Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

She wasn’t in school after that. She was gone.”
    “That fast?”
    He nodded.
    “You called her at home?”
    He nodded again. “I waited until that weekend, hoping every day she’d be in school, or come and meet me afterwards. Then I called her house, but her mother never said a word. She just hung up on me. I went by her house, too, rang the bell. Her mother said, ‘She’s not here. She doesn’t live here anymore.’ I didn’t know what to do. I never told a soul, not until now, and I didn’t...”
    His shoulders started to shake and then I heard the sobs. I stepped closer, putting my arms around him, letting him cry, tears he’d been wanting to cry for twelve years and counting. When he stopped crying, I stood back. He wiped his face with his hands, looking down, where the water was swirling around our feet, our feet sinking slowly into the wet sand, the bottoms of our pants cold and wet, pressing heavily against our ankles.
    “She must have been every bit as scared as I was.“
    “More,” I said. “She was the one who was going to have the baby.”
    “I always figured she must have had an abortion. When she didn’t come back, I pretty much wrote the whole thing off, wrote her off, until. . .“
    “Until you read my second letter.”
    He nodded. “Where did she go? What happened?”
    “The reason you couldn’t find her is that she got married,” I said, watching his face, watching him take it in.
    “They moved to the city. She was using another name, his name, so—”
    He turned to face me, grabbing my arms.
    “ Married? You mean I was right? You mean the kid’s not mine?”
    He let go of me. He was nodding now, not the kind of nodding that says he agreed with what I was saying, the kind that said he was nervous, angry, the kind that said if he were a volcano, it would be time to step back, get the hell out of the way.
    “All this time, all these years, because she disappeared and I couldn’t talk to her again, I figured I really fucked up. I really hurt her. And now it turns out I was right all along. There was someone else. Man, she had me fooled. Man, I could have been played for the worst sucker on the face—” I started shaking my head. It took him a moment or two to notice.
    “What?”
    “Not so,” I said.
    “The guy she married, he’s not—”
    “He’s not the genetic father, Jim. You are.”
    “How can you possibly know that? You don’t even know Sally. You never even met her.”
    “But I have met your daughter.” I reached out, not for his hand this time. I reached out and touched his face, the cheek that was twitching. It had been his eye earlier, when he’d walked into Dean’s, the eye that told me he was the man who’d called, the eye that told me why.
    He brushed my hand away. “It happens when I’m nervous. It was much worse when I was a kid. Now it’s only once in a . . .“ Getting it, understanding how I knew.
    “She’s got it, too?”
    “She does.”
    For what seemed like a long time, we stood there, Jim staring at me, me staring back, both of us rewriting history as we knew it, trying to get it right this time.
    Then I just nodded. And he did, too.
    “The man Sally married? He knew the baby wasn’t his?“
    “I’m sure he did.”
    “I don’t get it.”
    “I don’t either.”
    “Who is he? Who did she marry?”
    “Leon Spector.”
    “Who ... ? ” He looked away, then back at me, his face contorted. “Mr. Spector, the history teacher?”
    I nodded.
    “Mr. Spector married her. I. . .And they weren’t having an affair. Why would he?”
    “Maybe he saw the same thing you did, this beautiful creature sitting in his classroom every day, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. And now she was in trouble, bad trouble, and he could help.” He could be a hero, I thought. But things never work out the way you think they will.
    “So they got married?”
    “In Delaware. Parental permission isn’t needed there for pregnant teens.”
    Jim nodded, trying to absorb it all.
    “And Mr. Spector’s got her, my daughter?”
    I nodded.
    “And Sally’s gone?”
    “That’s right.”
    “You said she was in trouble, the kid?”
    “Come on,” I said, pulling on his sleeve. “Let’s sit down.” We walked back to where Jim had left his jacket. Sitting there on the sand, I told him about Madison, about her decision to stop talking, about the death of Dr. Bechman, about trying to find Sally in the hope that Madison would speak again. I told