A Matter of Chance Read online

  I kept talking.

  “I hired someone,” I squeaked out in a voice I didn’t recognize. A bird’s, perhaps. “A private investigator. I had to do something.”

  John D’Orfini knew how to wait before he spoke.

  “He scares me,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “You know that he scares me?”

  “I know that you hired someone. It’s my job to know.”

  “I thought your job was to find my daughter.” I turned my head away. I didn’t like how I sounded, but I couldn’t stop myself. Heat hit me from head to toe. Strange. John D’Orfini’s office was always cold—even the edge of his desk.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” I asked, in a tone of irritation combined with something sounding like defeat.

  John D’Orfini had a way of letting a question float around the room until it landed in the most preposterous position.

  “I don’t know how you found him, but you’re wasting your money.”

  There it was. Blunt and heavy.

  I lowered my eyes and rubbed my forehead back and forth with my second, third, and fourth fingers, drawing a steady line across the middle of my skin.

  “He smells, you know. When I walked into his office, it smelled like a boys’ locker room. I think it was the sweatshirt he was wearing.”

  “TEXAS in big white letters, with orange sleeves pushed up above his elbows?”

  I dropped my hand in my lap and looked up.

  “I wrote him a check for twenty-five hundred dollars before he told me the dismal statistics on a missing child being found alive after forty-eight hours.”

  John D’Orfini ran his hands through his hair and leaned back so far in his chair that I thought it might tip over. He exhaled deeply, pushing an involuntary sigh from his throat.

  “Do yourself a favor and don’t see him anymore. He’ll rip your heart out while he’s taking your money.” His voice deepened on the word heart.

  Without a sound, John D’Orfini released the backbend of his chair and leaned over his desk, his forearms resting on the cold wood. In a husky voice, he said, “I don’t want to see that happen.”

  “Which part?”

  “What?”

  “Which part? The heart part or the money part?” My eyes filled. His tone softened.

  “I know this guy. He could mess up the investigation, scare away potential witnesses. He’s only going to be following our tracks anyway. And besides, it’s too soon to quote statistics.”

  I believed him because the alternative was unbearable. I looked at the serious detective who sat across from me. I opened my mouth and spoke, leaving space in between my words.

  “Over and over, I ask myself, What should I have done to keep my child safe?” One beat. Two beats. Three beats passed. John D’Orfini said nothing in response. Instead, he stood up. His lips parted, then closed. One more beat of silence lingered, before he said, “Let me get you another coffee.”

  His tone changed to one that men use when they think the women around them have gone mad. If I was mad, then I had reason. When I was questioned, I felt the weight of everyone’s judgment. I saw how John D’Orfini, the media, Steve, and strangers looked at me on the street.

  When I was able to fall asleep, I slept for three-hour stretches during the night. Sometimes two. Often when I awoke, I had a fleeting moment of expecting to see Vinni standing by my bed. For a few seconds, I’d forget she was gone. I loved being in the dark when this happened. I loved not moving. I thought if I stayed still, I could reel in the nightmare and turn back the clock. I stared at the ceiling, knowing I had to pee but afraid to leave the bed and step into reality. All it took was the slightest movement, and then I remembered that Vinni was gone. My chest ached and ballooned with each breath. Inhale. Exhale. The ache swelled and settled. Swelled and settled.

  “Beating yourself up isn’t going to help us find your daughter. What I suggest is you let us do our job.” I think John D’Orfini aligned himself with the FBI for my sake. The detective had stepped back inside the protection of his somber sports jacket, hiding a pair of broad shoulders.

  “Stop telling me what to do! ‘Suggest’? Did you say ‘suggest’? Is this what it comes down to? Suggestions?” My speech turned sloppy. My voice dropped down into my throat, where it waited for moments like these to rise and lash out. The birdsong from my earlier tone flew away.

  I jumped up. “I have to find my daughter. I can’t sit around here and do nothing. I know she’s out there. It’s just . . .” I stumbled for words. “Vinni is different from other children. She senses things before they happen. There’s something I haven’t told you.”

