“What are you supposed to do with it?” Janice asked when I showed her the Beauty and the Beast refrigerator magnet. She made her well-known and purposely exaggerated trembling notion. “It feels like some kind of … accusation.”
Suddenly it all became clear. “It’s Maddox’s way of giving me the finger just one last time,” I said. “Making me feel guilty for sending her back. But she was the one who made it impossible for her to become a part of our family.” I shook my head vehemently. “So, I’m just going to stop thinking about her.”
I wanted to do just that, but I couldn’t.
Why? Because for me, it had never been “to be or not to be, that is the question.” It was what a human being learned or failed to learn while on this earth. For that reason, I couldn’t help but wonder if Maddox had ever acknowledged in the least what I’d hoped to do for her by bringing her into my family, or if she had accepted the slightest responsibility for the fact that I’d had to abandon that effort. With Maddox dead, how could I pursue such an inquiry? Where could I look for clues? The answer was bleak but simple, and so the very next day I took the train up to the Bronx.
Maddox had lived in one of the older buildings on the Grand Concourse. I’d gotten the address from Detective O’Brien, who’d clearly had more important things on his mind, a girl who’d starved herself to death no longer of much note.
Theo was in the courtyard when I arrived. He was clearly surprised to see me.
“Have you rented out Maddox’s apartment yet?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Would you mind letting me see it?”
“No,” Theo answered casually.
He snapped a key from the dangling mass that hung on a metal ring from his belt. “They’re coming to clear out her stuff tomorrow.”
“Did she have a diary, anything like that? Letters?”
He shook his head. “Maddox didn’t have much of anything.”
This was certainly true. She’d lived sparely, to say the least. In fact, from the drab hand-me-down nature of the furnishings, I gathered that she’d picked up most of what she owned from the street. In the kitchen I found chipped plates. In the bedroom I found a mattress without a bed, along with a sprawl of sheets and towels. When she’d lived with us, she’d been something of a slob, and I could see that nothing in that part of her personality had changed.
“That day you told me about,” I said to Theo after my short visit to Maddox’s apartment, “the day we all went to see Beauty and the Beast. Did she say why she thought that was the happiest day of her life?”
Theo shook his head. “No, but it was clear that it meant a great deal to her, that day.”
I remembered “that day” very well, and on the subway back to Manhattan, I recalled it again and again.
It wasn’t just that day that returned to me. I also recalled the many difficult weeks that had preceded it, causing a steady erosion in my earlier confidence that Maddox would adjust well to New York, that she would succeed at Falcon Academy and, from there, go on to a fine college, her road to a happy life as free of obstacles as Lana’s.
At first, Maddox had been on her best behavior, though in ways that later struck me as transparently manipulative. She’d complimented Janice on her cooking, Lana on her hair, me on my skill at playing Monopoly. On the first day of school, she’d appeared eager to do well; she had even seemed proud of her uniform. “It makes me feel special,” she’d said that morning, and then she flashed her beaming smile, the one she used on all such occasions, as I was soon to learn, and that I’d taken to be genuine, though it wasn’t. But the dawning of this dark recognition had come slowly, and so, as I’d walked Maddox and Lana to their bus that first school day, then stood waving cheerfully as it pulled away, I’d felt certain that I now had two daughters, and that both of them were good.
Janice was still at work when I returned home after making my bleak tour of Maddox’s apartment. I was already on the balcony with my glass of wine when she came through the door. By then the sun had set, and so she found me sitting in the dark.
“I went up to the Bronx today,” I told her. “To Maddox’s apartment.”
She looked at me with considerable sympathy. “You shouldn’t feel like you failed her, Jack,” she said quietly.
With that, she turned and headed for the bedroom. From my place in the shadows, I could hear her undressing, kicking off her dressy heels, putting away her jewelry, and then the sound of her sandaled feet as she came back onto the balcony, now with her own glass of wine.
“So, why did you go there?” she asked.
I’d never told anyone about that day, and I saw no reason to do so now. “I was just curious, I suppose,” I said.
“About what?”
“About Maddox,” I answered, “Whether she ever …” I stopped because the words themselves seemed silly. Even so, I couldn’t find more precise ones. “… ever became a better person.”