Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

fool’s errand, not wanting to tell him any more than I had to lest I get his hopes up only to dash them a moment later. I was going to wait until he went inside, but Leon stayed put, waiting for me to go. So I headed back the way I’d come, and when I got to Bank Street, I turned back to see if he was still standing there. The stoop was empty. I walked back that way, passing the entrance to Leon’s building and heading for the comer of Bethune Street. When I glanced up, I saw the light go off in Leon’s living room. I wondered what that meant. Surely, he wasn’t going to go to sleep at eight-twenty. Did he watch TV in the dark, I wondered, or listen to music with his eyes closed?
    Canned pears and Mop & Glo were on special at the D’Agostino’s on the opposite comer. I turned west and started watching the addresses, looking for the building where the C. Abele I’d found in the phone book lived, someone who might or might not be the person I hoped to find.
    The address in the phone book turned out to be a medium-sized brick apartment building. Like many buildings in the city, you could enter the vestibule without a key but not the lobby. I did so and checked the names on the bells. Again, it said C. Abele. There was one more place to check. The mailboxes were on the opposite wall. I looked for the one for 3F, then looked to see the name in the little slot. It said Charles Abele.
    Dash and I walked along the river before going home. The water was choppy, those small peaks everywhere, and it seemed to flow in stripes, every other one heading for the ocean, the ones in between going back from where they came. There was a good breeze, even better when we walked out onto one of the piers. I sat on a bench at the far end, putting the gym bag next to me, the Statue of Liberty overseeing the harbor to my left, New Jersey across the way. Looking downtown, I could only be aware of what was missing, a hole in the skyline where the Twin Towers used to stand.
    Dashiell lay down on the pier near my feet. We stayed for a while, listening to the water sloshing against the pilings, letting our thoughts drift. Then we headed home to open the gym bag once again and see if there was anything in what Leon had collected that would help me find his missing wife.

CHAPTER 7

    When I got home, I sat on the living room couch and dumped the gym bag out next to me. Then one by one I picked up the things Leon had packed and put them on the glass-topped red wagon that served as my coffee table. There was a Post-it in the high school yearbook indicating where Sally’s picture was. I opened that first and was going to prop it open with a stationery box that had been the last thing to tumble out of the bag. That, like the manila envelope, had rubber bands around it. I slid them off and took the lid off the box to see what was inside. Photographs. These looked like family shots, mostly old, mostly small, some cracked or missing comers. I thought they might have been slipped out of an album, maybe her mother’s, shortly before Sally moved out. I couldn’t be sure who was who, and there were no names written on the backs, but I thought I was looking at Sally’s parents, some aunts and uncles or family friends, a grandmother, from the shape of her face probably her maternal grandmother, and a couple of pictures of Sally as a little girl.
    Sally’s mother, or the woman I supposed was Sally’s mother—and would it have broken Leon’s hand to add a few Post-its with the names of these people?—was a tough-looking old bird. She looked to be one of those women who grit their teeth through life, expecting nothing good to happen, and thus not getting disappointed. She had a round, peasanty face. I couldn’t be sure about her hair color because the picture was black and white and not all that good, perhaps the work of a small point-and-shoot camera, if they had those then. She was stocky, grim-faced, and dressed without style. In the most recent of the pictures of her, she would have been no more than forty or forty-five, but she looked older than her years, the way Leon did, from grief, perhaps, or disappointment, or a sour, unloving upbringing.
    Sally’s father was blond, unless he had white hair by age thirty. It was from her father, clearly, that Sally had gotten her good looks. I picked up the yearbook, opened it to where Leon had put the Post-it and held one of the two pictures of the man I thought was Sally’s father next to the