Without a Word

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  “I’d be reading and I’d look up and both of them would be watching me.”

  “So that night…”

  “I took Roy as an excuse.” The dog cocked his head when he heard his name. “I only planned to get some air, a few minutes to myself.”

  “And?”

  “Leon used to walk him in the meat market. The side streets are pretty deserted, so he was able to take the leash off, let Roy run. He’d find things in the street, an old work glove, a sock, a plastic soda bottle, human detritus that would be a treasure for a dog, and he’d toss his prize and run after it.”

  “Leon told you this?”

  She shook her head. “He took pictures. I knew it from the pictures.”

  “He didn’t talk much?”

  “No, he’s not a big talker. I would have thought he would be, because of his teaching, but he was a pretty quiet guy.”

  More so now, I thought.

  “But you had the story, in pictures.” The way Madison communicated, when she did at all.

  “So that’s the way I turned when I got out of the house. It’s the way Roy turned, where he wanted to go. He went around the corner and down to Washington Street and then north. I guess that’s the way he went with Leon a lot of the time. I didn’t give it any thought. I was so glad to be out. I just followed him. And then this trucker stopped.” She turned to look at me as if for the first time realizing how bizarre what she’d done was. I saw her hands were shaking, her lower lip, too. “He asked if I needed a lift. He said he was going to North Carolina, he could use a little company. I said no. I thought it was funny at first, then scary. And then we walked up Little West Twelfth Street and Roy found a sock. I let him off leash and he was running with it, growling at it, dumping it back on the ground, crouching as if it were a sheep, then grabbing it again, and I kept thinking about the ride I’d been offered and it just pulled at me. It just kept after me, the way Madison used to.

  “I tried to go back home. I really did. I got as far as Horatio Street and then I stopped and I walked back to the market, to where the trucks were. Another one stopped on Gansevoort Street, the hookers giving me the eye, like was I taking their jobs away from them. I was going to walk away but then the driver opened the passenger door and asked if I needed help. I told him I did. It was strange, hearing myself say that. It was as if someone else had answered for me. But the moment it was out, I knew it was true, perhaps the truest thing I’d ever said.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He leaned across the seat and reached for my hand.” Sally sighed and looked at the ocean for a moment. “Roy jumped in first,” she said, her face still toward the water. “And then I got in. The driver leaned across me and pulled the door closed. ‘Where to?’ he said. And I said, ‘Where are you going?’ And that’s how it started.”

  “Did you come here right away?”

  “I didn’t know this was where I was headed. I was headed away, not toward, if you know what I mean.” Checking to see if I did, if I was on the same page.

  “I do,” I told her. And I did.

  “He went as far as Georgia. He gave me bus fare to get here. Paul. That was his name. He never told me his last name.”

  “Did you tell him yours?”

  “My first name only. But I remember thinking Russell, Sally Russell. So someplace inside, I must have known I was coming back here. We’d signed the register ‘Mr. and Mrs. J. Russell.’” She looked out at the water, then down at the sand. “I doubt we fooled anyone. I was fifteen. Now that I’m in the business, I know it doesn’t matter.” She shrugged. “No one cares.”

  “But why did you come here, after what happened?”

  “This is the only place on earth I’ve ever been happy.”

  “Are you happy now?” I asked her.

  She looked down at Roy, then out at the water.

  “I am,” she said, “as happy as I think is possible for me.”

  “Do you live here?” Nodding back toward the Madison.

  “I run the place. I have a cabin in the back with a small kitchen and a modest salary. I don’t need much.”

  The sun was overhead now, the air still and hot. I suddenly wanted to swim, to swim with Sally. I walked back to where I’d left the bag from Hank’s, tore it open and pulled out the snorkel and the flippers, nodding this time toward the ocean. Sally smiled, the first and last one I’d see.

  I pulled off my shorts and put on the flippers. When I took out the mask, she said, “Don’t forget to spit in it.”

