28
The Nationals
Two or three days later, he got an invitation to his mother’s funeral in the mail. The card was printed but wasn’t signed. His first thought was, How did someone get her body? No one had talked to him. He flipped the envelope and checked the return address: Springfield. So it had to be her mother, who had not been there for her in life.
On the appointed day, he drove out to the forested western part of the state and into the gray, low-income city with its low profile of low buildings constructed in a river valley that looked up at the highway.
He waited at a stoplight at an eight-lane intersection with one other car to keep him company. It was raining. The light changed and he drove on. He found the cemetery, went through the iron gate in the stone wall and parked under the overarching trees.
He crossed the field of headstones on foot. At her grave, twenty or thirty people he’d never known existed were sitting beneath a tent, white-haired senior citizens, men in khaki pants and blazers. “Are you her son?” they asked. They had reserved a chair for him. It took him time to figure out that the elderly individual sitting by his side was Gloria’s mother.
“We didn’t think you’d make it,” she said.
The rain, which had waned, came back again, pattering on the tent.
Someone introduced him to a person in a black-and-purple robe—the priest. “You’re the son?” The priest was narrowly built and had well-trimmed fingernails.
“Gloria was my mother, yes.”
“Do you have any special recollections of her?”
“I remember I was really young and we were crashing in somebody’s house. We didn’t have anything of our own and she somehow got me a TV to keep me company, because I was sick and she couldn’t be there because she had to work, and she put up prayer flags over me. I don’t know if you know what those are…”
“Prayer tags?”
“Tibetan prayer flags. It’s a Buddhist thing. Do you know anything about Buddhism?”
“No.”
“It was to pray for my health. She hung them up for me. And they worked, by the way. I was lying there watching TV while she was gone and I got better. And I’ve never forgotten what I saw while I was lying there. It was—”
He was about to mention Action Man. His story got interrupted. A stranger came over and the priest turned away. Corey took his seat.
The ceremony began. The priest began by welcoming Mrs. Goltz, the mother of the deceased. Mrs. Goltz pressed a handkerchief to her face, held it wadded in her fist, while the old women around her patted her hands. The priest recognized all of the departed’s family. He pointed around the audience. “Her cousin from right here in Chicopee…”—a woman in a hat dipped her head—“her son from Boston…”—the priest’s eyes skimmed over Corey.
“So many people remember Gloria,” the priest continued, raising his eyes to the tent roof and cooking up a smile, “for the joy she brought others.” He began to throw out Gloria anecdotes. “Her cousin remembers ice-skating with her as a girl…Her son remembers special times in front of the TV…”
Corey hadn’t been warned that his remarks to the priest would be used as material for a hastily thrown together eulogy.
The coffin rested behind the priest, a giant wooden piece of carpentry that weighed so much more than the body in it. Corey saw that Gloria had been embalmed and dressed formally in a navy dress and a blouse with a bow. She looked mature and formal, like a young woman of a bygone era going off to college.
They buried his mother on a hill.
On his way back to Boston, he stopped in a valley and shadowboxed by the roadside while the cars blasted by him in the dusk.
After the funeral, it rained. He was alone in the house, wondering what to do with his day. As he listened, the downpour became a storm. Through the blinds, he watched sheets of rain bowling down the street, hitting the window an inch from his eyes, turning the concrete seawall brown. He stayed inside, listening to the wind pry at the roof.
After several hours, he tried Molly’s number. When she didn’t answer, he went back to wandering around the house from room to room, listening to it rain.
The rain stopped for a little while on Monday, but he didn’t go outside. No one called him back. The entire day went by.
That evening, he tried her one more time with no success.
He finally called Tom, who asked about his mother.
“We had her funeral out in Springfield. I was right next door to Amherst.”
Tom said his daughter was away with her track team competing in the nationals in Texas. Corey took this to be the reason he couldn’t reach her.
The night before it rained was Saturday, March 21. On Monday, on the UMass Amherst campus, Molly’s psychology class met in Tobin Hall, a concrete block with a honeycombed appearance, which strongly resembled a criminal justice building in Boston’s Government Center. The psychology instructor wondered aloud if anyone knew why one of her students had missed that morning’s test; she had been doing well. Someone said she was at the nationals in Texas. But one or two young people who were present, who knew members of the track team, had heard otherwise. Someone texted Molly’s roommates and reported that they hadn’t seen her either: She was neither here nor in Texas.
