The Deep End of the Ocean (14 page)

Laurie wrote on the corner of her pamphlet, shoving it noiselessly across to Beth: “They probably didn’t want kids to begin with.” Beth covered her face with one hand.

“So, we’re finding that this experience,” the young mother went on, “difficult as it is, has actually been a time of growing…so that when we have another child, and we’re sure we will—”

“Why are you here, then?” Henry asked bitterly. “If you’re doing so great, how come you want to come and be with people who aren’t doing so great?”

“Henry,” Penny reminded him gently. “You know the covenants of the Circle. We don’t begrudge and we don’t grudge. Everyone has a right to work through a loss in their own way….”

“But they don’t seem like they need any help,” Henry said.

“But we do,” said the woman. “We need to know that we’re not alone.”

“Of course you do,” said Penny, turning suddenly to Beth. “Now, our newest guests, Pat and Beth, are just starting along the road some of us have been on for a long time. All of you have read about Ben Cappadora, Beth’s little boy. We have every reason to believe that your son will be found, Beth, but your family must be experiencing some of these reactions of mourning. Do you feel like talking about it?”

“No,” said Beth, and then, surprising herself, she asked, “How did you get how you are?”

Penny looked puzzled. “How did I…?”

“How you are. So accepting. So kind. Were you always like that? I mean, before?”

Penny nearly laughed. “I sure wasn’t. The first few months after Casey was shot by my ex-husband, the only thing I allowed myself to feel was rage. Rage at my own stupidity for trusting my ex-husband with my son, because I knew he was strung out about half the time. Rage at the man himself, for doing what he did. I quit going to church, and I devoted myself to eating everything in the house that wasn’t nailed down….” She gestured to her bright red tunic. “You can see the results of that. If you would have told me that I’d ever feel any different, I’d have said you were a fool, you just never understood what I’d been through….”

“So how?” Beth asked again, feeling a rush of admiration, a wish to graft some piece of Penny’s peace under the skin of her own heart.

“Well, what I did, Beth, was…I finally forced myself to…do things like look at the pictures of Casey after he died,” Penny said, with the first trace of hesitancy Beth had heard in her voice all night. “Casey was shot at point-blank range in the back of the head. And I forced myself to think, What did he feel? What did he know? And the answer was, he knew nothing. He was talking to me, and then he was gone, just gone. When I looked at it from Casey’s point of view, I had to think that he died, but he died happy and painlessly and quickly, and that the person it hurt most wasn’t him. It was me. And my…and my ex-husband. Because Wisconsin isn’t a death-penalty state, he has to live with this forever, even now that he’s sober.”

“And you feel sorry for him? Does he get some kind of pass because he’s crazy?” Beth asked.

“I guess, no, I don’t feel sorry for him,” Penny said. “I do feel, though, that his regret and grief are a kind of justice.”

Beth looked up. Pat was on his feet. He hadn’t said a word beyond his name all night, but he now said, “I’m so sorry. I can’t stand anymore.”

“I understand. Do come back,” said Penny. “Anytime. Any time you want. Or call me.”

“I will,” Beth said.

Outside, the last of the light was draining from a perfectly transparent fall sky. Beth breathed in, heavily, the smells of the church’s patch of wild roses, the bus exhaust from the metro on its way up Park Street.

Laurie asked Pat, “Are you okay?”

He said, “I just felt as though I couldn’t…I never imagined there was so much suffering in the world.”

Oh, Pat, Beth thought, there just never was in yours.

But that night, she couldn’t forget Penny Odin’s foolish, saintly face. Did Penny sleep? Beth got up and walked into the boys’ room and stood over Vincent as he lay curled on Ben’s bed. Each of the boys had a shelf over the head of his bed for books and toys; each one had a designated side to the closet, neatly labeled with stick-up letters spelling out their names.

Laurie had done her work sensitively and well. Only a few discreet things hung well back in Ben’s side of the closet. His toys were mostly gone (also boxed and stored in the crawl space, Beth knew, out of sight but not forgotten). There had been an easing of Ben’s imprint, a consolidation, but not a clean sweep. Thank you, my dear Laurie, Beth thought, kneeling down at Vincent’s side. Thank you for letting me be able to come in here.

