Maddie. Has my mother beaten her, ever? My God. I close my eyes. From time to time Maddie gets bruises, but she told me they were from falls. And first grade has been so difficult for her; her first year in my mother’s care. It all fits, and it sickens me. Would my mother really hit Maddie? It would be beyond belief, except that she apparently hit me, too.
When I was Maddie’s age.
What’s been going on in my own house? Maddie knows, but I have to pick the right time to ask her. It preoccupies me as I cook and serve dinner. Afterward, I clean up the dishes and let Bernice slobber over every plate, a silent payback.
Later, at bathtime, Maddie relaxes in a full tub of Mr. Bubble. She makes a blue rubber shark swim among plastic goldfish, hidden beneath the sudsy meringue. I sit down on the lid of the toilet, watching her. Now might be the right time.
“How’s that water, button?” I say.
“Want to see a tornado?”
“A tornado? Sure.”
She grabs her nose and turns over once in the tub. The water swirls around her and she comes up smiling, wet hair stuck in tendrils to her cheeks and chin. “Did you see?”
“Amazing.”
She looks askance. “You weren’t watching.”
“I was watching, it was cool. Like a whirlpool, right?”
She sinks into the bubbles up to her chin.
“So Mads,” I begin, as casually as possible, “what do you and Grandma do in the afternoons?” The shark plunges into a swell and Maddie doesn’t answer. Maybe she’s avoiding it; maybe it’s a child’s typical inattentiveness to adults. Or hers to me. “Mads?”
“What?”
“Do you have fun with Grandma while I’m at work?” Dumb. A leading question.
She nods and the shark leaps across her tummy.
“What do you guys do?”
“Watch TV.”
I’m relieved at this answer for the first time ever. “Cartoons?”
She nods at the shark, who nods back at her.
“Tapes, too?”
“Yeah. Yes.”
“Don’t you ever just play?”
She nods again. The shark nods, too.
“What do you play?”
“Can I have Madeline in the tub?”
“Of course not, she’ll get wet,” I say reflexively, then think again. Maybe Maddie can say something through Madeline that she can’t say to me directly. “I’ll let you this time, but not in the water, okay?”
“Yeah!” The shark dances for joy as I fetch the doll from Maddie’s room and bring it back. I sit cross-legged on the rag rug beside the tub.
“Hey, Maddie,” I make the doll say.
“Hey, Madeline,” Maddie says cheerily. She abandons the rubber shark.
“What games do you play with your grandma?” the doll says. “Gimme the dirt.”
Maddie giggles. “What’s ‘the dirt’ mean?”
“The gossip. The news. The real truth. I want to know everything.” The doll’s yellow felt hat bobs up and down.
Maddie sits up in the bathtub, focusing on the doll as if she were real. “We play lid,” she says.
“What’s lid?”
“It’s a game, with a ball and a lid.”
“That sounds boring.”
Two slick knees pop through the bubbles; she wraps her arms around them. “She chases me around when she loses.”
“My grandma does that, too. She’s a bad sport. I hate her.”
“Does she pinch you? My grandma pinches me.”
I feel my heart skip a beat. “Pinches you?”
She nods. “She chases me around and pinches my butt.”
“Hard?”
She shakes her head. “Just for fun. When she loses. Anyway, she doesn’t catch me ever because I’m too fast. I’m faster than the boys. Do you like boys?”
“No, I hate them more than grandmas. Does your grandma ever get mad at you and yell?”
She looks blank.
“Tell me!” the doll screeches. “Tell me, you little brat! Tell me everything!”
She giggles and unsticks a wet strand of hair from her cheek. “It’s a secret,” she whispers, growing serious.
“A secret?”
“A real secret. Something Mommy doesn’t even know.” Her blue eyes glitter.
“A secret from Mommy?”
“Grandma said she would never find out.”
I feel sick inside. “I know. Mommy’s so stupid. Tell me.”
“I can’t. Grandma said Mommy would be mad if she found out and yell at me.”
