“Please step out of the car, ma’am,” he said. Behind him, a woman in a brown coat and snow boots stood on the front steps of number 73. Her hair was cut short and blunt.
“What’s the matter, Officer?” I asked, as I focused on the stranger on the steps. I began to shiver. My winter coat lay on the backseat.
“I need your license and registration.”
Should I have blurted out the truth? Would you have? Or would you have raced up the steps past the stranger in house number 73 and screamed for your stolen child, running from room to room?
“I think I need to make a call, Officer. Detective Geronimo—”
“In Jersey?” He held my license and registration in his bare hand.
“Yes, in Spring Haven, New Jersey.” By now, my teeth were chattering. Cold swallowed up the hope I had carried with me from the city. Despair sank in as I saw an unfamiliar child dressed in a red parka slip under the woman’s arm. Strangers had never looked so sad to me, if only because they didn’t match the picture in my mind. My chest swam inward and froze. I wondered if my eyes might see something different if I moved closer to the house. If their faces might change. If the child might be taller.
“What are you doing in this neighborhood?” the officer asked in a brisk tone. “Someone called in that you’ve been sitting here all afternoon.”
“I’ve made a mistake, Officer. If I could just talk to Detective Geronimo in New Jersey, I know he could better explain why I’ve been sitting here.”
On the ride back to Manhattan, Kay laid into me over the phone. Geronimo had called her after he had spoken to the officer in Canandaigua and assured him I would drive south immediately. He knew we were friends.
“What the hell, Maddy? I knew it! I knew you were up to something.”
“It was a tip. I was following a lead from the website. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Wrong? It’s not about right or wrong, hon. Don’t go there. Don’t pull the ethics card. You could ruin the investigation.”
Maybe this is a test, I thought. One I keep failing.
FIFTEEN
SEEING THE UNFAMILIAR CHILD IN THE RED PARKA Hollowed out my heart. I wished I could reinsert Vinni into the placenta and let her float. Whole days went by when I wished and wished and wished. I wished Vinni were standing next to me at the food market as we chose red tomatoes and sweet onions and tossed them in bags. I wished she were in the bedroom down the hall. I wished I could hear her laugh when I asked her why she plastered tiny star stickers on one cheek and not the other. I wished she appeared like a vision by my side on the wooden seat when I prayed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Steve used to say wishing was for wimps.
Two weeks later, I asked Evelyn why she had no children. She was painting. I was watching her shade the head of a boy. The question slipped out of my mouth as Evelyn feathered a line down the left side of the paper. She repeated the lines until almost—not quite—they created a wall. She looked up, put her pencil down, and gestured for me to sit with her over at the table by the side windows overlooking the street. Grayness washed everything into one enormous cloud.
“I need to darken that one,” she said, looking over at the sketch. “Too much light.”
I was surprised to hear Evelyn say this, as she rarely talked about a work in progress. I guessed she hadn’t realized she was speaking out loud. Sometimes she did this, spoke without a trace of an introduction, as if the line between what she was thinking and what she was saying was nonexistent.
“Not having children was something I chose.” Evelyn stopped at this brief explanation to take a sip of tea. She did not look at me straight away. Her hesitation made me rethink what I said next.
“Was this choice Dr. Goodman’s also?”
“At first, no. He has two brothers and a sister. He grew up in a family of noise. Lots of grabbing for the biggest piece of whatever it was.” There was a long pause, and Evelyn closed her eyes. Looking back, I realize I saw a pain glide across her face. I wondered if she had gone to sleep. I stared at the grayness outside, watched its opaqueness.
She picked up the conversation. “Stanley agreed with me. At first it was hard, because he had never thought of any other way of being married. But later, our lives took such different paths. We loved each other. Of course, you can see we still love each other. There have been others for both of us, but neither of us ever married again. Instead, we chose something else.”
I persisted.
“And you have no regrets?” I asked.
She ignored the saucer and placed her teacup on top of the table. Then she closed her eyes once more. With right over left, she began a slow rub of the right thumb over the downwardfacing palm. Her face looked old in the shadow of the outside gray.
“I could have had a child, Maddy. I told you, I made my choice a long time ago. I’m too old to think about regrets.” Her voice cracked on the final word, as if straining for air. A lie floated around the lines above her upper lip. She brushed it away like a loose crumb from a piece of toast.
Evelyn’s reputation as an artist was significant. But it had been a struggle to reclaim her footing in the art world after the loss of her friend Nina, an adored artist whose meteoric rise to fame was cut short by her early death.
“She was a dear friend when we were students at Cooper Union. I loved her, but we were young and foolish—she more foolish than I, perhaps. She took risks that killed her. I’m certain of it. All her work with synthetics: latex and fiberglass. In those days, there were no precautions. No one could have kept her from doing what she wanted anyway. I tried, but she’d lash out and turn away from me.”
With each discovery into Evelyn’s life, I questioned my own world—the one without my child. Who would love me? Now that Vinni was lost, I lived alone with my own words when I walked. I needed a blank canvas upon which to speak. Or scream. I needed to paint.
Evelyn understood.
