She’d been found in the dilapidated Bronx apartment where she’d lived for the past seventeen months. It was a basement apartment and had only a couple small windows, but she’d made it darker still by drawing the curtains. It was so dim inside that the first cop to arrive had stumbled about, looking for a light switch. He’d finally found one only to discover that she’d unscrewed all the light bulbs, even the ones in the ceiling and the fluorescent ones on either side of the bathroom mirror. Neighbors later told police that they hadn’t seen a single sliver of light coming from her apartment for well over a month. It was as if the terrible capacity for destruction that I’d glimpsed in her so many years before had at last grown strong enough to consume her entirely.
A Detective O’Brien had related the grim details over the phone, the deteriorated condition of her body being the most graphic, the fact that the smell had alerted the neighbors. Then he’d asked me to meet him at the police station nearest my home. “Just following standard procedure,” he’d assured me, “Nothing to worry about.”
We’d agreed on a time and date, and so now here I was, dealing with Maddox again, just as I’d done so often before.
“So, tell me, what was your relationship with this young woman?” Detective O’Brien asked immediately after we’d exchanged greetings and I’d taken a seat in the metal chair beside his desk. His tone was casual enough, but there was an implication of something illicit in the word relationship.
“We took her in when she was a little girl,” I told him.
“How little?”
“She was ten when she came to live with us.”
That had been twenty-four years earlier. My family and I had lived in Hell’s Kitchen when there’d still been some hell left in it; sex shops and hot-sheet hotels, burnt-out prostitutes offering themselves on the corner of Forty-Sixth and Eighth. Now it was all theaters and restaurants, chartered buses unloading well-heeled senior citizens from Connecticut and New Jersey. Once it had been a neighborhood, bad though it was. Now it was an attraction.
“Us?” Detective O’Brien asked, still with a hint of probing for something unseemly. Had I abused this child? Is that why she’d embraced the darkness? Luckily, I knew that nothing could be further from the truth.
“With my wife and me, and our daughter Lana, who was just a year younger than Maddox,” I told him. “She stayed with us for almost a year. We’d planned for her to stay with us indefinitely. Lana had always wanted a sister. But as it turned out, we just weren’t prepared to keep a girl like that.”
“Like what?”
I avoided the word that occurred to me: dangerous.
“Difficult,” I said. “Very difficult.”
And so I’d sent her back to her single mother and her riotous older brother, hardly giving her a thought since. But now this bad penny had returned, spectacularly.
“How did she come to live with you in the first place?” O’Brien asked.
“Her mother was an old friend of ours,” I answered. “So was her father, but he died when Maddox was two years old. Anyway, her mother had lost her job. We were doing well, my wife and I, so we offered to bring Maddox to New York, pay for the private school our daughter also attended. The hope was to give her a better life.”
O’Brien’s expression said everything: But instead …
But instead, Maddox had ended up in the morgue.
“Did you know she was in New York?” the detective asked.
I shook my head. “Her mother remarried and moved to California. After that, we lost touch. The last I heard, Maddox was in the Midwest somewhere. After that, we had no idea where she was or what she was doing. What was she doing, by the way?”
“She’d been working as a cashier at a diner on Gun Hill Road,” O’Brien told me.
“Maddox was very smart,” I said. “She could have … done anything.”
The detective’s eyes told me that he’d heard a story like this one before; a smart kid who’d gotten a great chance but blown it.
I couldn’t keep from asking the question. “How did she die? On the phone, you just said her body had been found.”
“From the looks of it, malnutrition,” O’Brien answered. “No sign of drugs or any kind of violence.” He asked a few more questions, wanted to know if I’d heard from Maddox over the last few months, whether I knew the whereabouts of any family members, questions he called “routine.” I answered him truthfully, of course, and he appeared to accept my answers.
After a few minutes, he got to his feet. “Well, thanks for coming in, Mr. Gordon,” he said. “Like I said when I asked you to come down to the station, it’s just that your name came up during the course of the investigation.”
“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.
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.”
“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.”
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.
I walked over to Lana’s bed, sat down on it, and lifted her face to see the mark more clearly.
Then I stared hotly at Maddox. “We do not strike each other in this family,” I snapped. “Do you understand me?”
Maddox nodded silently.
“We do not!” I cried.
Maddox whispered something I couldn’t understand. Her head was down. She wouldn’t look at me.
“No matter what the reason,” I added angrily.
She lifted her head. Her eyes were glistening. “I mess everything up,” she said softly.
Suddenly, I found that I couldn’t buy one bit of it, neither her tears nor her weepy self-accusation, which, however vaguely, had the ring of an apology. No, I decided, you have fooled me all along, and with that grim realization, I abruptly believed that all the accusations against her were true, all her explanations false. She had played me as a con artist plays a mark. I was her pet fool.
