“Yes, you said that. But you didn’t tell me how my name happened to come up.”
“She’d evidently mentioned you from time to time,” O’Brien explained with a polite smile. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” he added as he offered his hand. “I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course,” I said, and then I rose and headed for the door, sorry that Maddox’s life had ended so early and so badly but also reminding myself that, in regard to my finally pulling the plug on the effort I’d made to help her, she’d truly given me no choice.
At that thought, her image appeared vividly in my mind: a little girl in the rain, waiting for the taxi that would take us to the airport, the way she’d glanced back at me an hour or so later as she headed toward the boarding ramp, her lips silently mouthing the last word she would say to me: “Sorry.”
But sorry for what? I’d asked myself at that moment, for by then she’d had so much to confess.
“Did you see her body?”
I shook my head. “There was no need. The building super had already identified her.”
“Odd that your name came up at all,” Janice said. “That she’d … talked about you.”
My wife and I sat with our evening glasses of wine, peering down onto a Forty-Second Street that looked nothing at all as it had when Maddox lived with us. Night was falling, and below our twelfth-floor balcony, people were on their way to Broadway, among them a few families with small children, some no doubt headed for The Lion King.
“So, she came back to New York,” Janice said in that meditative way of hers, like a philosopher working with an idea. After a moment, a dark notion seemed to strike her. “Jack?”
I turned to face her.
“Do you think she ever … watched us?”
“Of course not,” I said, then took a sip of my wine and eased back, trying to relax. But I found my wife’s mention of the possibility that Maddox might, in fact, have stationed herself somewhere near the building where we’d all once lived, and where Janice and I still lived, surprisingly unnerving. Could it be that after all these years, she’d returned to New York with some sort of vengeful plan in mind? Had she never stopped thinking of how I’d sent her back? As her life spiraled downward, had she come to blame me for that very spiral?
“It’s sort of creepy to think of her slinking around the neighborhood,” Janice said.
“There’s no evidence she ever did that,” I said in a tone that made me sound convinced by this lack of evidence. And yet, I suddenly imagined Maddox watching me from some secret position, a ghostly, ghastly face hatefully staring at me from behind a potted palm.
Janice took a sip from her glass and softly closed her eyes. “Lana called, by the way. I told her about Maddox.”
Lana was now married, living on the Upper West Side. Our two grandsons went to the same fiercely expensive private school that both Lana and Maddox had attended; Lana with little difficulty, Maddox with a full repertoire of problems, accused of stealing, cheating, lying.
“Lana and I are having dinner while you’re in Houston,” I said.
Janice smiled. “A nice little father–daughter outing. Good for you.”
She drew in one of her long, peaceful breaths, a woman who’d had remarkably few worries in her life, who liked her job and got along well with our daughter, and whose marriage had been as unruffled as could have been expected.
With a wife like that, I decided, the less she knew about the one time all that had been jeopardized, the better.
“Lana took it harder than I thought she would,” Janice said. “She’d wanted a sister, remember? And, of course, she’d thought Maddox might be that sister.”
“Lana’s done fine as an only child,” I said, careful not to add a far darker truth, that my daughter was, in fact, lucky to be alive, that the year Maddox had lived with us had been, particularly for Lana, a year of living dangerously, indeed.
“We were very naive to have brought Maddox to live with us,” Janice said. “To think that we could take a little girl away from her mother, her neighborhood, her school, and that she’d simply adjust to all that.” Her gaze drifted over toward the Hudson. “How could we have expected her just to be grateful?”
This was true, as I well knew. During the first nine years of her life, Maddox had known nothing but hardship, uncertainty, disruption. How could we have expected her not to bring all that dreadful disequilibrium with her?
“You’re right, of course,” I said softly, draining my glass. And with that simple gesture, I tried to dismiss the notion that she’d come to New York with some psychopathic dream of striking at me from behind a curtain, smiling maniacally as she raised a long, sharp knife.