Daniel Price - Slick

“Annabelle Shane wasn’t white,” I corrected.

“What?”

“She was half-black, half-Thai. There wasn’t a drop of white in her.”

Ira took another forkful of lo mein. “Well, she looked white. And she was middle class. That’s all that matters. You’re pissing in a hurricane.”

I checked my watch. After thirty-two minutes with Ira, I was already starting to appreciate places like “elsewhere.” Really, he wasn’t a bad guy if you took him in fun-sized doses.

“I’m serious,” he said. “It’s not worth the grief. Besides, it’s not like you’re hard up for money.”

“How do you know? “

“Because you don’t exactly live the wild life.”

“No, but I do have a mess of dwindling tech stocks.”

He nearly spit out his food. “Still? I warned you to get your money out!”

It’s true. He did. Three years ago. This was the same guy who treated Y2K like an Extinction-Level Event. He took all his cash out of the banks, loaded up the boat with Ensure, and made damn certain he was at least a hundred miles off the mainland when the computers hit the big double zero. He even asked me if I wanted to join him on his safe getaway. No thanks. Even if society did crumble, I saw being stuck at sea with Ira as one of those post-apocalyptic futures where the living envied the dead. He ended up riding his ark alone, until he got bored enough to come back.

But he was right. I wasn’t hard up for money. In truth, only a minuscule portion of my nest egg was wrapped up in investments, and not because of Ira’s portent. I still remembered the painful lessons of October 19, 1987, the day the Dow tripped and fell a mile. On that awful Black Monday, I lost $7,200 of my hard-earned savings, everything I’d squirreled away since college. I didn’t exactly bawl over my bad fortune, but I did hurl some pissy words up God’s way. In retrospect I probably shouldn’t have taken it so personally. That was a bad day for a lot of people.

One notable exception was Jean Spelling, then known as Jean McKnight. That was the day her own investment finally paid off. It had taken nine long months of hard work and mood swings, but it was worth it. While everyone else cried over their losses, she ended the day with a six-pound, nine-ounce gain. She named it Madison.

________________

Madison told me the story herself, thirteen and a half years later, from my very own couch.

“I think it cursed me somehow,” she professed, with a rising inflection that made her statements sound like questions. “Being born on Black Monday. All my life, I’ve been like a business jinx. When my mom and dad were married, they put all their money into this sign language school that folded within a year. Then my mom and my stepfather started this company that sold special movie theater seats that let deaf people see captions. That went bust. Now he does captions for live TV events and even that’s not going well. And don’t get me started on my mom’s so-called web design business. Sometimes I really think it’s me. I’ve got this black-cat thing going on.”

I sat across the room from her, listening, nodding, and covertly e-mailing her mother from my laptop.

Your daughter is here. I’ll try to stall her as long as I can. Please come soon.

I had returned from the Ishtar at 9:30 only to find Madison waiting outside my apartment door. In brighter light, I could see that she had inherited her mother’s sharp blue eyes, her perfect bone structure, and her tendency to drop by unannounced. It was also clear from her rumpled clothes and unwashed golden hair that she had yet to make her way home.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I found you?”

That was the first thing she said to me in the hallway. I already knew the answer. My instant reaction was to play dumb. If Madison knew her mother was one step ahead of her, she might flee for an even less obvious hiding place. I decided my good deed for the year would be to capture this stray cat myself.

“Actually, I was going to ask why you found me.”

“I used a reverse directory,” she bragged. “It used to be that only the cops and phone companies had them. Now they’re all over the Web.”

“That’s pretty clever. How did you get here?”

“SuperShuttle. I also did some research on you. I found a lot of your old press releases. They’re really good. You write them just like articles.”

“Journalists are busy people,” I said. “They can use all the help they can get.”

“Yeah, but I love how you bury the things you’re selling into the story itself. I mean you’re really subtle. I want to learn how to do that.”

I leaned against the wall. “Madison—”

“You remembered my name.”

“I’m good with names.”

“I’m not. I’m only good with faces.”

“Madison, what’s going on?”

She lost her smile. Now she looked as frazzled and desperate as Jean. “Can I come in?”

“Does your mother know you’re here?”

No. That’s why she’s here. “No. That’s why I’m here.”

“Look, Madison, I don’t want to get involved in some domestic thing.”

“It’s nothing tragic,” she insisted. “It’s not like she beats me or anything. It’s just…Look, can I just come in? I promise I won’t stay long.”

After a quality pause, I let her in. Obviously, I didn’t want to seem too eager, lest she get suspicious. But it was all a Method act. The real Scott wasn’t in the mood for live family drama. He just wanted to watch HBO until he fell asleep.

As soon as I closed the door behind us, I had a horrible thought. What if, for some malicious reason, she decided to cry rape? I’d be just as screwed as Hunta. It wasn’t too crazy to think about. After all, she clearly wasn’t a model of teenage stability, if such a model existed. Even worse, she could turn Jean against me with a few mere hand signals. Oh, it was terrible, Mother! He kept me prisoner here! When you showed up, I screamed and banged against the window! But you just couldn’t hear me!

Problem B: Lisa Glassman’s file was all over the coffee table. Before Madison had time to sit down, I gathered the papers.

“Do you want anything to drink? I’ve got water, milk, apple juice.”

“Apple juice is fine.”

“Okay.” I still had Jean’s business card in my back pocket. As soon as I slipped into the kitchenette, I pulled it out and memorized her e-mail address. It wasn’t hard for an old X-Fan. Her user name was Phoenix.

After giving Madison the last of my juice, I sat across from her and turned on my laptop. “Sorry. I just need to check my stocks.”

“It’s Saturday.”

“I invest in the Nikkei market. They go six days a week. They should be closing right about now.”

That lie had more holes than a tuna net. Fortunately, it just triggered the story of Madison’s Black Monday juju, which gave me enough time to send the message. Relieved, I closed the laptop and leaned back in my seat. We stared at each other.

“So. Madison Spelling.”

“Madison McKnight.”

“Why Madison?”

She curled up on the couch. She was a skinny little thing. Her thighs were thinner than Hunta’s arms. But her face was wide and uniquely captivating.

“I don’t know. I think it was my grandmother’s name. I hate it. Too many syllables, and I hate ‘Maddy’ even more. Of course my parents don’t know that. I mean about the syllables.”

“Oh. So your dad’s also…”

“Deaf? Yeah. So’s his wife and their daughter. My stepdad isn’t. He’s a coda like me.”

“Coda?”

“Child of Deaf Adults.”

“Oh. I wasn’t even sure a deaf couple could have a hearing child.”

She scratched her nose. “Neither of my parents were born deaf. It was just something that happened to them.”