Without a Word Read online

  Madison took the turtle out of the water and put it on the edge of the plate. I watched along with her as the turtle moved toward the little ball of beef, taking a surprisingly large bite, but then I thought of something my mother always said when we’d visit my aunt Ceil in Sea Gate, where all I wanted to do was stay in the water all day long.

  “Do you think turtles are supposed to wait an hour after eating before they swim?” I asked Madison.

  She looked up at me, her face blank. I could see a distorted image of myself in her oversize dark glasses, nothing more.

  Maybe mothers didn’t tell that to their kids nowadays. Maybe they did, but no one had bothered to tell Madison.

  “We need to make Dashiell’s dinner now,” I announced. And when she didn’t respond right away, perhaps waiting for me to take out a bag of kibble or a can of Alpo, I went back to the kitchen, pulled out the cutting board, set it on the counter and asked her if she’d rather grind or chop.

  I didn’t get the impression that Madison had to do anything at home, not set the table or help with the dinner, such as it was, or fold the laundry, anything that might make her feel she was helping to keep the family afloat. I knew dogs needed work and I thought kids did, too, for some of the same reasons. Doing something constructive was a great way to use your mind and your energy. And being a useful part of the pack is what made one feel secure, no matter what species the pack was. Besides that, I was out of homemade food for Dashiell, and if he was going to spend the evening seducing Madison, he’d need a hearty meal.

  Madison came into my tiny kitchen and picked up the sharp knife I had put on the cutting board along with the carrot tops that needed chopping. Holding the knife, she looked up at me, perhaps wondering what on earth I could be thinking.

  “Do you know how to chop greens?” I asked. “I can show you.”

  Madison put the knife back, picking up a carrot, studying the grinder, a little hand one I’d had forever. Then she held the carrot so that it would slide behind the cone and began to crank the handle. She did the sweet potato and the zucchini, too, and when the cone kept falling off, she looked at it carefully, figuring out how to get it back on so that she could continue, watching the colorful gratings pile up in the big bowl I’d put under the cone, orange, green and then the pale flesh of the sweet potato on top.

  After she finished, I dumped the rest of the beef into the bowl and handed her the wooden spoon. Madison mixed, stopping each time I had something else to add. When I asked if she wanted to put in the raw egg yolks, she took the eggs from my hand, cracking one on the side of the counter, spilling half the white and the yolk onto the floor. For a moment, she froze. I expected her arms to start shaking, one cheek to jump and flicker.

  “Not to worry,” I said, whistling for Dashiell and pointing to the egg. Madison watched as he licked up the spill. Had she never cracked a raw egg before?

  I pointed to the rim of the bowl and she cracked the second egg there. I mimed pouring the egg back and forth between each half of the shell and then held a glass under her hands to catch the white, praising her success when she plopped the yoke on top of the mixture, then smashed it with the wooden spoon. When we finished the food, stowing most of it in plastic containers and giving Dash his portion in the mixing bowl, I asked her what she wanted for dinner. I didn’t know how Leon did this. How do you find out what a kid might want to eat if the kid won’t tell you? Had I thought tonight would be any different, I would have been disappointed. Madison acted as if she hadn’t even heard me.

  I decided to order pizza. Madison was sitting with Dashiell on the living room floor and looked up when I made the order. I can’t say she looked happy about it. I can’t say she looked unhappy either. Maybe it was the dark glasses. You couldn’t see much of anything, which, I suppose, was the point.

  “You don’t need those here,” I said, tapping the air in front of my own eyes as if I were touching sunglasses. “He couldn’t care less and neither could I.” I didn’t wait for a response. I didn’t wait for her to remove her glasses, put them on the coffee table, feel all was okay with the world. I knew from doing pet therapy that things sunk in, or didn’t, in their own good time.

  I cleaned up the counter and the floor where Dashiell had licked up most of the spilled egg. When I looked back into the living room, Madison was nose to nose with Dashiell, her glasses still on.

