Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

  I shook my head. “Come sit down.”

  “Oh no. I wash the dirty feet off my hands first.” He went immediately up the back stairs, not wanting to contaminate our kitchen sink. I sat silently waiting for him to return while watching my mother go through her nightly routine. I thought of Annie again. She was my age with two husbands and three kids tugging on her shirt. Why was the alarm on my biological clock set at a later date than hers? Why hadn’t I found my soul mate yet—the person I could settle down with—when Annie had already downed two and was prowling for the third? Or was I simply not ready to give up my own life and take responsibility for someone else’s? And if I was simply resisting marriage and children in an effort to remain independent as long as I could, why were Shannon, Beth, and Laurie afflicted as well? There seemed to be a restlessness in the four of us, a need to find something more to life while we were still young enough to hold our bellies and laugh out loud. None of us wanted to be mixing pancake batter or changing diapers when the circus master hollered out the last call for the carousel.

  My father came back down the stairs. He sat at the table with me and picked a carrot from the bowl. He crunched his teeth into it, releasing a pungent vinegar and garlic smell into the warm room. “So, you like this new job? Or you want to change again?”

  “Holton pays better than the AG’s, but the job is actually harder than I thought it would be. It’s kind of like an emotional juggling act.”

  My mother continued her ritual of washing lettuce in a large colander, then transferring it to a pot and returning it to the colander for another rinse. She would do this at least three times for lettuce and ten times if it was sandy spinach or arugula.

  “As a prosecutor, I didn’t treat one person different from another. Same cases. Same crimes. Same punishment. I’d try them or plead them out. Even the defendants were the same after a while. Names may have been different, but they were all the same. Shortly before I left the AG’s, I put a guy named Whittaker behind bars. He was a millionaire banker but a habitual drunk driver. Do you think the judge pulled me aside and said, ‘Miss Melone, this is a volatile case. We have to treat it discreetly. Let’s just let him go free and see what happens’? At Holton, we have ‘special students,’ who are rich, and the male students are treated differently from the female students, and blacks, whites, ethnics. . . . It’s a whole caste system over there.”

  My father watched me and chewed. My mother turned from the sink again. It was too quiet in the house without Cassie.

  “I don’t like to hear this,” my father said. “Maybe we don’t want Cassie to go to a school like that.”

  As the seeds of worry began to germinate in each of our minds, our apprehension and fear overheated the kitchen and made the food smells almost nauseating.

  “Cassie has not called from this camp yet?” my father asked.

  We both looked at him and shook our heads no.

  My mother joined my father and me at the kitchen table and we updated my father on the latest developments in Cassie’s most recent malfeasance. Then the two of them, my parents, sat quietly, looking at me, waiting for my superhuman plan to make it all right again. Unfortunately, I had none. I was usually so full of ideas for them, telling them in my strong American way that everything was doable, all things fixable. Anything was possible. This was the first time in my adult life I had to help my parents and was failing them. There was nothing any of us could do except wait.

  “The police have started a search,” I finally said. “I spoke with the coach.”

  My mother crossed herself.

  “I’m going up there,” I said.

  My father looked at his hands folded atop the table. “We need you here. You can do nothing more than what the police are doing. They are doing their job.”

  I looked at my mother for a response. She was numb with worry. My father was finished with the niceties of conversation. “We wait together. Cassie will call here first.”

  I swear she heard it before my father and I. My mother heard the phone before it even rang. Wondering where she was going, I watched her rising from her chair seconds before the ring pierced the slow, heavy silence of our small kitchen. “Who is this please? . . . Yes, she is here. Who is this please?”

  My mother held the receiver to her chest. “It is for you,” she said to me. “Please, Marianna, don’t tell me anything bad. Please.”

  I took the phone from her. “Hello?”

  “Miz Melone? That you now?”

  I froze at the sound of Lucky’s voice. I had never heard it in my kitchen before. Lucky’s voice was something from another realm. Disjointed. Disembodied. From work, where everything involves someone else, not me, not my family. Morgues and medical examiners and death did not belong in my parents’ kitchen. Lucky should not be calling here.

