A Matter of Chance

by Julie Maloney

  Despite all my walking throughout the city, the two sets of stairs winded me. I turned left at the top of the staircase and walked straight through to the Rose Reading Room. Once I sat down, I studied the cement wall at the back of the room. I had to make myself hard like the wall until I found Vinni. Nothing could get in my way. To compare my loss to the shade of evening was too soft. If fucked had a color, I would not be forced into pedaling backward into blue. This was my big worry—that I would start to pedal backward, unable to stop until I came to a cement wall. Then, of course, I would have no choice.

  Bang!

  I sat and stared and pretended to read a book on electricity I had pulled from a shelf by my chair. I have no theory about where ideas come from, but one banged into my head. I left in a hurry, and as I flew down the steps outside, I dialed Kay’s office. Without waiting once her secretary connected me, I charged in. “Do you think I should go back to Germany?”

  “Whoa . . . Where would you go? You’ve already been to Rodenbach, where Hilda grew up. You have nothing new. It’s about facts, remember?”

  “I believe I’m talking to an assistant US attorney now, right?”

  “Indeed,” Kay said. I imagined my friend’s eyes looking off to the side of her office, landing on a stack of files piled high and staying there.

  I still loved Kay. In the beginning, when Steve’s name came up during a discussion of the investigation, we avoided eye contact. Grown women do this when one has slept with the other’s husband. Oddly enough, or maybe because Kay knew me better than Steve, we both pushed the affair into the back of our brains. Vinni held steadfast in the front like the cement wall.

  “Meet me at Gascogne’s on Eighteenth Street after work, and we’ll talk,” Kay said.

  “Eight?” I asked.

  “No. I’m tired. Make it earlier. Six thirty.”

  I could walk there from my apartment in less than fifteen minutes.

  Kay was already there when I arrived, sipping sauvignon blanc. “Mmm . . . this is just what I needed,” she said. Before I ordered, she began a new conversation. “I think the serious detective has fallen for you.”

  I hadn’t told Kay about that time we shared the home-cooked chicken in my apartment.

  “Let it alone,” I said. “I mean it.”

  “Do you ever think that maybe you deserve to live?” Kay said.

  “Don’t do this.”

  “I’ll do it because I haven’t said anything for almost a year.” Kay pushed the sleeves of her midnight-navy top higher up her arms. A gold cuff graced her left wrist. “You’ve got to consider the idea that . . .” Kay looked away, but I knew where she was going. “People don’t kidnap an older woman. But a woman with a young child and no ransom note . . .” She let the idea float.

  “You’re wrong. Everyone is wrong. I’ve told you. Hilda would not hurt Vinni. Hannah knows where they are. I feel it each time I see her in the bakery.”

  “Feelings lie.” The slight movement in the hollow of Kay’s left cheek signaled something else.

  “What? Where’s that coming from?”

  Kay leaned forward. “I know you went to Mueller’s last week. Don’t think you can poke around without my finding out.”

  “Are you having me followed?”

  “All I’m saying is that you’ve got to let our people do their work. They know what they’re doing. You don’t.”

  I took a deep breath but let it out fast and loud.

  “I’m not stopping anything,” I said. I gripped the edges of the table with both hands. Somewhere in the ceiling, a blast of warm air let loose from an overhead vent.

  Kay and I stared at each other. We had years of history behind us. I wasn’t sure what lay ahead, but I was certain I wouldn’t stop going to Mueller’s.

  “Hannah’s going to crack one day, and when she does, I’ll be there to pick up the pieces,” I said.

  “When she cracks, you could be dead.”

  “How long can she hold out? Forever? Hannah will talk to me before she’ll talk to the FBI.”

  “You’re wrong. If Hannah knows where Hilda and Vinni are, then she’s been smart enough to hold out for over two years. If she tells us something, she’s going to want immunity.”

  Kay reached for my hand and drew her shoulders inward, as if she were gearing up to drop a secret right in the middle of the dipping oil on the table.

