THIRTY
“WHAT HAPPENED, MADDY?” ASKED STANLEY.
“I bumped into a pretty nasty metal casing on one of the legs on my easel.” My head spun. Thoughts like Where was I? and What just happened? flipped on their sides. I eased myself into the nearest club chair.
Stanley removed the red-soaked mess of tissues attached to my foot. “Dear God, your toe is gone!”
“I flushed the bloody mess down the toilet,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Stanley stared at me the way he had when I had first visited the doctor’s office with Evelyn four years earlier. “Maddy?”
“What?” I refused to look at him straight-on. Instead, I lowered my head and bent over my knees as I fondled the leather at the tips of my toes. “My shoes are ruined,” I said.
“We should go straight to Presbyterian Hospital,” Stanley said. “I was just about to close the office anyway. You’re not going to hobble up there alone.”
“No, no, no. I’m sorry. I should have gone straight to the emergency room.”
“I’m glad you came to see me. The first thing I’ve got to do is disinfect this thing.”
Stanley studied my face. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Is everything okay?”
Everything was not okay. The voice of the man in the limousine played in my head.
“I get woozy at the sight of my own blood. That’s all.”
“Well, you can get ‘woozy’ as long as I’m here with you.”
I hesitated. I needed someone to whom I could tell the truth. I turned away as I fought back tears. When I looked up, the good doctor said, “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
I shook my head, but our mutual silence sealed an unspoken agreement. I had something to tell that I could not . . . and Stanley knew.
It was too bad Evelyn had gone first. They belonged together. Stanley looked older since Evelyn’s death. His back hunched more, and his eyes lost focus as he spoke. Sometimes I had the feeling they drifted out to sea, where Evelyn’s ashes floated at the bottom of the ocean.
Stanley broke the tension. “Have you eaten today?”
I thought back to the morning and my desire to steal the blond child in the coffee shop. “I’m good. I just did something stupid.”
Stanley cauterized the open skin with a local anesthetic. I jumped from the exposed bone and raw flesh. I held my eyelids closed, forcing the last two hours behind my chest bone.
“How long do you think before . . .”
“Before you’re not limping?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be limping for a few weeks. Walking a little funny after that. Right now, you need stitches. We’ll clean you up first. You’ve got some exposed bone that’s got to be covered. The best scenario for an amputation like this to heal, my dear girl, is probably two to three months. Of course, some residual healing will take maybe an additional four months. You’ll be walking pretty close to normally sooner than you think. What I do suggest is that you get rid of that damn easel, for God’s sake!”
In the ER, a tired-looking resident with a twenty-four-hour shadow stitched my toe and then hooked me up to an IV streaming a heavy dose of Ancef. I don’t know what he said, but Stanley warded off any suspicions from the doctors. After all, the slice was clean—too clean.
I played the role of absentminded artist—someone so engrossed in the ethereal, she walked into furniture. I left the hospital with a prescription for Keflex, another antibiotic. I persuaded Stanley that I was fine to taxi home alone. When I returned to Evelyn’s apartment—mine now—I put the book in a drawer by my bed. I touched the opening pages and closed my eyes. The secret bound me tight, but at the same time I felt free. I limped over to the closet, where I had stored a painting Evelyn had created of an imagined older Vinni. I lifted it out of the corner and unrolled it onto the top of the bed.
Vinni stared up at me.
I TOLD NO one about the ride in the black car. My foot was a constant reminder that worse things could happen if I opened my mouth.
Fear. Excitement. Torment. They turned and twisted me until I spun, unsure which way to step forward. Nothing was for certain. If I told John D’Orfini or Kay about being whisked away in a black limousine in the middle of the afternoon in front of the library, they’d say I was lucky to be alive. I did feel lucky, but not because of what I was sure would be their conclusion. And Steve? I couldn’t tell Steve. He had been working more and more in Sydney, flying back and forth, having a life that relied on distance. When he did call, we were polite—like strangers deferring over the same armrest on an airplane.