The instructor said maybe one of them “ought to contact someone.” She never clarified if this someone was the police. Presumably, it was someone other than the professor.
That afternoon, Molly’s classmates told the dean of students that a sophomore girl was AWOL. The dean emailed back that if this was an emergency, they needed to contact the police. Her friends weren’t sure: Was this an emergency? If it wasn’t, should they not contact the police? The dean’s response left them confused about what to do. It was written in such bureaucratic language, so heavily reliant on subjectless verbs in the passive voice, that they didn’t know who should do anything.
A rumor began going around campus that a few impulsive girls on the track team had pooled their money to go on a last-minute spring break trip before the NCAA championships; Molly had gone along with them to Mexico and gotten left behind.
The members of the UMass women’s track team, deplaning now in Texas, were under a different impression altogether. They thought they were going to have to do without one of their better sprinters because she was sick at home in Massachusetts, having come down with a sudden illness during their weekend celebration.
The source of the sudden-illness story was Amanda Fiorelli, a hurdler from Dracut. But no one, including the coaches, had been able to confirm it by speaking to Molly directly.
Molly’s roommates, Danielle Baskys and Heather Bishop, hadn’t seen her since early in the weekend when she had gone out for pizza with her team. Since then, her dorm bed had been empty and unslept-in, as far as they could tell. If she was sick, she hadn’t told them. They hadn’t been worried by her absence, because they had known she was going to the championships in Texas.
But on Monday night, after she was supposed to have left with her team, the roommates noticed that the bag she’d been packing for the trip was still in their room.
The coach of the UMass women’s track team called Molly’s father, from Texas.
“Are you Molly’s dad? Can you fill me in on what’s going on? She didn’t fly with us today and I didn’t have your number. One of my assistant coaches is telling me she’s home, sick.”
Tom strode across the kitchen with the phone to his ear and looked in Molly’s room. He opened the garage and turned the light on, seeing bugs and cobwebs around the lightbulb.
“She isn’t here.”
Coach Kershaw said, “This is unusual. I hope she’s okay.”
Tom found himself reassuring her. He knew his daughter would be okay. “She uses common sense.”
After talking to Kershaw, Tom tried to call his daughter. She did not answer. He told himself she might have lost her phone. He tried to go to sleep.
A few hours later, while it was still night, he got up and drove his route to work. He sat in the long white truck outside the plant in Norwood in the dark.
At four a.m., he was hunched over the iPhone, listening to it ring. Rain was spattering the windshield. The lot had turned to mud. The phone rang and rang and clicked and went to his daughter’s voicemail. “It’s your dad,” he said. “Call me.”
He reached down with his powerful finger and delicately touched the red Disconnect key and remained staring at the phone, which, along with the magnificent truck, had been a gift from his bosses.
When the men arrived at daybreak, Tom got out and walked with his head down through the drizzle to the hangar. He worked the morning, directing technicians on a snorkel lift.
At lunch, he went outside again. The rain had stopped and the sky smoked and boiled. He made his way through the wet mud to the truck and called the college. An administrator told him that, due to privacy rules, she couldn’t talk to him about his daughter.
Tom hurried to his truck when the men went home and started driving and drove without intending it all the way to Amherst. He steered through the town with its quaint, ski-lodge-style chalets and onto the state school campus. A hockey player let him into his daughter’s dorm and led him to her room—Tom had never been here before—and eventually, after waiting ninety minutes, he managed to speak with Molly’s roommates, who told him that they hadn’t seen his daughter.
“Do you know where she is? Did she say she was going somewhere?”
“We thought she went home. We figured she had a personal issue.” A whippet-thin girl, Danielle Baskys wore pancake makeup and hunched when she talked. Heather Bishop parted her hair with a barrette, was short, had a childish face, and her blouse was covered in embroidery. “I tried to text her,” Heather said. “Both of us were worried. We told the dean.”
At eight o’clock that night, Tom made the decision to call the police. When speaking to the dispatcher, he stipulated that this was not an emergency.
An Amherst police car met him in front of Molly’s dorm. Students in Minutemen sweatshirts stopped to watch their classmate’s father being interviewed by a young patrolman.
“Has your daughter run away before?”
“She’s never run away before.”