  “Thanks,” I told her. And I did.

  Water could wash away forensic evidence, dirt, even stress. It could reshape rocks, smooth glass, and sometimes, perhaps for Sally, it could wash away memories or at least the pain that came with them. Perhaps it would wash away the pain I was feeling, pain for a little girl back in New York, because though I’d found Sally, she wouldn’t be coming back with me. With my heart feeling broken, I followed Sally into the ocean, hoping that would glue it back together, hoping for some of the magic Sally had found here, not once but twice.

  CHAPTER 25

  Once again I dreamed of fish, striped, dotted, patterned, pied fish, tiny fish that swam together as one being, solitary fish with undershot jaws, fish that looked as if they’d eat you as soon as look at you, New York fish, street-corner fish, gangsta fish, only this time I was wide awake. This time I was following Sally into a small cove, grasses swaying as if they were at the end of a long dance marathon, schools of brightly colored fish suspended as if in midair, Sally, clearly in her element, moving gracefully, easily through the water ahead of me, as if she were one of them.

  Afterwards we sat on the warm sand, Roy between us, Madison and Leon between us, too.

  “I have Madison’s medical records with me,” I said, knowing it was too late for all that, years and years too late, but still feeling I had to try.

  She waved a hand in the air.

  “I have a couple of pictures.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t expect you to understand, but I just can’t.”

  I nodded, and for a while we sat there quietly looking at the ocean, neither of us able to think of anything to say.

  “How did it happen,” I finally thought to ask, “you and Leon?”

  “Me and Leon,” she said, “some pair. It was the day I’d told Jim that I was pregnant.” Turning to look at me now. “Did he tell you about it?”

  I nodded.

  “What he said to me, he told you that?”

  “He did.”

  “I can’t think of words to describe how I felt, Jim’s sneering disbelief on one side, my mother’s fanatical intolerance of anything less than perfection on the other, and me fifteen years old. I was even too afraid to cut class—so I went.”

  “Leon’s class?”

  “I actually sat through another class first. Creative writing. Then Leon’s honor history. Last period. When the bell rang, I couldn’t move. It was as if I was telling my body to stand and it didn’t hear me.

  “He didn’t do anything at first. He was packing up his briefcase, putting some books in it, erasing the board. Then he saw that I was still sitting there and not doing anything. I must have looked like hell. He must have known something was really wrong because before he came over to talk to me, he walked over and closed the door. Then he sat at the desk next to mine and he said, ‘Something the matter?’

  “I still remember the way the tears welled up and out of my eyes, remember how they felt running down my cheeks, how helpless I was to stop them, how helpless I was, period.”

  “So you told him?”

  She nodded. “Everything but who.”

  “And where.”

  Sally looked at me, a line between her eyes.

  “He didn’t know about this place, right? He didn’t know the circumstances. Nor how you’d chosen your daughter’s name. Is that right?”

  She nodded, sighed, put a hand on Roy’s back.

  �
�But he knew the boy knew?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that you had your back against the wall?”

  “Yes, he knew that.”

  “And then what?”

  Sally turned to look at me, her eyes shining. “He said, ‘Marry me.’ He said, ‘I’ll take care of you. I’ll raise the baby as if it were mine.’”

  “Did you agree right away?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I was so overwhelmed by the whole thing, by fear, by grief, by anger, by gratitude, I couldn’t speak. So Leon took charge. He worked it out. He figured it out on the spot, what we’d do, how we’d do it, everything. He was so sure.”

  “That you became sure.”

  She nodded. “Without thinking.”

  “There’s that,” I said. And now this, I thought.

  “What about your mother?” I asked. “How did that…?” I stopped in mid-sentence, lifting a hand, letting it fall back to the warm sand between us. I knew the answer, didn’t I? So why ask?