The truth? I didn’t want to tell him.
As long as no one knew about my conversation in the car, I could keep it safe. I worried that Steve would insist we alert the FBI. I simply could not take that chance with my daughter’s life.
Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking: foolish woman!
But a mother beast relies on instinct.
AFTER THE LIMOUSINE ride, I stayed up night after night, unpacking and removing boxes from the spare bedroom. The Baby’s Feet paint color in the bathroom was perfect. I hadn’t thought about the second bedroom, although I knew it was Vinni’s. It made sense to get it ready.
I had the door closed when Kay visited one evening. As we sipped a $12 bottle of prosecco, I kicked off a pair of flats and Kay saw the bandage on my foot.
“What’s that all about?”
“Nothing. I hit the metal casing on the easel last week. That’s all. A couple of stitches . . .” I shrugged away the topic.
“Since when have you been clumsy?” Kay asked. She kept fiddling with one thin strand of hair fallen over her right eyebrow.
“Old age, I guess.”
“You’re a little jumpy tonight. Are you feeling okay?”
I tilted my head back and drained the rest of my glass.
“I’m okay. Tired, maybe.”
“When was the last time you saw John?” D’Orfini’s first name rolled off Kay’s tongue more easily than it did off mine.
“Two weeks. He was away on some seminar for four days last week. He’s convinced . . .”
Kay walked over to my chair and sat down on the floor. She picked up my foot and began unwrapping the thin bandage. I hadn’t told her I had one less toe.
“What are you doing?”
“Uncovering some shit, I think. Or else I’m going to kiss it and make it better, okay?” Kay laughed the way she did when she felt she “had” you. But we were far away from being school-age kids, and I wasn’t going to let her see more than I could tell.
No police.
“What the . . .? Where the hell is your little toe?” she asked. Her eyes searched me out. “Maddy, I mean it. What happened?” Kay sat on the floor, examining me with the kind of intensity she had used to build her reputation as a show-no-mercy assistant US attorney.
I tried to laugh it off. “I had a studio accident, that’s all.”
“You’d tell me if something was going on, right?” Kay looked for the words I couldn’t say. Her eyes searched mine.
“There’s nothing going on. I’ve been running around like a nut. I’ve got the art show and deadlines, and I’ve got to make a decision about the story More wants to run on the anniversary of Vinni’s five-year disappearance.”
“Don’t do the story,” Kay said.
“Why not?”
“Because you believe she’s coming back, right?”
“Yeah, and?”
“And I don’t,” Kay snapped.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to argue tonight.
Kay rewrapped my foot slowly with the fresh-since-the-morning bandage. Tension flitted around the room, not knowing where to land. I wanted to tell Kay that Vinni was alive. I wanted to dance and cry. I wanted to scream out, Vinni’s coming home, but fear kept me quiet. Fear kept me farther from Mueller’s Bakery, but not so far away that I couldn’t watch from the window across the street. I stayed behind t
he curtain like a spy following secret instructions. The only difference was that I kept still when I saw the black limousine pull up in the middle of the night. I walked by the bakery and looked in through the glass front of the store. I stopped asking questions, but I didn’t stop watching.
I painted.
As I worked, I thought of the paintings of the mother and child by Käthe Kollwitz in the Morgan Library. The big hands, the bent back, the woeful eyes penciled into their sockets. I drew on Käthe’s despair, and it fed me. Boldness found its way onto the canvas as I added six more paintings after the number sixteen. I titled each piece by number, just as I had with the work I had exhibited in Evelyn’s show. I continued to paint whole scenes imprisoned inside large triangles for the eyes.
Memory of the man in the limousine telling me to wait hid in every cell of my being. Nothing eased with the passing of time. Keeping everything to myself—not telling—took its toll and stole my nights. When I closed my eyes, my mind raced. John D’Orfini lay next to me in bed. I made up a story with a cast of known characters: Kay stood at the foot of the bed. “There’s no room for all of us,” Steve said, knees bent into his chest, as he looked down from a shelf on the wall. Evelyn sat in one of her purple chairs with Vinni’s book in her lap. George and Hannah licked each other’s fingers, wetting their lips in satisfaction. The acne-faced nephew was there, eating a slippery submarine sandwich stacked with salami and red onions.
