Madison was sitting on the bed. If I expected her to look outraged that I’d invaded her privacy, that wasn’t the case. Her face, at least whatever showed around her dark glasses, was, like her mother’s face in her yearbook portrait, beautifully blank. Whatever harm I might have caused had already been safely stowed away.
“Look, Madison,” I said, standing at the foot of her bed, the jacket over my right arm, “your father told you why he hired me, right? Well, I’m having a little trouble here. I can’t even begin to try to look for your mother without knowing anything about her. And your father’s not much more forthcoming than you are.”
I waited a moment and then went on.
“I found her old coat in the back of the hall closet. I bet your father forgot it was even there. My guess is that she used one of the closets in here, because there’s no way two adults could fit all their clothes in the two small closets out there. So you probably never went looking out there, am I right?
“Anyway, the reason I tried on the coat is that I wanted to know Sally’s size. How am I supposed to find her if I don’t know how tall she is or if she’s fat or skinny? I don’t know if she likes hot climates or cold, if she bowls, ice-skates, skydives, rides a bike. I normally wouldn’t talk to a kid like this, but under the circumstances…” I stopped again to take a good look at Madison, her blonde bangs half under and half over her dark glasses, the length of her hair uneven, her nails too long not because it was a chosen style but because they hadn’t been cut, her shirt tucked in in the front and hanging out in the back. “You do understand the circumstances, don’t you?” I asked, so angry that no matter how hard I tried not to, I ended up shouting.
Should I just turn around, go sit in the living room and wait for Leon, I wondered, tell him this wasn’t going to work? I could follow the slimmest thread, but I couldn’t follow nothing, and nothing was precisely what I was getting.
But I didn’t do that. I was already on the road to hell. Now I started running.
“I wish one of you would help me out,” I said. “I wish one of you would tell me what kind of music she likes, if she had any friends, boy oh boy, the names of a few friends would be nice. Or even what she likes to eat, her favorite color, anything, just anything at all. But no, no one’s talking. Are you listening? Good.” Too angry to stop, not sure why.
“Here’s the thing,” I said, watching her left cheek twitch up and down, her eye, I guessed, along with it, but the way she was holding her head and with those dark glasses on, I couldn’t see her eyes. “I don’t know who I’m looking for, except that she’s twenty-eight, shorter than I am, she’s right-handed and she may or may not have a Border collie with her.”
With that, the tics revved up. Madison took off her glasses, bent her head and cupped her palms over her eyes, then quickly put the glasses back on. As soon as she dropped her arms, the bed seemed to be shaking. But it wasn’t the bed, it was Madison, her arms trembling as if she’d suddenly gotten very cold.
What the hell was I doing here? What the hell was I doing to this kid?
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “You don’t have to do a thing. I’ll work it out. I promise.” Thinking that now I was really being cruel; I was giving her hope.
“By the way,” I said, holding up the jacket with both hands so that Madison could see it, “I found this, too. I think this would be perfect for you. What do you think?”
At first, Madison didn’t move. She sat where she was, legs folded in front of her, the book leaning on her feet. Then she pushed the book out of the way and got up. She slid off the bed and came around to where I was standing, took the jacket and slipped it on. I heard the front door open, heard Leon walk into the kitchen, open the refrigerator and pop open a can of soda. I checked my watch. He’d only been gone an hour and ten minutes.
“Looks good on you, kiddo, real good,” I whispered, giving her shoulder a quick squeeze. “Check the right-hand pocket,” I whispered, walking out into the hallway before she did.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Swell,” I said. I didn’t tell him that I was dying from a lack of information. I didn’t ask him who I had to fuck to get out of this job. I didn’t tell him anything.
Leon’s eyebrows went up. My mouth stayed closed. If Leon wasn’t talking, neither was I. That’s when Madison came out of her room, still wearing Sally’s jacket.
“I’d forgotten about that. Where was it?”
“In the back of the closet,” I said. “You mentioned that there were things of Sally’s here. I hope you don’t mind my looking around.”
He shrugged his shoulders. Leon, it seemed, had nothing to hide.
“Hey, Madison, thanks for the visit. Maybe next time you’ll come to my house, okay?”
Leon walked me out into the hall. I asked him about Madison’s diagnosis and what the prognosis was. I told him I’d be in touch.
Walking home with Dashiell, I realized the morning hadn’t been a total loss. I’d found out what didn’t work with Madison. Now all I had to do was find something that did. I’d also seen evidence that Madison had problems other than chronic motor tic disorder. For one thing, there was a roar in the apartment. I wondered if it came from the street or if it was the result of some sort of air intake for the kitchen vent. But that made no sense. The kitchen had a window, so it didn’t need a vent and probably didn’t have one, especially in a building this old. Maybe it was just the hum of the city, something newcomers always heard and natives rarely did. In that case, why was I hearing it? Being a New Yorker, I shouldn’t have noticed it at all. Instead, I couldn’t get the sound, like the sound of the ocean from two blocks away, out of my mind. The only explanation I could come up with was really crazy, that it was the sound of Sally’s absence, roaring through the house, not letting anyone forget she was gone.