“What was the name again? Hubbard?”
“Hibbard.” Tom spelled it. “Do you want my number so you can reach me?”
“You can give it to me,” the officer said.
The policeman went away, the onlookers dispersed, leaving Tom alone amid the playing fields, in the middle of the campus, against the black backdrop of the woods. He checked his phone: Still no word from Molly.
He got in his truck and drove back to the shore.
The next morning, the cold woke him. He had fallen asleep in his clothes. He got the iPhone and looked up the number for the UMPD, called and spoke to Police Officer Jessica Ventra and said he wanted to report a missing student. Ventra said that a report had already been taken.
Two days later, News Center 4 reported that the UMass police were declaring Molly Hibbard a missing person and the detective bureau of the Amherst Police Department was investigating her disappearance. Tom called Officer Ventra to ask if he should give his statement to a detective. Ventra told him to call Amherst Police Detective Dale Herrick. Tom did so. Herrick said he wasn’t in charge of the case; a detective named Paul Costa was. Tom tried to reach him, but Costa didn’t answer his phone, so Tom left a message. Costa didn’t return his call.
The next night, upon returning from Texas, Kershaw led her fellow coaches and her athletes out to the residence houses to request volunteers for a campus-wide search of the university in conjunction with the UMass police. Their search failed to turn up any sign of the missing athlete.
Corey heard about Molly’s disappearance when it was reported by the news. He thought of the last time he had uttered her full name—when he had claimed he was going to marry her—to his father.
Detectives with the UMass police went to Molly’s residence and searched through her belongings. They learned her class schedule, her track and field events. They bagged up her toiletries and makeup. They learned she had a work-study job at the Sylvan Snack Bar. She was an America Reads tutor for kids sixteen and under. She had student athlete financial aid, which depended on her grade-point average. Her major was psychology. She had taken Social Psychology, the Psychology of Sensation, Child Behavior, Primate Psychology, Development and Personality. Detectives looked for evidence of sadness, stress, drug and alcohol abuse, a boyfriend. They asked about her friends and grades, her followers on Facebook.
Investigators spoke to Heather and Danielle. Molly’s roommates described her as a responsible person who liked to joke about being irresponsible and wild. She had joked about making money as a high-priced prostitute—or, with her luck, a low-priced one! Her roommates had been in stitches. She was very funny. She didn’t joke about her sports performance. Where men were concerned, she had been vexed. Earlier in the winter, after an unhappy one-night stand, she had forsworn them altogether.
Her swearing-off had been tongue-in-cheek of course. Afterwards, she had started getting weird phone calls, her roommates said, from a blocked number.
Investigators located her one-night stand, a Minuteman football player with a pigeon-toed walk and bisonlike legs whose shoulders were humps of muscle. He came from New Haven, Connecticut (“the hood”); was white, rough, of below-average intelligence. On weekends, he got drunk (“You know how it is”); on the night in question, he and Molly had both been drunk to the point of madness. He did not like to learn that she had been upset afterwards, especially when the detectives made it clear that she was missing now. And he got angry when it dawned on him that he might have let his team down through this stupid drunken conquest. But he readily gave them permission to check his phone records. The police verified that he had never called her.
Amherst, like everywhere, is a somewhat divided town. It’s situated on the Connecticut River, near Mount Holyoke Range State Park, a short distance north of Springfield and roughly thirty miles east of the border of New York State.
One of the most attractive features of the town of Amherst is the loveliness of the state park, which offers grand views of the valley from its promontories—a hiker’s paradise.
It may be thought that the individual—and women perhaps especially—can find themselves in nature here. There’s a flavor of benign mystery in the air in Amherst—in the postcards of long-haired girls holding hands on forest paths among old stones, by a creek, their leafy natural temple graced by a beam of dreamy sunlight. There’s the Emily Dickinson Museum in a yellow house, the high ground of Holyoke, the trees on the edge of the Connecticut River like a rolled seam in green velvet, sown fields radiating laterally in serried rows away from the banks.
At the Beneski Museum of Natural History, the dinosaur skeletons look like devils—tusks, ribs, huge skulls with teeth, big crouched leg bones, claws, leather wings. Next door, there’s a café with salmon salad.
