Without a Word (13 page)

“Your father told you what I was doing,” I said. “This is how I work,” my voice as even as if I were still showing her how to prepare homemade food for a dog rather than talking about the search for her missing mother. “Every time I learn something new, no matter how trivial, I make a note and tack it up. Sometimes a pattern emerges. Or more questions. But even the smallest detail can turn out to be the thing that leads me to the path I need to be taking, to the solution. Most of what I learn will turn out to be useless. But I keep trying. I don't give up. Giving up is not part of the plan. It's not acceptable. Not for me. And not for him,” pointing to Dashiell, who was standing next to her in the doorway.

Madison turned and looked up at me. I didn't need to hear the question.

“He's my partner,” I said, letting that sit in the air between us for a moment. “He can do things I can't.” Her face still turned toward mine, listening.

I pointed to my nose. “You know dogs can analyze odors in a way humans can't, right?” Was I expecting her to answer me? “Well, suppose I find Sally. How would I know her? I only have an old picture of her, from when she was a fifteen-year-old kid.” I took a step into the office and picked up the yearbook and opened it to the page where the Post-it was,
the page with Sally's picture on it. I thought Madison might react, take the book, make a sound, start to cry. But she didn't. She looked at the picture of her mother, then back at me. “But if I had something of hers with me, like the coat I found in the back of the closet on Saturday, Dashiell would know her scent, and he could tell me if the person I thought was Sally really was.”

I closed the book and put it back on the desk.

“It's a long shot, finding her.” I put my hands on Madison's shoulders. “But that's not a reason not to try, is it?”

For a moment, we stayed like that, Madison facing me, my hands on her skinny shoulders, feeling the small bones under her skin. Then she turned and continued down the hall to my room. She put the purse with Emil/Emily in it on top of my dresser, dropped her backpack on the floor and slid into bed.

I pulled up the covers and shut off the light. I wanted to kiss her, to sit on the bed and hug her, but I wasn't sure it was a good idea, and I didn't want to spoil what seemed like the beginning of trust. Then, in order to make sure she didn't get scared, I ended up doing it anyway.

“If you wake up and I'm not here, it means I'll be walking Dashiell around the block and that I'll be right back.”

She still had her glasses on, but it didn't matter. There was no way to hide what was happening. The twitching began immediately, quickly followed by that jumping in her cheeks, both this time. Her mouth opened as if she was going to say something, but she didn't. Even in the dark, I could see that her lips were trembling.

Not the notes over my desk, not the discussion of how Dashiell might help identify Sally, not the photo of her mother at sixteen and pregnant. What terrified her was the thought of me going out to walk the dog and disappearing off the face of the earth, the way her mother had.

She sat up against the pillows. I sat on the bed. Dashiell jumped up and stood at the foot of the bed, then walked up and lay down across her feet.

“Would it make you feel better if you got dressed and came with me?”

There was no response, of course. Madison stayed where she was, under the covers, not making any attempt to get up, her face turned away from me.

I put my hand on her leg, near where Dashiell was lying. “Eventually, you're going to have to make up your mind to let a lot of this stuff go,” I said.

She turned and looked at me.

“Terrible things happen to people, all kinds of things, and some people seem to get more of them than others. You, for instance. But the awful things that happened to you, they're not your fault. You do know that, don't you?”

That's when the first tear fell.

“So at some point,” I whispered, leaning a little closer to her, “maybe not today, maybe not until you're fourteen, say, or even a grown-up, but at some point, you have to decide to live your life despite the bad stuff. You have to say to yourself, Madison Spector, it's your life and you have a choice in how you want to live it, in what you want it to be. You already know you can't control everything. But there are things you can control,” reaching out to touch her hand. Then whispering, “Despite
everything,
you can have a life.”

She was still looking at me, not moving.

“It's true,” I said. “You can. You're strong and you're smart and you're beautiful. You're a fabulous kid. If you don't believe me…”

I turned and looked at Dashiell, as if he would chime in now, help me convince Madison that our higher opinion of her worth was the one she should embrace as well. She reached out and put her hand over my mouth, her fingers
warm against my lips. Then she slid down under the covers, turning away from me. She'd had enough, and who could blame her?

Or was it something else? Was she thinking what had just occurred to me, that one of the bad things might indeed be her fault and what kind of a life she might have if she'd indeed killed Dr. Bechman?

I suddenly felt terrified for her. Was that how Leon felt, too? I wanted to grab her and pull her close and make her listen to me. I wanted to tell her that if she didn't kill Bechman, she better speak up fast, she better talk and keep talking until she was believed. But if she did it, if she did stab him in the heart with the Botox injection, she better not talk to anyone, not now and not for a very long time. Instead, I sat there quietly for another minute or so before getting up, Dashiell jumping off the bed and following me. I closed the door most of the way, leaving the light on in the hall, the way her mother might have done. Then I went into my office and turned on the computer.

