace.

I’d fallen into what Sam has diagnosed as a hyperthermia of the soul; I’d crawled into a snow cave of amnesia. “It happens to people whose lives end the way yours did”—violently, recklessly, unforgivably. Young. “Feeling your father’s love, though, may unlock some memories.” Sam’s theory sounded like a mountain of psychocrap, but I began to see the truth in it. This made me want to return one last time, though my powers were like muscles hanging loose after a long illness.

Then it wasn’t a choice, really. I begged my father to travel with me, but he said he wasn’t ready, that he may never be ready. Dan Divine can’t stand to see his Claire with another man.

Two years after he died, my mother married her next-door neighbor, a widower who’d confessed that he’d always been nuts about her, which Lucy and I had guessed years ago from the way his admiring eyes
hung on her like Christmas lights. Claire Divine is one for the books, a woman who’s twice found true love, with its purple passion, peachy tenderness, and bright white understanding. I don’t think my father begrudges my mother her play-it-again happiness, but he doesn’t care to hear it sigh and call her “Clairey babe.”

Up until now, my complete British Isles experience has consisted only of London—antiquing, eating too many crumpets, and noting that people seem strangely attached to the word
rubbish
. Now here I am. A greenish sea by this coastal Scottish town is calm as ancient porcelain, and the first crocuses are pushing through rocky soil. If a flock of tiny, black-faced sheep wandered down the lane, herded by Little Bo Peep herself, I would not be surprised. In the distance, for some other occasion, bagpipes wail as if they themselves are grieving. Yet in this plain stone chapel, the mood is pumped with joy. I enter and feel at home here, as if I’ve taken a beloved book from the shelf and stepped inside an earmarked page. The source of this intimacy I cannot explain, but I have learned that just as life is a long, rolling sum of mysteries, death is no different.

I turn and there she is, Annabel, a nasturtium encircled by hummingbirds, standing radiant and straight as she walks to her seat, turning right and left to acknowledge well-wishers. By her side is Ewan, sheltering a very young boy and girl with ruddy cheeks and hair the color of pralines. “The spitting image of their father,” someone whispers of the children. Annabel is their fairy stepmother. She is carrying a bundle wearing the Campbell family’s christening gown and bonnet, creamy old lace the color of eggnog, its fabric soft as feathers. The sweetly sleeping newborn, unaware of this dignified hoopla, has the other half of my attention.

The chapel fills, its heavy wooden doors thrown open, the air catching a fresh sea breeze. Love flows round, Annabel gazing with warm disbelief at her child as I once looked at her. I drink in everyone, everything, and my emptiness begins to fill.

A clergyman, bent and kindly, starts the service, giving thanks for this moment of gladness, the birth of a child. “Our God, we turn to Thee with full hearts for these thy children, Ewan and Annabel Campbell.” His r’s roll gently, water flowing over polished old rocks. “Help them, that they be wise and patient parents, understanding the care
required of a young one’s growing body and mind. Give them courage in times of difficulty.”

I begin to pray involuntarily, to a God with whom I’ve had my share of differences.
Spare them from grief
, I ask of God.
Protect Annabel, protect her husband and his children. Protect this baby, this grandchild
. I use that word in true wonder. It is grand that my child has a child, a child whom I do not know but who, too, is grand indeed.

The minister goes on, his voice a melody, and I gaze around the room. There’s my mother, her face—to my eyes—young. She is leaning on her brand-new rock, a man not half as handsome as my father, but with a round, sympathetic face. He understands that even today’s happiness brings it all back. He strokes my mother’s hand, arthritic but soft to the touch. She can blink and it could be the February of my death, the future a shadow blocking her view. But she is wise enough to blink again and return to today, where fulfillment rules.

Hicks and Brie whisper and laugh. Around her neck hangs the silver magnifying glass that I gave her long ago. Faint lines etch the decades. She is a queen, with dark hair twisted into a chignon. Hicks has retired his earring, started wearing glasses, and grown thicker, as befits an attorney of his stature. After my unresolved trial, which he took as a personal failure, he studied the law at night. Brie and he practice together, Lawson and Hicks, the go-to firm if you’re crawling with guilt. They are doing well, more together than many couples who have married. Yesterday, after golf, they decided that Scotland is so magnificent perhaps they should buy a home here. But how could they give up the hilly green of Columbia County, and where would Hicks keep his goats? Rich people’s problems, good to have.