  John D’Orfini stayed silent. I sucked the inside of the bottom of my mouth with little bites. “That morning as we walked on the beach . . . she said she knew I loved her differently than her father did. ‘Daddy is different than you, Mommy,’ she said. ‘If I lose you, I know you’ll never give up looking for me.’

  “‘I’ll never lose you, honey,’ I said. ‘Never, never, never.’”

  “Your daughter’s a pretty special child, isn’t she?” The words fell out of John D’Orfini’s mouth, but he leaped over them and added, “We’ll find her.”

  I grabbed my black leather tote bag, catching the long handles on the back of my chair. As I pulled harder, the straps tangled more and dragged the chair with me as I tried to move away from John D’Orfini and his stare. The chair squealed as it followed behind me like a wounded puppy. I didn’t look back. I ran. I wanted to get the hell out of there and get out of the hell I was living. I started the car and drove up the Garden State Parkway. What had begun as a drizzle picked up until I could barely see beyond the windshield.

  I skidded to a stop on the side of the highway and grabbed my cell phone from the pocket inside my tote. I hit the key for John D’Orfini. He had given me his direct extension and told me to call him anytime. I knew he’d pick up on the third ring. This was his style. Keep them waiting.

  He hardly finished answering, “John D’Orfini” when I cut him off.

  “Look. I don’t think you get it. This is not just another child missing. This is Vinni. This is my . . .”

  I lost it. I started choking on my own words, until spit and tears and phlegm mixed together and paralyzed my speech. Alone, on the shoulder of the highway, I let go of every ounce of fight that had sustained me. I needed help but didn’t know whom to ask. I sunk low in my seat behind the wheel and let my heart go.

  “Maddy? Where are you?”

  “Maddy?” After what seemed like a long time, with John D’Orfini waiting on the line, I spoke in a voice that I squeezed out from the bottom of my heart.

  “I’m nowhere.” Then I hung up.

  I turned off the engine and watched the raindrops hit the windshield. Dozens fell at a time, splashing the glass. I closed my eyes and unraveled. Slowly at first, and then like a train picking up speed down a long stretch of open track, I began to tremble. My shoulders fell over the steering wheel. My head hung and bobbed like one of those dangling toys people hang from their car mirrors.

  My pain fell onto the seat and settled in pools around the floor mat beneath my feet. It seeped its way into the back of the car and slipped through the bottom of the closed passenger doors. It hit the gravel on the shoulder of the road.

  I vomited out the window. From inside the car, I gagged on the idea that I might never see Vinni again. Maybe it was a good thing I threw it all up. Otherwise, how could I have believed she was alive?

  I closed my eyes. The sweat from my head wet the seat’s headrest as I stretched my neck back and up. My lower lip turned downward. My jaw released. I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my jacket. I smelled rotten, like fresh vomit.

  “Baby’s Feet.” Don’t ask me why I thought of this now, but I did. I traveled backward, with my eyes closed. Once, I had picked up a pale nude stone—flat and smooth—and showed it to Vinni. “What color would you say this is, honey?” Without hesi
tation, she replied, “Baby’s Feet.”

  This is my smart child.

  FOURTEEN WEEKS AFTER Vinni had vanished, I walked up Fifth Avenue in New York City in the direction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. As I crossed Thirty-Sixth Street, I skirted around a construction site directing pedestrians to walk through a narrow pathway into the street.

  I was thinner than I used to be and wore my hair pulled tight into a ponytail reminiscent of my preteen years. My hunger went untended as I ignored the croissants in the window of Au Bon Pain on the corner.

  Sometimes if I saw a woman holding a child’s hand, my heart beat more quickly. My memories slid quickly into chaos, and what was real versus what was not got scrambled. What Vinni wore was still vibrant in my mind. What she said was distinct.

