“Pity?”
“Everyone looking at me as if I’ve done something wrong. As if I’m responsible. Mothers are supposed to be better than that. Right?”
John D’Orfini cleared his throat and settled into his chair. His office was cold. I knew if I checked the thermostat, it would probably be in the midsixties.
“I hear you. I’m just not sure I understand. You seem too responsible to—”
“Walk away. Right? That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I had a case of responsibility the next day. I returned to work thinking I could handle things.”
“And you couldn’t?”
“It’s been getting harder for me to go back to the office after taking walks in the middle of the day. I’ve started having panic attacks.”
“Are you getting help with this?”
I turned my head toward the window to the right of his desk and ignored the question. I replayed the mess from earlier in the week in the restroom.
As I sat on the toilet, a wave like a monsoon washed over me. I felt trapped inside the stall. Unable to wipe, get up, pull up my slacks, and walk to the sink and wash my hands. The simplest things were all of a sudden out of reach. My heart raced, and I started hyperventilating. Someone from the other side of the toilet asked if I was okay. More voices. Concern. I watched pairs of flats and boots pivot, stand still, turn, and pivot some more. Then I heard the voice on the phone from the previous night.
“Maddy? Can you come out of there?” Someone had gone to get the editor in chief. We had worked together for the past six years on Hot Style. We weren’t the kind of friends who shared sushi after work. Standing around a glass conference table, we ate fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork delivered late in the afternoon. We had a working relationship built on knowing what it took to get where we were. She was tough. The way I used to be. We had worked our way through the ranks together, stumbling into each other on magazine stints. She was six years older than I, married to a seasoned television anchor of a major network out of New York. When she was presented with the top gig, she took me with her to run the haute couture section. I owed her.
The morning after our phone conversation, she was at my side at the sink, watching me dry-heave. My face felt hot, although I wasn’t red. White consumed me. Blank, like a piece of paper. I had had panic attacks after my mother killed herself. Not many, but two is enough to cling to a towel rack when you’re in your own bathroom and can’t leave. The doctor prescribed Lexapro, Xanax, and behavioral therapy. I carried one emergency Xanax wrapped in a Kleenex folded into a neat square the size of half a matchbox car. I zipped it into a tiny compartment of my wallet. Knowing it was in my purse made me feel safe. I refused to carry around an entire bottle of drugs. I told myself I was less dependent if I held on to one pill at a time.
WITH MY BOSS’S hand on the small of my back, I leaned over the sink.
“Maddy, I want you to take a leave of absence. You need to get out of here for a while. You can work as a freelancer on the larger stories. But you’ve got to make the deadlines. You’ve got no choice. Make your own hours, but get the job done. You’re failing at this one. You’ve lost your edge. If we feed you some freelance work, you’ll be under less pressure. You can come back, but . . .” She shook her head, lowered it, raised it, and looked around the tiled bathroom.
“Everyone is tiptoeing around you. I can’t run a magazine like this. I’m sorry.”
No one had ever told me I had failed.
I began to object, but she dropped her hand and interrupted.
“This is not a suggestion. It’s the way it is. You need time to figure out where you’re going. I’m not tossing you out. I’m saying maybe if you work less . . . Look, I can’t say ‘I get it,’ because I can’t get it. Take the time.”
I had never told her about the nights when I got home late from working on deadline, how I’d sneak down to Evelyn’s to paint. “I’ll be back in a sec,” I’d whisper into Steve’s ear as he dozed on the couch with the television staring at the top of his forehead. On those nights, Rosa, our nanny since Vinni was born, had already fed Vinni homemade tortillas with guacamole and beans. She had fixed her a bubble bath and put her to bed. Steve kissed Vinni’s cheek, nestled into her pillow, when he arrived home.
The editor in chief hesitated, as if she wanted to say something or throw her arms around me, but instead she walked away without waiting for me to break from the sink. One of the interns, young and fair—a recent graduate from Pace University— handed me a wet paper towel. “Feeling better?” she asked.
