Without a Word (14 page)

It took ten more minutes to get a cab, then another twenty to get down to the Village. Madison stared out the window on the left side of the cab, Dashiell leaning his chin on her shoulder. I looked out the right, thinking of the e-mail exchange I'd had with Jim, barely registering any of the passing scene.

By the time we got to the cottage, we only had time to pick up Emil/Emily and Madison's backpack if we were going to get her home on time. Madison ran up the stairs before I had a chance to do so myself. I stayed in the living room, waiting, thinking about the strange phone call from Jim, whatever he had to say it was so urgent he had to say it tonight and in person.

When Madison came bounding down the stairs, Dashiell right behind her, I picked up the shopping bag and handed her the plastic purse. But instead of taking it, she picked up the leash and clipped it onto Dashiell's collar.

Walking her home, she and Dashiell ahead of me, the way her head was moving, the way he kept turning his face to look at her, I'd swear she was talking to him, but I wasn't close enough to hear.

Leon was waiting out front. Madison handed me the
leash and took the shopping bag and the turtle, barely seeming to notice her father as she passed him and headed into the lobby. I guess she did have a key.

“How did it go?”

“Fine, really fine.”

“What do I owe you for…”

I waved a hand at him. “I just bought her a few things, it's no big deal.”

“What about the haircut?”

“I did it myself. She looks great, doesn't she?”

Leon nodded. He even smiled.

“I hope you don't mind about the nail polish,” I said.

He turned toward the lobby, but Madison was inside already. When he turned back to me, he looked puzzled.

I showed him my nails. “I did hers. She did mine,” I said, my mind elsewhere, Jim's whispered words ringing in my ears.

“What next?” he asked.

“I'll call you,” I told him.

When I got to the corner, Leon was still standing out front. I walked home quickly, keeping Dashiell close at my side, leaving the door open to let some cool air into the house, to let Dashiell choose where he wanted to be. For a moment, the house seemed empty without Madison sprawled on the rug communing with Dashiell, without Emil/Emily swimming in his/her makeshift pond on the green marble table.

I dropped my jacket on the arm of the couch and headed up to the office. I wanted to look at those letters again, see if there was anything I'd forgotten, something telling that I'd missed in his letter or mine, but when I leaned over the desk to turn on the computer, something caught my eye. There was a small photograph sitting on the keyboard of my laptop, beaten up from having been handled so much, one of
the corners broken off, that edge rough and uneven. I picked it up, turned on the lamp, holding it in the light, a pretty young woman addressing the camera without a smile. She had the same straight blonde hair as her daughter did, some of which was still clinging to my terry robe and spread out like tiny pickup sticks on the blue tile floor of the bathroom. Her eyes, like her daughter's eyes, were blue, her skin pale and clear, and her expression, too, was like her daughter's. Or was it the other way around? Wasn't it the daughter who, in her grief, had modeled herself after her missing mother, her face neutral, almost serene, no hint of her inner life, her feelings invisible? Except that hadn't worked for Madison. Circumstances had pushed her over the top, out of control.

Out of control. That's what Leon had said that first day at the dog run, that Madison was sometimes out of control. I thought of Dr. Bechman's monochromatic office, pictured him lying on the rug, his arms and legs askew, the needle next to him. Had she been out of control that day?

And what of her mother? Perhaps Sally was better able to hide her inner chaos, at least until five years ago.

I held the picture of Sally under the light for a long time. Then I tacked it carefully onto the bulletin board, letting the heads of the pins brace the edges of the photo so that when I returned it to its owner it would have no holes in it. Sally at twenty-two or twenty-three, I thought. Sally more the way she might look today, enough so that if I found her, I'd know who she was.

I sat in a booth at the far end of Dean's Coffee Shop, facing the door. He would be around Sally's age if he knew her in high school, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, maybe thirty. He said he'd be coming from work, but he didn't say what he did, so I had no idea what he'd be wearing. Would I know him? Would he know me? Not a problem so far, I thought. There were three people eating at the counter, a Hispanic couple, a tall thin black man wearing a UPS jacket, all three decades too old to have gone to high school with Sally Bruce. There were two black girls in a booth near the door. They were probably Madison's age, drinking colas, poking each other and giggling. There was a young mother and a baby in the booth behind them, the mother looking too young to be a mother, just as Sally had been.

The man who'd waited on me could have been seventy or older, his skin pleated and sallow, his eyes faded. I'd ordered a ginger ale, not wanting to commit to anything more elaborate, not wanting to stay if Jim didn't show. It was five to seven and he wasn't here yet.

I looked out the window at the street. I was only a few blocks from my aunt Ceil's house in Sea Gate, but that neighborhood was a world away from this one with its proj
ects, clusters of tall brick buildings that had replaced the two- or four-story tenements that lined the blocks adjacent to the ocean when I was a kid. There were rides on one end of the island, what people thought of when they thought of Coney Island, the Cyclone, Nathan's hot dogs, places where you could buy a hot knish, other ethnic food now as well, tacos, pizza, Thai or Chinese takeout. Walking here from the subway, I'd smelled the food, but I'd also smelled the ocean, just a block away.