  “I don’t want to talk about Hannah tonight, Maddy. I’m worried about the way you look.”

  “I’m fine. For God’s sake, I’m telling you. It’s just my hair. I know it’s thinning. Okay, and my back hurts. Maybe it’s old age. After all, we’re months over forty,” I said with a twisted smile. I thought of Nude from Back, by Käthe Kollwitz, and how her back hid grief inside its skeleton.

  Kay signaled the waiter. “Okay, here it is: I booked you five days at a spa in Pennsylvania. Nothing fancy. Yoga, healthy food, and a few massages thrown in.”

  “I’m not going. I hope you can get your money back.”

  “I’ve spoken to Stanley to get his medical input, and he thinks you need to do this. He’s even talked to the director of nutrition there and set up an appointment.” Kay paused as she adjusted her bangle away from her wristbone.

  “I guess I should tell you I spoke to Evelyn also. She thinks it’s a good idea for you to go.”

  Kay had met Evelyn only a few times, but she had a habit of taking control. Even in seventh grade, when the eighth graders had a graduation dance, Kay orchestrated an invite for us to check coats. Her point was that we’d get to see what it was like from the inside, so we would know what to expect the following year.

  “When?”

  “The end of the week. I’ve arranged for a car to pick you up on Saturday morning. You have four days to pack.”

  Kay searched around for her handbag, an elegant aubergine satchel. The conversation was over. I was too tired to fight her.

  THE RIDE TO Pennsylvania took over two hours. At first, the driver started talking, but my silence shut him down.

  “Good to get away, huh?”

  “I guess.” I dug out my oversize, wraparound black sunglasses from my nylon tote. The sun beat down on the highway. The sky had never looked so blue.

  Kay had failed to mention that I would see a “dream therapist” at the spa.

  The scent of jasmine greeted me as I opened the door to her office. The room was warm. The walls, painted a shade of yellow, whispered, Come in. The visit required less of me than I anticipated. The Dream Lady spoke in short sentences tumbling on top of one another.

  “Do you dream? Describe one,” she said, as she poked around her messy head of frizz with a pencil.

  The truth is, I had one dream that replayed itself over and over, but I said nothing about it.

  The Dream Lady loved her dream talk. “Dreams keep things alive,” she said.

  Anyone who had taken Psychology 101 in college would have understood where she was headed. What I feared was looking pitiful, as opposed to possessed. I didn’t want the Dream Lady to see me as this pathetic mother who lost her child at the beach. The single parent living and working in New York City— in the fashion industry, no less. I didn’t want some new age, om-breathing woman telling me what to do.

  Where would dreaming take me?

  The Dream Lady said it again. “It’s important to dream.”

  I nodded and fell asleep that night and dreamed that one dream. If you prefer not to hear it, I understand. Dreams are supposed to mean something, but before now I’d refused to dwell on them.

  In my dream, I return to the house where I grew up. I walk outside and look in through my parents’ bedroom window. I hear myself say, “Where is she?” Then I see her. Vinni is older. She lies side by side, next to my mother, who is recognizable even in death. Vinni’s eyes are wide open, and I see her chest move up and down. My mother’s eyes are closed, her chest still.

  A child—with my mother’s violin-playing hands and Vinni’s e
yes—sits next to Vinni. In the dream, my child is now a young woman, old enough to have her own daughter lie beside her.

  It is all so confusing, but I stay and watch them. The three of them. They talk, but I cannot hear them. I press my nose closer to the glass window. The temperature of the glass startles me, and I look down and see my feet covered in snow.

  I tap on the window, and the child looks up, smiles, and waves back.

  Vinni has her arm wrapped around the child’s shoulder, the way a mother pulls her baby close in the dark. Why does she ignore me? Or is it that she doesn’t see me?

  The woman next to Vinni opens her eyes and looks out the window. She sees me standing outside, and I know she recognizes me. She waves for me to go, the way she used to when I was a child. She tells me to leave by the flick of her wrist.

  “Be quiet, Maddy.” That’s what she used to say when I was older. “Be quiet.”

