Manhattan Mayhem (14 page)

I turned to face her.

“Do you think she ever … watched us?”

“Of course not,” I said, then took a sip of my wine and eased back, trying to relax. But I found my wife’s mention of the possibility that Maddox might, in fact, have stationed herself somewhere near the building where we’d all once lived, and where Janice and I still lived, surprisingly unnerving. Could it be that after all these years, she’d returned to New York with some sort of vengeful plan in mind? Had she never stopped thinking of how I’d sent her back? As her life spiraled downward, had she come to blame me for that very spiral?

“It’s sort of creepy to think of her slinking around the neighborhood,” Janice said.

“There’s no evidence she ever did that,” I said in a tone that made me sound convinced by this lack of evidence. And yet, I suddenly imagined Maddox watching me from some secret position, a ghostly, ghastly face hatefully staring at me from behind a potted palm.

Janice took a sip from her glass and softly closed her eyes. “Lana called, by the way. I told her about Maddox.”

Lana was now married, living on the Upper West Side. Our two grandsons went to the same fiercely expensive private school that both Lana and Maddox had attended; Lana with little difficulty, Maddox with a full repertoire of problems, accused of stealing, cheating, lying.

“Lana and I are having dinner while you’re in Houston,” I said.

Janice smiled. “A nice little father–daughter outing. Good for you.”

She drew in one of her long, peaceful breaths, a woman who’d had remarkably few worries in her life, who liked her job and got along well with our daughter, and whose marriage had been as unruffled as could have been expected.

With a wife like that, I decided, the less she knew about the one time all that had been jeopardized, the better.

“Lana took it harder than I thought she would,” Janice said. “She’d wanted a sister, remember? And, of course, she’d thought Maddox might be that sister.”

“Lana’s done fine as an only child,” I said, careful not to add a far darker truth, that my daughter was, in fact, lucky to be alive, that the
year Maddox had lived with us had been, particularly for Lana, a year of living dangerously, indeed.

“We were very naive to have brought Maddox to live with us,” Janice said. “To think that we could take a little girl away from her mother, her neighborhood, her school, and that she’d simply adjust to all that.” Her gaze drifted over toward the Hudson. “How could we have expected her just to be grateful?”

This was true, as I well knew. During the first nine years of her life, Maddox had known nothing but hardship, uncertainty, disruption. How could we have expected her not to bring all that dreadful disequilibrium with her?

“You’re right, of course,” I said softly, draining my glass. And with that simple gesture, I tried to dismiss the notion that she’d come to New York with some psychopathic dream of striking at me from behind a curtain, smiling maniacally as she raised a long, sharp knife.

And so, yes, I tried to dismiss my own quavering dread as a paranoid response to a young woman who’d no doubt come to New York because she was at the end of her tether, and the city offered itself as some sort of deranged answer to a life that had obviously become increasingly disordered. I tried to position my memory of her as simply a distressing episode in all of our lives, with repeated visits to Falcon Academy, always followed by stern warnings to Maddox that if she didn’t “clean up her act,” she would almost certainly be expelled. “Do you want that?” I’d asked after one of these lectures. She’d only shrugged. “I just cause trouble,” she said. And God knows she had, and would no doubt have caused more, a fact I remained quite certain about.

And so, yes, I might well have put her out of my mind at the end of that short yet disquieting conversation with Janice that evening as the sun set over the Hudson, my memory of Maddox destined to become increasingly distant until she was but one of that great body of unpleasant memories each of us accumulates as we move through life.

Then, out of the blue, a little envelope arrived. It had come from the Bronx, and inside I found a note that read:
Maddox wanted you to have something.
It was signed by someone named Theo, who offered to deliver whatever Maddox had left me. If I wanted to “know more,” I was to call this Theo and arrange a meeting.

I met him in a neighborhood wine bar three days later, and I have to admit that I’d expected one of those guys who muscled up in prison gyms, cut his initials in his hair, or had enough studs in his lips and tongue and eyebrows to set off airport metal detectors. Such had been my vision of the criminal sort toward which Maddox would have gravitated, she forever the Bonnie of some misbegotten Clyde. Instead, I found myself talking to a well-spoken young man whose tone was quietly informative.

“Maddox was a tenant in my building,” he told me after I’d identified myself.

“You’re the super who found her?”

“No, I own the building,” Theo said.

For a moment, I wondered if I was about to be hit up for Maddox’s unpaid rent.

“Sometimes Maddox and I talked,” he said. “She usually didn’t have much to say, but a few times, when she was in the hallway or walking through the courtyard, I’d stop to chat.” He paused before adding: “She’d paid her rent a few months in advance and told the super that she was going away for a while. He assumed she’d done exactly that, just gone away for a while, so he didn’t think anything of it when he stopped seeing her around.”

“She planned it, you mean,” I said. “Her death.”

“It seems that way,” Theo answered.

So,
I thought,
she’d murdered someone at last.