As if that weren’t enough, when Leon left the house, he hadn’t offered to kiss Madison good-bye, and when he came home, he’d ignored her completely. Apart from Emil/Emily, the kid was pretty much on her own.
CHAPTER 9
It was almost lunchtime but I wasn’t hungry. I was still angry and I couldn’t shake it. But who was I angry at? Surely not Madison. She was a frustrating kid but she was managing any way she could, like the rest of us. She’d reacted to an extreme circumstance with extreme behavior, electing not to speak. Did that make her a criminal? Actually, it made her a survivor. Even the little turtle was helping her to survive, giving her some sense of control and a companion who couldn’t walk out on her.
Was I angry at Leon? Wasn’t he doing the best he could, too? Wasn’t he trying to survive despite difficult circumstances and a severely broken heart? What more could I expect of him, or of Madison?
Walking down Hudson Street past the big playground, I found myself shrugging my shoulders, talking out loud, like the rest of the crazies in New York. I needed to do something to get my sanity back. I thought about the blue walls of Madison’s room. I needed to get to the pool.
I dropped Dashiell off at home, grabbed the bag with my suit, cap, goggles and lock and headed for the Y on Fourteenth Street, still talking to myself on the way there.
I thought about my sister’s kids, kids who had every privilege, pricey private school, horseback riding lessons on the weekend, braces to fix their crooked teeth, a summer abroad studying music for my nephew, one of those expensive summer camps for kids who want to act for my niece. And what about Madison? A nearly empty refrigerator, hair that needed trimming, an isolating chronic disorder, abandonment, neglect and now suspicion of murder.
Was that why I was so mad? Was I mad because there wasn’t a roast chicken in the Spectors’ refrigerator, because Madison’s nails were long and dirty? Even given Leon’s neglect, there were lots of kids who had it worse than Madison, kids without homes, kids who were abused by their own relatives, kids who lived with parental addiction or without parents at all.
There was a water exercise class
on one side of the pool, families with kids swimming on the other, the dads and moms encouraging their kids to swim, praising every effort. There were only three lap swimmers in the available center lanes. I slipped into an empty lane and began to swim, all the thoughts that had been plaguing me gone for the moment. I swam hard, wanting to keep my mind empty, just to feel my body working as I moved through the water, leaving room for nothing but what I was doing at the moment. I concentrated on my breathing, stretching my arms as far out in front of me as I could, trying to kick away my anger. There was something calming about the blue world under the water, something that allowed me to push away all the chatter that had been going on inside my head.
But once I was out of the water, all the calm disappeared. Now there was a wall of noise from the kids, only a dozen or so of them but each one shouting as loud as possible. And as I walked toward the showers, all my own noise came back. Standing in the hot shower, I finally knew why I’d been so angry at Madison’s house. It wasn’t a coincidence that I’d been thinking about my sister lately. Because what had happened to me had happened to her as well.
I was only five at the time. Lillian was fourteen. My mother sat us down in the kitchen and told us that she was going away. We were bad, she said, and that was why she was leaving. I remember how cold the air seemed, how hard the wooden chair I sat on felt. Lillian asked when she’d be back. My mother, who had been sitting with us, got up and walked over to the sink. With her hands on the edge of the sink, her back to us, she said she didn’t know. Without turning around to face us again, she left the room.
It was my fault. I knew it. Lillian was always so good. I was the one my mother got mad at time after time. I was the one she said would aggravate her to death. I was frozen with fear and guilt. Lillian ran after her. “If you don’t love us anymore, then fuck you,” she shouted. I didn’t hear my mother’s answer, if there’d been one, and even though I waited for Lillian to come back and tell me what to do to keep my mother from going away, she never did. I heard the door to my mother’s room close. I heard Lillian’s door slam. I sat in the kitchen for a long time, holding the seat of the chair as tight as I could with both hands.
When I woke up the next morning, my mother was gone. There was a strange woman in our kitchen. She knew our names and told us to call her Aunt Minnie. She was strangely pale, I remember, not like the dark-haired people in my own family, and she smelled funny, sour, not at all like the sweet way my mother smelled. Even when we were outside, Aunt Minnie’s hands were always warm and moist. I wanted her to touch me and not touch me, all at the same time.
Unlike Madison, I was a very lucky little girl. My father kept telling us that our mother would come home “in her own good time,” and a week after she had left, she did. She never told us where she had been or why she came back, but years later, when I was an adult, my aunt Ceil did. She said my mother had been thinking of leaving my father, that she’d gone away to think it over. But something in me, something that my mother had broken, remained the way it was. It’s hard, nearly impossible, to alter the truths you learn as a child, even when you find out that what you were told had nothing at all to do with what was so.
My mother’s mysterious disappearance made my sister, Lillian, want to be the best mother in the world, one, she told me years later, unlike the mother we had. It had the opposite effect on me. If it was possible to give birth to a baby and then one day abandon her, even for a week, I wouldn’t be anyone’s mother. That way I’d be sure I’d never do to a child of mine what my mother had done to me, what Sally had done to her daughter.
