Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

enough, it seemed to me, to put little JoAnn and her mother, the late doctor’s lover, into a building with an elevator or perhaps on the garden floor of a lovely old town house. By the time I’d climbed to the tiny top-floor apartment where Celia Daniels Abele lived with her daughter, I was thinking that perhaps the doctor hadn’t been quite as thrilled as he let on. But that was no secret to Celia, Bechman’s wife up in Larchmont having her teeth capped or doing Pilates with a private trainer or whatever it was you did in Larchmont, while she, Celia, had to carry her groceries, her baby and the stroller up all these stairs. Dashiell might have been the only one who found the trip to apartment 4B a total joy. He ran ahead, waiting for me at each landing with a manic smile, his mouth open, his tongue lolling out to one side, his eyes ablaze. Was he hoping for another flight to climb, then another still?
    “JoAnn would love a puppy,” Celia said, greeting me at the door with the teakettle in her hand. “But with all these stairs . . .“
    As if I hadn’t noticed.
    She headed back to her kitchen. Dashiell was already inside. I followed him into the small, sunny living room and sat down on the couch. While Celia was making tea and heating the croissants, I slid off my jacket, letting it just fall behind me. The living room had an exposed brick wall and a small, nonworking fireplace. The couch I was sitting on opened up to a bed. The thickness of the seat told me that. And with two apartments to a floor, there could only have been one bedroom in Celia’s apartment, the one that faced back, south, over the garden below and the one from the town house on the next block, back-to-back, like married couples who had stayed together but had nothing on earth to say to each other.
    There was carpeting on the floor, nubby and in shades of oatmeal, very much like the one in the apartment she’d moved out of, and the furniture was decent. Had he paid for everything, I wondered, the blue vase on the windowsill with the single rose in it, long past its prime, the round coffee table in front of the couch, the two chairs facing the couch, one with a stain on it that might have come from a bottle of milk that spilled sometime back or a sippy cup with a loose top more recently, the bookshelves, the small color TV set, the primitive wooden carving of a bird of some kind? In this neighborhood, even a small walk-up would have a hefty rent, $1,800 a month, maybe more. If Celia hadn’t been working all these years, how had Bechman come up with all this money without anyone knowing about it? That was the real question.
    She came in with a tray and set it down on the coffee table, her blonde hair, cut to chin length, falling forward as she bent, covering her pretty face, her pale freckled skin, her large, sad eyes.
    “She was never what you’d call a happy child,” she said, as if I’d asked her to tell me about Madison a minute ago rather than the night before on the phone. “She was odd, very bright, her own little person, you might say. Even all those years ago, you knew there was something different about her, something out of the ordinary.”
    “In a nice way?” Her ex had said she’d liked Madison, but I didn’t want to bring him into the conversation just yet, if at all.
    “Oh, yes, for me, at least. I found her, well, compelling. You could have a conversation with her, at seven. Imagine that. And she’d notice things none of the other kids would notice, the fact that one of the doorways was raised, you’d have to step up to get into one of the offices or the fact that a light would blink when the phone rang. She had just as much reason to be scared as all of Eric’s other patients, but she never seemed scared. She just seemed, well, curious, interested.”
    “Did she socialize with the other kids?”
    Celia thought. “No. Not really. Only with adults. Sometimes she’d get into a conversation with me, sometimes with one of the parents, almost never with the kids. Or she’d take a book and read aloud to one of the toys, as if it were real.“
    “Did she bring the turtle?”
    “I heard about that.” She shook her head, a slight smile on her lips but not in her eyes. “The turtle came later, after.“
    “After her diagnosis? Or after her mother disappeared?“
    “Both. And also after I had left my job.”
    “Had she stopped talking while you were still there?” Celia nodded. “Poor thing,” she said.