The passing of Thanksgiving also heralded the Christmas season. All over town the stores were filling with decorations and gifts. The city itself had strung lights in the trees on the Commons, and families were starting to trim their homes with lines of colored lights. Danny had been gone now for over a month and the pain was acute as ever. There was no way to ignore the approach of the holidays, though Molly did her best to avoid the toy sections in the stores.
Danny's birthday fell on the fourteenth of December, so close to Christmas that Molly always went to great efforts to make sure that that day was not slighted because of the big holiday. For his fourth birthday she had thrown a large party for him, inviting as many little kids as could fit into the trailer. The place had been a mess, but Danny, swamped with attention and gifts, had been euphoric. After all the children had left, it had taken hours for him to settle down.
“What kind of party am I going to have this year?” he kept asking right up until the day he had disappeared from Kute Kids.
“Well, we’ve got to plan something, don’t we,” Molly had said.
But they had never had the chance.
Molly kept wondering about that little body, chopped up into pieces and abandoned to rot in the woods somewhere off the highway near Batavia. Despite herself, she couldn’t resist following the story in the newspapers. The body remained unidentified and Tripoli tried to avoid talking about it. When pressed, all he would say was that the DNA results hadn’t come back yet. It took time. He tried to be supportive. What else, he wondered, could he do?
Life seemed suspended as she waited for the inevitable call. It came a week later, Tripoli reaching Molly at work to inform her that the DNA didn’t match.
“Aha!” she said, exhaling a loud sigh of relief. “I knew it. I was sure, Trip, just sure. Now didn’t I tell you?”
“Yeah. I suppose so.” There was a flatness to his tone of voice, but Molly refused to be infected by his lack of optimism.
The body was not Danny's, and that meant hope. Hope for her. She tried not to think about the other mother…Hope…Even if it was just a shred she clung to that fragment for all she was worth, and two days before Danny's birthday Molly took off during her lunch break and drove straight to the mall. She hadn’t been there since the day Danny vanished and the shopping center seemed bigger, busier, more crowded than she remembered it. Danny's biggest dream was to own a remote-controlled car like the ones he had seen the older boys playing with in the park. She found them in the toy store next to J. C. Penney's and picked out the biggest, most expensive one she could find: a pickup truck souped up with flames and decals. It weighed nearly ten pounds and cost more than a week's worth of groceries.
When Molly arrived at work the next morning, Larry called her into his office to tell her that Doreen was leaving and that she was being promoted to editor. The job entailed a lot more responsibilities but he was sure she could manage them.
Two days later, Molly moved into Doreen's office. It was small, but had a door she could close and a window. Though it was sealed, it looked out on the garden courtyard and on days when the sun was out, it flooded the room and lifted her spirits. Part of Molly's responsibility was to train the new secretary Larry had just hired. Tasha was fresh out of school with no real experience and needed to be coached. Suddenly, here she was in a position of authority, student transformed into teacher.
Life went on. Not only at the magazine, but in the rest of the world. That was the odd thing about tragedy, thought Molly. It was like a rock dropped in the ocean—the ripples were evident only close to where it had pierced the surface.
Tripoli was working long, irregular hours. A lot was happening in town. There were a flurry of break-ins, an attempted rape up near the campus.
“Your people are not working on Danny's case like they used to,” said Molly one night, sitting at the kitchen table as Tripoli washed up the dinner plates.
“Well, I’d be lying to you if I said we were going full-steam. It's not that I’ve given up looking. It's just that we’ve got an overload of cases right now. You’ve gotta understand, Molly, the department works by a system of priorities.”
“And Danny is now low, is that it?”
“A day doesn’t go by—no, not an hour—that I don’t think about Danny. Nothing in the world would make me happier than to get him back to you.”
That same week, Rosie lost her job at the P&C. They fired her because she had come up short on two occasions. It was just before Christmas, a particularly bad time. Ed was still laid off, she had lost her health insurance with her job, and…
“And on top of everything,” said Rosie, biting her lip, “I think I’m pregnant.”
“Think?” asked Molly, putting down her pastrami sandwich. In an attempt to cheer Rosie up, she had taken her out for lunch at Hal's Deli on Aurora Street.
“Know!” she said heaving a sigh.
“But that's wonderful. Aren’t you and Ed…?”
“I’d say right now we’re more scared than happy. I know why I lost my baby last time. You can’t imagine what that body shop was like.”
Molly could. She remembered how the building was sealed in winter and the exhaust fans were ineffective. Every time she stepped in she got nauseated from the fumes.
“There were days I had these throbbing headaches. Sometimes I couldn’t even breathe. I knew I should have quit right away, but…”
“But now you’re out,” said Molly, trying to sound upbeat.
“Two years there. All I can do is think about what they did to my body. Did permanently. And now there's some other poor sucker trapped in my place.”
Molly opened her pocketbook and took out her checkbook.
“What's this?” asked Rosie, her face flushing as Molly slid a check for five hundred dollars across the Formica.
“This is for medical expenses. I want you to see a doctor.”
“I can’t take this.”