  Should not.

  “Yes,” I said weakly.

  “Miz M, I’m so sorry to bother you, but Miz Lynch is on her way here. She told me to call you. You got another student missing from Holton College and—”

  “This is about work? You’re calling me about work here?” He had never heard me screech.

  “Well . . . as I said, Miz Lynch told me to call you. When you didn’t answer your cell phone, she told me to try this number. I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am.”

  “No, no. Lucky, I’m sorry. Just that my sister . . . never mind . . . what is it, Lucky?” I looked at my parents and realized they were watching me with white faces and open mouths.

  I shook my head to relieve their anxiety that the call was about Cassie, even though I suspected that it was.

  “We got a body down here—”

  The air caught in the lump of my throat.

  “—young girl, hard to tell her age due to the fact that . . . hmm . . . well, ma’am, she’s got no face.”

  I walked into the corner of the kitchen, as far away from my parents as the cord would allow. “How young, Lucky? What do you mean by ‘young’?”

  “Could be twenty, could be fifteen. Hard to tell—”

  Fifteen?

  “—and when I was preparing the body, I found a paper in the pocket of her jeans and it’s got your name and cell phone number on it.”

  “Oh yes, yes. Of course.” I tried to remain calm, for the sake of my parents, and in fact I appeared so calm, I looked half dead. It was one of my better defense mechanisms. I turned stone cold and all emotion drained out of me when I was sure catastrophe had finally arrived at my doorstep. I expected catastrophe, so when it was imminent, I hung my head and waited for the axe to sever my emotions from my body like a swift guillotine.

  I hung up the phone. I couldn’t remember if I’d told Lucky I was coming down or not. But I knew that was my intention. I would go to the morgue to see a dead young girl, and pray, as I’ve never prayed for anything before, that it wasn’t my little sister Cassie.

  “Mom? Dad? I have to go back to the office for a minute. Problem with some paperwork. I’ll be back in half an hour. Promise,” I lied cheerily.

  “You are lying.” My father always knew. I could lie to my mother, but never to my father. He always knew. I now wondered for the first time whether my mother always knew when I was lying too. She was just smart enough not to confront me; she knew that if, and when, I lied, it was for a good reason. My mother had a mother’s instinct. She knew when lying was selfish, and when it was necessary.

  “Let her go,” my mother said. “She’ll be back, and we will be here waiting.” My mother was calm like me. Maybe she saw her own guillotine.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Morgue 102

  I TOOK THE FRONT DOOR to the ME’s office and walked directly past the front desk with a nod. From the front of the building, visitors had to descend into the basement of the building, where the processing of bodies took place. In the past, I had always entered from the back, which was built into the ground so the bodies could be unloaded directly into the basement.

  My business there ha
d suddenly turned personal; the morgue was quiet, dark, and gloomy, just as it appeared to others who had walked before me to identify bodies of their loved ones. In the past the morgue had meant parties of laughs and black humor, of chilled lobster in Styrofoam coolers and Dom Perignon kept in eight-footlong unoccupied refrigerated drawers. Now as I entered to view the body of a young girl who might possibly be my sister, the thought of eating dead lobsters made me sick.

  Sitting in the windowless and airless reception area, a man and woman held hands. They looked numb and paralytic, like the parents I had left at home. They could be here for no other reason than body identification. Another woman sat alone in a corner, shivering. I waited for someone to answer the buzzer next to the windowed door leading into the holding area. The blinds were closed tight but within seconds their slats flipped opened and Lucky’s face appeared through the glass. He nodded at me and unbolted the door.

  “Your girlfriends are already here,” he said. “This something new? Why are you all coming to ID a body? And it’s a bad one.”

  “Bad?”

  “Well . . . those people, out there in the waitin’ room, are missing their daughters. Now, usually I can tell if it’s a match, you know? I been at this so long, I can look at the faces out there”—he nodded toward the waiting room—“and know if it’s the ones connected to what’s in here. But hell if I ain’t stumped when the face in here is practically filleted from the bone.”