  When the pizza came, I asked Madison to get us some drinks. She brought two Cokes. Then she went back to the kitchen for Dash’s water bowl and set that down next to the pizza box. We sat on the living room rug eating the pizza right out of the box, tossing Dashiell bits of crust, which he caught in midair.

  After dinner, I ran a bubble bath and handed her the shampoo, miming washing my hair as if I didn’t speak either. She held the door open for Dashiell, closing it behind him, and that was all I saw of either of them for quite a long time.

  When she came out of the bathroom, wearing my terry robe, all bunched up over the belt so that she wouldn’t trip, I took a stool into the bathroom, put a dry towel around her shoulders and showed her the scissors and comb. As if we’d done this a thousand times, Madison pulled the towel tight and turned to face the full-length mirror on the inside of the bathroom door.

  I combed her hair, then pointed to a length and waited. She seemed to be studying herself in the mirror, assessing my suggestion, the dark glasses still on. I could cut the back that way, but not the sides and not the bangs. So I began in the back, combing her silky blonde hair straight down and trimming across the end of the comb, the fine hair falling everywhere.

  When I moved her around to face me, I just waited, scissors and comb poised. Madison slipped off her glasses, looking up at me for a moment and then closing her eyes. The droopy lid was still droopy, long after the effects of the Botox were supposed to wear off. But the other eyelid wasn’t twitching. Still, sitting and waiting for me to finish her haircut, she looked so vulnerable it made me want to cry.

  I trimmed the bangs and then ran my fingers through her hair, checking by feel to make sure everything was even and straight. Then I picked up the glasses from her lap and slipped them back on her.

  “What do you think,” I asked, “nails next?”

  I still had some blue-black polish from when I went undercover as a transvestite hooker. Don’t ask. We took turns doing each other’s fingers and toes. Then we sat on the living room rug and played jacks, Dashiell retrieving the ball when either of us missed it.

  “I thought we might go shopping tomorrow,” I told her at bedtime, Dashiell running ahead of us up the stairs. I picked up her backpack from where she’d left it in the bathroom and handed it to her. The purse with Emil/Emily in it was in her other hand. “I’ll be in here,” I said when we passed the office, the door closed, “and you get to sleep in my bed.”

  But instead of passing by the office, she pushed the door open. There in front of us was my desk, and over it the bulletin board with all my notes about the case, notes only I was supposed to read. I’d planned to turn them all around after she’d gone to bed so that if she came to wake me in the morning, she’d only see their backs, blank cards and empty scraps of paper.

  She stood still, her head moving slightly as she read. Then she turned and looked at me.

  “Your father told you what I was doing,” I said. “This is how I work,” my voice as even as if I were still showing her how to prepare homemade food for a dog rather than talking about the search for her missing mother. “Every time I learn something new, no matter how trivial, I make a note and tack it up. Sometimes a pattern emerges. Or more questions. But even the smallest detail can turn out to be the thing that leads me to the path I need to be taking, to the solution. Most of what I learn will turn out to be useless. But I keep trying. I don’t give up. Giving up is not part of the plan. It’s not acceptable. Not for me. And not for him,” pointing to Dashiell, who was standing next to her in the doorway.

  Madison turned and looked up
at me. I didn’t need to hear the question.

  “He’s my partner,” I said, letting that sit in the air between us for a moment. “He can do things I can’t.” Her face still turned toward mine, listening.

  I pointed to my nose. “You know dogs can analyze odors in a way humans can’t, right?” Was I expecting her to answer me? “Well, suppose I find Sally. How would I know her? I only have an old picture of her, from when she was a fifteen-year-old kid.” I took a step into the office and picked up the yearbook and opened it to the page where the Post-it was, the page with Sally’s picture on it. I thought Madison might react, take the book, make a sound, start to cry. But she didn’t. She looked at the picture of her mother, then back at me. “But if I had something of hers with me, like the coat I found in the back of the closet on Saturday, Dashiell would know her scent, and he could tell me if the person I thought was Sally really was.”

