A Matter of Chance

by Julie Maloney

  “The realtor,” I said.

  “Why did you call him?”

  “I told you: he was the only person I could think of. And besides, he was friendly to us,” I answered, becoming more aware with each word.

  “Who was this guy?”

  “Steve, we had him over for dinner twice. Nothing serious. Can we stop talking about the goddamn realtor?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Steve persisted.

  I didn’t want to talk anymore, although Steve’s voice was not as loud as it had once been. He could still become impatient, though, and when I detected it in his tone, my own grew nasty.

  “I’m hanging up. I’m done.” I went to put the receiver down, but as soon as I did, I woke up fully, furious that Steve had called me in the middle of the night to talk about something we had gone over and over these past five months.

  “Steve, it’s late.” He had forgotten I was not on California time.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that I keep thinking about the realtor who rented you the house.”

  “What about the realtor? What about the damn realtor?” I said. “Are you really going to bring this up again? Haven’t I told you about the guy a million times? He’s the only person I knew to call down here. I couldn’t think of anyone else!”

  I was losing it—I knew it and Steve knew it. Except, for some reason, he didn’t start yelling at me. Since Vinni had been gone, he’d been more patient. However, his attorney self couldn’t stop analyzing. He hated it when he couldn’t figure things out.

  At a dinner party hosted by a colleague in the magazine business—someone looking for an extra couple to sit at the Hawaiian wood dining table—Steve and I sat across from a whitehaired novelist and his Tahitian beauty of a young wife. When the discussion turned to Pete Hamill’s latest essay collection, Steve interjected, “Wasn’t he a high school dropout?” That alone wouldn’t have been bad, had he followed it up with what a success the guy had become, but leaving things alone burdened Steve. Everything found its way into the world of pollutants.

  “He missed the point on his essay on tar.”

  “Tar?” our host asked. “I don’t think that was Pete Hamill.”

  “Yup. Hamill wrote it. Positive.”

  The Tahitian beauty shook her head. The novelist said, “You must be thinking of someone else.”

  “No, I’m right. I remember because Hamill’s usual subject matter revolves around New York and this was completely off his mark.”

  I kicked Steve under the polished table, but he dug in his heels.

  Looks exchanged across the table signaled a polite weariness.

  On the way home, I said, “Why did you have to make a scene?”

  “Why didn’t you defend me?” Steve asked.

  “You were wrong. Everyone could see that. It didn’t have to be a big deal, but you made it into one.”

  “I wasn’t wrong,” he insisted.

  Toxins invaded our household, our language . . . even our silly discussions on what to eat for dinner. “Chicken? I’ll skip the pesticides, thank you,” he said. Soon, he stopped reaching for me in the bedroom.

  The day he moved out, I bought a new set of sheets and a lush quilt covered with blue peonies. I pulled the shades up as high as they would go. I needed the light.

  Steve moved across the country and settled in San Francisco. By the time we got around to working things out via the lawyers, Vinni was six years old and I was facing thirty-four. Vinni and I stayed in the apartment. Steve’s work as an environmental attorney sent him around the world, but his monthly checks arrived on time.

  I LAY THERE wide awake until Rodenbach slipped its way into the forefront of my brain and exploded. Rodenbach. Hilda’s hometown. For weeks, I’d been questioning why no one flew over there to investigate. I lay there in the dark as more questions banged around in my head. I sat up and called Steve. I charged in as soon as I heard him pick up the phone.

  “I want you to go with me to Rodenbach. Germany. I know the FBI communicated with the police in Hilda’s hometown, but that’s all it was. A fax? An e-mail? No one went over there. We need to go!” I took a breath. “I don’t want to argue with you about it.”

  How can I sound so certain that this is what we need to do?

  I’ll tell you why. Vinni is my girl.

  “Steve?”

  “When?” His voice was near sweet.