Luckily I hadn't printed any of the letters I'd written or received via Classmates.com. I wouldn't have wanted Madison to see letters I'd written pretending to be her mother, signing her mother's name. What she'd seen was more than enough, too much for a young girl to have to deal with.

I checked my mail to see if Jim had written back. “Your not Sally,” he'd written after my first post. “Who are you?”

“You're right,” I'd written back, “I'm not Sally. Sally went missing five years ago when her little girl was seven. Now her daughter is in trouble and needs her mother. I've been hired to try to find her but the trail's ice cold—in fact, there is no trail. I was hoping to find someone who knew her before and might be able to tell me something about her, anything at all, that might give me a clue where she might have gone. I would be most grateful if you'd talk to me.” I'd
given him my name and both phone numbers, landline and cell, but hadn't heard back. Nor was there anything now.

How interested could anyone be after all these years? Curious, maybe, but beyond that? After all, Sally had abandoned all her friends. According to Leon, they'd gone to Delaware and moved to Manhattan, without a word to anyone.

There were two new letters to Sally, both from girls. I wrote back, but it was difficult to feel hopeful.

I decided to let Dashiell out in the garden instead of walking him. When he ran to the gate, I called him back, sitting on the cold steps and waiting while he made his rounds, and left some notes that only he would get to read.

Back inside, I opened the door to my bedroom enough that I could see Madison. Her glasses were on the nightstand and she'd turned onto her back, the covers pushed partway down, one leg sticking out on the side. Her face was smooth and calm in sleep. And with her eyes closed, you couldn't tell that one lid drooped when they were open. She looked like a normal little girl, peacefully asleep.

Lying in the bed in my office, Dashiell squeezed under the covers at the foot of the bed, I couldn't sleep for wondering what would happen to Madison. I didn't hear her at first, bare feet on the wooden floor, but the old boards in the hallway squeaked and then the door to the office opened, and she was silhouetted in the doorway, her dark glasses back on.

I figured she was looking for Dashiell, so I held up the covers to show her where he was, to let her wake him and spirit him away, but she misunderstood my gesture, taking it as an invitation. She slipped into bed beside me, her cold feet touching me for a second and then coming to rest against Dashiell's warm back. Then she rolled toward me, as if by accident, until she was leaning on me as well. I could
smell the sweet almond scent of my shampoo in her hair. I let the cover drop, my arm with it so that both covered her. I felt her arm move as she reached for her glasses, slipping them off and letting them drop to the floor. And lying like that, nestled together, we fell asleep.

I woke up alone, to the smell of bacon. Or rather the smell of burnt bacon. When I got downstairs, there were two cans of Coke on the table, and Madison was making peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. There was an empty pan on the kitchen floor so I knew that Dashiell had been fed. And Emil/Emily was in the swimming bowl, which sat between the cans of Coke like a centerpiece, a rock in the bowl, meaning Madison and Dashiell had been out in the garden. She might have even walked him had she known where the key to the wrought iron gate was kept, but luckily she didn't. Had I awakened to find that Madison and Dashiell were gone, I would have been at least as scared as she'd have been were it the other way around.

“Hey,” I said, sitting down on the chair nearer to the stairs. “This looks great.”

I took a sip of the Coke and a bite of the sandwich. Trust was a two-way street, wasn't it? Besides, it wasn't nearly as awful as it looked.

Emil/Emily swam while we ate, then got up on the flat stone and peered at us, first Madison and then me. I noticed the red kiss marks on his or her cheeks, the stripes all leading toward the small, dark, inscrutable eyes and the bulldog
mouth. I wondered how long these little turtles lived and whether Leon had ever found the thing dead when Madison was in school, and replaced it before she'd gotten home. To me anyway, one small green turtle looked pretty much like another, but I guess some people thought that about cocker spaniels and Border collies, too.

Not me. I wasn't sure I'd know Sally, having only seen a picture of her that was eleven years old, but I thought I'd know Roy.

“Here's my plan,” I said across Emil/Emily's bowl. “The Guggenheim Museum, shopping at Bloomingdale's, lunch on the fly, and then I'll take you back home. Sound okay?”

No response.

How did Leon do this? Or didn't he?

Madison was already dressed. I took a quick shower and got dressed while she cleaned up after breakfast. I called Leon to let him know we'd survived the night and gave him a time when Madison would be home, and then decided to change the day's itinerary. I thought at first that Madison would take Emil/Emily along. She seemed to take the turtle everywhere. But the way things were going, I thought Dashiell should go as well. If Madison and I were getting along, it was because of him. He was the bridge between us. More than that, he was a reminder to me that you could understand someone else without benefit of words, though, more than ever, words were what I was still hoping for from Madison, words that would help me find her mother, words that would tell me she hadn't killed Dr. Bechman.

The Guggenheim wouldn't let Dashiell in, but Bloomingdale's would. I told Madison about the change, and she went right for Dashiell's leash, leaving the turtle on the rock in the bowl on the marble table.

