Manhattan Mayhem (15 page)

Janice was still at work when I returned home after making my bleak tour of Maddox’s apartment. I was already on the balcony with my glass of wine when she came through the door. By then the sun had set, and so she found me sitting in the dark.

“I went up to the Bronx today,” I told her. “To Maddox’s apartment.”

She looked at me with considerable sympathy. “You shouldn’t feel like you failed her, Jack,” she said quietly.

With that, she turned and headed for the bedroom. From my place in the shadows, I could hear her undressing, kicking off her dressy heels, putting away her jewelry, and then the sound of her sandaled feet as she came back onto the balcony, now with her own glass of wine.

“So, why did you go there?” she asked.

I’d never told anyone about that day, and I saw no reason to do so now. “I was just curious, I suppose,” I said.

“About what?”

“About Maddox,” I answered, “Whether she ever …” I stopped because the words themselves seemed silly. Even so, I couldn’t find more precise ones. “… ever became a better person.”

Janice looked puzzled. “Maddox was just a child when she left us, Jack,” she said. “It wasn’t like she was … formed.”

But she hadn’t just “left us,” to use Janice’s words. I’d sent her back, and I couldn’t help but feel that Maddox must have known why, must have understood what had become so clear to me
that day.

It had come at the end of a harrowing eight months of difficulty, and even as I’d bought the tickets for
Beauty and the Beast,
I’d suspected that my options were becoming fewer and fewer with regard to Maddox staying with us.

There’d been the continually escalating problems at Falcon Academy, where Maddox had repeatedly made excuses for the accusations hurled against her. She’d never intended to steal Mary Logan’s fancy Mont Blanc pen; she had simply picked it up to give it a closer look, then mistakenly dropped it into her own backpack, rather than into Mary’s. And, after all, didn’t those two bags look similar, and hadn’t they been lying side-by-side in the school cafeteria?

Nor had she lied about how she’d gotten hold of Ms. Gilbreath’s answer sheet for an upcoming history test, because it really had fallen out of the teacher’s pocket, and she’d seen that happen and meant to give it back immediately, but she was already a long way down the hall,
and so, well, wasn’t it only natural that she tucked it into the pocket of her skirt so that she could give it back to her at the end of the school day? And anyway …

Maddox had manufactured explanations for everything that came her way, most of them vaguely plausible, as she must have realized, a fact that increasingly worked against her in my mind. It wasn’t just that she lied and stole and cheated; it was that she did it so cleverly that, in every case, the charge against her emerged with that fabled Scottish verdict: “Not Proven.” For was it not possible that an answer sheet might fall from a teacher’s notebook … and all the rest? Listening to her exculpatory narratives, I began to feel like Gimpel the Fool in I. B. Singer’s famous story. Was I, like Gimpel, a man who endlessly could have the wool pulled over his eyes? In secret, did Maddox laugh at my credulity in the same cruel way that the villagers mocked Gimpel?

I’d been in the throes of just that kind of searing analysis of Maddox’s character as I’d stood in line at the box office. But there was an added element as well. Maddox and Lana had lately begun to quarrel. A room that once seemed plenty big enough for two young girls to share had become, over the past few months, an increasingly heated cauldron of mutual discontent. There were arguments over where things, particularly underwear, were dropped or left to dangle. Crumbs were an issue, as were empty bottles; Lana the neatnik, Maddox the slob. I’d endured shouting and crying from Lana, sullenness from Maddox, but at each boiling over I’d refused to intervene. “Work it out, you two,” I’d snapped at one point, and I expected them to do exactly that.

Then, suddenly, and for the first time, our home life was rocked by violence.

It was a slap, and it occurred as the culminating act of a long period of building animosity between Lana and Maddox. The shouting matches had devolved into sinister whispered asides at the breakfast and dinner tables, little digs that I simply refused to acknowledge but that, over time, produced a steady white noise of nasty banter. Gone were the days when Maddox complimented Lana’s hair or when Lana even remotely pretended that she considered Maddox her sister.

And yet, in many ways, as Janice sometimes pointed out, they were behaving exactly like a great many sisters do. My wife had never gotten along with her older sister, and I knew that the same could be said of countless other siblings. Still, I had wanted harmony in my household, and the fact that the relationship between Maddox and Lana had become anything but harmonious produced a steady ache in my mind. The truth is that, on that day, as I stood in line waiting to buy those tickets, I felt wounded, perhaps even a tad martyred by the conflict between Maddox and Lana. After all, was I not a man who had selflessly taken in another person’s child and who, rather than gaining a spiritual pat on the back for the effort, reaped a daily whirlwind that was tearing my home apart? And that, just the night before, had finally erupted in an act of violence?

Had I not heard that slap, I might never have known that it happened. But as soon as did I hear it, all notion vanished of my no longer intervening in the disintegration of my family life.

The door to their room was open. They were now sitting on their respective beds, Maddox with both feet on the floor, Lana lying facedown, her head pressed deep into her pillow.

When she raised it, I saw the fiery red mark that Maddox’s hand had left on her cheek.

“What happened?” I asked from my position in the doorway.

Neither girl answered.

“I won’t leave this room until I know what happened,” I said.

I walked over to Lana’s bed, sat down on it, and lifted her face to see the mark more clearly.

Then I stared hotly at Maddox. “We
do not
strike each other in this family,” I snapped. “Do you understand me?”

Maddox nodded silently.

“We do not!” I cried.

Maddox whispered something I couldn’t understand. Her head was down. She wouldn’t look at me.

“No matter what the reason,” I added angrily.

She lifted her head. Her eyes were glistening. “I mess everything
up,” she said softly.