  Trying hard not to visualize it, I let that information find its way into my brain. As Lucky and I walked, I explained that my sister was missing from her soccer camp on the Cape. That she hadn’t been seen since yesterday. Lucky said nothing, not even nodding in his usual respectful fashion. He was as dumbstruck as I was.

  “Well, no, then I don’t think it’s your sister. This sweet thing was found here in Providence in the woods.”

  I heard his voice as an echo from far away. My vision began to blur. Nothing clear, everything stained white. I breathed deeper, as if the air would clear the smog I was looking through. But my rapid heavy breathing made me dizzy, and my head fell back into darkness until the next thing I saw was Shannon, Laurie, and Lucky staring over me as I lay on a cold steel table.

  “How many times you been here, Miz M? You ain’t never fainted before.”

  “Get the bourbon,” Shannon ordered. “The Knob Creek from our private stash.”

  Lucky leaned closer into my face, worried, but he was talking to the girls as if I had left the room and wasn’t coming back. “Is she okay? Maybe we should call 911.”

  “She’ll be fine after a few slugs,” Laurie said. “I’ll get it.”

  Underneath me the table to which Lucky had lifted me was hard and unforgiving. Up in the ceiling was a hooded and domed light fixture, the bulb shrouded in glass for easy disinfecting of spattered blood and other body secretions. Shannon’s face appeared next to Lucky’s, and I spoke to both of them. “If Cassie is in that drawer just kill me and put me next to her. I can’t go back home and face my parents.”

  “I know,” Shannon said. “I know.”

  “I don’t know nothing like that.” Lucky shook his head briskly. He was getting to that point where he usually distanced himself from our shenanigans. I interpreted his shaking head to mean that he had no intention of packing me up in a metal drawer, no matter who we found in the adjoining one.

  Laurie returned with a paper cup. Like a nurse, she pursed her lips to guide me as she lifted my head and brought the cup to my mouth. “Take a nice big one,” she said.

  A burning stream of liquid slid smoothly down my throat. “Help me up, Laur. I’ve got to find out.”

  Lucky wound his large strong arms around me and lifted me to a sitting position. While he fed me another sip and then lifted me by the waist off the table, Laurie and Shannon each took her own hefty swig from the bottle. Shannon and Laurie led the way and we walked to the room where the refrigerated drawers were kept. Lucky never let go of my elbow.

  We stopped in front of a breast-height steel drawer. As Lucky grasped the latch to pull it open, I put my hand over his, stalling him. The Cape was only two hours away. The killer could have brought Cassie back to Providence and done it here.

  Lucky blew air up to the ceiling. Still looking up there, he said, “Well then, you sure you want to do this? We can get some tests first. Do it that way.”

  “Let’s get it over with,” Laurie said. “My tribe isn’t keen on cadavers.”

  Lucky depressed the silver latch, jerked it hard until it released, then pulled the heavy stainless sarcophagus from its airtight seal. A white-draped mass spread slowly before us.

  When I was twelve, our next-door neighbors had a dog. My mother believed animals belonged outside. She discouraged our attention to the huge German shepherd that weighed as much as we did. I found the dog one day, sick. She had fallen on a shallow step that she once could easily stride. She lay there, unable to get up, her legs splayed into the air, saliva dripping from her mouth; diarrhea caked her hind legs. The next day I went back to see if she was better. I found her dead on that same step.

  It was winter and the ground was covered in dirty sheets of ice. Our neighbors, her owners, were not rich. They couldn’t afford vets or even the cost of vet-assisted disposal, so for months until spring, the animal lay there covered by a plastic shower curtain, freezing peacefully at rest through the winter.

  The mound spread before Lucky and me was only slightly larger than the frozen German shepherd in our neighbor’s backyard. Lucky rested his hand at the corner of the sheet. “You know any marks on the body? Maybe we do it that way and keep the head covered.”

