Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

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