“Oh yes you can!” said Molly fiercely.“And you will.”
With the command post closed, Lou Tripoli was back in his old office on the second floor of the city police building on Clinton Street. He spent hours reviewing the videotapes they had taken from the AM/PM Minimart on Green Street, the Short Stop Deli on Seneca, even the cameras posted outside the banks and merchants out at the malls.
The surveillance cameras had been running continuously on the afternoon that Danny disappeared, and Tripoli began again the laborious task of watching the tapes. He was still hoping that the police had overlooked something, some fleeting detail that might generate a fruitful lead.
Tripoli actually found Edna Poyer on the Minimart tape. She had cut across a corner of the station lot, and was indeed heading towards Woolworth's around three o’clock—just as she had claimed. Tripoli pushed a button on the machine and printed out a couple of the frames.
The more Tripoli searched, the more determined he became. He was sure that if he kept at it, sooner or later he’d turn up something substantive.
It was late December. The January issue of the magazine had been put to bed, and the office was closed for an extended Christmas break. Two solid weeks. Losing Danny had been bad enough. But now, missing him at the time of year they both loved so much—that was almost too much to bear. Molly was afraid she might go to pieces. Tripoli made it his business to check up on Molly at odd hours. Once in a while they made love. At other times Molly wasn’t quite up to it and he didn’t push. They just slept, content to lie in each other's arms.
Molly made it through the Christmas holidays by simply staying outside and walking. It snowed incessantly that winter, the low gray clouds dumping layer upon layer onto the frigid landscape. But the snow didn’t stop Molly. She kept pushing on through drifts of thigh-deep snow, across the campus, up and down the hills. Each time she spotted a small figure her heart would start racing.
“I tried to call you yesterday,” said Tripoli when he finally reached her on the phone one morning.
“I must have been out,” said Molly, her voice dull and flat.
“Everything okay?”
“I’m making it.”
Tripoli was going to fly down to North Carolina to bring back a guy on a warrant.“You going to be all right while I’m gone?”
“Sure. Don’t worry about me.”
“But I do.”
That winter, Ithaca barely saw the blue of sky. At first people were merely inconvenienced, but soon farm animals had to be locked inside their barns, and the deer began dying by the hundreds. Day and night the plows kept noisily scouring the roads, and soon the trailers in Molly's park lost their form and came to resemble huge white burial mounds. The snowfall, which in one twenty-four-hour period exceeded thirty inches, had already broken all accumulation records for an entire winter. Temperatures, too, continued to plummet to all-time lows. On a Wednesday, while Molly was at work, the propane heater in her old trailer gave out, and she returned to find the pipes frozen. Although she was able to get her heat restored, she was without water for nearly a week. Yet Molly refused to move. How else could Danny find her?
As the days wore on, Molly continued putting in long hours at the magazine. No matter how hard she worked, however, there was still time left over, time to fill, time to think, and time to miss her boy.
Despite her growing doubts about ever seeing Danny again, her nights of despair and moments of panic, her career was taking off, reaching a level she could only have dreamed of a year earlier. She was earning a good salary, meeting critical deadlines, and having other people seeking out her counsel. She realized she was perfectly capable of holding a good job, here or maybe anywhere. By any external measure she had made it; she had strengths and resources greater than she ever realized. Yet without Danny, this victory felt hollow.
Frigid February yielded to a wind-whipped March. In the middle of the month it rained, then abruptly turned colder, the snow freezing into a hard and treacherous icy mass. To Molly, however, the weather became a matter of indifference. When she wasn’t working, she continued her endless hunt, a bundled-up figure lumbering through the glazed and gusty streets, peering into every alley, searching every face, stopping total strangers to show them a picture, ask them questions. Somewhere, someone had to know something about Danny. It was only a matter of connecting. Always her search took her back to Green Street, to the boarded-up remains of Kute Kids, to the place she had left her little boy that morning in the late fall, entrusting him to strangers.
“What are you raising in there?” asked Molly, gently poking Rosie's stomach when she stopped by the trailer on a night late in March. “Elephants?”
Though Rosie was only into her sixth month of pregnancy, she was now so big that when she walked she wobbled and had trouble keeping her balance.
“It's twins,” said Rosie.“We just saw them on the sonogram up at the hospital. I got the picture at home. Ed says he's framing it.”
Molly kissed her.“Why that's wonderful!” she exclaimed.“I just hope you’re taking care of yourself.” Rosie didn’t look good to her. Her skin seemed sallow. Though her stomach was distended with the pregnancy, her cheeks were a little hollow and she wasn’t as lively as usual.
“I’m just very tired these days.”
“It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”
After Rosie drove off, Molly remained in the driveway. For the first time in months, the air had a distinct touch of warmth and she could hear the melting snow dripping from the trailer roofs, the sound of the nearby creek gurgling under the ice. The wind, she noticed, was coming out of the south and, when she closed her eyes, she could detect the rich smell of fecund earth. If you used your imagination, she thought, you could catch the scent of blossoms drifting up from the south. Spring was finally returning to Ithaca.
