The Mystery of Hollow Places(25)
Clutching the photos, I want to say, Great, this helps; here’s my number and thanks for your time. I’ll make my way out of this dim apartment, which is weird—pickles-in-your-desk-drawer weird. I wasn’t expecting Lil to bake us scones or break into “Be Our Guest,” but if she couldn’t have been happy to see me, she might’ve been . . . interested? Instead of acting like her estranged cousin’s daughter is some Girl Scout selling charity magazine subscriptions to support underage monkeys or cure albinism.
Jessa stands up from the table, which is my ticket to ride. But when I open my mouth, the one question I’ve wanted to ask all along bubbles out. “Did she ever ask about me?”
Lil’s whole face slides downward just a bit, but she clamps her jaw and tightens up. “Last time we talked, she never said much about anyone but herself.”
I wish I knew what Lil was thinking. Sherlock Holmes would know. On the one hand, that guy is bug nuts—he’s selfish, rude, and messy. He leaves beakers and pipettes and knives and poisoned shoe polish lying all around. Sometimes Watson wakes up to find Holmes watching him from the foot of the bed at five a.m. He solves a lot of mysteries after sulking on the couch in his sitting room for days. Confession: when I read A Study in Scarlet, the first book about Sherlock Holmes and his lifelong sidekick, Dr. John Watson, I paid particular attention to the scene where Watson walks in to find Holmes on his back, staring with dulled eyes at the ceiling of No. 22IB Baker Street. Dad did the same in the bad times, a few of which I’d seen before we went to Lindy, and I thought maybe it was because that was how he figured out his mysteries. So Dad needed a little help sometimes—so what? Holmes needs Watson, and not just to fetch his shoes or write his biography. Watson brings him cases to solve when he’s been sitting around for weeks shooting morphine and cocaine. Watson’s the keeper of all the knowledge Holmes considers beneath him—literature, philosophy, politics. He didn’t even know the Earth revolved around the sun till Watson told him so, for god’s sake.
But flaws aside, Sherlock Holmes can read people like no other detective. He spent his whole life studying regular people instead of learning how to become a regular person. When he meets Watson, he knows the guy has been an army doctor in Afghanistan by the stiffness of his arm, the tan on his face, and the paleness of his wrists.
I look at Lilian Eugene and try to read her life. Once she had a husband. Now she lives alone, and if she has coworkers or boyfriends or girlfriends over to visit, there sure isn’t any evidence around her apartment. Lil didn’t even have a second chair set out before Jessa and I came, and there are pictures of no one anywhere, unless you count a Garfield calendar tacked up by the wall phone. I think of how she sat on the kitchen floor with her babies, though it physically hurt her to do it. How her clothes were covered in their hair before they walked all over her, like she spends her whole life down there among them. I think of the bobblehead in her car, the Petco bags she lugs her school stuff and cleaning supplies around in, like she’s got an endless hoard of them. The cats are absolutely everything to her, and she doesn’t love them halfway; she loves them hard.
Once Lil had a cousin, and they loved each other enough that even after they lost touch, she was my mother’s emergency contact, the one person Mom trusted to come if she was called. Maybe Lil loved Sidonie Faye hard, that little girl drawing creatures in the tent in Fitchburg, the girl she shared her family with. Then Mom slipped away, called her once for money and never again, and Lil closed all that love up and put it away like a book on a shelf. So I come around after all this time and she acts like we’re strangers, even if we’re connected by something as everything-and-nothing as blood. I almost wouldn’t believe even that connection, except for Lil’s chin, the tip of an aging heart.
“Okay. Thanks for your help, Lil.”
“If I could tell you more, I would. But by the time she left your daddy, I didn’t really know her anymore.”
A stray thought stops me in the doorway. “Hey, did she ever say anything about marrying Dad? Whether they were, or were planning to, or anything?”
Lil looks surprised. “I guess I always thought they had gotten married. Like I said, we weren’t close at all, not at that point. I was shocked she called me up when she left. But she did talk about getting married, once. In the beginning, when she first came back. Sid said she could see herself happy, and if she and your daddy tied the knot, she wanted to do it on the same date they’d met. Their anniversary, kind of. She thought it’d be romantic, on account of the holiday. I told her sure, though secretly I thought that was strange, because that was the same day she went to claim Siobhan’s body.”
“And that day . . . was it Valentine’s Day?”
“Yes, 1995, that would’ve been.” Lil blinks at me. “Why, that day mean something to you?”
NINE
It’s not that my dad is superstitious, but . . . he does like to find the meaning in things.
He claims it’s because he tells stories. That it’s the job of a writer—even writers of popular medical mysteries—to sift through random events and watch patterns emerge, like finding constellations in a giant star-speckled sky. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t write during the bad times. He once said in a session with Lindy that things seem meaningless in the bad times, and how can he write if he can’t find meaning?