Chapter 1 Molly #6
“That’s the million--dollar question,” Jesse replies.
“Her husband was a guy named Ron Lieberman. He wasn’t surprised when she never came home that night, because she had a habit of going out to bars with friends, or staying over at her brother’s place when he was working late.
Anyway, a full day after the Towers fell, she hadn’t come home, so he reported her missing.
Her brother was interviewed on WABC, said he’d last talked to her as she was running into the World Trade Center to help with the injured. ”
I nod.
“So Sneha Philip is anointed a hero, right?” Jesse continues.
“But then the NYPD starts to narrow down their list of nine thousand presumed victims of the attacks. Turns out, there were a lot of red flags for Philip. She didn’t have a great marriage, she had affairs with women, she had been fired for substance abuse.
There’s footage of her shopping with a woman the night before—-buying bedding and three pairs of shoes and five hundred dollars’ worth of lingerie.
Lieberman hired a PI, who found grainy security camera footage of a person in the lobby of their apartment building moments before the first plane hit the tower.
Lieberman insisted it was Sneha Philip based on her hair and movements.
She stood in front of the elevators for a while before running out the door.
And then it turns out that her brother lied about hearing from her. ”
“So she didn’t run into the World Trade Center?” I sit up a little straighter. “Did anyone ever find her?”
He shakes his head. “Her husband refused to believe the NYPD, who strongly suspected she hadn’t died that day. But in 2008, he finally got her name added to the memorial.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
“Well,” he explains. “You know how unreliable suspect lineups are?”
“So you’ve told me,” I reply.
“It’s not that the victim wants to point out the wrong perp. Your mind is just working overtime to match the person in front of you with the one you remember.”
“So . . . what?”
Jesse meets my gaze. “We reinvent people to make them fit what we want to believe about them.”
Evie shows up at my office holding a can of olives. “I wanted to bring an olive branch, but it’s February,” she says. “Please, Molly. Can I come in?”
I can’t help but laugh; I gesture for her to sit down.
“I miss you. And so does your father.”
“I don’t see him holding any Kalamatas,” I point out.
“He’s trying to give you the space you wanted.”
I rub my forehead. “Evie,” I say, “I’m not mad at you. I’m just . . . mad at everything.”
She draws in a breath. “I hate knowing you’re upset, and that you don’t want to talk. You used to tell me everything.”
It’s true; Evie had been my confidante and my best friend when I was too introverted, too brainy, too intense for kids my own age.
She goes on. “Do you remember when you found the shoebox of glass tiles in my bedroom closet, and you asked me if they were jewels?”
I nod. I had been maybe five. The cut glass glittered in all the colors of the rainbow. Evie said they’d belonged to my mother.
“I thought she was a queen.”
“And I didn’t correct you,” Evie says. “Because I wanted you to think the best of her.” She twists her hands in her lap. “I know this must feel like a deliberate lie of omission. But right or wrong—-anything I did or didn’t tell you about Eloise was out of love for you. For her.”
I had taken that box of glass with me to college. By then, of course, I knew it was meant for mosaics. But sometimes I’d push an edge against my skin and watch blood bead and think about how it once had circulated through my mother’s body, when I was still a part of her.
“If you don’t want to talk, let me.” Evie leans closer. “Is that okay?”
I tip my head.
“The week after the attack, we took you to the armory. They did a cheek swab so that if they found Eloise’s DNA, they’d be able to identify it,” she says, steeling her spine.
“There were dozens of kids there, because so many parents were missing. We gave statements about what Eloise was wearing when she went to the appointment, what time she left, the cab she’d taken.
The driver had survived; he’d pulled over when the first plane hit.
He said his passenger got out of the car and disappeared while he was still staring at the sky.
” She takes a deep breath. “I had to fight your father to have a memorial—-force him to accept that Eloise was truly gone. On her birthday in 2002, I named a star in her honor. You can get a certificate. I never told anyone—-not even your father.”
I let my gaze slide away, but I am listening.
“When you learned to talk, you called me Mama. I didn’t correct that, either,” Evie says softly, “because I liked it too much.”
I feel a slow unraveling in me. Grief, maybe. Or shame.
“I fell in love with you before I fell in love with him,” she says.
I look at her face. I so desperately want to believe her.
She goes on. “Now I don’t even know if I’m still his wife.”