  I stare back at her, but she has turned her attention to my Vinni—the lost child-woman to whom I never got to whisper, “I love you” on her birthday when she was nine and ten. The child keeps smiling. She jumps off the bed, and I reach my hand through the glass window to touch her face. The glass melts away, turning the broken shards into lemons.

  The child picks up a lemon and throws it directly at me. I catch it just before it hits my right cheekbone. I return the lemon like a sweet ball, and the child in my dream squeals as she leaps to her side to catch it. I laugh, but no one hears me. I laugh until tears come and the child cowers back onto the bed between her mother—my grown-up Vinni—and my dead-again mother.

  “No, wait,” I cry out. I try to stop her from leaving, but she slips away from my grasp.

  KAY WAS RIGHT . I slept well. The hills of the Pennsylvania Dutch country tucked me into a cocoon where I found a balance of comfort and discomfort. The comfort came in the form of food—slabs of butter spread on bread. Discomfort was that oh-so-jazzy dream therapist with the softest of voices.

  In my last session with her, she asked about my dream. I told her about the snow on my feet, Vinni as mother to her own child, the lemons and sweet balls. All the time I spoke, I wondered if the pencil resting inside her hair would slip out and fall to the floor. I was getting used to having two or more conversations happening in my head at the same time.

  “In your dream, your daughter is grown, with her own child. Isn’t that right?”

  It seemed a day or two passed during the silence that followed. Finally, she said, “What’s given you the most pleasure while you’ve been here?”

  I answered, “The bread.”

  “Again?” She cupped her hand behind her ear, reminiscent of a child holding a conch shell to her ear to hear the ocean’s roar.

  “The bread,” I repeated, “and the butter, too.”

  “And the indoor swimming pool? Did you take advantage of the guided relaxation exercises in the water?” she asked.

  “I hate the smell of chlorine,” I said. “I love bread and butter.”

  “So I guess the mealtimes have been satisfying for you, then?”

  “No, just the bread and butter.”

  The Dream Lady sneezed and reached behind her for the floral tissue box on her desk. I rolled my eyes up to God, hoping he might send rain in through the roof and end the conversation.

  “Is this something new?” she asked.

  “You mean, is eating bread and butter a new thing for me?”

  She nodded and hunched forward, the way a jockey does at the starting gate.

  “I haven’t had much of an appetite since . . .”

  “Since you lost your daughter. Of course—the child in the dream.”

  The therapist adjusted a strap underneath her blouse, reached inside, and scratched at what—an imaginary gnat? She waited a second and settled back in her chair.

  She didn’t pursue the dream.

  “Why do you think you latched on to eating bread and butter here?” she asked. We were far, far away from my dream now.

  “Maybe because it was on the table.”

  “Salt and pepper were on the table also.”

  I leaned forward in my chair, letting my elbows rest on my thighs. “When I get home, I’m buying a loaf of pecan-and-raisin bread.”

  “Do you have butter at home?”

  “Of course. Who doesn’t have butter in their refrigerator?” I sat back and adjusted the two pillows against the small of my back. “My mother always kept the butter softening on the counter. It was disgusting. In summer, the butter sat and sweat.”

  I shot up. “It’s time to go. My ride should be coming soon.”

  The Dream Lady stood and reached for my hand. Hers was cool. “I wish you the best. Take care of yourself,” she said.

  That’s what everyone wished for—the best. The best peaches in the produce aisle, the best price on turnips, the best seat at Madison Square Garden, the best radiologist, the best egg cream, the best cashmere cardigan.

  I started for the door, but suddenly I stopped and turned. “I know you’ve been trying to help me. I’m sorry if I’ve been . . . difficult.”

  It was true. I was sorry. On the drive home, I thought about how I responded when people asked me how I felt. It was always the same. “I’m doing as well as I can.” Then, with a swift turn, I’d walk away.

  People do not understand another’s grief. They want to. But it is not possible. I learned this every day when someone would ask, “How are things?”