There’s free Wi-Fi in downtown Amherst. The title of a lecture at a local bookstore: “How Not to Think in Terms of Race, Gender, and Class.” On the college website, we see, first and foremost, a young black woman, seated in a coffeehouse, working at her laptop, partaking of a cappuccino—she is slim and elegant—and she is first—and everything around her, everyone but her, is out of focus. The next image is a pair of young white women, laughing over coffee. Links include Student Life; Our Community; Health, Wellness & Safety; Federal Policies; Transgender Rights; Queer Resource Center—Proud, Vibrant, Caring. In “Housing,” we see two women in a dorm room; a white girl is sitting in a chair looking up, a black girl is sitting on a desk above her, laughing down at her. It cannot be but that these tableaux have been artfully designed with the humane ambition of correcting the historical past by symbolically humbling the descendants of the Anglo-European colonizers of the Americas.
UMass has 23,373 students. A Division One party school, its nickname is Zoo Mass. The football team is called the Minutemen. They play Coastal Carolina, Georgia Southern, Brigham Young, FIU and Temple.
After games, UMass students have rioted, clashing with police.
The Amherst police log is public record. Typical arrests are for speeding, unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, DUI, destruction of property, unlawful noise, liquor possession by a person under 21, open container, no seatbelt, Class C drug possession, trafficking in marijuana.
Less typically, a man who might have been in the Latin Kings was shot in the townhouses on Route 116. He was helicoptered to Springfield and died at a trauma center there.
Cops, courts, social services publicize efforts to keep at-risk kids off the streets and out of gangs. Around Amherst, the backbone of these efforts seems to be a team of women in pantsuits with tired faces—judging by photos on the district attorney’s website. Topics of current concern are the opioid crisis and sexual assault on campus.
The bars in town include Rafters, Bistro 65, the Olde Town Tavern, The Spoke, and Stackers: “Watch Every Game Here.” The patrons—townies, college kids, and those just passing through—come for the pitchers and pool tables. They come for the Rolling Rock and Rubinoff.
Besides beer and pot, the drugs are 2C-T-7, also known as Lucky 7, Beautiful, Blue Mystic, PT-DM-PEA, Red Raspberry, T7, Tripstasy, Tweety Bird Mescaline, 7th Heaven, 7-Up; AMT (or Spirals); BZP (also known as Nemesis or Frenzy); Foxy; Fentanyl; DXM; GHB (code-named Great Household Bargains); Jimsonweed; khat; ketamine; OxyContin; Rohypnol (Circles, Forget-Me Pill, Lunch Money, Pingus, R-2, Roachies, Reynolds, Wolfie); Salvia divinorum; Soma (or Soma Coma); Triple C; Yaba (which means “crazy” in Thai, a mixture of caffeine and methamphetamine); synthetic marijuana, a.k.a. Spice, K2, Blaze, Red X. Dawn, Blizz, Bombay Blue, Genie, Zohai, Black Mamba, Cloud 9, Yucatan Fire, “incense,” “potpourri”; and bath salts or Flakka.
Even in an enlightened place like Amherst, it’s possible to see surveillance footage of persons possessed apparently by the devil, tearing their clothes off, sprinting full speed through a parking lot and smashing headfirst into a car, shattering the window, falling down—and jumping up again and running away like a werewolf—naked, berserk and impervious to pain.
To qualify for the nationals, Molly’s track team had beaten Rhode Island, a victory they’d celebrated on Saturday. After morning practice and a team meeting at which the coach reminded them how to approach the upcoming national competition—by fighting their utmost to win, hardening their collective will, banishing the thought of failure while remaining ever ready to learn from their mistakes—the girls went out for beer and pizza despite the rain in Amherst. The weather was going west to east.
As they set off, the coach enjoined them not to eat or drink too much or do anything that would take away from their performance in Texas. They mustn’t drink and drive. She expected the more self-disciplined girls to lead by example. There would be time later for unchecked celebration if and when they won the national trophy, which she expected them to do. Outside the coach’s earshot, some girls voiced dissatisfaction with her advice. In a parody of her warning, someone said: “Go have a good time! Make sure you don’t have fun!”
The team broke apart into several groups, because they had different notions about where to go in town. A line of girls linked their arms together and began trooping along past the clapboard houses, singing Rihanna songs, loosely followed by a cluster of others laughingly and loudly declaring, “We don’t know you!”