Suddenly, I found that I couldn’t buy one bit of it, neither her tears nor her weepy self-accusation, which, however vaguely, had the ring of an apology.
No,
I decided,
you have fooled me all along,
and with that grim realization, I abruptly believed that all the accusations against her were true, all her explanations false. She had played me as a con artist plays a mark. I was her pet fool.

And yet, despite all that, I knew I would not send her back.

No, there had to be a way to help Maddox.

Besides, there was plenty of time.

And so, in an effort to reset everything, I decided that we should all take a deep breath, give it another go, do something together, something that spoke of sweetness and kindness and the power of a human being to look beyond outward appearances.

That was when I thought of
Beauty and the Beast.

Lana was already seated at a small corner table when I arrived at the restaurant. She was dressed to the nines, as usual, with every hair in place. Her life had gone very well. She had a good job and a good marriage, with two nice little boys who appeared to adore their parents. From childhood down to this very moment, I told myself as I sat down, she’d gotten everything she’d ever wanted.

Except a sister.

It was a thought that immediately brought me back to Maddox, to how right I’d been in removing her from the circle of our family.

I brought up none of this latest news, of course, and we chatted about the usual topics during our dinner: how her work was going, how the boys were doing, upcoming plans of one sort or another. We’d already ordered our end-of-meal coffees when she said, “Mom told me you’ve been thinking about Maddox.”

I nodded. “I suppose I have.”

“Me, too,” Lana said. “Especially that day.”

“The day we went to
Beauty and the Beast
?” I asked.

Lana looked puzzled. “Why would that day be special?”

I shrugged. “Okay, what day do you mean, then?”

“The day Maddox hit me.”

“Oh,” I said. “That day.”

“The thing is, I provoked her,” Lana said. “I was just a kid, and kids can be cruel. I see it in the boys. The things they say to each other.” Tentatively, I asked, “What did you say to her?”

“I told her that she was here because nobody wanted her,” Lana said. “Her mother didn’t want her. Her brother didn’t want her. I told her that even you didn’t want her.” She paused and then added, “That’s when she slapped me.” She lifted a slow, ghostly hand to that long vanished wound. “And I deserved it.”

I wondered if Lana had come to blame herself for my decision to send back Maddox. If so, she couldn’t have been more wrong. It wasn’t anything Lana had done that decided the issue. The blame had always lain with Maddox.

“Maddox had to go,” I said starkly, still too appalled by the evil I’d seen in the subway station to reveal what had truly convinced me to send Maddox back.

The thing that struck me as most odd now, while Lana sipped nonchalantly at her coffee, was the sweetness that had preceded that terrible moment.
Beauty and the Beast
had come to its heartbreaking conclusion, and, along with the rest of the audience, we were on our way out of the theater, Lana on my right, Maddox on my left. As we approached the front doors, Lana suddenly bolted ahead to where items associated with the show were on sale. Maddox, however, remained at my side.

“I liked it,” she said softly, and with those words, she took my hand in hers and held it tenderly. “Thank you.”

I smiled. “You’re welcome,” I said as my heart softened toward her, and I once again harbored the hope that all would be well. Lifted by that desire, I stepped over to the counter and bought two refrigerator magnets. I gave one to Lana, who seemed much more interested in the
T-shirts, and the other one to Maddox.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “I will always keep it.”

She turned toward a couple who were exiting the theater. They had a little girl in tow, each holding on to one of the child’s hands.

“That’s what I want,” she said in that odd way she sometimes said things, looking off into the middle distance, speaking, as it seemed, only to herself. “I want to be an only child.”

By then, Lana had made her way to the theater’s front door. “Can we go to Jake’s, Dad?” she asked when we reached her.

Jake’s was a pizza place in the Village where we tended to have dinner on those days that we found ourselves downtown and didn’t want to rush home to cook.

I looked at Maddox.

“Jake’s okay with you?” I asked happily.

She smiled that sweet smile of hers. “Sure” was all she said.

The subway was only a few blocks away. We walked to it amid the usual Times Square crowd, at that time a curious mixture of vaguely criminal low-life and dazzled tourists.

On the train, I sat with Maddox on one side and Lana on the other, a formation that continued as we exited the train and made our way to the restaurant. During the meal, Lana spoke in a very animated way about
Beauty and the Beast,
while Maddox remained quiet, eating her slice of pizza slowly, sipping her drink slowly, her gaze curiously inward and intense, like one hatching a plot.

We were done within half an hour. The restaurant was near Washington Square, and so, before returning home, we strolled briefly in the park. Lana glanced up as we passed under the arch, but Maddox stared straight ahead in the same inward and intense way I’d noticed at the restaurant.

“You okay?” I asked as we left the park and headed for the subway.

Again, she offered me her sweet smile. “I’m fine,” she said.

We descended the stairs, then one by one we each went through the turnstiles and headed down the long ramp that led to the uptown trains. We were about halfway down when I heard the distant rumble
of our train heading into the station. “Come on, girls,” I said and instinctively bolted ahead, moving more quickly than I thought, as I realized when I turned to look behind me.

The train had not yet reached the station, but I could see its light as it emerged from the dark tunnel. On the platform, perhaps ten yards behind me, both Lana and Maddox were running. Lana was skirting the edge of the platform, with Maddox to her left, though only by a few inches. I looked at the train, then back at the girls, and suddenly I saw Maddox glance over her shoulder. She must have seen the train barreling out of the tunnel, for then she faced forward again and, at that instant, leaned to her left, bumping her shoulder against Lana’s so that Lana briefly stumbled toward the pit before regaining her footing, as if by miracle.

I heard Maddox’s voice in my mind:
to be an only child.