  I chose a pew in the middle on the left side of the aisle, knelt down, and prayed. My lower back rested softly on the seat’s rounded edge. Ever since I moved to the city, I couldn’t resist stepping inside the cathedral when I passed by. It had nothing to do with my parents’ Catholicism or with my having been baptized in the church or with feeling full of grace. I liked the peace it gave me when I sat in the pew and soaked in the quiet. I talked to God inside my head, and it made me smile.

  This was before I lost Vinni.

  The size of St. Patrick’s Cathedral did not diminish what was in my heart. Its huge pillars hugged row after row of candles waiting to be lit with requests. What is everyone praying for? I wondered. Money? A career promotion?

  How many women were lighting a candle asking God to return their daughter?

  The woman across the aisle showed nothing on her face as she knelt upright, keeping her back straight and long. I noticed her hands. Palm to palm, fingers pointing upward, they aligned themselves perfectly, directed toward heaven. The man sitting next to her appeared interested in the architecture. I focused on the woman. She turned toward me and gave me a gentle smile, as if she knew I was in pain. Did I imagine the smile? I looked away and bowed my head. What was the right kind of prayer? How long should I stay on my knees? I looked back across at the woman who had smiled at me, but she was gone. My heart sank.

  What was happening? Was I fading away or coming back to life?

  FOUR

  I LEFT THE APARTMENT ON A COLD MORNING IN EARLY December and traveled north uptown, toward Columbia University. Ever since John D’Orfini had mentioned that the FBI had contacted Rudy’s former colleagues in the philosophy department, I’d had the idea to go there myself. I googled Rudolf Haydn, and a link appeared, featuring a photo of Rudy presenting a philosophy department prize to a graduate student. In the photo was another professor, the advisor of the prizewinner.

  I made an appointment at Philosophy Hall for 10:00 a.m.

  Dr. Baretta was a man in his late sixties with a handsome crop of thick white hair. He taught a course called Rational Choice. When I entered his office, he greeted me with a formal handshake and gestured for me to sit. I smelled the scent of papers and books—lots and lots of books.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I said.

  “Of course, but I’m not sure what I can do for you.”

  I told my story. He listened. He rested his chin on his fingertips, with both palms touching. His desk had several nicks in it around the edges where once they had been smooth and polished. The winter light from one small window lit the top of a wide bookcase overloaded with books stacked every which way. Piles of varying-size texts sat on the floor, their spines facing the center of the room.

  “Was there anything unusual about Dr. Haydn?” I said.

  What did I know to ask other than that?

  Tell me something I need to know.

  “Dr. Haydn was a brilliant philosopher and teacher. Everyone would agree. I was privileged to work with him all these years. He originated the curriculum for the popular course Rational Choice. He asked me to continue teaching it after he retired. I was deeply honored.”

  Dr. Baretta talked about Rudy’s skills, his love of his work, and the way the university had revered him, as his farewell dinner, two years earlier, had demonstrated.

  What does any of this have to do with Vinni and me?

  “I’m afraid I haven’t been able to help you,” Dr. Baretta said.

  I got up to leave. I shook the professor’s hand and moved toward the door. Dr. Baretta had already sat down and began shuffling papers.

  “There is one thing,” he said in a quiet voice.

  I stiffened and turned.

  “One Sunday, Dr. Haydn invited my wife and me to his home on Riverside Drive for dinner. It was a rare invitation, a lovely evening with him and his wife, but I left wondering how one could live so well on a professor’s salary. His apartment was, shall we say, astonishing!”

  “What does that mean?” I took a few steps to the center of the room.

  “Art. Music. Books. All of it, in copious amounts. The apartment alone was in one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods.”

  Dr. Baretta returned to his work, picked up a pen, and, head bent, said, “I’m afraid it’s nothing. My observation is that of a jealous old man. You must excuse me.”

  On the subway ride home, I wondered about the philosophy professor’s comments. Art. Music. Books . . . Copious amounts . . . Most exclusive neighborhood.

  Who were Hilda and Rudy Haydn?

  Had the FBI knocked on doors in their New York City apartment building and asked the same question?