Vincent had always slept hard. She had never seen him wake easily; he was like a cold-cocked prizefighter—he woke disoriented, bleary, looking plucked as a newly hatched chick. But now he rolled in his sleep, twitching, sweating like a racer. Maybe he’s sick, she thought. He’d asked her a lot of odd questions since she came home.

“How many bad guys are there in Madison?” he had asked. Vincent wasn’t the kind of child to be fobbed off with something easy.

She’d said, to get it over with, “There are thirty.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Who said?”

“Detective Bliss. She counted.”

“How many are there in Los Angeles?” he’d asked then.

Beth had sighed. “There are two hundred,” she’d told him.

What he was really asking was, Am I next? Beth knew that. What could she tell him? What could she feel, in front of his asking eyes, except accused and resentful? Hadn’t she let the bough break?

A memory, a safe one, flitted past her face like moth wings. Just before Ben was born, Vincent had stared at her belly and said, “You’ll like the baby. But it won’t be the same. You won’t like the baby as much as you like me.” And Beth had feared the same thing.

Indeed, Ben had managed to perfect for himself the role of second child, undemanding and delighted, the one she knew she would never need to worry about, never need to worry about…and she hadn’t.

She hadn’t worried at all.

Now she should be worrying. About Vincent. But it was all gone, that mother radar, along with her belief in it. She could do nothing for Vincent. Leaning low, she whispered, “I love you.” Studies had shown that even in deep sleep, people could hear, could even learn languages that came to them on paths of the subconscious. Perhaps it would work, and he would wake up feeling loved, even if he wasn’t sure who loved him. Or whether she was still around.

December 1985

Vincent had thought it over and he decided he would ask Santa for Ben. What he really wanted was a Lionel train or a radio-controlled boat, but the way he figured it was, if he asked Santa for Ben, he might get the boat and the train, too, because asking for Ben was an unselfish wish. Santa would be impressed, and everyone would be happy. His mother. Grandpa Angelo. Everybody.

Vincent would probably be happy, too, because, to tell the truth, after six months, he was getting sick of not having Ben around. Kerry was cute, but you couldn’t really play with her yet. Plus she was a little smelly and boring. And his mother was still acting like she was sick, sitting around all the time, except once in a while yelling at him if he got too loud. It wasn’t like she never yelled at him before Ben got lost; but in between yelling, she used to do stuff with him and be funny. Now when he tried to make her laugh by singing Elvis or something, she didn’t even notice. He had the feeling that getting Ben back for Christmas would be about the only thing that would make her goof around. The way things were now was annoying.

Back in Chicago, he hadn’t minded because he could do anything he wanted. He never had to go back to school for the last week before summer break, and he still got passed into second, and got almost all Es, even though he was pretty sure he was only going to get an S in math because he goofed with Andrew P. the whole time. His teacher even wrote him a note and sent him some Geoffrey dollars. There was a lot more hugging and petting him than Vincent strictly liked, some of it from old people whose breath smelled like the wooden sticks the doctor used to hold your tongue down. But the police gave him all kinds of stuff—baseball cards, a play badge that was real metal and wouldn’t break if you left it on your shirt when it went into the washing machine, and so much gum he had to make a special place in a drawer to store it all. The lady with the blond hair who was a police officer even though she was really pretty gave him a piece of the stuff bulletproof vests were made out of. Grandma Rosie sewed it inside his Batman shirt for him. (He later put on that shirt and his dad’s fishing hat for Halloween, until Alex’s mother picked him up to go trick-or-treating. She took him back to her house to put some face paint on him, all the while saying to Alex’s dad, “Enough’s enough—really, enough’s enough”—like face paint was that expensive.)

But at first, he liked that everybody who came over gave him something. Grandpa Bill’s friends gave him dollars, paper and silver ones. He saved up eleven dollars the first week. And when he whined and wouldn’t eat, they just took the plate away and gave him anything—cookies, or even the kind of cereal his mother wouldn’t let him have, the kind with little marshmallow people in it. Uncle Bick even went out at night to get it at the store, just because Vincent wanted it…which actually almost gave Vincent the creeps.