Not taking Emil/Emily with us meant we'd have to come back to the cottage before Madison went home. I thought
that might be why the turtle was not going to take what might have been his/her first cab ride, so that we could come back here. I didn't know how far this would go, but I was pleased. I was clearly doing better than I had my first time alone with Madison.

Getting a cab with Dashiell along wouldn't be too difficult in the Village, where there were more cabs than customers, but coming home would be another story. In midtown, the competition for taxis was fierce, something I figured we'd deal with when the time came. Madison's plan was to hold the leash, that was pretty clear even without words. It was okay with me as long as Dashiell stayed right at her side when we were in the store. Since Madison wasn't talking to him either, I showed her the hand signal that would get him to heel, and we managed to get to the kids' department without tripping any of the other shoppers.

I thought that Dashiell's presence probably helped Madison over her initial embarrassment, and by the time we were finished, she still had the leash and I had a huge shopping bag with bras, a short cotton nightgown, new jeans and a pair of pale green high-top sneakers that were so cool I would have liked a pair for myself.

We stopped on the main floor for some barrettes and found one in the shape of a turtle. I bought the barrette, but when we found a green plastic turtle pin with rhinestone eyes, Madison paid for it with the ten-dollar bill that had been in the pocket of Sally's old jean jacket.

From Bloomingdale's, we walked all the way to Central Park, Madison and Dashiell ahead, me carrying the shopping bag and following along behind. We bought hot dogs and sodas from a street vendor and sat on a bench eating them in companionable silence. I didn't at all mind not having a conversation while we ate. The leaves were turning red and gold and orange. Dashiell was sitting in front of Madi
son, hoping, I figured, that she'd break off a piece of her hot dog and give it to him. And it was nice just to sit there. But I had a job to do and I was still hoping that somehow Madison would be able to help.

More than that, there were things she needed to do to help herself. Even if she outgrew the tics, she'd never be part of the world again without talking. I turned to watch her chewing her hot dog, her open soda on the bench between us, in that gulf she usually left between herself and anyone else, except for last night. I picked the soda up and put it on my other side, sliding closer to her.

“I have a proposition for you,” I said. Even without feedback one way or another, I wasn't worried about the vocabulary I used since I'd seen that Madison was reading adult books. “If you've got anything to say,” I said, talking in a whisper even though no one else was close by, waiting while she turned to look at me, to pay attention to the odd thing I had started to say to her, “you know, to help me with the case or just something you want to say, you can do that. I won't expect it means you'll be talking all the time, or even ever again. And I won't tell a soul. That's a promise.”

Madison screwed up her face, but her left eye wasn't twitching and her cheeks were remarkably smooth and without movement.

“You can decide case by case, mood by mood, this is worth saying, this isn't, this is worth answering, this isn't. You follow? So you can talk to me today, for example, but not tomorrow, not ever again if that's what you want. Talking today would not oblige you to talk again tomorrow. It would be entirely up to you and totally between us.”

I broke what was left of my hot dog in half, gave one piece to Dashiell and put the rest in my mouth.

“Don't say anything now,” I said, my mouth still full of food, “just think about it.”

She was looking at me as if I were out of my mind.

“I mean, I wouldn't want you to make a rash decision or anything. These things take consideration and time.”

I was looking toward Fifth Avenue now, a playground between us and the street. We'd walked farther away from home, and it was getting late. I took a last swig of my soda and stood up.

“Ready?” I asked, expecting nothing. That was what I'd promised her, wasn't it, that I'd expect nothing?

I picked up the shopping bag, and Madison took the leash. We dropped our garbage in the nearest can and headed for the exit. Standing at the curb with my arm up for a cab, my cell phone rang. I figured it was probably Leon, getting nervous about where we were, though we still had over an hour before we were expected. But it wasn't Leon.

The caller ID showed an unfamiliar area code 718 phone number, meaning the call was coming from outside Manhattan. I wondered what someone was trying to sell this time and how the hell they got my cell phone number. I must have barked “Hello” because for a moment, no one said anything. I was ready to hang up when he finally spoke.

“Rachel?” Whispering. Not a telemarketer. A potential client? Because he sounded scared. No, worse than scared, desperate.

“This is she.” Then waiting for him to tell me who he was, to see where this was going.

“I need to speak to you,” he said, his voice so low I could barely hear him over the sound of the traffic.

“Who is this?” I asked.

Madison looked in my direction.

“Where are you?” he asked. Not answering my question, leaving it to me to figure out who was calling, who needed to talk to me so badly that he couldn't take the time to tell me who he was. “Your e-mail didn't say where you live.”

A cab pulled toward the curb, saw Dashiell and pulled away.

“Jim?”

“Yes.”

“New York City,” I said, Madison still watching me.

“Can you get to Coney Island?”

“I can.”

“There's a coffee shop on Mermaid Avenue and West Twenty-eighth Street, Dean's. I get off work at six-thirty. I can be there a quarter to seven.”

With Madison right next to me, still paying attention, I couldn't ask the one question I wanted to.

“I'll be there,” I said. “How will I know you?”

“Good,” he said. “Thanks.” And the line went dead.