Gradually, instead of watching her paint, I picked up a brush myself. When I painted, Vinni retreated into the middle of my mind. Space in the front opened for colors and shapes. When I heard myself saying, This is good, I felt uneasy. Guilt worked me over as I allowed the word good to sneak up on me and stay awhile.
Evelyn pushed me to go deeper.
“You remind me of her,” she said.
“Who?”
“My artist friend who died from taking chances.” Then she hesitated and said softly, “Her mother killed herself.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
She shrugged and said, “I loved her.”
Evelyn stood up, and for a moment I saw the younger version of her strong self. Her shoulders dropped into place inside her purple and lime—colored tunic. Her red skirt, asymmetrical but long enough to cover her ankles and drape onto the floor on the left side, looked surprisingly elegant. Evelyn pivoted and curtsied, moving her older woman’s bulk in a graceful dance.
“Valentino says a woman should never show her ankles when wearing a long piece. What do you think?”
“I think Valentino knows what he’s talking about,” I said. Then we laughed until our cheeks needed a rest.
Before I realized what was happening, Evelyn reached for my hand and pulled me up to dance.
“We need to go to the market and buy some jewel-colored fruits,” she said, as she twirled me under her arm. “Afterward, we must take a little walk. Yes?”
She had no intention of waiting for my answer.
“Good!”
My heart rate picked up, and I began to perspire. I moved away from the grasp of Evelyn’s hand and danced alone. I lost myself in the motion. Each of us twirled around the room, making our own path, until Evelyn announced she was beginning to feel dizzy. “I need to sit a bit before we shop for the fruits,” she said.
Of course Evelyn assumed I had agreed to go. How could I disappoint her? We had already picked a date to go together to the Morgan Library. Evelyn’s idea.
SIXTEEN
Evelyn guided me to a single piece on a corner wall. She wrapped her arm around my waist and waited. I looked up and studied a woman bent and rounded in grief.
The Grieving Mother stared back at me.
“Let the piece speak to you.” With a voice deliberate but kind, Evelyn pointed out the brilliance behind the black-and-white pencil sketch by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz. I had heard of her but had never studied her work. Kollwitz’s work bespoke a pain I had had—until now—no words within my grasp to express.
“Käthe knew about loss. She lost her son and her grandson to war. Both named Peter. She swung between periods of depression when she painted. She took in the misery of others and put it onto the canvas. She gave them a voice even as she suffered bitterly herself. She refused to step outside her grief until she was done with it.”
“Is anyone ever done with it?” I asked.
As we walked through the exhibit, Evelyn sighed deeply after I asked my question. Her face broke into creases. Lines grew longer outside the corners of her eyes. Fine grooves stemming from the edges of her nostrils down the inside of her cheeks dug deeper like highways to the mouth. Grief fed my doubt.
“Let’s sit awhile,” Evelyn said in a tired voice.
We had seen the light-filled courtyard café beyond the museum’s entrance. Airy and bright, with glass walls and high ceilings, it was the kind of place where Vinni and I would have loved to sit and create stories to tell each other.
To tell. To tell. To tell. There will be so much to tell when we see each other.
As I studied the drawings, I felt alive.
Evelyn and I stopped at a piece titled Nude from Back.
“Look at her,” Evelyn said. “See how the artist burrowed the woman’s grief down inside the bones in her naked back?”
I never thought about how I looked from behind. How I walked those years without Vinni. How low my head hung. My shoulders caved. My round back rounded more. I carried grief around with me until I grew unseen fat that no one noticed. Only I felt its weight.
“You must paint, Maddy. You have a gift. Never mind the guilt.”
“Guilt?”
“Of having more time.”
A sting seared me from deep inside, where I reached for Vinni and held on tight. This was not what I wanted. Evelyn took my hand with hers across the table and covered it like bread, end to end. She curled her left fingers into a fist and softly hit the table. Once. Twice.
“I know you can’t stop the grieving.” Evelyn’s dark eyes burned like fired chestnuts. Her intensity deepened, and for a moment I withdrew. I leaned back in my chair, but my eyes fixed on Evelyn.
“What do you know about grieving?” I asked.
Her jaw relaxed into hung flesh. She closed her eyes. Words dropped from her lips, one slow hurt at a time.
“Stanley and I had a child. She died at five months. I had been painting all afternoon while she napped. I knew she had been quiet while I worked. Quiet for longer than the other afternoons, but I was painting . . . working. I didn’t want to stop. When I went to check her in the crib, she had stopped breathing.”
“Evelyn, I . . . I’m so sorry.”
What do you say?
Before Evelyn stopped speaking, she said one last line that made me gasp.
“She had turned blue.”
I moved my palm from underneath to top Evelyn’s.
For a long time, we breathed in and out of the silence. We sat and sipped tea. Two years ago, I had met Evelyn, when she was seventy-six. I had not seen her true age until that afternoon. Old skin around her eyes creased more deeply. Folds under her neck looked fuller. I studied her hands as we held on to each other, dropping our clasp to sip our tea.
Had Evelyn lied when she’d said that she and Stanley had made a choice not to have children?