Amanda Fiorelli would tell police that she was standing next to Molly when they disowned their exuberant teammates. Both she and Molly were in this more cynical faction, which was bringing up the rear.
At 6:55 p.m., the sun set. The moon, which was in its first quarter and waxing, had risen earlier but had remained invisible behind cloud cover until now. It would reach its zenith in three more hours. The temperature was in the mid-fifties. There was a hole in the rain. Fog was coming in at midnight. Then the moon would set.
In the morning, Quincy would wake up to rain. For Molly’s father, the day would pass without a call from her. She had spoken to him a few days earlier to confirm that she was going with her teammates to the nationals. They had talked about money—he was helping pay her credit card this month. Their conversation had been tense, Tom told investigators. She had accused him of being angry about money, which he had denied. When she didn’t call him, Tom said, he was not alarmed.
Law enforcement concluded that no one had seen or heard from Molly after the night of the twenty-first. Somewhere in the course of that night, the girls had gotten separated. Everyone was drinking. At around nine o’clock, a witness saw Molly in Stackers Pub with a drink in her hand, talking with someone at the bar. The witness was looking through a crowd and couldn’t see this other person. An hour later, a local woman, who had stopped in to ask about a waitressing job, may have seen Molly in the parking lot. She had noticed a tall, well-built girl with reddish-blonde hair, wearing jeans and a short down parka, staggering, as if heavily intoxicated, away from the raucous noise of the pub and out into the darkness.
Ten days after Molly was declared missing, News Four reported that a clerk at a Mobil station off Route 116 some miles north of Amherst had found a pair of woman’s jeans rolled up in the dumpster behind the bathrooms. The clothing had been thrown out before the police could secure it as evidence.
Tom thought back to the last time he had seen his daughter in person. He’d been asleep when he’d heard her coming home late one night from college. This had been many weeks ago, back when the winter had felt like it would never end. Through the wall, he had heard her talking on the phone, getting ready for bed. In the morning, he had gotten up, fixed a cup of coffee, seen her Uggs outside the door of her room. Her laundry basket had been resting on top of the washing machine. He had gone to the garage, fired up the truck, gone to work. It had been a good day. He’d seen her in the afternoon. She’d sat next to him on the couch, manipulating her smartphone, figuring out her evening. The next morning, she’d made eggs and bacon and pancakes—the bowl smeared with raw batter in the sink, eggshells in the sink, batter dripped on the stovetop, a tray full of hot scrambled eggs, thick-cut bacon done in the oven, grease in the paper towels, the sticky syrup bottle, a real feast washed down with orange juice. Father and daughter drank black coffee together afterwards—two big individuals in a sunny house in their pajamas. Then she’d disappeared into her room while he’d sat on the couch and watched TV. He’d heard the shower. She’d come out an hour later, a new person, a woman dressed and in makeup, her travel bag on her shoulder, heeled boots clopping the floor, and she’d gone back to school. Somehow before leaving, she’d magically done all the dishes: His old-man’s kitchen was clean and bright.
The weekend before she went to Texas, when she hadn’t called, he’d gone to work as usual and put in his eight. After work, the yellow sun had painted the trees and houses and the road beneath him in shades of gold when he was heading home. He’d had a Sam Adams in front of the TV. He’d seen a reality TV show about a father and his sons living in the wild. The father sent the boys off to spend the night alone. They built a shelter in the snowy woods and slept with their .22. At twilight, he crept up on them, like a hunter. The boys heard a twig break but failed to take action. Their father stepped out in the open, revealing himself. He warned them: “Next time, trust your gut. I could have been a predator.”
Tom had woken up. He had fallen asleep. His empty beer was in the cup holder on the arm of the couch. The house was dark, but the sky was light—a strange effect. A slice of blue-gray illumination cut across his wall. The TV continued to warp and ripple and flash and implode with advertisements. A truck chugged uphill like a rhinoceros against a scene of brilliant skies and tall trees. The intimate chummy TV voices cajoled him to come on down to his local Chevy dealer. He muted them. The house was empty. His daughter was at school. Then the sun went down completely.
He hadn’t worried until Kershaw had called from Texas. Now, as his worry turned to dread, he looked back on that moment on a Saturday night at dusk, when his only act had been to mute the TV and get himself a fistful of pretzels from the cupboard, and wonder—what had been happening to his daughter at the same time he had been eating pretzels in the dark?