On nights like these, I woke up sweating—fearful that everyone knew about the conversation in the black car.
STEVE CALLED ME from the club room at the airport. I could tell he had had too many glasses of pinot. Twice before, he had called me from the airport half loaded out of his mind, but that had been within the first year Vinni had gone missing. Similar conversations took place from his home in San Francisco on Saturdays when Gina was out selling real estate.
“Why hasn’t she tried to call me?” His speech was sloppy. Exaggerated.
Years earlier, I had asked myself the same question, but without an answer, I had let it go. What choice did I have?
“Vinni was smart. She knew better. Why didn’t she try to call me?” He kept referring to himself as if I didn’t have a phone or a home or a hand to hold things.
“You’ve had too much to drink. That’s all this is,” I said. Years of unsaid things had piled up until alcohol-induced words started spewing from his mouth.
“That’s right. Play the compassionate mother. You’re soooo good at this. You’re so damn good at this. You’re worried if Vinni called me, then you’d look bad. And you couldn’t stand that.”
“Steve, this is stupid. Sleep it off on the plane.”
“You wouldn’t tell me if she called, though, would you? You’d keep it to yourself. You and your Detective D’Orfini. You’d both keep it to yourselves.”
Steve said John D’Orfini’s name out loud as if it were the name of a pasta special. Enunciating the vowels of each syllable. Raising his pitch on the last i.
“What about Gina?”
“I love you, Maddy. I love Vinni. I love the three of us. When I return from Sydney in two weeks, I want to come home.”
Steve sobbed. I knew he was drunk. Out of his mind.
He threw his own words back and forth like the volley in a Ping-Pong game. I held my breath. I kept quiet about the black car. I didn’t know who he’d be once he sobered. The idea of our being a family again saddened me. It wouldn’t happen. Steve’s shadow flew in and out, but that’s all it was—a shadow. He hadn’t talked to Vinni for two months before she disappeared.
“Dad’s busy, I guess, huh? He must get pretty tired flying back and forth to Australia.” She looked up from stacking four boxes of rice crackers in the bottom kitchen cabinet. “Do you think he misses us?”
I had been packaging food for the freezer with my back to Vinni. I turned and said, “I’m sure Dad thinks of you all the time, honey.”
She shrugged.
I didn’t know if this was true unless he was intoxicated, but I believed my daughter needed to hear it.
VINNI WAS TWELVE now.
I imagined her hair worn long. She’d want to move it away from her face. But then, didn’t preteens like to cover their faces? Shy away from adults like they were an intrusion? She’d be tall, like Steve. Even at eight years old, she was the tallest of her school friends. Skinny. But that was when she was a child. I tried not to think about what I had missed. I concentrated on what we would do when she came home. When I couldn’t see her clearly enough, I swallowed more Xanax. I closed my eyes.
My financial situation continued to deteriorate. A turn in the stock market plummeted my investment returns from my meager inheritance from my father. My freelancing career swung back and forth. My editor from Hot Style magazine fed me deadlines. Maybe she was testing me to see how I was coping. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding, worried that I’d have to sell Evelyn’s apartment or let go of my room in Brooklyn. I wasn’t ready to do either. Just the previous month, the editor in chief and I had met for lunch and she had invited me to step back into my old role of fashion editor. I had asked for another three months. I had been extending time as if it were free. While sipping white wine, she had nodded and said, “Of course.” In the meantime, I stuck to a low budget, scrambling white-shelled eggs for dinner and calling it a meal.
ON A FRIDAY in July, I stopped off at my room across from Mueller’s to add a few more photos to the wall. Photo upon photo told a story out of sequence of the black limousine with the same license plate. I captured pictures of young girls with their faces hidden by falling hair. I had shot after shot of their turning down the alleyway and then nothing. No return.