And yet, despite all that, I knew I would not send her back.
No, there had to be a way to help Maddox.
Besides, there was plenty of time.
And so, in an effort to reset everything, I decided that we should all take a deep breath, give it another go, do something together, something that spoke of sweetness and kindness and the power of a human being to look beyond outward appearances.
That was when I thought of Beauty and the Beast.
Lana was already seated at a small corner table when I arrived at the restaurant. She was dressed to the nines, as usual, with every hair in place. Her life had gone very well. She had a good job and a good marriage, with two nice little boys who appeared to adore their parents. From childhood down to this very moment, I told myself as I sat down, she’d gotten everything she’d ever wanted.
Except a sister.
It was a thought that immediately brought me back to Maddox, to how right I’d been in removing her from the circle of our family.
I brought up none of this latest news, of course, and we chatted about the usual topics during our dinner: how her work was going, how the boys were doing, upcoming plans of one sort or another. We’d already ordered our end-of-meal coffees when she said, “Mom told me you’ve been thinking about Maddox.”
I nodded. “I suppose I have.”
“Me, too,” Lana said. “Especially that day.”
“The day we went to Beauty and the Beast?” I asked.
Lana looked puzzled. “Why would that day be special?”
I shrugged. “Okay, what day do you mean, then?”
“The day Maddox hit me.”
“Oh,” I said. “That day.”
“The thing is, I provoked her,” Lana said. “I was just a kid, and kids can be cruel. I see it in the boys. The things they say to each other.” Tentatively, I asked, “What did you say to her?”
“I told her that she was here because nobody wanted her,” Lana said. “Her mother didn’t want her. Her brother didn’t want her. I told her that even you didn’t want her.” She paused and then added, “That’s when she slapped me.” She lifted a slow, ghostly hand to that long vanished wound. “And I deserved it.”
I wondered if Lana had come to blame herself for my decision to send back Maddox. If so, she couldn’t have been more wrong. It wasn’t anything Lana had done that decided the issue. The blame had always lain with Maddox.
“Maddox had to go,” I said starkly, still too appalled by the evil I’d seen in the subway station to reveal what had truly convinced me to send Maddox back.
The thing that struck me as most odd now, while Lana sipped nonchalantly at her coffee, was the sweetness that had preceded that terrible moment. Beauty and the Beast had come to its heartbreaking conclusion, and, along with the rest of the audience, we were on our way out of the theater, Lana on my right, Maddox on my left. As we approached the front doors, Lana suddenly bolted ahead to where items associated with the show were on sale. Maddox, however, remained at my side.
“I liked it,” she said softly, and with those words, she took my hand in hers and held it tenderly. “Thank you.”
I smiled. “You’re welcome,” I said as my heart softened toward her, and I once again harbored the hope that all would be well. Lifted by that desire, I stepped over to the counter and bought two refrigerator magnets. I gave one to Lana, who seemed much more interested in the T-shirts, and the other one to Maddox.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “I will always keep it.”
She turned toward a couple who were exiting the theater. They had a little girl in tow, each holding on to one of the child’s hands.
“That’s what I want,” she said in that odd way she sometimes said things, looking off into the middle distance, speaking, as it seemed, only to herself. “I want to be an only child.”
By then, Lana had made her way to the theater’s front door. “Can we go to Jake’s, Dad?” she asked when we reached her.
Jake’s was a pizza place in the Village where we tended to have dinner on those days that we found ourselves downtown and didn’t want to rush home to cook.
I looked at Maddox.
“Jake’s okay with you?” I asked happily.
She smiled that sweet smile of hers. “Sure” was all she said.
The subway was only a few blocks away. We walked to it amid the usual Times Square crowd, at that time a curious mixture of vaguely criminal low-life and dazzled tourists.
On the train, I sat with Maddox on one side and Lana on the other, a formation that continued as we exited the train and made our way to the restaurant. During the meal, Lana spoke in a very animated way about Beauty and the Beast, while Maddox remained quiet, eating her slice of pizza slowly, sipping her drink slowly, her gaze curiously inward and intense, like one hatching a plot.
We were done within half an hour. The restaurant was near Washington Square, and so, before returning home, we strolled briefly in the park. Lana glanced up as we passed under the arch, but Maddox stared straight ahead in the same inward and intense way I’d noticed at the restaurant.
“You okay?” I asked as we left the park and headed for the subway.
Again, she offered me her sweet smile. “I’m fine,” she said.
We descended the stairs, then one by one we each went through the turnstiles and headed down the long ramp that led to the uptown trains. We were about halfway down when I heard the distant rumble of our train heading into the station. “Come on, girls,” I said and instinctively bolted ahead, moving more quickly than I thought, as I realized when I turned to look behind me.