  “Leon asked how she’d handle it, and all I could manage was more tears. So he said I shouldn’t worry about it at all, I should leave everything to him, if that was okay with me. I’m saved, I thought. He was talking, and I remember sitting there thinking, I’m saved. That’s all I could manage. It was like falling off a building, and at the last minute you saw there was a net, you weren’t going to die.”

  Or you saw Superman coming to scoop you up in his powerful arms moments before you hit the ground.

  “So he took the heat on this, too, the blame?” I asked.

  “He did.”

  “Then how did it end up he wasn’t in trouble with the law? Did your mother relent? Because he said there were no charges pressed. A teacher and a fifteen-year-old student…?”

  Sally was shaking her head. “My mother went insane. She never forgave me. Nor Leon.”

  “But?”

  “When he went to the precinct, and to the Board of Education, he had proof that he wasn’t the one who’d gotten me pregnant.”

  “I don’t understand. What sort of proof?”

  “Leon didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  She shook her head. “He’s still protecting me. Even now.” She smoothed the sand in front of her, making lines afterwards with one finger. “Leon never wanted to have kids.” Not looking at me. “He’d had a vasectomy when he was twenty-eight.”

  We sat for a long time after that. She told me more about the night she’d left, how she’d sat saying nothing in the truck for hours, just listening to Paul go on and on and on, sometimes only pretending to listen, or pretending to sleep, sitting there terrified, not understanding what she was doing, what she’d done. They’d stopped at a diner, the parking lot filled with semis, even in the middle of the night. She didn’t know where they were, not even what state they were in. She didn’t know the time. She didn’t care either.

  She told Paul she wasn’t hungry, but he insisted. He told her not to worry about the money, how often did he get the chance to eat with someone when he was working, and anyway, he told her, they were in the South, cheap living, this was New York, he might think twice. He’d meant it as a joke, to lighten things up, but Sally hadn’t laughed. She just got down from the cab, and as she was closing the door, he asked about the dog, didn’t he have to eat, too? And Sally was confused because in New York you couldn’t take your dog into a restaurant, and anyway, Leon had always fed Roy. She’d never had to think about it, about feeding him, walking him, about anything else he might need. What had she done? she wondered. Why had she taken him along? Now there was Paul making her worry about Roy when all she wanted to do was never worry about anyone again for the rest of her life. She looked toward the diner across the sandy parking lot, then back at Roy. She’d never been anyplace where you could take a dog into a restaurant but she’d read once you could in Paris, only this wasn’t France, this was the middle of nowhere, or maybe the edge of nowhere.

  But Paul had taken the leash, had whistled the dog down from the truck, and they’d gone into the diner, Maud’s, she told me. She still remembered the name. She still remembered a lot about that night, the night her life changed, the night she became a free person. The night her husband’s life changed, I thought but didn’t say, the night Madison’s life changed as well. The night their worst nightmare came true.

  Roy had gone under the table, all on his own, and Sally said she thought maybe Leon did that with him when they were out on a shoot and it got to be lunchtime, maybe he just walked in someplace with the dog and no one said boo, and Roy went under the table where no one would see him, and then Leon might feed him from his hand. That was what Paul did, first asking the old man who waited on them for a bowl of water, to put it in a take-out container if anyone was going to be fussy about eating from a bowl that a dog ate from, and the guy had laughed and told them, you going to be fussy, you’re not stopping at Maud’s, the old bat wouldn’t spend a nickel she didn’t have to. Have the fried chicken, he’d told them, it’s the only thing we can’t seem to ruin here. Some folks say it’s not half bad. When he laughed, you could see he had a tooth missing, one of his upper canines, maybe a result of eating at Maud’s. They ordered the chicken, Paul taking the meat off the thigh and the leg of his half, putting it on the palm of his hand for the dog to take. And then he’d asked her, what made you take the dog with you? And that’s when she told him, spilled it all, every single bit of it. It was the first time, too, the first time she’d ever said any of it out loud, and it felt like a cement block was being lifted off her chest, and that’s when she thought about the Keys, where she’d been happy for two days, where she felt what that was for the first and only time in her entire life.