  This was Tuesday. We left on Friday. Five months from when Vinni was taken. I dared not believe it was too late. During this time, I had relied on the FBI, the Spring Haven police department, the justice system . . . and prayer. Prayer? I had no choice. I believed obedience dictated resolution. I believed happiness resulted from doing the right thing. I lived inside a blur, dependent upon rules, doing what I was told by people of authority who didn’t begin each day wondering how deep a hole in the heart could go. I let myself be led . . . until I stopped.

  Five months is a long time only when the heart stops reading signals from the brain. I convinced myself I was not too late.

  All I told John D’Orfini was that I was flying out to see Steve in San Francisco. I didn’t want a bureaucratic mess trailing behind me.

  I acted on my own.

  I broke the first rule: tell all.

  I booked my ticket for ten days.

  My mother used to say, “Maddy, tell me what you’re thinking.” But I had learned at an early age that “telling” didn’t always work out well. The FBI had not sat at the dinner table with Hilda and Rudy as they described Rodenbach. They had not seen their faces. I am the only one who knew that something passed between Hilda and Rudy when they mentioned their homeland. Something they chose not to speak about.

  Steve met me in Frankfurt, the major airport closest to Rodenbach. We rented a car and drove the thirty-one miles to Hilda’s birthplace. It might as well have been a million miles past the sun.

  I had expected New York City bleakness to follow me to western Germany, but it was a warmer-than-usual January day, with cyclists taking advantage of the remarkable weather. As we drove by farm after farm, I saw thoroughbred horses, calm and well behaved, heads bowed to the ground, in a land where residents’ prosperity showed in their equine inventory. I had researched Rodenbach before I’d left and learned it was part of the Rhineland section of the country, known for its vineyard slopes and hospitality to hikers, cyclists, and horse lovers. Tourists gathered to navigate the huge Palatinate Forest Nature Park, most of it under woods.

  No category of tourism described why Steve and I had traveled to this idyllic part of the country. Other than an old priest we interrupted amid a hot sauerbraten lunch, no one had seen Hilda since she was a girl in her early twenties. The priest invited us to join him at his dining table, and although Steve hesitated, I accepted for both of us. We learned that just the day before, a younger priest, a deacon, newly assigned to take over for the retiring priest, had arrived to begin preparations to relieve the old priest of his duties. He spoke enough English to interpret for his predecessor.

  “Hilda was the daughter of a prosperous farmer who bought parcels of the surrounding land until it grew to be the largest farm estate in Rodenbach. The farm they lived on was known for its watchdogs that guarded the pigs.” The old priest had known the family since Hilda was a girl of six.

  “As a child, Hilda sang in the choir. Beautiful girl. Beautiful voice. I remember she sang a solo in the Christmas pageant one year.”

  We stayed for a short time, as I could see the old man’s eyelids growing heavy while we sipped our tea.

  Steve and I showed Vinni’s picture to everyone. People shook their heads and kept walking. Others touched our hands.

  Some made the sign of the cross. On the drive back from Rodenbach, I thought about Hilda and Rudy’s meeting and falling in love and leaving Germany. Did they really leave because Rudy was offered the job at Columbia? Something gnawed at me, until I begged Steve to stay longer in Germany.

  “Where do we begin?” he
asked. “We’ve got nothing.”

  “Heidelberg is only three hours away. Why don’t we see if that café where they met is still here?”

  We changed our flights and checked in to an old but famous building called the Hotel zum Ritter in Heidelberg, where the clerk assured us we could park our car at the curb while we dropped off our bags. The Hackteufel café—the oldest café in town—was still in business. When I stepped inside, I reached for Steve’s arm as my heartbeat sped up.

  “What?” he said.

  I hadn’t touched any part of Steve in a long time.

  “What if we’re close but can’t see her?”

  “Stop.” Steve took a breath. “You wanted to come here, and we did.” I knew he was hurting by the way he held his face: set square like a block, no flexibility in sight.

  I couldn’t help him. I needed strength to believe that Hilda was somewhere alive with Vinni. I could smell my child. It was just that no one else could.

