Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

tom-up bread. She may have thought she was feeding birds and squirrels, but much of the food would end up nourishing the park’s rather healthy rat population. New York City could boast not only some of the fattest squirrels on the face of the earth, but also rats as big as Hummers. On the bottom row, there was Madison emerging from Dr. Bechman’s office.
    Even when Leon went with her, he apparently only went as far as the door.
    I made a cup of tea, thought about offering something to Madison, then changed my mind. Leon had said there were things of Sally’s here. Why would he have told me that if he hadn’t meant for me to look at them?
    I checked out the two hall closets, looking for anything that might have belonged to her, not sure if Madison had taken all of Sally’s clothes into her room. The coat closet was crammed full of clothes and boots and hats, scarves, gloves and rain gear that seemed to belong to a grown man and a little girl. I wondered how big Sally had been, thinking of the shirt Madison had worn the first time I saw her. When I looked underneath the coats, at Leon’s winter boots and Madison’s, the closet seemed to go farther back than I originally thought. I put my hands in the middle of the clothes and pushed both sides apart as far as I could. There in the back, along with a few parkas for the coldest weather, was a jean jacket and a long black coat. I took them out. Too big for Madison. Not the right gender for Leon. I put the jacket on the back of Leon’s chair and held up the coat with one hand, slipping my hand into the pockets with my other. Tissues, black leather gloves, thirty-six cents in change. The label was missing so there was no size. I slipped the coat on, to see how big Sally had been, one more tiny piece of information that would probably get me nowhere. The coat was snug in the shoulders and it was too short. So Sally was smaller than me, and Madison was built more like her mother than her father.
    I never heard the door open, but when I turned around, Madison was standing at the end of the dining area, staring at me wearing her mother’s coat. Before I had the chance to say anything, she’d wheeled around and returned to her room. And in case I hadn’t heard the door the first time, she slammed it, opened it and slammed it shut a second time. Who said this kid didn’t communicate?
    Good job, I told myself. If there’d been a chance in hell I could get through to this kid, I’d just blown it. I took off the coat and hung it back where it had been. Then I reached for the jean jacket. It was a washed-out blue with silver studs around the collar and along the tops of the patch pockets. There was nothing in the left-hand pocket, a ten-dollar bill in the right. I left that where I’d found it. Then I walked down the hall to Madison’s room and knocked. When she didn’t answer, I opened the door.
    Madison was sitting on the bed. If I expected her to look outraged that I’d invaded her privacy, that wasn’t the case. Her face, at least whatever showed around her dark glasses, was, like her mother’s face in her yearbook portrait, beautifully blank. Whatever harm I might have caused had already been safely stowed away.
    “Look, Madison,” I said, standing at the foot of her bed, the jacket over my right arm, “your father told you why he hired me, right? Well, I’m having a little trouble here. I can’t even begin to try to look for your mother without knowing anything about her. And your father’s not much more forthcoming than you are.”
    I waited a moment and then went on.
    “I found her old coat in the back of the hall closet. I bet your father forgot it was even there. My guess is that she used one of the closets in here, because there’s no way two adults could fit all their clothes in the two small closets out there. So you probably never went looking out there, am I right?
    “Anyway, the reason I tried on the coat is that I wanted to know Sally’s size. How am I supposed to find her if I don’t know how tall she is or if she’s fat or skinny? I don’t know if she likes hot climates or cold, if she bowls, ice-skates, skydives, rides a bike. I normally wouldn’t talk to a kid like this, but under the circumstances...“ I stopped again to take a good look at Madison, her blonde bangs half under and half over her dark glasses, the length of her hair uneven, her nails too long not because it was a chosen style but because they hadn’t been cut,