  Paul wasn’t only a good talker. He was a good listener. He nodded a lot. He didn’t seem to judge her. And then when they got to Georgia, he’d given her money. This is for a bus ticket, he’d told her, folding her hand around the money with his, leaving it there for a second. You pick the direction. You pick the place. It’s up to you.

  He gave a hundred dollars on top of it, but when she’d asked for his last name and his address so that she could pay him back one day, he’d said no, that that wasn’t part of the deal. He didn’t want to know her last name, he didn’t want that responsibility, and he wouldn’t tell her his.

  “Sally, had there been any talk of abortion? Did Jim suggest it? Or Leon?”

  She shook her head. “No. And I couldn’t have.” Looking away again. “I know it makes no sense, but I just couldn’t have.”

  We took one last swim, Roy, too, to rinse off the sand. Then we stood at the edge of the beach, Sally holding her mask, flippers and snorkel, mine in the bag from Hank’s.

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  “I am,” she told me.

  I nodded. I thanked her for being up front with me. I didn’t suggest she come back for just a week or so, see if Madison would start talking. For her to do that and then leave again, I couldn’t think of anything worse.

  “If Leon wants to come down here…” She shook her head. “You tell him…”

  “I will,” I said, knowing she’d be gone anyway. Knowing she’d be someplace else, someone else, before I got off the plane in New York. Even staying in one spot, she’d been traveling light for over five years. She knew how to do it. I imagined there wouldn’t be more than a couple of bags to pack, more than likely, no car. No bank account either. My guess was that Sally Russell didn’t exist the way the rest of us did, that she didn’t pay taxes, serve jury duty, have a phone, a library card, get junk mail. I’d passed a used book store on the way down. I bet they knew Sally there, the way Hank did. I bet if I’d shown her picture there, whoever was behind the desk would have shaken their head, no, no, pretty girl, never saw her. Something about her made you want to protect her. By the time I was in a cab on my way back to the Village, I was sure Sally Russell would be swallowed up by the Keys again, paying cash, living free.
It was something everyone thought about from time to time, disappearing without a word to anyone. Standing there, my last minutes with her, part of me was rooting for her to get away with it.

  She clipped a short rope onto Roy’s collar and turned to go. Then she looked at me one last time.

  “I used to have a pair of glasses just like yours.” She looked sad for a moment, but only for a moment. “But that was a long time ago.”

  CHAPTER 26

  There was an airport in Marathon. I could have returned the car there, flown to Miami, and tried to get an earlier flight home. But I decided to drive back to Miami. Heading toward the mainland, the Bay of Florida on one side, the Atlantic Ocean on the other, visible because of a full moon, I’d have time to think, time I needed because I had no idea what I was going to tell Leon and Madison about this trip. What, I wondered, were my choices? Leon was my client. I’d come here to try to do what he’d asked me to. I’d come here on Leon’s dime. So what would I tell him, that against all odds, I’d found his missing wife, but what might seem like a combination of incredible genius, some great second-guessing and a ton of good luck hadn’t turned out all that great after all, that said missing wife had refused to come back with me, had declined the opportunity to even look at photographs of her daughter or to examine Dr. Bechman’s records of the treatment, if you could call it that, of Madison’s disease? Would I tell him, too, that while I was driving to Miami to catch my plane home, I was sure Sally was packing her few belongings and moving elsewhere, that even before he heard what I had to say, she’d be missing again, this time for good?

  And what of Madison, hearing all of this? What of Madison? Of course, I could talk to Leon privately. Then what? Would he lie to Madison and say I’d failed to find Sally? Would I do that, too? Would she be better off thinking Sally was still out there someplace, not wanting to come home, not wanting her, or that she was dead? And where in myself could I possibly find an answer to these questions?