  Cassie’s body was a mystery to me. My mother might recognize every mark on her, but from me, Cassie had hidden her nakedness with the modesty of a young girl whose body changes daily, hair by hair, rounding in small increments, turning from a dry, straight stem to a moist, curved flower almost overnight. But I would know Cassie by her hands. Like my father’s, they were fleshy and short-fingered. I was jealous of Cassie’s hands, knowing they would age better than mine, whose fingers were bony and long, showing every blood vessel through translucent, thin skin. Cassie’s hands would always look young.

  As Lucky pulled the sheet back, I stiffened in expectation, avoiding as well as I could the bloody mass contained by a plastic bag fastened at the neck. I followed the thin arms down to her hands.

  And I fainted again.

  This time I recovered quickly. Lucky had wrapped me in his large arms. He smelled of disinfectant and rubber. The room was cold. Lucky was warm. I looked into his face above me.

  “Her hands?”

  Laurie answered for him. “It’s the same sicko, Mari. Except this time he cut up the hands too.”

  Laurie, unlike me, hated morgues and dead bodies. But this girl could have been Cassie, and I knew Laurie was doing this for me—painstakingly examining the mangled fingers with rubber-gloved hands. “He used some kind of hunting knife, looks like—jagged edges. You know, I bet he was trying to cut off the fingertips to make the ID harder. He probably gave up. It’s damn hard to saw through bone.”

  “Oh shit, oh shit.” I cried into Lucky’s chest and he held me hard to him.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry, Miz M. This is no good. I’m taking you out.” He pushed the drawer closed with one hand and I watched the white mound disappear slowly like the foam at the end of a wave going back to sea. “You girls take her back to the room. I got to let those people sitting outside come on in here.”

  Shannon and Laurie walked me back to the autopsy room, where the three of us sat silently on the edge of the stainless steel table, sipping whiskey from paper cups. Within minutes, we heard a woman’s loud scream, followed by a man moaning.

  “It’s not your sister,” Laurie breathed.

  Lucky returned a minute or two later.

  “Good news,” he said with a smile. “Tattoo on her back. The Bartons just ID’d their daughter Emily.”

&nb
sp; SHANNON AND LAURIE came back with me to my parents’ house. They were still sitting at the kitchen table where I’d left them. I had no news for them, nor they for me, but I assured them, in one of my best theatrical performances, that everything was going to be just fine. Their silence continued unbroken.

  The girls and I went upstairs to Cassie’s room. Her computer screen was sitting dark on her desk; several practice SAT exam books lay sprawled next to it.

  We all stood over the screen as I booted it up to check for e-mail on the off chance that whichever “friend” had picked her up from camp had made plans with her to do so before Cassie left for the Cape. I combed through each and every message. None of them seemed pertinent to her disappearance. I hoped that wherever she was she was having the time of her life so we could all scream at her in the morning for worrying all of us so needlessly. She apparently had learned nothing from my warnings after her little drinking spree with Sherman and Lipton. Elliot was right. Cassie was thickheaded and stubborn. And she’d just fallen into a pothole.

  THE THREE OF us huddled together in the street in front of my parents’ house. Hands in pockets, blowing into our collars, stomping the ground to keep our feet warm, it was too cold for even Shannon to bare her hands for a quick smoke.

  “Tomorrow, if you haven’t heard from her,” Laurie said, “we’ll get the cops in on this and everyone else we can think of in this one-horse town. Forget Holton. Forget Vince. We’ve got to find your sister.”

  I nodded wordlessly and watched as Laurie and Shannon hopped into Shannon’s Suburban and drove off. I should have gone back into the house, where I saw my father’s face peering out at me from the front hall window. Instead I shot him a cowardly wave and escaped into the safety of my own car for a solitary ride home.

  My brownstone had a small lot with assigned spaces for three cars in the back of the house. I pulled into my space, walked into the front foyer, and began my climb to the second floor when the doorbell rang. Mike, I assumed, had returned for another round in the ring with me. Or another one of his let’s-kiss-and-make-up speeches.