Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

to the wall of books opposite where I was sitting, taking a few books off a high shelf, pulling out one that had been lying flat against the back of the bookcase.
    “She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
    “Sally?”
    Leon nodded. “Sally,” he repeated, grateful, I thought, for any chance to say her name.
    He sat down on the edge of the daybed.
    “I couldn’t take my eyes off her.”
    “Where did you meet?” I asked.
    “I was her teacher,” he said.
    “College?”
    “No,” glancing down at the book in his lap, “high school.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    “She got pregnant so I married her.”
    “How old was she?”
    “Sixteen. Fifteen really. She was in the twelfth grade. She was, is, very bright and she’d been skipped a couple of times.”
    “Wasn’t there some kind of trouble about this, Leon, you getting a fifteen-year-old kid pregnant?”
    Leon looked at me for what seemed like a very long time before responding. “I left the school. I left teaching actually. That’s when I began...“He touched his camera, still hanging around his neck, lifting the strap over his head and putting the Leica down on the round wooden coffee table that sat between us.
    “And what about Sally? Did she get into any kind of trouble over this?”
    Leon shrugged. “We moved here,” he said. “I got her into another school for the rest of her senior year. She graduated with honors.”
    “How’d you manage to marry a fifteen-year-old?”
    “We drove down to Delaware. Pregnant teens can marry there without parental permission.”
    “So her parents...“
    “It was just her mother.“
    “And?”
    “It was bad.”
    “Did it ever get better?”
    Leon shook his head.
    “What? They never spoke again?”
    “No.”
    “So you’re saying Sally was fifteen when you got her pregnant and her mother disowned her?”
    “Something like that.”
    “So Sally’s mother never got to see her granddaughter?“
    “No.”
    “Not even after Sally left?”
    “She was gone by then. Cancer.”
    I shook my head. “You’d think she’d taken an Uzi and shot up the school. High school kids get pregnant. It’s not great, but it’s a fact of life.”
    Leon nodded.
    “Let me get this straight, okay? Sally was a senior in high school at the time?”
    “That’s right. She was in my honors history class.”
    I stopped for a minute to make some notes.
    “And you got married in Delaware when she was only fifteen.”
    “And a half.”
    I nodded.
    “She got to graduate,” he said. “That was good.”
    ‘Then no one knew?”
    “Only her mother.”
    “Did her mother get you into any kind of trouble, with the law?” I whispered, thinking for just the briefest of moments whom it was you’d look at first when a wife disappears, then pushing the thought from my mind, at least for now. If the police hadn’t suspected Leon, why should I?
    “No, not really. It, it got worked out.“
    “Because you married her?”
    Leon didn’t answer me.
    “It’s still considered statutory rape, isn’t it, when a girl is only fifteen?”
    He nodded.
    “But even with an irate mother, you weren’t charged?“
    “No, there were no charges.” Leon turned away, but not before I could see the pain in his face.
    “I see,” I said, putting the pen down. “Had you or she ever considered terminating the pregnancy?”
    “No, we never did. It never came up.”
    “And no one else knew?”
    He shook his head. “She made it all the way through graduation without showing. Madison was born in September.”
    “What about her girlfriends? Did she confide in any of them?”
    Leon shook his head again. “After we came back from Delaware and moved here, she kept pretty much to herself.“
    “She lost touch with her old friends?”
    He nodded. “She didn’t want any of them to know.“
    “What about new friends at the new school?”
    Leon turned the yearbook over, as if the answer to my question might be on the front cover. “No. She read a lot.“
    “So she’d be what now, twenty-eight?”
    Leon nodded. “June fifth,” he said. “She graduated at sixteen. She’s an extraordinary...”
    He looked toward the end of the living room where the little hall to Madison’s room began, before opening the yearbook to where there was a picture of Sally among the graduates. He put his finger next to it, but she was the only Sally on the page, Sally Bruce, it said, talented newcomer, and above