  Steve spoke to the manager with poorly aligned bottom teeth while I showed pictures of Hilda and Vinni to both of the waitresses and the one lone waiter grabbing a smoke at the door. At first I wondered if they understood my questions in English, but each answered with a shake of the head and an uncomfortable look in their eyes as I insisted they look again at the pictures printed on the paper.

  From the café, we moved on to the museum and lucked into spending time with the oldest docent, a volunteer named Max who spoke perfect English and who met with us upstairs in a wood-paneled assembly room. Although he was sympathetic to our story, he relished the opportunity to tell us about the history of the university, even going so far as to name Jewish professors who’d had to flee the country. Later, he took us downstairs and showed us their pictures, framed on the walls in rows of honor. His kindness prompted me to ask him if he’d help us with our visit to the town hall the next day and serve as interpreter if we needed one. He agreed, and we left with plans to meet in the morning.

  At the town hall, we found records of Hilda and Rudy’s marriage date and the names of their two witnesses, both of whom were now deceased. We were lost in a town full of history that kept us asking questions for three more days. That’s all we had—questions without answers. We said goodbye to Max and thanked him for his compassion. I watched the old man walk away. I waited until I could no longer see him in the distance before I turned in the opposite direction.

  SIX

  EVERYTHING I KNEW ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY TOLD ME ANGER was part of grieving. Loss involved stages of awareness. Although I never accepted the possibility of Vinni’s being gone forever, anger slammed me in the gut. By the end of spring, it had stopped up the natural swallow reflex so I could barely eat. Evelyn urged me to get a physical examination. She made the appointment and insisted on coming with me. “Just to make sure you walk through the door,” she said, as we stepped into the cab and she directed the driver to take us to Seventy-Second Street and Amsterdam.

  Dr. Stanley Goodman was an older man with a bent back, accustomed to years of listening to heartbeats and sad stories whispered in confidence as he placed his stethoscope over his patients’ chests. He greeted Evelyn with a warm hug and looked at me with eyes that took me in in one whole piece.

  Evelyn chose a seat in the waiting area. As we were the last appointment of the day, the room was empty. Several issues of Gourmet magazine were strewn carelessly on an old coffee table.

  “I’ll be here, Stanley, if Maddy needs me,” Evelyn told the doctor.

  He extended his arm for me to walk down the hallway.

  “Turn at the first door on the left,” he said. We both walked into a sunny room with an examination table set against the inside wall, across from a window that opened onto an inner courtyard. The electric shades worked from a switch by the door. He must have seen my surprised look at what I saw through the window. Young children knelt side by side at beds of dark mulch, planting pink and white impatiens bordering the sun and shade. Three adults were on the ground with the children, helping them dig the earth apart to make larger holes for rosebushes. Small yellow blooms hinted at what was to come in the summer months ahead.

  The doctor waited for me to sit down on the examination table. He spoke as he pressed the button on the electric shade.

  “Have you always been this thin?”

  I looked toward the window at the children gardening. A dark haze covered my eyes. A wave of heat from the pit of my stomach wound its way through the top of my head.

  “I think I’m fainting,” I said. Then I blacked out.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw both of them standing over me. Evelyn’s eyes had narrowed into concern. Dr. Goodman held my hand.

  “You’re pushing back life. Refusing to take it in,” he said.

  I stole a glance at Evelyn. She nodded her head and smiled gently. I didn’t speak. I waited for more.

  “I know about your child’s disappearance. Evelyn told me when she called for your appointment. But I want you to tell me.”

  Evelyn kissed me on the forehead and left the room. I was too tired to move. I lay on the exam table and said nothing.

  I wanted to die.

  Should I have made Vinni more afraid? Was she too trusting?

  I thought of Vinni and how she had never cried out for me that day at the beach. Had she thought I wouldn’t hear her?

  My father used to say, “Your mother is sick. She cannot hear you.”