“Danny,” Molly whispered into the night, caressing his name. “Danny, my dearest baby boy. Wherever you are, please come home to me.”
“I think you have to let go,” said Tripoli late at night as they lay in bed, sleep elusive. Molly had been talking about Danny, making plans for when he got back. May was now splendidly warm, winter but a memory. The windows in the trailer were open and the air was alive with the sound of nighttime crickets. A mosquito buzzed around Molly's room and it got her thinking of summer. When Danny got back she would take him to the Adirondacks, they would go canoeing, fishing, just like she had done with her father when she was little and he was still living at home. It was a memory that Tripoli suspected had been burnished with time.“Letting go doesn’t mean giving up.”
“Never,” she said. “Never.” She got up on an elbow to look at him in the darkness. She studied his face, tracing with a finger the line on his brow. “I’m cruel to you. It's not fair. You should find someone else, a woman who could love you full time. If you left me—”
“Never,” he said with a laugh and silenced her with a quick kiss on her lips.“Never.”
BOOK TWO
chapter seven
For the month of May, Tripoli was stuck working weekends. He hated leaving Molly, knowing she would be alone all day in the trailer. As usual, he left her at dawn that Sunday morning, slipping out of bed and dressing as quietly as he could, then bending over her and giving her a kiss. In her half sleep Molly reached out to caress him, then sank back into sleep.
Tripoli was long gone when she finally arose. He had made himself a hasty breakfast, and when Molly got up all that remained of their night together were a plate with crumbs and his coffee cup piled on top of last night's dishes.
Molly helped herself to the coffee he had made for her, then set to work cleaning up the kitchen. As she waited for the sudsy water to fill the sink, she thought about Tripoli, his loyalty and tenderness, and wondered why she couldn’t have met him before—before Danny had disappeared. How vastly different life might have been. Danny would have had a father and…
She was facing the kitchen window when a small, distant figure near the highway caught her eye. It was a child, walking along the road near the trailer park. The water kept rising in the sink as she leaned closer to the window to see the child more clearly. It was a boy, she saw as he came around the curve of the road, a boy just about Danny's age with a sprightly gait just like Danny's. As he got closer, she thought she recognized Danny. But no, her eyes were playing tricks on her again and she squinted in the morning brilliance to get a better look.
The boy came closer and Molly stood transfixed. Then, as the water began overflowing the sink and cascading onto the floor, Molly let out a scream.
She rushed out of the trailer and down the road, barefoot, oblivious to the stones cutting into her feet.“Danny!” she was screaming. “Danny!” And the closer she came the more she was now certain that it was her child, her lost boy. His hair was long, much longer than it had been, but he was wearing the same red flannel shirt and bib jeans, and draped over his shoulder was an odd gray sweater. His face was set in a cheerful, contented look, and when he spotted Molly rushing toward him, his face lit up and he ran to greet her.
“Mother!” he laughed as Molly swooped down and scooped him up into the air. In her arms he felt feather light.
“Oh, my God, oh my God!” she said, both crying and laughing. “My baby! My baby!” she kept repeating as she raced with him back to the trailer, nuzzling his neck and ears and drinking in his scent. She wept so hard, held him so tight, that she could hardly breathe.
Tripoli was getting ready to head out of the office when his phone rang. Molly was sobbing and her speech so garbled he couldn’t make sense of it.
“Hey. Slow down,” he said, at first alarmed.“What's going on?” He had never heard her like this.
“He's back!” she gasped.
“What are you talking about?”
“Back! Back!” She kept repeating.
But all he could make out was her sobbing. She's hysterical, he thought.“Don’t do anything, please,” he pleaded.“I’ll be right over.”
He burst through
the door and dashed down the hall, knocking officer Lynn Spino off her feet and shouting an apology over his shoulder as he moved off. When he reached his car, he flipped on the siren and lights and took off.
“Let me just look at you!” said Molly, the phone slipping out of her hand as she fell to her knees, coming eye to eye with Danny, his face smudged with dirt.“Oh my God. You’re so skinny. Are you okay? Is everything…” She took up his hands and counted every finger, lifted his shirt to examine his bony chest and belly, kissed his silky skin and again smelled his special fragrance. His ribs were showing and his arms felt like sticks and he was not particularly clean, but she could find nothing really wrong with him.“And it's you! My darling! My baby! I still can’t believe you’re real.”
Danny threw back his head and laughed.“Oh, I am!”
Then she was crying again.
“Please don’t cry,” he said, and looked like he was about to cry himself. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Scare me? Scare me?” she laughed giddily. “You didn’t scare me. You’ve made me so happy. That's why Mommy's crying. So happy!”
She kept touching him, trying to reassure herself that he was actually alive and healthy and there.“But where have you been?”
“I’ve been…I’ve been…” he gazed around the interior of the trailer.
“Yes? Yes?” she prompted, trying to catch his eyes to capture his attention. She kept combing her fingers through his hair pulling out burrs and little sticks of wood caught in it, running her fingertips over the contours of his skull as if the explanation lay there somewhere.
THE LAST BOY Page 14