“Terrific.” I mumbled an additional “fuckin’ peachy” with my head lowered toward the bottom of the sink. I straightened up and looked at the face in the mirror. Lines of black mascara ran down the tops of my cheekbones. My eyes were watery, my throat scratchy from the dry heaves. My hair hung in sweaty chunks touching my ears. Was I failing at everything?
I had no idea how to live anymore. How was I supposed to find another life and make it stick?
Ten minutes later, I walked past my coworkers’ offices, where family photos sat secure on their desks. My stomach somersaulted as I scratched at my arms through my shirt. Screaming inside did nothing to soothe the pain. Why did everyone else seem so safe?
Three freelance assignments were waiting for me when I reached my office. I buried their deadlines inside my head and left the building. I could not fail at this, too.
I had some savings from a small inheritance my father left me when he died. When Steve and I married, I kept the money in my own account on advice from a friend of my father’s—an Italian stockbroker who spoke with an accent so thick you’d think he had just arrived on Ellis Island. The broker’s wife had dropped dead in a grocery store in the soup-and-condiments aisle after having just left her doctor’s office with the phone number of a pain management center in Parsippany, New Jersey. Although her recent onset of migraines had made her miserable, she needed chicken stock for a recipe she had read about in Prevention magazine. All this and more came from the broker as Steve sat there, nodding and rubbing his chin, until I gently took his hand from his face and held on to it.
Steve balked at the idea of my father’s money staying with me, but the broker’s undulating words were so hard to understand, it was easier to agree so we could leave his office and drive away with our windows down.
THE POLICE DEPARTMENT in Spring Haven was seventy-eighty miles from Manhattan. Each time I drove there, I got a tight feeling in the pit of my stomach. The station might as well have been on the other side of the moon. At first, the town had extended a huge circle of support, but each time I returned, I detected a pulling-back. An uneasiness followed me from corner to corner.
I drove down Main Street and parked in front of the Spring Haven Religious Gift Shop. Cream-colored Irish pottery by Belleek filled the display windows. The woman standing behind the glass case of beads and necklaces recognized me right away. She laid a silver Miraculous Medal, one of Mary, the mother of Baby Jesus, with arms spread open and palms facing outward, on the counter to untangle a tiny knot. I waited to speak as she folded the necklace into a white box outlined in a thin gold line. I thought about the time Vinni and I had come in to the shop to look at a silver ring with thin woven circles that we had seen in the window. I recognized the design from one my mother had had in her jewelry box. It represented the Holy Trinity.
“What’s that, Mommy?” Vinni had asked.
The saleswoman sensed my hesitation.
“Maybe I can help you,” she offered. “The circles mean you’ll always be loved,” she said with confidence. Vinni looked up and said, “Can we buy it?”
As the woman polished the ring, Vinni stared at her and smiled.
“Why don’t you wear a ring?” she asked the saleswoman.
The woman laughed, but it was obvious she was surprised at Vinni’s remark. At first, her lips tightened, but then Vinni said, “You’re pretty�
�� and the lines around the woman’s mouth relaxed. She looked at me and said, “You’re lucky to have her— children are blessings, aren’t they?”
When we left the store, I carried the empty white box in my purse and Vinni wore the ring. She had it on the day she disappeared.
I hadn’t been in the shop in several months. Two other women were browsing, picking up Waterford crystal vases and turning them upside down to check the high price tags on the bottom.
“You may remember me. I’m—”
“Yes, of course. How are you? Spring’s in the air, I think.”
The other women looked up at the sound of the door opening. A young girl, about ten years old, raced in, out of breath, and asked her mother for money to buy a cone at the ice cream shop next door. I stood frozen until the chill in the room drew a fine line of ice chips on the floor separating the others from me. If I crossed the line, I would make things messy—stir up the chips.