  I closed the book and put it back on the desk.

  “It’s a long shot, finding her.” I put my hands on Madison’s shoulders. “But that’s not a reason not to try, is it?”

  For a moment, we stayed like that, Madison facing me, my hands on her skinny shoulders, feeling the small bones under her skin. Then she turned and continued down the hall to my room. She put the purse with Emil/Emily in it on top of my dresser, dropped her backpack on the floor and slid into bed.

  I pulled up the covers and shut off the light. I wanted to kiss her, to sit on the bed and hug her, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, and I didn’t want to spoil what seemed like the beginning of trust. Then, in order to make sure she didn’t get scared, I ended up doing it anyway.

  “If you wake up and I’m not here, it means I’ll be walking Dashiell around the block and that I’ll be right back.”

  She still had her glasses on, but it didn’t matter. There was no way to hide what was happening. The twitching began immediately, quickly followed by that jumping in her cheeks, both this time. Her mouth opened as if she was going to say something, but she didn’t. Even in the dark, I could see that her lips were trembling.

  Not the notes over my desk, not the discussion of how Dashiell might help identify Sally, not the photo of her mother at sixteen and pregnant. What terrified her was the thought of me going out to walk the dog and disappearing off the face of the earth, the way her mother had.

  She sat up against the pillows. I sat on the bed. Dashiell jumped up and stood at the foot of the bed, then walked up and lay down across her feet.

  “Would it make you feel better if you got dressed and came with me?”

  There was no response, of course. Madison stayed where she was, under the covers, not making any attempt to get up, her face turned away from me.

  I put my hand on her leg, near where Dashiell was lying. “Eventually, you’re going to have to make up your mind to let a lot of this stuff go,” I said.

  She turned and looked at me.

  “Terrible things happen to people, all kinds of things, and some people seem to get more of them than others. You, for instance. But the awful things that happened to you, they’re not your fault. You do know that, don’t you?”

  That’s when the first tear fell.

  “So at some point,” I whispered, leaning a little closer to her, “maybe not today, maybe not until you’re fourteen, say, or even a grown-up, but at some point, you have to decide to live your life despite the bad stuff. You have to say to yourself, Madison Spector, it’s your life and you have a choice in how you want to live it, in what you want it to be. You already know you can’t control everything. But there are things you can control,” reaching out to touch her hand. Then whispering, “Despite everything, you can have a life.”

  She was still looking at me, not moving.

  “It’s true,” I said. “You can. You’re strong and you’re smart and you’re beautiful. You’re a fabulous kid. If you don’t believe me…”

  I turned and looked at Dashiell, as if he would chime in now, help me convince Madison that our higher opinion of her worth was the one she should embrace as well. She reached out and put her hand over my mouth, her fingers warm against my lips. Then she slid down under the covers, turning away from me. She’d had enough, and who could blame her?

  Or was it something else? Was she thinking what had just occurred to me, that one of the bad things might indeed be her fault and what kind of a life she might have if she’d indeed killed Dr. Bechman?

  I suddenly felt terrified for her. Was that how Leon felt, too? I wanted to grab her and pull her close and make her listen to me. I wanted to tell her that if she didn’t kill Bechman, she better speak up fast, she better talk and keep talking until she was believed. But if she did it, if she did stab him in the heart with the Botox injection, she better not talk to anyone, not now and not for a very long time. Instead, I sat there quietly for another minute or so before getting up, Dashiell jumping off the bed and following me. I closed the door most of the way, leaving the light on in the hall, the way her mother might have done. Then I went into my office and turned on the computer.

  Luckily I hadn’t printed any of the letters I’d written or received via Classmates.com. I wouldn’t have wanted Madison to see letters I’d written pretending to be her mother, signing her mother’s name. What she’d seen was more than enough, too much for a young girl to have to deal with.

  I checked my mail to see if Jim had written back. “Your not Sally,” he’d written after my first post. “Who are you?”

