Janice looked puzzled. “Maddox was just a child when she left us, Jack,” she said. “It wasn’t like she was … formed.”
But she hadn’t just “left us,” to use Janice’s words. I’d sent her back, and I couldn’t help but feel that Maddox must have known why, must have understood what had become so clear to me that day.
It had come at the end of a harrowing eight months of difficulty, and even as I’d bought the tickets for Beauty and the Beast, I’d suspected that my options were becoming fewer and fewer with regard to Maddox staying with us.
There’d been the continually escalating problems at Falcon Academy, where Maddox had repeatedly made excuses for the accusations hurled against her. She’d never intended to steal Mary Logan’s fancy Mont Blanc pen; she had simply picked it up to give it a closer look, then mistakenly dropped it into her own backpack, rather than into Mary’s. And, after all, didn’t those two bags look similar, and hadn’t they been lying side-by-side in the school cafeteria?
Nor had she lied about how she’d gotten hold of Ms. Gilbreath’s answer sheet for an upcoming history test, because it really had fallen out of the teacher’s pocket, and she’d seen that happen and meant to give it back immediately, but she was already a long way down the hall, and so, well, wasn’t it only natural that she tucked it into the pocket of her skirt so that she could give it back to her at the end of the school day? And anyway …
Maddox had manufactured explanations for everything that came her way, most of them vaguely plausible, as she must have realized, a fact that increasingly worked against her in my mind. It wasn’t just that she lied and stole and cheated; it was that she did it so cleverly that, in every case, the charge against her emerged with that fabled Scottish verdict: “Not Proven.” For was it not possible that an answer sheet might fall from a teacher’s notebook … and all the rest? Listening to her exculpatory narratives, I began to feel like Gimpel the Fool in I. B. Singer’s famous story. Was I, like Gimpel, a man who endlessly could have the wool pulled over his eyes? In secret, did Maddox laugh at my credulity in the same cruel way that the villagers mocked Gimpel?
I’d been in the throes of just that kind of searing analysis of Maddox’s character as I’d stood in line at the box office. But there was an added element as well. Maddox and Lana had lately begun to quarrel. A room that once seemed plenty big enough for two young girls to share had become, over the past few months, an increasingly heated cauldron of mutual discontent. There were arguments over where things, particularly underwear, were dropped or left to dangle. Crumbs were an issue, as were empty bottles; Lana the neatnik, Maddox the slob. I’d endured shouting and crying from Lana, sullenness from Maddox, but at each boiling over I’d refused to intervene. “Work it out, you two,” I’d snapped at one point, and I expected them to do exactly that.
Then, suddenly, and for the first time, our home life was rocked by violence.
It was a slap, and it occurred as the culminating act of a long period of building animosity between Lana and Maddox. The shouting matches had devolved into sinister whispered asides at the breakfast and dinner tables, little digs that I simply refused to acknowledge but that, over time, produced a steady white noise of nasty banter. Gone were the days when Maddox complimented Lana’s hair or when Lana even remotely pretended that she considered Maddox her sister.
And yet, in many ways, as Janice sometimes pointed out, they were behaving exactly like a great many sisters do. My wife had never gotten along with her older sister, and I knew that the same could be said of countless other siblings. Still, I had wanted harmony in my household, and the fact that the relationship between Maddox and Lana had become anything but harmonious produced a steady ache in my mind. The truth is that, on that day, as I stood in line waiting to buy those tickets, I felt wounded, perhaps even a tad martyred by the conflict between Maddox and Lana. After all, was I not a man who had selflessly taken in another person’s child and who, rather than gaining a spiritual pat on the back for the effort, reaped a daily whirlwind that was tearing my home apart? And that, just the night before, had finally erupted in an act of violence?
Had I not heard that slap, I might never have known that it happened. But as soon as did I hear it, all notion vanished of my no longer intervening in the disintegration of my family life.
The door to their room was open. They were now sitting on their respective beds, Maddox with both feet on the floor, Lana lying facedown, her head pressed deep into her pillow.
When she raised it, I saw the fiery red mark that Maddox’s hand had left on her cheek.
“What happened?” I asked from my position in the doorway.
Neither girl answered.
“I won’t leave this room until I know what happened,” I said.