“I bet she wouldn’t.” The doll flops up and down in frustration, cloth mitts falling at her side.
“Uh-huh,” she says emphatically. “My mom yells a lot. She says it’s because she has to do everything and I don’t help.”
Guilt washes over me like a tsunami. “My mom yells all the time, too. She’s a jerk. A big, fat, stupid jerk.”
Maddie covers her face, laughing. “My mom yells all the time. She yells when I don’t put my clothes in the hamper and she has to pick them up. She bends over twenty times a day. If she had a nickel for every time she bends over she’d be rich.”
“She sounds like a big fat jerk, too.”
“But know what I do?”
“What?”
“I go in the closet and take off my clothes.”
“What? Why do you do that?”
“That’s where the hamper basket is. I stand in the basket and my clothes fall right in.” She smiles and so do I; I picture her standing in the closet in a Rubbermaid bin.
“You’re pretty smart, you know that?”
“I am. Really.” She rubs her nose with the palm of her hand.
“Do you love me?” the doll asks.
Maddie reaches over and arranges a strand of the doll’s too-red yarn hair. “Yeah.”
“Then tell me your secret!” the doll explodes, jumping around frantically. “RIGHT NOW!”
“All right, all right! Calm down!” she says, a tenuous cross between laughter and true concern. “The secret is that Grandma smokes.”
“What?”
“On the porch. During Tom and Jerry. My mom thinks she doesn’t smoke when she baby-sits me but she really does.”
“That’s the secret?” I try not to sound disappointed, although I didn’t know my mother did this. She’d told me, with an absolute straight face, that she holds off for three hours. A good liar, from years of practice.
“Isn’t it a good secret?”
“Yep. You got any other secrets for me?”
Maddie looks up, thinking. “Nope.”
“I’ll tell you one.”
“Okay.” She straightens out her knees in the tub.
“My mom gets so mad sometimes that she hits me. Like this.” I squeeze the doll and bounce her head off the ledge of the tub. “Like this and this. Owww!”
“Really?” Maddie’s eyes grow wide and she looks at the doll for confirmation. I make the doll nod.
“Really. It hurts.”
“That’s mean.”
“I know. She does it when she’s mad or when she drinks.”
“Drinks?”
“Like a beer. Like wine or whiskey. Does your mommy do that?”
“No.” Maddie shakes her head, mystified. “She just yells.”
“Does your grandma?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“Do you ever see her drink anything?”
“Water.”
“No whiskey? It’s yellow.”
“No. She just smokes. It comes out her nose like a dragon.”
“Yuck.”
She nods gravely. “Yuck.”
I feel my pulse return to normal. So the unimaginable didn’t happen, and my daughter is safe in her grandmother’s care. It’s just the past I have to deal with. My past.
I’ll get to it right after I’m finished with the present.
22
It’s
Sunday, and Bernice, Ricki, and I sit on the bottom row of the hard steel bleachers, watching Ricki’s favorite son play soccer. Ricki’s eyes remain glued to Jared while I tell her how Shake and Bake turned out to be Winn and about my father. She looks at me only when I tell her about the hit on the head in front of the courthouse, but I think that was because Jared took a water break.
“Way to go, Jared!” she shouts, cupping her hands to her mouth. “Did you see that? He almost scored!”
“He’s the messiah. I’m convinced.”
“Hey, watch it.”
I look around the lush suburban field almost reflexively; my paranoia hasn’t diminished, even though the Italian stalking my daughter turned out to be her grandfather. Apparently, there’s nothing to be worried about here. Bryn Mawr, where Ricki lives, is one of the wealthiest communities on the Main Line. No killers here, only color-coordinated parents watching their kids kick the shit out of each other. I’m safe as long as I stay off the field.
“Are you gonna see your father again?” Ricki asks.
“Not if I can help it.”
“You should, you know. I think it’s very healthy.”
“Give me a break, Rick. It’s a horror show.”
The wind blows a strand of hair into her lipstick and she picks it out. “I like that he came forward and found you. He’s dealing with it, or trying to. Credit where credit is due.”