  “You’re right,” I’d written back, “I’m not Sally. Sally went missing five years ago when her little girl was seven. Now her daughter is in trouble and needs her mother. I’ve been hired to try to find her but the trail’s ice cold—in fact, there is no trail. I was hoping to find someone who knew her before and might be able to tell me something about her, anything at all, that might give me a clue where she might have gone. I would be most grateful if you’d talk to me.” I’d given him my name and both phone numbers, landline and cell, but hadn’t heard back. Nor was there anything now.

  How interested could anyone be after all these years? Curious, maybe, but beyond that? After all, Sally had abandoned all her friends. According to Leon, they’d gone to Delaware and moved to Manhattan, without a word to anyone.

  There were two new letters to Sally, both from girls. I wrote back, but it was difficult to feel hopeful.

  I decided to let Dashiell out in the garden instead of walking him. When he ran to the gate, I called him back, sitting on the cold steps and waiting while he made his rounds, and left some notes that only he would get to read.

  Back inside, I opened the door to my bedroom enough that I could see Madison. Her glasses were on the nightstand and she’d turned onto her back, the covers pushed partway down, one leg sticking out on the side. Her face was smooth and calm in sleep. And with her eyes closed, you couldn’t tell that one lid drooped when they were open. She looked like a normal little girl, peacefully asleep.

  Lying in the bed in my office, Dashiell squeezed under the covers at the foot of the bed, I couldn’t sleep for wondering what would happen to Madison. I didn’t hear her at first, bare feet on the wooden floor, but the old boards in the hallway squeaked and then the door to the office opened, and she was silhouetted in the doorway, her dark glasses back on.

  I figured she was looking for Dashiell, so I held up the covers to show her where he was, to let her wake him and spirit him away, but she misunderstood my gesture, taking it as an invitation. She slipped into bed beside me, her cold feet touching me for a second and then coming to rest against Dashiell’s warm back. Then she rolled toward me, as if by accident, until she was leaning on me as well. I could smell the sweet almond scent of my shampoo in her hair. I let the cover drop, my arm with it so that both covered her. I felt her arm move as she reached for her glasses, slipping them off and letting them drop to the floor. And lying like that, nestled together, we fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 17

  I woke up a
lone, to the smell of bacon. Or rather the smell of burnt bacon. When I got downstairs, there were two cans of Coke on the table, and Madison was making peanut butter and bacon sandwiches. There was an empty pan on the kitchen floor so I knew that Dashiell had been fed. And Emil/Emily was in the swimming bowl, which sat between the cans of Coke like a centerpiece, a rock in the bowl, meaning Madison and Dashiell had been out in the garden. She might have even walked him had she known where the key to the wrought iron gate was kept, but luckily she didn’t. Had I awakened to find that Madison and Dashiell were gone, I would have been at least as scared as she’d have been were it the other way around.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting down on the chair nearer to the stairs. “This looks great.”

  I took a sip of the Coke and a bite of the sandwich. Trust was a two-way street, wasn’t it? Besides, it wasn’t nearly as awful as it looked.

  Emil/Emily swam while we ate, then got up on the flat stone and peered at us, first Madison and then me. I noticed the red kiss marks on his or her cheeks, the stripes all leading toward the small, dark, inscrutable eyes and the bulldog mouth. I wondered how long these little turtles lived and whether Leon had ever found the thing dead when Madison was in school, and replaced it before she’d gotten home. To me anyway, one small green turtle looked pretty much like another, but I guess some people thought that about cocker spaniels and Border collies, too.

  Not me. I wasn’t sure I’d know Sally, having only seen a picture of her that was eleven years old, but I thought I’d know Roy.

  “Here’s my plan,” I said across Emil/Emily’s bowl. “The Guggenheim Museum, shopping at Bloomingdale’s, lunch on the fly, and then I’ll take you back home. Sound okay?”

  No response.

  How did Leon do this? Or didn’t he?