Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

to find her, but there was no way, no way.”
    After that, he stopped talking. He checked the time, he tapped the table with his fingers, he bit his lower lip. “Maybe it was my fault. Who knows?” he said.
    “What was your fault?”
    “Her going away like that.The first time.”
    “How so?”
    He looked away, then got up and went to the counter again. I saw the woman with the red hair nodding, no expression on her face, you want this, fine, you want that, fine, why would she give a rap, standing on her feet all day for coolie wages?
    When he came back to the table, he picked up his glass, but he just moved it out of the way so that he could lean forward, elbows on the table, his face so close to mine I could feel his breath.
    “I thought I could do this,” whispering, “but I can’t. I just can’t.”
    “You’re not telling me you asked me to come all the way to the ass end of Brooklyn and now you have nothing to say, are you? You’re not—”
    “No, no, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry. I meant I can’t talk here. I asked for the sandwiches to go,” he said, drumming his fingers on the table, looking at everything but me.
    “Where do you want to go?” Wondering if he had a car outside, if he lived nearby, wondering how I should feel about either prospect.
    “The beach.Won’t be anyone there. Do you mind?”
    I shook my head. With nothing but sand and ocean, not another human being around, maybe Jim would find himself able to talk. Why not, no one but a stranger willing to listen, the inky water, the dark sky?
    Henry brought the sandwiches, grease already leaking out of the waxy paper they were wrapped in and onto the bag. Jim paid. Without talking we headed for the beach, walking under the boardwalk where you could barely see your hand in front of your face, nothing visible except the moonlit sand up ahead. We walked partway down the beach, far enough so that the sound of the ocean was loud enough to make my skin vibrate. Jim took off his jacket and spread it out for me to sit on, but I shook my head, sitting on the cold sand, slipping off my shoes and socks and burying my feet the way I did when I was a kid.
    “One day she was there, the next day she was gone,” he said, the grease-stained bag sitting on the sand in front of us, neither of us touching it. He shook his head. “No one knew where she went—or if they did, they wouldn’t say. It’s not that I didn’t ask.”
    He looked at me, his eyes wet, as if to say it was my turn now, my job to tell him what I knew, where Sally had gone back then.
    “You were lovers,” I said, a statement, not a question.
    He looked at me, a crease between his eyes, then back down at the sand, tracing a line with one finger. “Yeah, we were.”
    “How did it start?”
    His hands lay flat on the sand now, his face turned away from me.
    “I know she meant something to you, Jim. I think she meant a lot to you. Whatever it is you’re feeling now, that’s not what’s important. Whatever happened back then, it doesn’t really matter much anymore. What matters is this little girl, Sally’s little girl. What matters is finding Sally, if that’s even possible.”
    He turned to look at me. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean we have no way of knowing if she’s alive or dead.”
    “I need you to tell me what led up to Sally going missing back then. I need you to tell me everything you can, because something you tell me, some little thing, might be the very thing I need to point me in the right direction.” I touched his arm. “Will you do this for me?” I waited. “You did call me, Jim. You did ask me to come here. I know you want to talk about it. And I want nothing more than to listen. I didn’t come here to judge you or Sally. I came here to find help.“
    “What good will it do now, to tell you about her, about us, back in high school? It was a million years ago. It can’t have anything to do with what she did five years ago. It couldn’t possibly help.”
    “Do you have kids, Jim?”
    He looked surprised. “Yeah, I do.”
    “How many?”
    “Three.”
    I nodded. “How old are they?”
    “The boy is ten. The girls are six and four.”
    “This isn’t about us, about my job or your feelings. It’s about a little girl who’s twelve, though frankly, when I first met her, I thought she was only nine or ten. She’s small, like Sally. She looks just like her.”
    “She does?”
    I nodded.
    He looked away, toward the water. “I