  THE TRAIN WAS stifling, so I got off a stop early. When I reached the corner and saw my building, I ran down the block and up the front steps and fumbled with my keys to get inside. Once there, I leaned against the interior door, out of breath. I closed my eyes. I could feel a thin layer of sweat around my belly. I started up the stairs and heard a door open as I crossed the third-floor landing. A familiar voice called up to me.

  “Maddy, would you like to join an old woman for a cup of tea?”

  Although Evelyn Daly lived an artist’s life in a studio downstairs from Vinni and me, it seemed as if she were only a room away. She was the grandmother Vinni never had. I had called her in a panic that first day Vinni was gone. Since then, we had spoken at least once every twenty-four hours. She tried to comfort me, but she never hushed me up. Soon, she was saying, “Come home. You need to come home.”

  I fell into her arms. She held me like my own mother never did, as we cried together. She led me over to the couch, and I lay down with my head resting on a purple velvet pillow. She covered me with a cotton blanket. When I awoke, she was painting a few feet away from me. Later that evening, she warmed soup and together we sipped from small bowls as we sat by the window overlooking the street.

  “I have nothing to say,” I had said.

  “I know.”

  Many nights, I’d go downstairs to Evelyn’s and sit and watch her paint. I had no desire to continue my own work at the easel. Somehow, she understood.

  “Staring is good for you. Quiets the mind,” Evelyn would say, and so I sat and stared—at her, at her paintings, at the couch, and out the window.

  She was probably in her late seventies—a guess that I made and she never confirmed. She wore bright red lipstick, slightly missing the natural curvature of her upper lip. Her silver hair was wound around in a twisted knot between two Japanese-style orange combs. For an older woman, she had unusually broad shoulders, as if announcing to the world, I have ideas.

  “I have lavender tea brewing,” Evelyn said. “Come in and choose your cup.” I followed her down a linen-white hallway with vignettes of contemporary minimalist art positioned on both walls. Thirteen individual cups with matching saucers sat meticulously balanced equidistant from one another on two wooden shelves.

  Evelyn opened the door to the china cabinet. “Pick one, dear.”

  I reached in and lifted the teacup next to the end on the top shelf.

  “Ah . . . the French painted faïence. Your favorite,” she said.

  Light from the north coated the walls
, exposing stacks of paintings on canvas and Masonite. The only feeling close to the warmth I experienced at Evelyn’s had been in my Saturday-morning pastel class four years earlier at the Art Students League on Fifty-Seventh. I used to paint from nine o’clock to eleven o’clock and race home to a pouting Steve by eleven-thirty.

  “Stop thinking like an artist,” Steve said when I brought home pint-size sample cans of paint one Saturday after class and drew thick stripes of different shades of yellow on the bedroom wall. “Just make a decision. Yellow is yellow.”

  Soon I was skipping class every other Saturday to try to ease the tension between us. I painted with Evelyn late at night when Steve was away and the latest issue of Hot Style magazine had been put to bed for the night. I was so tired I could barely lift my arms, but when I painted at Evelyn’s, I unearthed a desire I had tamped down. What I felt found its way from my fingers to the painting, but with no support at home, my inner critic grew fat and wide.

  “Just explore without expectation,” she used to say, as she coaxed me into experimenting.

  I was searching for a subject. A series that told a story, a small opening into a scene—anything would have helped. While Evelyn’s work screamed freedom through her large strokes, mine whispered, You’re too careful.

  Since Vinni’s disappearance, Evelyn had grown quiet. Once, I said, “Say something,” and she walked over to me and kissed me on the forehead. I had always assumed that it had everything to do with my child. People didn’t know what to say, other than something like, “You’re in my prayers.”

  I wanted to shoot back, “I’d rather be in Vegas.”

  I had tried prayers. At least a gambler had a chance.

  FIVE

  “WHO WAS THE FIRST PERSON YOU CALLED AFTER THE police?” Steve asked.

  It was 3:00 a.m. East Coast time. I had finally fallen asleep around 2:00 a.m., thankful for Ambien.