Seven o'clock. Still no Jim. I took a sip of ginger ale, checked my watch again, and then there he was. We might have been in Grand Central Station, I'd still have known him. It wasn't the dark hair, curls covering the top of his shirt collar, some falling over his brow when he took off his baseball cap. It wasn't his height, so tall that his shoulders were rounded, as if he were trying to make himself seem shorter. It wasn't his complexion either, because even though he'd clearly attempted to clean up, there was so much dirt on his face I couldn't see if he was fair or dark. It wasn't even the pain on his face that made me know he had to be the man who'd made the call. It was something else, something that even before he got to the table, changed everything I thought I knew, tilting the world so that for a moment my stomach swirled so badly that I felt prophetic for having ordered that ginger ale.

As he got closer, knowing me, too, I saw that what covered his face wasn't dirt. It was grease covering his skin and his hands. He wiped one against his jeans and extended it toward me, grease in the creases on his knuckles, grease under his nails. A mechanic. When he slipped off his jacket, his name was over the pocket of his dark blue shirt, dark blue like the blue of his eyes, confusion in those eyes now, not knowing how to do this. Jim, it said over his pocket, part of the
m
missing.

He tossed the jacket onto the bench opposite me and slid into the seat, his hands flat on the table, looking around for Henry, his name over his pocket as well, ordering a Coke, no ice. I noted the wedding band on his left hand, scratched and worn looking. He apparently didn't take it off when he was working.

“Do you want anything else?” he asked. “The burgers are pretty good here. The BLT's not bad.”

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever you're having.” Buying time more than feeling hungry.

He got up, leaned over the counter and spoke to the woman there, a net covering her bright red hair, her pink uniform stretched tight around her ample bosom, the buttons barely able to hold the stiff material closed. Then he was back, bringing the Coke with him, sitting across from me, hands around his glass, eyes down, having trouble getting started.

“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.

“Sally?” As if I might mean someone else. He took one hand off the glass, lifted it, turned it over, then touched his forehead with two fingers. “High school, senior year.”

“You were good friends?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.” Then, “No, not exactly good friends.” He picked up his glass, moved it off to the side. “I thought we were. Then I thought we weren't. Now,” lifting his hands, “now I don't know what to think.” He took the glass again, taking a long drink this time.

“Because?”

“She disappeared twice, you know.”

I nodded. I did. “Five years ago, that would be the second time.”

This time he nodded. “She took off back in high school, too. Same thing. She just disappeared. I tried like hell to find her, but there was no way, no way.”

After that, he stopped talking. He checked the time, he tapped the table with his fingers, he bit his lower lip. “Maybe it was my fault. Who knows?” he said.

“What was your fault?”

“Her going away like that. The first time.”

“How so?”

He looked away, then got up and went to the counter again. I saw the woman with the red hair nodding, no expression on her face, you want this, fine, you want that, fine, why would she give a rap, standing on her feet all day for coolie wages?

When he came back to the table, he picked up his glass, but he just moved it out of the way so that he could lean forward, elbows on the table, his face so close to mine I could feel his breath.

“I thought I could do this,” whispering, “but I can't. I just can't.”

“You're not telling me you asked me to come all the way to the ass end of Brooklyn and now you have nothing to say, are you? You're not—”

“No, no, that's not what I meant. I'm sorry. I meant I can't talk
here
. I asked for the sandwiches to go,” he said, drumming his fingers on the table, looking at everything but me.

“Where do you want to go?” Wondering if he had a car outside, if he lived nearby, wondering how I should feel about either prospect.

“The beach. Won't be anyone there. Do you mind?”

I shook my head. With nothing but sand and ocean, not another human being around, maybe Jim would find himself able to talk. Why not, no one but a stranger willing to listen, the inky water, the dark sky?

Henry brought the sandwiches, grease already leaking out of the waxy paper they were wrapped in and onto the
bag. Jim paid. Without talking we headed for the beach, walking under the boardwalk where you could barely see your hand in front of your face, nothing visible except the moonlit sand up ahead. We walked partway down the beach, far enough so that the sound of the ocean was loud enough to make my skin vibrate. Jim took off his jacket and spread it out for me to sit on, but I shook my head, sitting on the cold sand, slipping off my shoes and socks and burying my feet the way I did when I was a kid.

“One day she was there, the next day she was gone,” he said, the grease-stained bag sitting on the sand in front of us, neither of us touching it. He shook his head. “No one knew where she went—or if they did, they wouldn't say. It's not that I didn't ask.”

He looked at me, his eyes wet, as if to say it was my turn now, my job to tell him what I knew, where Sally had gone back then.

“You were lovers,” I said, a statement, not a question.

He looked at me, a crease between his eyes, then back down at the sand, tracing a line with one finger. “Yeah, we were.”

“How did it start?”

His hands lay flat on the sand now, his face turned away from me.

“I know she meant something to you, Jim. I think she meant a lot to you. Whatever it is you're feeling now, that's not what's important. Whatever happened back then, it doesn't really matter much anymore. What matters is this little girl, Sally's little girl. What matters is finding Sally, if that's even possible.”