  Things?

  Time does not heal.

  It stretches the pain so it lies flat like a sheet, but it does not heal.

  TWENTY

  TWO DAYS BEFORE MOTHER’S DAY IN MAY, I WENT TO Brooklyn. Vinni had been gone for thirty months. Mueller’s Bakery was packed. Hannah’s husband, George, stood slightly stooped. When he looked up and noticed me, he nodded and returned to the pastry cases, lining up raisin cookies and apple strudel triangles wedged against one another. He had one eye on the window to the outside. His tight lips locked secrets behind their natural crease. Hannah spoke to the customers for both of them, with an easy voice couched inside a lingering German accent.

  Signs in the windows reminded customers to place their cake orders early. For two years, I had hoped that Hannah would break her silence. I ignored the facts presented by John D’Orfini and Kay—namely, that a child gone missing this long had almost no chance of being found alive. Steve called it a “realistic hypothesis.”

  Hannah had no children. Still, she must have had some hint of the hideousness I was certain she concealed. Could even a hint help her understand what it was like to wake each morning with the same ache? If so, how could she stay silent?

  Hannah approached my table and laid a small slice of strudel in front of me. “You are a thin woman,” she said. I shrugged my shoulders slightly, so as not to ignore her comment.

  Evelyn told me all the time that I was too thin. I drank green tea with her but passed on the baklava she ordered from Poseidon’s Bakery on Ninth Avenue. Three generations of bakers had held on to their customers as the city rose up from the dead again and again. Evelyn was a loyal customer, dating back to her days as an art student, when she and her friends spent late nights mulling over the creative process as they chewed on apricot tarts.

  To my surprise, Hannah slid into the seat across from me. George was at the register. The morning crowd had finally begun to thin.

  “What will you do this weekend, miss?” Even though I was sure Hannah remembered my name, she avoided it. My long black skirt hung in an asymmetrical circle. A yellow cardigan shrug fit nicely over my cropped white T-shirt.

  “This weekend is no different than the others,” I said.

  “This is not so good for you to think like this, is it?” Hannah asked.

  Without hesitation, I said, “You know what is good for me, don’t you, Hannah? You’ve known for a long time.” I emphasized the word good, allowing it to stay long and deep on my rolled-up tongue.

  I could almos
t hear John D’Orfini and Steve gasp in unison.

  Hannah folded her hands on the table. Her heavy chest lifted and fell. Her eyes looked into mine, without a trace of what lay behind them.

  “Have you tried George’s cheese strudel?” she said. “It’s a recipe passed down from his father who was a baker. George learned all his baking secrets from him. Since he was a boy . . .”

  Hannah stopped. “He was a good boy, but later . . . it was not an easy time.”

  “What happened?”

  Hannah covered my hand and looked away. It felt warm and old.

  “I talk too much! I must help George!”

  Hannah pushed her chair away from the table with care, as if she were questioning right and wrong. Her left cheek hollowed as she bit into it, and she shook her head as if to shake loose an answer. She stood up and brushed the lower half of her apron in an attempt to smooth out the wrinkles. Tears piled up in her eyes as she looked at me and parted her lips. She sighed with an open mouth, then turned and walked away.

  As I left the bakery, I read the sign in the window of the wine bar across the street: ROOM FOR RENT. I walked quickly but misstepped over a puddle from the afternoon’s storm and splashed a stream of rainwater onto my bare leg. I pushed open the door into a dimly lit bar built snug against the wall. Couches that appeared to be tossed had landed in the right spots. They zigzagged into intimate seatings where two, four, or eight people could drink in silence or engage in a loud discussion over the rise of subway suicides. It was Friday, which meant wine tasting started as early as 4:00 p.m. One couple sat on the couch, knees touching. The girl’s skirt rose up her young thighs. Her male companion talked on his cell phone as his fingers drew small circles into her skin. I made a mental note: how easily his hand could slip inside her underpants.

  “Hi, could I talk to someone about the room for rent?” I asked the bartender.