“I just wondered if you’ve heard anything more about my daughter. She’s been missing since last summer—”
“Detective John D’Orfini is handling this, right?” the saleswoman interrupted.
“No . . . I mean, yes, along with the FBI.”
It was the same every time I visited Spring Haven and asked questions. I reminded people of what they didn’t want to know. My existence made them aware of evil lurking on the beach. I offered them nothing. No hope. No goodness. No possibilities.
I left the gift shop and headed toward my car, parked across the street in front of Lucy’s Sweet Shop. The rear of the Mustang on the driver’s side sagged to the left by the curb. As I got closer, I saw the collapsed tire.
“What the . . .?” I said quietly. I tugged at my knit tee and stretched it beyond my waist, only to have it ride up above my hipbones. I kept tugging as I walked around the car with my stomach clenched in uneasiness. Two women wheeling toddlers in matching red strollers passed without a glance. Three boys on bikes rode one behind the other on the sidewalk. On another day, it could have been a Norman Rockwell painting. But this wasn’t an image on canvas. This was real.
The man from AAA told me the tire had been slashed.
“Are you sure?” I asked, as he reached into the trunk hatch for my spare.
“I’m afraid so. Funny, though—I don’t see this kind of thing around here.”
Where was everyone when the goon was slashing, sending me a message to leave the town alone? John D’Orfini had the answer. The town was in church at St. Catherine’s, at the funeral mass for Father Delbarton, who had been the pastor for over thirty-two years.
“A perfect time to slash a tire, I guess?” I asked John D’Orfini.
You might think I would have been calling the detective by his first name by now, but whenever I thought of him or saw him, his full name was what slid into my brain or fell from my mouth. Saying his first name aloud without attaching it to his last was like wearing one shoe.
“What better time to commit a crime when everyone you know is praying for the soul of a priest?” he said with a smile.
Would Vinni have been scared if we had walked out of a store together only to find our car damaged? Would she have held my hand? Worried that she was in danger?
No. No. No.
Vinni was never scared.
She wasn’t that girl.
She held my hand when she wanted to get closer. That’s all it was.
I SHOULD HAVE cared who slashed my tire, but I didn’t. What haunted me was why. Why would someone come after me like this? A note tucked under my windshield wiper, threatening me to stop stirring up a bad memory, would have sufficed. The town’s tolerance was waning, not because—and I can say this now—they were indifferent, but because they seemed to be ashamed of a bad thing happening where they lived. I might as well have been dressed in black from head to toe each time I stepped foot over the town line. No one in Spring Haven wanted to be reminded that a little girl had disappeared from the beach where other kids built sandcastles.
TEN
JOHN D’ORFINI TRAVELED TO THE CITY ONE SATURDAY afternoon in December.
“I’ll take the train from Spring Haven. I’m not a city driver. Take me around with you on your walks.”
“I walk everywhere, you know. I don’t stop at the light. I just switch direction.”
“That’s fine. Just take me with you.”
I walked all over the city. I told myself I had to keep moving to avoid drowning inside my emotions. I walked from TriBeCa, where the empty hole from 9/11 reigned over the dead, and across Broadway into the edge of Greenwich Village. I walked to the Museum of Modern Art, where I took the escalator to the sixth-floor photography exhibit to stare at the faces hung on the wall. I sipped tea in the sculpture garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, and afterward I walked to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to pray. As large as it was, the cathedral had become a haven. I purchased a pair of rosary beads in the gift shop and created a ritual in which, each night, I kissed the cross and folded the beads and laid them in a loop under my pillow. Sometimes I held the rosary between my palms and fell asleep, only to find it knotted in a loose ball near my feet in the morning.
The Cathedral provided a safe place for me to be alone, unlike my apartment, where Vinni’s life hung suspended each time I turned the key.