I hadn’t thought about that. My mother had been declared dead, but clearly she wasn’t. Which meant her original marriage to my father was intact, and legally, Evie’s wasn’t.
“You’re entitled to your anger, Molly. If you’re not ready to talk to me,” she says, “call your father.”
By the time I look up, she has silently left my office.
I turn my attention to the brief I was typing out before Evie interrupted me, and read the same sentence three times. With a sigh, I pick up the phone. My father answers on the first ring.
“I’m sorry, Molly.”
“I know you are.”
There is static and silence between us. “It was like seeing a ghost,” my father says after a minute. “I veer back and forth between hating her for staying away and hating myself for not finding her. But I don’t think I can bear it if you hate me.”
“I don’t, Dad,” I sigh. “I just wish . . .”
What do I wish?
That he’d noticed something was wrong with his wife sometime before September 11, and did something about it?
That he and Evie had trusted me with the truth?
That Georgia had never reappeared?
But if I’m going to be honest with myself, I can understand how my father might have affixed blinders.
I can understand why he and Evie didn’t want to tarnish my memory of my mother.
I can even understand why, as messy as Georgia’s return is, she hoped it could prevent history repeating when I have my own baby.
“Dad?” I hesitate. “Just because I’m not ready to talk to Georgia doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”
That night after Jesse and I finish brushing our teeth, I ask, “What if I am like her?” I turn to him. “What if the same thing happens to me?”
“It’s not a sure thing that you’ll inherit postpartum psychosis.
Dr. Mantillard even said so. And in the unlikely event that it does happen, we’re all on high alert.
We’ll get you the help you need, fast. Georgia’s completely stable now.
The problem she had was that no one was willing to admit at first she needed help. ” He pulls me into his arms.
“What if being a bad parent is in your genes?”
“You know it doesn’t work that way. Shit just sometimes happens to people who don’t deserve it, and you survive it.” He strokes my arms. “Do you really think Georgia was a bad mother?”
My brows shoot up. “Don’t you?”
He rubs his hand over his mouth, considering. “Georgia was sick—-just like someone who has cancer is sick—-and in one moment when she wasn’t in excruciating pain, she made a decision to protect you, even if it meant she couldn’t be with you. So does that make her a bad mother . . . or a good one?”
He leans down and kisses my forehead, then leaves the bathroom.
I wash my face and pull the ribbon from my French braid. Then I take my phone from my back pocket and pull up my text thread with Georgia.
If you’re free, I type, maybe we could meet for lunch.
Immediately three dots appear and disappear. Appear.
I hold my breath, waiting again for my mother.
I talk to Georgia at a diner over platters of cheeseburgers and chocolate milkshakes.
The conversation is smoother this time. She asks about my father, about Evie—-she had followed their lives, and mine, on social media.
She asks how I’m feeling in the final stretch of pregnancy.
At my prompting, she tells me about her journey out of New York City on 9/11, and meeting Ximena, and being hospitalized.
I tell her about graduating early, and why I chose public health, and why I came back to Rhode Island. We swap information as if we are playing a game of Go Fish, our memories the playing cards. But it is still all very superficial—-the stuff you’d read in a short CV.
I want to ask her if she still has feelings for my father. If she resents Evie for taking her place. If she misses her life in Georgia.
When Georgia takes her milkshake and pours a thin stream of it over her fries, my jaw drops. “Oh,” she says. “I know it’s gross—-”
“It’s the only way to eat French fries,” I murmur. I like to dip them, that’s why I ordered the chocolate shake. “Jesse used to think I was crazy.” I look up at her. “But I’ve never seen anyone else do it.”
“Well,” Georgia says. “I guess great taste is hereditary.” She swirls a French fry in the soup of melted ice cream and takes a bite. “I used to dream of the kind of ice cream Willy Wonka made.”
“The kind that never melts, not even on a very hot day,” I quote.
Georgia grins. “Roald Dahl fan?”
I nod. “I was kind of a loner as a kid. Inevitably someone would find out that my mother had—-um—-died on 9/11, and then things would get weird. So the older I got, the more I just kept to myself and read incessantly.”
She looks stricken. “I’m sorry.”
It feels like dipping a toe into a pool you thought you wanted to swim in, only to learn it’s ice cold.
“You know,” I say, changing the subject, “there are all kinds of theories about Willy Wonka being a serial killer who chooses his victims with the Golden Ticket, and operates a slave ring of Oompa--Loompas.”