If Madison Spector had nothing to say to anyone, she surely had her reasons. Even without being told so, she would assume that Sally had left her, as indeed she may have. Ms. Peach said that Sally had left shortly after Madison’s diagnosis. What other conclusion could this kid have come to given the timing of her mother’s departure?
I stopped by Miyagi on the way home and got some sushi to go. I was anxious to get to the computer and find out more about the disorder that might have been part of what made Sally run.
Chronic motor tic disorder, which Madison might or might not outgrow, was considered to have a genetic cause despite the fact that the gene or genes that caused it had not yet been identified. I wondered if Sally had had a tic disorder as a kid. The more common kind was transitory, lasting only weeks or months. The kind Madison had lasted considerably longer, usually for years and sometimes for a lifetime.
Or was it Leon who’d had the disorder?
I stopped reading what little I’d found online when I got to a part that was particularly painful for me. All the symptoms common to the disorder, muscle spasms, tics, grimacing, odd recurrent movements and blinking, exacerbated during times of stress. I had gone to spend time with Madison in the hope that someway, somehow, I could make some connection with her, that she would be able, one way or another, to feed me some information about her missing mother. Instead, I vented my frustration, most of which had nothing to do with her or with this case, ranting at the poor kid while her face twitched, her eyes blinked and both arms began to shake and tremble, reminding me of the autistic kids I used to work with and what happened when you first tried touching them.
I owed Madison, I thought. But perhaps it wasn’t that simple. Perhaps there was another side to getting her upset. Perhaps that would be the way I would find out what it took to get her to act violent. The question was, how far did I dare go and what would it do to Madison and to me if I pushed her again, if I pushed her even harder than I already had?
I printed the rest of the pages on chronic motor tic disorder and put them on the side of the desk to finish reading later. Then I wrote some notes and questions on file cards, tacking them up over the desk. It was early evening by the time I called Leon. “I have a few more questions,” I told him.
“Shoot.”
“Are there any of your neighbors that Sally was friendly with, another young mother perhaps?”
“Three-H,” he said. “And four-F. There was another one, but she moved. And Ted. He’s downstairs, the apartment under us.”
“Names?”
“Three-H is Nina Reich. Four-F, the Goodmans. They have a girl Madison’s age.”
“Do the kids still see each other?”
“Not anymore. Not since the accident.”
“What accident?”
“It was a couple of years ago. Madison accidentally pushed Alicia when they were on the stairs.”
“And?”
“Alicia broke her arm. They haven’t played since then.”
“Was anyone with them? Were you there, or one of Alicia’s parents?”
“Yeah, Nancy, the mother, she was there. She said it wasn’t an accident. She might not even want to talk to you.”
“I see. What did she say happened?”
“That Madison shoved Alicia down the stairs.”
“I mean before that. What was the reason for her anger?”
“Whatever the reason, there’s no excuse for that kind of behavior.”
“Agreed. I’m just trying to understand. The kid, Alicia, did she make some comment about the tics? Is that what happened?”
“That’s my guess.”
“You mean Nancy wouldn’t say?”
“That’s right.”
“Leon, has Madison had any therapy to help her deal with her disorder?”
“Yeah, she went to two different shrinks. Neither one of them worked out.”
“Why is that?”
“Because she just sat there. She wouldn’t speak.”
“I thought they do play therapy with kids. Or art therapy. I would think they’d have some way to work with her, even without spoken language.”
“Me, too. That’s what I thought, but it didn’t work out that way.”
“Okay, and the last name, Ted? He’s your downstairs neighbor? Sally and he were friends?”
There was no answer. Perhaps Leon was nodding again.
“No, she usually came home right after class unless she had to go to the library.”
Right, I thought. “Leon, were you happy?” I asked him. But Leon didn’t answer me. That’s not a question, I learned a long time ago, that everyone can answer. “Was Sally happy, do you think?”
“She was going to school,” he said. “That’s what she wanted to do.” There was silence on the line. “At least that’s what she said she wanted to do. I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if she was happy. I don’t know if I was happy. I never thought about it.”
“The night she left?”
“A Saturday.”
“What time?”
“Nine. Nine-ten, actually. I looked at my watch because I thought it was too early for Roy’s last walk. I figured I’d just walk him again, after the eleven o’clock news, the way I always did.”
“What was she wearing?”
“Sally?”
“Yeah. Do you recall?”
“A white T-shirt, not one of those oversize ones, one that fit her, faded blue jeans, work boots. A light jacket, white, with a hood but she had the hood down. It was warm out. Summer. She had her hair pulled back and stuck up at the back of her head in a big barrette, but it didn’t catch all the hair. There were these wisps that always slipped out and hung down around her face.” Leon stopped, perhaps to take a sip of water, or wipe his eyes. “She never wore any makeup,” he said, his voice cracking. “She didn’t need to.”
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