I STOPPED IN at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the day I was to meet John D’Orfini. This time, I sat on the side, to the left of the middle aisle. If praying is just words, scrambled and fragmented, then I was a master at it. The light from outside shone through the stained-glass windows and rested on my lower left arm. I walked up the side aisle and stopped at the statue of Elizabeth Sexton Seton. The artist had carved a stone child with her arms wrapped around the woman’s hips. Her head was nestled inside the folded stone fabric. The candles shone brightly in the shadows of the cathedral. For a few seconds—that’s all it was—I pretended nothing could hurt me in this sacred place. I reached inside my purse to pull out a few singles to buy a prayer. Instead of holding two $1 bills, I had a $100 bill and a single. My first response was to slip the large bill back into my wallet, but something made me stop. The idea of buying a slew of prayers at one time struck me. I dropped the $100 into the tiny collection box in the center of the votive candles. I calculated that this amount of money could buy me a world of praying time.
Here it is, God. Make something happen.
I met John D’Orfini outside Penn Station at Thirty-Second Street and Seventh Avenue. As I approached the corner, I saw his face turned in the opposite direction. I recognized the bulk of his neck. His full head of hair amused me. It was shaved close at the back of his neck, and the top had a wild curse about it. His shoulders were wide enough for someone like me to lean into. I was glad he had moved away from the crowd of people lined up at the taxi line. Smart, I thought, especially for an out-of-town cop.
We headed north and crosstown toward Fifth Avenue. As John D’Orfini strolled, I told him to pick up the pace.
“You’re too slow. I can’t walk like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like a tourist.”
“Well, I guess I am, aren’t I?”
I hadn’t warmed to John D’Orfini since I had broken down in the car on the highway. We never talked about it. He continued to call me Maddy. It didn’t matter until later on, when I liked the way he said it.
He asked questions about gridlock and crime. I answered in sentences without adjectives, but mostly we walked in silence.
John D’Orfini broke through the noise of the street. “I thought walkers had fancy sneakers or special outdoor shoes. What are you doing walking in boots?”
I shrugged away my answer. I don’t think he wanted one anyway. For the first time, I noticed how out of place he seemed in the city. He belonged where there was a body of water, a fishing pole, and a sauté pan.
For sixteen months, I’d been traveling down to Spring Haven. I wondered why John D’Orfini wanted to see me
here in New York. The year before, the FBI had come to check out the living arrangements that Vinni and I shared. The head guy on the team asked me how long I had been living in the city. When I said, “Seven years,” he nodded. I read into it that he liked the place Vinni and I called home.
John D’Orfini and I stopped for a coffee and a chocolate at La Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue.
“What’s your favorite candy?” he asked.
“Coconut or dark chocolate truffles.”
He bought one of each and picked out a chocolate-covered peanut turtle for himself. Together, we carried our candies on small napkins and sat down in the cherrywood café three steps up from the main selling floor.
“Why did you really come?” I asked.
“There’s something I want to tell you.” The coconut stopped going down as I chewed the same tiny strips slowly and carefully. With difficulty, I swallowed without taking my eyes off John D’Orfini.
“It’s Vinni, isn’t it?” I waited a full ten seconds and then said, “You know something.” I put my coffee cup down. People around me slowed. The waiter handed the check to the couple next to us in what seemed like a painstakingly long sweep of the hand. The weight of the air around me hung heavy.
“We found a connection to Hilda in Brooklyn.” He spoke slowly, saying each word so I could hear its fullness. “Rudy was supposed to be part of it. His death was a shock, but it didn’t stop the plan.”
“What plan?”
The light in the café dimmed.
Blue slipped through the window.
My hand touched his wrist, and, to my surprise, I kept it there too long.
“Hilda and Rudy lived in Spring Haven, but no one really knew them. From what we know, you and Vinni were the only ones they had to their home that summer. They kept to themselves.”
I remembered the look that had passed between Hilda and Rudy when Vinni and I had eaten dinner with them that summer. Had they been planning something as we sat there?
A Matter of Chance Page 6