Theo placed a refrigerator magnet on the table and slid it over to me. “This is what she wanted you to have.”

“
Beauty and the Beast,
” I said quietly, surprised that Maddox had held on to such a relic—and certainly surprised that, for some bizarre reason, she’d wanted me to have it. “I took her and my daughter to that show.”

“I know,” Theo said. “It was the happiest day of Maddox’s life. She remembered how you bought the magnet for her and put it in her hand and curled her fingers around it. It was tender, the way you did it, she said, very loving.”

I gave the magnet a quick glance but didn’t touch it. “Obviously, she told you that she lived with us a while.”

He nodded.

“Unfortunately, I had to send her back to her mother,” I told him bluntly, picking up the magnet and turning it slowly in my fingers. “She told lies,” I added. “She cheated on tests, or, at least, she tried to. She stole.”
And that was not the worst of it,
I thought.

All this appeared to surprise Theo, so I suspected he’d been taken in by Maddox, fallen for whatever character she’d created in order to manipulate him. She’d tried to do the same with me, but by then I’d seen how dangerous she was and had acted accordingly.

“And so I sent her back,” I said. “I’m sure that’s what she wanted all along.”

Theo was silent for a moment before he said, “No, she wanted to stay.”

Perhaps at the very end, Maddox truly had wanted to stay with us,
I thought. But if so, that only meant she’d have done whatever she had to do to accomplish that goal. In fact, I decided, that might well have been the reason she’d done what she’d done that night in the subway station.

“She was capable of anything,” I told Theo resolutely.

At that point, I actually considered telling Theo the whole story, but then found that I couldn’t.

After a moment, Theo nodded toward the refrigerator magnet. “Anyway,” he said, “It’s yours now.”

“What are you supposed to do with it?” Janice asked when I showed her the
Beauty and the Beast
refrigerator magnet. She made her well-known and purposely exaggerated trembling notion. “It feels like some
kind of … accusation.”

Suddenly it all became clear. “It’s Maddox’s way of giving me the finger just one last time,” I said. “Making me feel guilty for sending her back. But she was the one who made it impossible for her to become a part of our family.” I shook my head vehemently. “So, I’m just going to stop thinking about her.”

I wanted to do just that, but I couldn’t.

Why? Because for me, it had never been “to be or not to be, that is the question.” It was what a human being learned or failed to learn while on this earth. For that reason, I couldn’t help but wonder if Maddox had ever acknowledged in the least what I’d hoped to do for her by bringing her into my family, or if she had accepted the slightest responsibility for the fact that I’d had to abandon that effort. With Maddox dead, how could I pursue such an inquiry? Where could I look for clues? The answer was bleak but simple, and so the very next day I took the train up to the Bronx.

Maddox had lived in one of the older buildings on the Grand Concourse. I’d gotten the address from Detective O’Brien, who’d clearly had more important things on his mind, a girl who’d starved herself to death no longer of much note.

Theo was in the courtyard when I arrived. He was clearly surprised to see me.

“Have you rented out Maddox’s apartment yet?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Would you mind letting me see it?”

“No,” Theo answered casually.

He snapped a key from the dangling mass that hung on a metal ring from his belt. “They’re coming to clear out her stuff tomorrow.”

“Did she have a diary, anything like that? Letters?”

He shook his head. “Maddox didn’t have much of anything.”

This was certainly true. She’d lived sparely, to say the least. In fact, from the drab hand-me-down nature of the furnishings, I gathered that she’d picked up most of what she owned from the street. In the kitchen I found chipped plates. In the bedroom I found a mattress without a
bed, along with a sprawl of sheets and towels. When she’d lived with us, she’d been something of a slob, and I could see that nothing in that part of her personality had changed.

“That day you told me about,” I said to Theo after my short visit to Maddox’s apartment, “the day we all went to see
Beauty and the Beast.
Did she say why she thought that was the happiest day of her life?”

Theo shook his head. “No, but it was clear that it meant a great deal to her, that day.”

I remembered “that day” very well, and on the subway back to Manhattan, I recalled it again and again.

It wasn’t just that day that returned to me. I also recalled the many difficult weeks that had preceded it, causing a steady erosion in my earlier confidence that Maddox would adjust well to New York, that she would succeed at Falcon Academy and, from there, go on to a fine college, her road to a happy life as free of obstacles as Lana’s.

At first, Maddox had been on her best behavior, though in ways that later struck me as transparently manipulative. She’d complimented Janice on her cooking, Lana on her hair, me on my skill at playing Monopoly. On the first day of school, she’d appeared eager to do well; she had even seemed proud of her uniform. “It makes me feel special,” she’d said that morning, and then she flashed her beaming smile, the one she used on all such occasions, as I was soon to learn, and that I’d taken to be genuine, though it wasn’t. But the dawning of this dark recognition had come slowly, and so, as I’d walked Maddox and Lana to their bus that first school day, then stood waving cheerfully as it pulled away, I’d felt certain that I now had two daughters, and that both of them were good.