“Please. The guy looks like Elvis. On the stamp they didn’t pick.”
“You should talk to your mother about what happened when you were little.”
“Another winner. Masquerading as Rose Kennedy. What a joke.”
She watches Jared kick the ball to his teammate. “Nice pass, honey!” She covers her mouth. “Damn. He told me not to say that anymore. Anyway, talk to her.”
“I have bigger problems.” I think of Armen. His killer is still out there, and this is my only Sunday without Maddie, who’s at Sam’s.
“You mean the judge?”
“I told you it wasn’t suicide, Rick. Even the FBI thinks so.”
“Don’t be unbearable, please.”
“You mean because I was right and you were wrong?”
“Yes, already.”
“Do you say uncle?”
She claps loudly. “Way to go, Jared! Way to go!”
“Sometimes a train really is a train, Ricki. Trains and bagels, bagels and trains.”
“Go, Jared, you can do it!” She claps. “All that matters is you getting out of that mess. You’re right to let the FBI take over, it’s their job. You should never have been involved in the first place.”
So I lied. It was a white lie, a little white lie. Why worry her?
“I don’t know what made you think you could investigate a murder all by yourself. With the Mafia yet.”
Silly me. “Uncle,” I say.
“Maybe I’m finally getting through to you. All that free therapy, paying off.” She smiles at me, then gets distracted by the action on the soccer field. “Hey, ref, what about it? Wake up, you jerk!” The woman next to her glances over. “I heard on the radio about that death penalty case.”
“Yeah, the Supremes still have it. They haven’t decided yet.”
“Go, Jared, charge him!”
I think of Hightower, sitting alone. I read they moved him from death row to a special cell near the death chamber. The death warrant runs out tomorrow morning at 9:03. I wonder what Mrs. Stevens is doing today. How many mothers know the exact time and place of their child’s death? Besides the Gilpins?
“The radio said they were locking down the prison tonight,” Ricki says. “What’s that mean?”
“It means all the prisoners have to stay in their cells.”
“Isn’t that what prison is?”
“They do it before executions, so the population doesn’t riot.”
Ricki leaps to her feet. “He scored! Way to go, honey! Way to go!” Applauding wildly, she looks down at me. “Clap, you! He scored!”
So I clap for Jared, who truly is a fine young man, all wiry legs in his baggy soccer trunks. He throws his arms into the air and beams at his mother and me, his mouth a tangle of expensive orthodonture. But somehow when I look at his face, flushed with adrenaline and promise, I think about Hightower, who had no suburban soccer field, no fancy jersey or hundred-dollar cleats. One will go to Harvard; the other will be put to death.
No justice, no peace.
Empty rhetoric, until I think of Armen and his killer.
That very night I’m on the warpath, rattling toward West Philadelphia in the dark. I’m heading for Armen’s secret apartment. Someone killed him; maybe the answer is there. And I’m the only one who knows about it, so it’s relatively safe. I decide to go, especially since Maddie is with Sam. I make the most of baby-sitter time; if you have children, you’ll understand. I’ve known couples to drive around the block just to enjoy that last fifteen minutes.
I’ve disguised myself as the high-priced lawyer I used to be, just in case anybody’s watching me: a monogrammed briefcase, overpriced raincoat, and pretentious felt hat. I check out the rearview mirror on the way to West Philly, but everything looks clear.
I open the car window into the cool night air. It still smells like hoagies at the corner of 40th and Spruce, like it did twenty years ago. I swing the car into a space and step out into a curbful of trash. Some things never change.
I lock the car and walk down Pine Street, which used to be lined with Victorian houses full of expensive apartments with hardwood floors and high ceilings. The richer students lived here when I was in school; it looks like they still do, judging from the cars parked along the street, bumper to exported bumper.
I reach the address on the checkbook and stand outside the brownstone in the dark. It’s a three-story Victorian, with high arched windows and a mansard roof. A light is on on the bottom floor, showing through closed shutters in what would be the living room. I straighten my hat, climb the porch steps, and ring the bell to the front door.