He turned to look at me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we have no way of knowing if she's alive or dead.”

“But—”

“I need you to tell me what led up to Sally going missing back then. I need you to tell me everything you can, because something you tell me, some little thing, might be the very thing I need to point me in the right direction.” I touched his arm. “Will you do this for me?” I waited. “You did call me, Jim. You did ask me to come here. I know you want to talk about it. And I want nothing more than to listen. I didn't come here to judge you or Sally. I came here to find help.”

“What good will it do now, to tell you about her, about us, back in high school? It was a million years ago. It can't have anything to do with what she did five years ago. It couldn't possibly help.”

“Do you have kids, Jim?”

He looked surprised. “Yeah, I do.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

I nodded. “How old are they?”

“The boy is ten. The girls are six and four.”

“This isn't about us, about my job or your feelings. It's about a little girl who's twelve, though frankly, when I first met her, I thought she was only nine or ten. She's small, like Sally. She looks just like her.”

“She does?”

I nodded.

He looked away, toward the water. “I might've fallen in love with her the first time I saw her,” he said. “There were all the girls in high school, and there was Sally.”

“She was that beautiful?”

“She was. And all these years, I never once, I could never figure out what she saw in me. But she said she loved me, too. I used to run to meet her after one class, just to walk her to the next. Or we'd go to the library together. Never my house. Never hers. My father, he had a bit of a problem, well, an elephant of a problem with booze. You'd never
know what you were going to find if you went to my house. And Sally's mother was a little crazy, I think. She sat in church half the day, every day. She scared the shit out of Sally not only about boys, but about everything. So we never went there. We never had much time at all. If Sally got home more than ten, fifteen minutes late, she'd have hell to pay. But then the senior class trip was coming up, to Lauderdale. We'd have time together. It seemed, it seemed like…”

“Sally's mother let her go?”

“She did. We couldn't believe it, but she did. She had this big thing about shame. Sally told her all the kids were going, she'd be the only one if she didn't, and there were three chaperones, she said, teachers. They'd be watching every minute. Her mother said she'd have to pay for half of it, out of her babysitting money, and Sally agreed, she said she would and her mother signed.”

“So you both went? And what happened?”

“The teachers, the chaperones, they didn't much care what we did. They were doing their own thing. Anyway, we were seniors, a lot of us eighteen already, and in a few months we'd be out of the school and out of their lives. They just didn't pay a lot of attention.”

“And?”

“We left, me and Sally. We just wanted to be alone. That's all we ever wanted, just to be together with no one else there. I'd been working weekends and sometimes after school, and she'd been babysitting. We had a little money with us. We took a bus and went down to the Keys and we found this motel along this strip of land, across the road from the water just south of Long Key, and we stayed there two days, two nights, just the two of us. It was a dumpy little place, just these little wooden cabins, no restaurant, no pool, not much of anything. But it was the most wonderful…”

Jim took off his work boots and stuffed his socks into his
shoes. He stood and offered a hand to help me up. I followed him to the hard, wet sand, and we stood there letting the foamy, ice-cold water rush around our bare feet, neither of us saying anything.

“And then what happened when you got back?”

“At first, it was just like it had been before. I'd walk her to her classes. We'd meet in study hall or the cafeteria. I'd wait for her after school and walk her partway home.” He looked at me. “Not close enough for her mother to see us if she was looking out the window.” He turned his face back toward the ocean. “Sometimes we came here, when the beach was empty. But it wasn't the same, not like it was down there.”

“And then what happened?”

“She came and told me she was pregnant.”

“And what did you say when she told you?”

“I was scared, more scared than I'd ever been in my whole entire life. I was living with my parents. I didn't have a dime. I had no way to make a living, to support her and a kid. And she was fifteen and a half. I could have gone to jail for what I did. I just wanted it to be not true. I wanted…” A whistling sound came from deep in Jim's chest, the noise an animal might make after the hunter found his mark. I reached for his hand and he let me take it. “God help me, I wanted her to go away, to disappear.”

“So you questioned the baby's paternity?”

“I did. I asked her whose it was.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “You were, what, seventeen, eighteen? Just a kid. You were terrified. You made a mistake.”

“She was…you should have seen her face when I said that. As soon as I did, I knew I'd done the stupidest thing I'd ever done in all my life, but the words were out there, and a minute later the bell rang and she was gone.”

“And you were still scared?”

“Terrified. But I waited for her outside of the school, where we'd always met. I figured, we'd have to work it out somehow. Only she didn't show. I didn't know it yet, but it was already too late. She wasn't in school after that. She was gone.”

“That fast?”

He nodded.

“You called her at home?”

He nodded again. “I waited until that weekend, hoping every day she'd be in school, or come and meet me afterwards. Then I called her house, but her mother never said a word. She just hung up on me. I went by her house, too, rang the bell. Her mother said, ‘She's not here. She doesn't live here anymore.' I didn't know what to do. I never told a soul, not until now, and I didn't…”