Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

her face as still and blank as it was in the two pictures I’d seen. “Why now? Why after all these years?”
    “Because Madison’s in trouble,” I told her. And sitting there on the sand, I told some of what I knew, about Madison’s tics, about the Botox, about Dr. Bechman’s murder. She stopped me there.
    “She did that?” she asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Well, what did she say? Did she say she did it? Did she deny it?”
    “Madison doesn’t speak, Sally. She stopped talking shortly after you left.”
    “Not at all?”
    I shook my head. And then we sat for a while without speaking either.
    “There’s nothing physical? It’s not part of the tic disease?” Sally asked after a while.
    “No, a decision, they think.”
    “Does she write notes? Does she nod, shake her head? Does she try to...?”
    I shook my head again.
    “She’s a great kid,” I said, barely loud enough for her to hear me, even sitting just a foot apart. “But...”
    Sally waved a hand back and forth to stop me. “You can’t think that I’m going to go back.” She turned away, toward Roy, toward the ocean, shaking her head. “If you met them, if you met my husband and my daughter, you know that I can’t be anyone’s wife, anyone’s mother. You know I never was. Not ever. I don’t —”
    “Tell me how you got here, will you? Tell me what happened that night, the night you left home.”
    “Home,” she said. “If only.” She stood and walked toward the water’s edge, the way Jim had when the conversation had gotten more painful. I followed her, and we stood with our feet in the water, Roy off to the right hauling a frond he’d found around the sand.
    “You felt at home in school,” I offered.
    She shook her head. “Not really. It was reading I was after, losing myself in books.”
    And now here, I thought, looking out at the ocean.
    “But even that was hard, with Madison always wanting your attention,” I said. Sally didn’t respond, but Roy came back to stand near her, looking up at her face. “The night you left, had you planned it, had you planned to leave?” She shook her head. “I was feeling as if I was suffocating, a way I almost always felt then. I thought I’d die if I didn’t get outside and get some air.” She looked me right in the eye. “If I didn’t get away from them.”
    “Both of them?”
    She nodded. “Both of them. Leon is the sweetest man alive. What he did for me, what he tried to do, what he’s doing now...“
    “I met Jim,” I told her.
    “You are thorough.” Her foot stirred the water. “So there’s that, too. He’s raising her and she’s not even his.” She’s his now, I thought, saying nothing. Whatever his faults, he was committed to Madison, to his daughter, you had to give him that.
    “So you took Roy, so that you could go out for a walk?” Sally nodded. “Yes, because he’d ask if I’d just gone out.“
    “Where you were going?”
    “Why I was going. Like my mother. I was on a tight leash.”
    “But you were going to school,” I said. “I thought he—“
    “He encouraged that. Don’t get me wrong. He was . . .“ Sally shook her head. “It’s just that he...“ She looked at me again, and I could see the pain in her eyes. “He loved me too much,” she whispered, and I could feel the trap, a kid so young with a kid of her own who needed her attention, a husband who was the same way, pulling on her to give them something she just didn’t have.
    “I’d be reading and I’d look up and both of them would be watching me.”
    “So that night...”
    “I took Roy as an excuse.” The dog cocked his head when he heard his name. “I only planned to get some air, a few minutes to myself.”
    “And?”
    “Leon used to walk him in the meat market. The side streets are pretty deserted, so he was able to take the leash off, let Roy run. He’d find things in the street, an old work glove, a sock, a plastic soda bottle, human detritus that would be a treasure for a dog, and he’d toss his prize and run after it.”
    “Leon told you this?”
    She shook her head. “He took pictures. I knew it from the pictures.”
    “He didn’t talk much?”
    “No, he’s not a big talker. I would have thought he would be, because of his teaching, but he was a pretty quiet guy.”
    More so now, I thought.
    “But you had the story, in pictures.” The way Madison communicated, when she did at all.
    “So that’s the way I turned when I got out of the house.