A porch light comes on. An older woman appears at the window, behind bars. Her gray hair is plaited into a long braid and she wears thick aviator glasses. “What is it?” she shouts at me, through the bars.
“I’m a lawyer,” I say, brandishing my briefcase.
She does an about-face. The light goes off.
Good move. I take another tack. “Please, I’m a friend of Greg Armen’s.”
The light goes on again and she reappears, friendlier in a colorful Guatemalan shirt. “What do you want?”
“I need to come in. I’m meeting him here. My name is Grace Rossi.”
She squints and I smile in a toothy way. She unlocks the several locks on the door and opens it, welcoming me into the foul odor of Indian curry. “Smells good,” I say.
“Do you work with Greg?”
“Yes. I was supposed to meet him, but he’s late. Do you know a way I could get into his apartment? To wait for him?”
I hear a cat meow from inside her apartment. “He didn’t come today. He always comes on Sundays.”
“I know, he got tied up. He asked me to stop by tonight. We just starting seeing each other.”
“You want to surprise him?”
“Right.”
“Interesting. Hold on,” she says, winking at me in a stagey way. “He gave me a key in case he forgets it.” She scuffs into her apartment in Birkenstocks and returns with a key on a ring. “He does forget it sometimes. He’s kind of strange, in that cap and sunglasses all the time. I like her, though.”
“Her?”
“Whoops! You didn’t hear it from me! Give him hell!” she says, slapping the key in my palm; then she turns on her heel and scuffs inside. I hear the cat meow again as she closes the door.
I trudge up the stairs with a sense of dread. I like her, though. Who is she? The shabby carpeted stair winds around to the left, and at the top are two doors, 2A and 2B. The checkbook said 2B, so I slip the key into its lock. It opens easil
y, eager to reveal its secret, even if I’m not so eager to know it.
The room is dark, except for a streetlight streaming through the bay windows at the other end of the room. It looks like an efficiency, with a single bed against the wall. A chain hangs down from an overhead light, and I yank it on.
What I see shocks me.
All over the apartment, everywhere I look, are toys. Against the wall are white IKEA shelves full of stuffed animals. A plush tiger. Pinocchio. A Steiff lion. Mickey Mouse. They’re crammed onto the shelves in all directions, sticking out by their cartoon feet and white-gloved hands. The lower shelves are stacked with an array of games. Candyland. Don’t Break the Ice. Clue. Monopoly.
Stunned, I close the door behind me.
A child’s room. Does Armen have a child? The woman downstairs said he comes on Sundays, like lots of divorced fathers. Like Sam. Is Armen divorced? Was he married before?
What is this all about?
I walk stiffly to the middle of the room and pick up a stuffed Dalmatian puppy from the couch. It looks back at me, round-eyed, blank.
Who is this child? Who is this woman?
I rummage through the stuffed animals on the shelves, then the games. Toy cats and teddy bears fly off the shelves in my wake. I feel myself getting angry, losing control. Who is this woman? Who is this child?
I tear the plastic lid off a white toy box full of blocks and root to the bottom. Nothing, except for plastic beads and a pirate’s scabbard.
I move to a bookshelf next to the toy box, also white. It’s full of children’s books, more than most libraries, and many in hardback. I snatch them out, one by one, enraged. Why didn’t he tell me, that night on the couch? I hear the sound of my own panting and watch with satisfaction as Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are fall to the soft carpet, littering it.
I take the next book from the shelf. Eloise. There’s a pang deep within my chest; I know this book, but I have yet to buy it for Maddie.
How do I know Eloise?
I open it, going through it page by oversized page, trying to remember. I come to a page that at first looks ripped but unfolds at the top. I trace the trail of Eloise from a distant memory, my nail running along the dotted red line that goes up and down on the elevator. I remember a thick fingernail tracing these same travels. See, here she goes. The finger is yellow-stained at the edge with nicotine, and the hand is warm as my own hand rides around on top of his. My father’s hand. See, Princess?
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