The train had not yet reached the station, but I could see its light as it emerged from the dark tunnel. On the platform, perhaps ten yards behind me, both Lana and Maddox were running. Lana was skirting the edge of the platform, with Maddox to her left, though only by a few inches. I looked at the train, then back at the girls, and suddenly I saw Maddox glance over her shoulder. She must have seen the train barreling out of the tunnel, for then she faced forward again and, at that instant, leaned to her left, bumping her shoulder against Lana’s so that Lana briefly stumbled toward the pit before regaining her footing, as if by miracle.
I heard Maddox’s voice in my mind: to be an only child.
The little girl who’d been the object of Maddox’s murderous intent was now a grown woman with children of her own, and I had only to look across the table to reassure myself that I’d done the right thing in sending Maddox away. To have done otherwise would have put Lana at risk. Other children had done dreadful things, after all, and that searing episode in the subway station convinced me that Maddox was capable of such evil, too. She had declared what she’d wanted most in life and then ruthlessly attempted to achieve it. I had no way of knowing if she would make another attempt, but it was a chance I wasn’t willing to take, especially since the intended victim was my own daughter.
“Maddox had to go,” I repeated now.
Lana didn’t argue the point. “I remember the day you took her to the airport,” she said. “It was raining, and she was wearing that sad little raincoat she’d brought with her from the South.” She looked at me. “Remember? The one with the hood.”
I nodded. “That coat made her look even more sinister,” I said dryly.
Lana looked at me quizzically. “Sinister? That’s not a word I would use to describe Maddox.”
“What word would you use?” I asked.
“Damaged,” Lana answered. “I would say that Maddox was damaged by life.”
“Perhaps so,” I said, “but Maddox had done some damage of her own.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that she stole an answer sheet at Falcon Academy,” I said. “One of her classmates saw her.”
“You mean Jesse Traylor?” Lana laughed. “He just got caught himself. Cheating on his taxes.” She took a sip from her cup. “Jesse was the school apple-polisher, a tattletale who would have done anything to ingratiate himself with the headmaster.”
Cautiously, I said, “Even lie about Maddox?”
“He’d have lied about anyone,” Lana said. She saw the disturbance her answer caused me. “What’s the matter, Dad?”
I leaned forward. “Did he lie about Maddox?”
Lana shrugged. “I don’t know.” She glanced toward the street where two little girls stood outside a theater. “She apologized, by the way,” she said. “Maddox, I mean. For slapping me. Not a spoken apology.” She looked as if she were enjoying a sweet memory. “But I knew what she meant when she did it.”
“Did what?” I asked.
“Nudged me,” Lana answered. “It was a way we had of telling each other that we were sorry and wanted to be sisters again.” She smoothed a wrinkle from her otherwise perfectly pressed sleeve. “After we had pizza at Jake’s,” she said. “In the subway. We were running for the train, and Maddox gave me that hostile look she used when she was joking with me, and then she just nudged me, and that was her way of saying that she was sorry for hitting me, and that she knew I was sorry for what I’d said to her.” She looked at me softly. “And since we were both sorry, things were going to be okay.”
With those words, Lana finished her coffee. “Anyway, it’s quite sad what happened to Maddox.” She folded her napkin and placed it primly beside her plate. “The way she never got her balance after she left us.” She smiled. “And so she just … finally … stumbled into the pit.”
“Into the pit,” I repeated softly.
Shortly after that, we parted, Lana returning to her husband and children, I back to my apartment, where, with Janice out of town, I would spend the next few days alone.
I passed most of that time on the balcony, looking down at the tamed streets of Hell’s Kitchen, my attention forever drawn to families moving cheerfully toward the glittering lights of Times Square, fathers and mothers with their children in tow, guiding them, as best they could, through the shifting maze. I saw Maddox in every tiny face, remembered the tender touch of her small hand in mine, her quiet “Thank you,” for the little refrigerator magnet she had returned to me; the last bit of kindness I’d shown before sending her out of our lives forever.
Had she been a liar, a cheat, a thief? I don’t know. Had I completely misunderstood the little nudge she’d given Lana that day as the two girls raced for the train? Again, I don’t know. What children perceive and remember years later can be so different from what adults know … or think they know. Perhaps she’d already been doomed to live as she did after she left us, and to die as she did in that bleak, unlighted space. Or perhaps not. I couldn’t say. I knew only that for me, as for all parents, the art of controlling damage is one we practice in the dark.
THOMAS H. COOK is the international-award-winning author of more than thirty books. He has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award eight times in five different categories, and his novel The Chatham School Affair won the Best Novel Award in 1996. He has twice won the Swedish Academy of Detection’s Martin Beck Award, the only novelist ever to have done so. His short story “Fatherhood” won the Herodotus Prize for best historical short story. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages.