And so, yes, I tried to dismiss my own quavering dread as a paranoid response to a young woman who’d no doubt come to New York because she was at the end of her tether, and the city offered itself as some sort of deranged answer to a life that had obviously become increasingly disordered. I tried to position my memory of her as simply a distressing episode in all of our lives, with repeated visits to Falcon Academy, always followed by stern warnings to Maddox that if she didn’t “clean up her act,” she would almost certainly be expelled. “Do you want that?” I’d asked after one of these lectures. She’d only shrugged. “I just cause trouble,” she said. And God knows she had, and would no doubt have caused more, a fact I remained quite certain about.
And so, yes, I might well have put her out of my mind at the end of that short yet disquieting conversation with Janice that evening as the sun set over the Hudson, my memory of Maddox destined to become increasingly distant until she was but one of that great body of unpleasant memories each of us accumulates as we move through life.
Then, out of the blue, a little envelope arrived. It had come from the Bronx, and inside I found a note that read: Maddox wanted you to have something. It was signed by someone named Theo, who offered to deliver whatever Maddox had left me. If I wanted to “know more,” I was to call this Theo and arrange a meeting.
I met him in a neighborhood wine bar three days later, and I have to admit that I’d expected one of those guys who muscled up in prison gyms, cut his initials in his hair, or had enough studs in his lips and tongue and eyebrows to set off airport metal detectors. Such had been my vision of the criminal sort toward which Maddox would have gravitated, she forever the Bonnie of some misbegotten Clyde. Instead, I found myself talking to a well-spoken young man whose tone was quietly informative.
“Maddox was a tenant in my building,” he told me after I’d identified myself.
“You’re the super who found her?”
“No, I own the building,” Theo said.
For a moment, I wondered if I was about to be hit up for Maddox’s unpaid rent.
“Sometimes Maddox and I talked,” he said. “She usually didn’t have much to say, but a few times, when she was in the hallway or walking through the courtyard, I’d stop to chat.” He paused before adding: “She’d paid her rent a few months in advance and told the super that she was going away for a while. He assumed she’d done exactly that, just gone away for a while, so he didn’t think anything of it when he stopped seeing her around.”
“She planned it, you mean,” I said. “Her death.”
“It seems that way,” Theo answered.
So, I thought, she’d murdered someone at last.
Theo placed a refrigerator magnet on the table and slid it over to me. “This is what she wanted you to have.”
“Beauty and the Beast,” I said quietly, surprised that Maddox had held on to such a relic—and certainly surprised that, for some bizarre reason, she’d wanted me to have it. “I took her and my daughter to that show.”
“I know,” Theo said. “It was the happiest day of Maddox’s life. She remembered how you bought the magnet for her and put it in her hand and curled her fingers around it. It was tender, the way you did it, she said, very loving.”
I gave the magnet a quick glance but didn’t touch it. “Obviously, she told you that she lived with us a while.”
He nodded.
“Unfortunately, I had to send her back to her mother,” I told him bluntly, picking up the magnet and turning it slowly in my fingers. “She told lies,” I added. “She cheated on tests, or, at least, she tried to. She stole.” And that was not the worst of it, I thought.
All this appeared to surprise Theo, so I suspected he’d been taken in by Maddox, fallen for whatever character she’d created in order to manipulate him. She’d tried to do the same with me, but by then I’d seen how dangerous she was and had acted accordingly.
“And so I sent her back,” I said. “I’m sure that’s what she wanted all along.”
Theo was silent for a moment before he said, “No, she wanted to stay.”
Perhaps at the very end, Maddox truly had wanted to stay with us, I thought. But if so, that only meant she’d have done whatever she had to do to accomplish that goal. In fact, I decided, that might well have been the reason she’d done what she’d done that night in the subway station.
“She was capable of anything,” I told Theo resolutely.
At that point, I actually considered telling Theo the whole story, but then found that I couldn’t.
After a moment, Theo nodded toward the refrigerator magnet. “Anyway,” he said, “It’s yours now.”