“But before, you told me you had made the choice not to have children.”
“I know what I told you!”
Trust flitted in and out, but I did not grab hold. Didn’t even consider wringing its neck. Evelyn looked away from me, caught inside a wave of pain. I could barely hear her when she spoke.
“The pregnancy was a surprise. And the child’s death. Too many surprises for a young doctor and a wife who wanted to paint.”
“Did you separate shortly after the child . . .?”
“We tried to stay together, but I needed to conquer my guilt. It’s strange, you know. Guilt. It grows.”
I knew.
Finally, I said, “How long?”
The smell on my clothes of another winter’s passing was too much to bear. I swallowed hard.
Evelyn looked at me and asked, “What do you mean?”
“How long until you could paint again?”
“I was young. And Stanley never blamed me. Only once did he walk into the bedroom, where I sat on the edge of the bed, and ask, ‘Why didn’t you stop painting and check on her?’ Of course, that was the end.”
“Of what?”
“I left Stanley even though I still loved him. I had no choice. The love had grown painful. I had to go. After the divorce, we slept together on the weekends, making love like young fools.”
A slight lilt touched her voice when she said “young fools.”
Tears slid down my cheek, but I needed to know the answer to my question. “How long before you painted again?” I repeated.
“It was so long ago. Two years. No, maybe three.”
AFTER THAT DAY in the library, I stayed away from Evelyn. Three weeks passed before I went downstairs and let myself into her apartment. From the hallway, I could see the northern light shining into her studio. I noticed more and more how she sat in the dark, and when I asked why she kept the shade pulled in her bedroom, her only reply was, “It suits me.”
Discovering a dead baby in a crib could make you crave the dark, I thought.
Or keep you in the shadows.
I had a sudden urge to flee.
SEVENTEEN
KAY SWALLOWED A PIECE OF TUNA AND CROSSED HER fork and knife like two sabers on top of her plate. Desperate people learn to forgive. I had to forgive Kay because I needed her. She looked around for the waiter to take her plate, but either he had gone home or, I imagined, he was shoveling down a plate of picked-over paella in the kitchen. It was ten past ten. The restaurant, Kay’s choice, was out of my price range, but I didn’t care.
“Vinni was a blessing to you and Steve,” Kay said, without looking up to warn me where she was headed. She wiped her mouth with her napkin, unaware of the verbal minefield she had ignited.
“What exactly do you mean by ‘blessing’?” I asked. I waited a second to catch my breath. I wasn’t looking for an answer.
Kay stared at me from across the table but made no attempt to open her mouth. The muscles around her lips hardened.
“Do you have a nonblessing because you have no husband and no children? Did God take his sword and refuse to tap your right shoulder because he was low on blessings that day? And if your God blessed me with Vinni, is he now hell-bent on bestowing an unblessing? Tell me, Kay, why did God decide to ‘unbless’ me by removing my child from my life?”
More words filled my mouth and spilled over my lower lip. I spit them at Kay and bit my lip in the meantime. Red stained my fingers after I touched my mouth.
Kay never took her eyes off me. Her napkin fell to the floor. She pulled at the perfectly folded collar on her black knit turtleneck.
“Call it spiritual perversion
. Yeah, I like that—I really do. I’m perverted because I’m unblessed. That’s what this is, isn’t it? That’s what’s happened to me. I’m unblessed,” I said.
I screamed the word so the other diners could hear me: unblessed. “Unfuckingblessed.”
I stood up and leaned my hands on the table, bending over the chicken on my plate. Thick and brown, it drowned in a butter sauce so rich, I tasted it later, in the middle of the night.
You’d think I would have stopped, but I kept on barreling forward, steamrolling over Kay and whatever sense of reason she thought I might have left.
“Wasn’t my mother’s suicide perverted enough?”
I had no intention of giving Kay the space to answer.
“Is this some half-assed way of teaching me a lesson? Is this what God is doing, Kay?”
Kay let out a quiet “Maddy . . .” But I gave her no room.
“Vinni gave me the kind of love I wanted. I don’t want unblessings, and neither should you.”
Silent diners looked over at us. They knew I was the loud one. The one with a spray of sweat over her upper lip.
“Stop it,” Kay said. “Sit down.”
I choked out one last line.
“Don’t ever tell me Vinni was a blessing. Don’t ever say that to me again. I swear, Kay, I’ll fucking kill you.”
Kay picked up her wineglass. She had one swallow of cabernet left. She began to bring the glass to her lips but stopped midair, looked me in the eye, and said, “A hell of an unblessing that would be for me, wouldn’t it, Maddy? I’d say that’d be pretty damn perverted.”
After a long pause, as the two of us stared back at each other, I smiled. First. Then I laughed out loud. Kay laughed after me. Soon, we doubled over our plates and howled. Tears streamed down our cheeks.
KAY HAD INVITED both of us to meet at her office on Court Street. Steve flew in and stayed at the W Hotel at Union Square. He had been coming east less frequently, but for a meeting like this—the first with Kay and me together in the same room—he wanted to be there in person.
A Matter of Chance Page 10