More photos popped up of the neighbor man in the straw fedora standing in the corner edge of the photograph. He was always around, whether it was three o’clock in the afternoon or four in the morning. Up until now, I hadn’t gone down the alleyway myself. I had stopped sniffing.
I was afraid that Hannah or George might see me. Especially George.
I was afraid I might ruin everything and Vinni would lose her chance to come home. I convinced myself that the girls who disappeared down the alleyway had nothing to do with me or what was mine. I watched to be sure. All I wanted was my own child returned.
My life had stopped and stumbled into a different direction until the man in the black limousine had told me Vinni would come home. Afterward, it kept its own time clock. Each day, I awoke wondering if today I’d find Vinni sitting outside on the steps.
THIRTY-ONE
I WAS AFRAID KAY SUSPECTED SOMETHING.
On a Thursday evening two weeks before the art show, she arrived at my apartment unannounced. The door to Vinni’s room was open. Dusk in August lit the walls a gauzy shade of silver. The buzzer startled me. I jumped and dropped the photo of Vinni standing by the horse. Look at my girl, I thought.
I pressed the intercom and heard Kay’s voice. “I’ve got the prosecco. Get out two glasses.”
When I opened the door, Kay stood there with a chilled bottle and a hunk of Corbier and crackers from Murray’s Cheese Shop in the Village.
“What are you doing here this time of day? Shouldn’t you be working?” I said.
Kay dropped her briefcase in the foyer and slipped off her nude stilettos. “We need to talk, Maddy.”
Her tone startled me into thinking that she had discovered my secret.
“I spent the day yesterday with D’Orfini at the police station in Brooklyn. Apparently, dead Mr. Kosinski—Mr. Uncle— left a protégé. A cousin from Uzbekistan with the same last name has slipped into his position in the community rather gracefully.”
“What position?”
“As the ‘fixer.’ We know he’s been to Mueller’s Bakery, talking to Hannah. We put a tail on him.”
My heart stopped. I waited for the question about the man in the black limousine. Was the man the fixer’s cousin? Instead, Kay spread cheese o
n two crackers and handed me one as she looked down at my foot.
“How’s the wound?”
“Fine. I’m lucky, I guess. It was a clean slice.” I winced at my own choice of words.
Kay got up and, with a glass of prosecco in hand, wandered down the hall and saw the door open to Vinni’s bedroom. Without asking, she walked in and I followed her. Her back was to me when she spoke. I couldn’t see her face, but, more important, she couldn’t see mine.
I had hung new curtains earlier in the week. I shouldn’t have spent the money, but I had. Pale blue fabric against the baby-blue walls created a monochromatic look. What stood out was Evelyn’s writing table. I had moved it from the hallway to Vinni’s bedroom.
“Why did you do all this?” Kay said.
“Do what?”
“Make this room for Vinni. Everything looks like she’s coming home for Labor Day weekend.”
Kay turned around and faced me.
“Is she? Is Vinni coming home?”
I wet my lips before I spoke, to give myself more time.
“You know I believe Vinni’s alive, Kay. Nothing’s changed. One day, she’ll sleep in this bed.” I spoke slowly, careful not to pause as if I were reconsidering how much to divulge.
I moved over to the bed, and Kay sat down next to me.
“What else do you want to tell me?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
We stared at each other as if we were in a contest of who might give in and speak first. I didn’t flinch. Kay broke the silence. “D’Orfini did some investigating on his own time at the FBI storage yard where they took custody of the blue car. He found a gas receipt crumpled into the size of a spitball underneath the driver’s seat. The receipt was from a gas station in Montreal.”
“Canada?”
“Yes. Someone could have driven Hilda and Vinni into Canada, dropped them off, and turned around and driven Hilda’s car to Kosinski’s garage in Brooklyn. A private garage is a perfect place to dispose of a car you don’t want found. Of course, then Kosinski went ahead and died and the nephew found the car, hoping for gold.”
A Matter of Chance Page 20