  I looked at several children planting flowers, their hopes pinned on blossoms promising to bloom.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” Dr. Goodman broke up the fantasy in my head. I slid from the examination table and sat down on the small couch across from his chair. The window facing the courtyard separated our seats.

  He pointed to the children, the flowers, the secured haven behind his office. “‘Put something pretty back there,’ Evelyn said. And you know, when she said it, it made sense. She arranged for a local nursery to partner in an after-school program with the neighborhood elementary school. The children are my gardeners!”

  Dr. Goodman’s bent spine fit neatly under the window sash as he leaned over the sill and waved to the children.

  He turned and said, “You’re suffering—I see it—but you’ll be of no use to your daughter if you’re sick. You have to start eating—”

  I interrupted him. “No, no, no.” I shook my head back and forth. “I’m not sick. I’m tired, that’s all.”

  “You need nourishment.” Dr. Goodman rose and opened the door. He confused me, because he had asked me to tell him about Vinni and now he was gone. As I waited, I looked out at the garden. A few minutes later, he returned with a small bowl of just-washed strawberries and set it down on the table in front of the couch. He moved aside an assortment of cooking magazines.

  “Do you like to cook?” I asked.

  “It’s my hobby.”

  I reached for a fresh strawberry. I knew Dr. Goodman was waiting for me to tell him about Vinni, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. He was a different kind of doctor. Old-school, I thought. When he spoke to me, I had the feeling he was paying attention. When he placed the stethoscope on my back and asked me to take a deep breath, I was barely able to inhale.

  “How long has Evelyn been a patient of yours?” I popped a strawberry into my mouth. I hadn’t eaten anything this good in a long time. The berries reminded me of the breakfast that Vinni and I had had on the beach on the morning of her disappearance.

  “Evelyn isn’t my patient. She was my wife a long time ago.”

  I began to cry. He sat there without saying a word. It was nice to have someone not expect a story.

  “Vinni will turn nine in May. She’s been missing for five months.”

  Dr. Goodman said nothing. My breathing slowed as I reached for another strawberry and ate it whole, enjoying its juice as it rolled around my tongue. Its perfect sweetness soothed me. Or maybe it was sitting by the open window, or in a room with walls painted pale yellow. “The strawberries are delic
ious.” I avoided talking about Vinni, but Dr. Goodman asked me a question that made me swallow my hesitation.

  “You believe she’s alive, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  SEVEN

  SPRING BLOOMED, AS IT ALWAYS DID. FIRST CROCUSES, followed by the blooms of tulips and daffodils. I ignored the flowers, but I could not hide my eyes from staring into the black of night. I prayed that wherever Vinni was, she could see the moon and the stars. I fooled myself into thinking maybe we were watching them at the same time.

  I continued driving back and forth to Spring Haven, dreading the ride home alone. Sometimes I met with John D’Orfini at his office, but his sad face behind the professional exterior frustrated the hell out of me and I found myself fleeing to the boardwalk. “I wish there was more,” he’d start.

  When I’d get to the spot on the beach where I’d last seen Vinni, I’d stop and hang my arms over the railing and stare. I’d stare and stare and stare, waiting for my girl to appear out of the sand.

  On May 30—I know the date because it was Vinni’s birthday—I stood at a sink, staring at the soapy lather, as I washed my hands in a restroom on the Garden State Parkway. Over the outside and around into the palms, I massaged and soaped. I looked up into the mirror over the sink to my left and caught the eye of a woman wearing a veiled hat shaped flat like a pancake. She stared back at me and then pointed to a card by the hot-water faucet that read READINGS BY JACINTA. With her right hand closed into a fist, she began to beat on her heart. I turned quickly and left the card at the sink and walked over to grab a paper towel. From behind me, I heard a voice say, “I can help you.”

  I turned and came face-to-face with the woman as she placed the card in my hand. She was dressed in red, except for the black hat topped with a thin veil covering her forehead, eyes, and most of her nose. The red of her lips haunted me all the way home as I drove in the fast lane, switching over to the turnpike until I exited for the Holland Tunnel.