Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

in a trip to Denmark or Kenya, no photos of Sally or any other family member, just the three of Madison and those weren’t in the living room. They were over the dining room table. I’d stopped there for a moment on the way out. Madison at two holding a small wooden giraffe. Madison at what looked like four reading a book, precocious like her mother. Madison at six holding up a drawing the way kids do, proffering favorite artifacts to the eye of the camera. Nothing more recent. Nothing, it seemed, since her mother had disappeared, as if she, Madison, had disappeared along with her.
    Dashiell and I took the stairs down to the Siegals’ huge kitchen. I checked the windows, he checked the odors. With nothing out of the ordinary there, I sent him on ahead to check all the rooms, following slowly behind him. Anything I found might need a glazier or perhaps a plumber. What he might find would be of more concern, and while I checked for signs of break-ins, too, Dashiell was the one who would actually find the intruder were there one. There was nothing to worry about this time. When I got to the top-floor bedrooms, I opened the back windows to give the place some air. I’d stop back and close them in a day or two.
    We always left by the back door, emerging into the light of the garden. Dashiell followed me into the cottage and up to my office on the second floor. I sat at the desk, thinking about Madison, about the tics that the late Dr. Eric Bechman was treating with Botox. I turned on the laptop and Googled Botox to see what I could find and discovered that Botox is not only used for wrinkles, but that it’s used medically as well, to mitigate the pain of migraine headaches and to stop the muscle spasms of Tourette’s syndrome. Leon hadn’t mentioned Tourette’s. He hadn’t mentioned any disease, just the fact that Madison suffered from tics. I wondered if it was Tourette’s, and if so, what the timing was in Madison’s diagnosis and her mother’s departure.
    Botox, or botulin toxin A, paralyzes muscles. That had been the point, of course, in injecting it into the muscles that controlled Madison’s eyelid. And even though it had caused ptosis, or drooping, rather than merely stopping the tics, Dr. Bechman, it seemed, had planned on injecting the other eyelid. Wasn’t that why there’d been a hypodermic needle there, already filled?
    It didn’t take a genius to figure out what that injection might do to any other muscle, including the heart. Even a kid, say a twelve-year-old, could figure that out.
    I thought about the little girl I’d met that day. She wasn’t the same little girl I’d seen in the three portraits her father had taken. The little girl in the pictures was serious, not smiling at the camera for Daddy. But the little girl I’d met in Washington Square Park was seething with anger, and from what I had already learned, with good reason.
    And what about her mother? Had Sally been angry, too, trapped by a pregnancy at fifteen? I thought about the girls who got pregnant when I was in high school, Amy Mandel and Claire something or other. Amy had married her boyfriend. They were both seventeen. They had a boy. I heard later that they got divorced and that Amy and the kid had moved back home, to her parents’ house. Claire disappeared for the rest of the term, and when she came back to school she was neither married nor did she have a child. Someone said she gave it up for adoption. Someone else said that since she was a devout Catholic, abortion had been out of the question. But apparently sex hadn’t been.
    I didn’t know of any other girls at school who were pregnant before graduation, but I’m sure there were a few others. And I didn’t know of any girls who were having sex with their teachers, something frowned upon by society in general and by the state of New York in particular. But we all knew things happened. Every girl in the school knew never to be caught alone with Mr. Margolies. We called him the Groper. And there were rumors about two of the gym teachers as well, Ms. Edison and Mr. Morris. Mr. Morris was married, but still the rumors flew that he liked boys. Ms. Edison looked like a truck driver and everyone said she lived with another woman. If you got her for gym, she’d pat you on the ass when it was your turn to play, or if you got a basket, ran faster than you had the day before or simply stood close enough for her to reach you.
    Leon said no one knew that Sally was