It made him wonder if they were all telling him the truth, and whether Ben was really killed instead of alive but not here. And letting him have anything he wanted actually made him miss his mom even more, and he already missed his mom a lot. She was never around when they were in Chicago. Sometimes she called up and said, “Hi, Vincent.” His dad was around more often, but had this new, really hard way of hugging him that was also creepy.

All in all, though, Chicago was better. Grandpa Angelo used to put him in their big cannonball bed at night to sleep—not just the first night,
every
night. And even when he couldn’t sleep, people were talking out in the living room. Police and grownups.

Now, at home, when he couldn’t sleep, he just sort of sat there. His mother never made any noise at night. Kerry never made any noise. Unless it was Monday, his dad was always gone at the restaurant at bedtime. Vincent hated just sitting. He understood now why adults knew how to read fast. A long time ago, he and Ben used to figure out quiet ways of getting out of bed and playing with their cars until they started hitting and laughing and somebody caught them. But Vincent was afraid to do it on his own. It just seemed really dangerous to disobey, even though he was pretty sure his mom wouldn’t even notice.

Getting to sleep had always been Vincent’s best thing. His mother used to say, “You’re the best sleeper of all.” All you did was shut your eyes and float, like you were in a big, warm tub. But since the thing happened in the lobby, Vincent couldn’t just fall asleep anymore. For one thing, he had the room to himself now; and though he liked being able to spread his stuff out on both beds, it felt weird having nobody to talk to at night. For another thing, he was all of a sudden almost afraid of the dark. It wasn’t just one of those things kids feel. He had a good reason to be scared. After all, the kidnapper would probably come and get him, too. It made sense. That kind of bad guy, the kind they told you about at school, who would come up and ask you for directions and grab your arm right in front of your own house, and give you drugs and touch you inappropriately, would definitely want the other brother, too. And if the bad guy asked, Ben would say where Vincent was. Ben knew the number of their house.

Vincent got so nervous, he told Uncle Joey about it, and Uncle Joey said no bad guys better dare ever come near Grandpa’s house or he would take them out.

“Do you know what that means, buddy, ‘take them out’?” Uncle Joey said in a rough voice. And Vincent had nodded his head, though he didn’t; but Uncle Joey was a bodybuilder, so he figured it meant he would punch the bad guys.

But people always said stuff like that to kids, didn’t they?

They said you would always be safe, and they would keep you safe, but then you could fall on the playground toys and break your collarbone with them standing right there. You could get kidnapped in front of a million people. And the bad guy probably didn’t even need to give Ben drugs or candy. He probably just told him what to do, because kids like Ben did what grownups told them. Even Vincent, who usually didn’t, even he sometimes did what certain adults told him to, like when his mom told him to eat eggs, even though eggs made him want to barf.

Once, before they came home, he dreamed that who took Ben was a witch, like in “Hansel and Gretel.” Grandma Rosie said there were no such things as witches. Vincent didn’t really believe her. It was just another sort of lie adults told kids to make them not be scared. If there were no witches, how come there used to be in the olden times? When all those stories were written? Where did they all go to? Didn’t they have babies who grew up to be witches?

There was also the third thing. The smell thing.

It was the only thing he really remembered about the day Ben got lost, that smell. And he couldn’t really smell it; he could just remember it. Like all the different powders and perfumes in Mom’s makeup bag, all mixed, and then this stinky cooking smell. Uncle Augie would say in a restaurant that wasn’t owned by somebody they knew, “Bottle gravy.” Like at Thanksgiving, when his mother had opened up a jar of turkey gravy because they forgot to bring gravy from the restaurant—it was just like that smell. It made Vincent so sick he couldn’t eat anything, and his dad said quit trying to always be the center of attention, and his mom said shut up about it, and she didn’t eat either. She took him upstairs and lay down on the bed with him, which was actually pretty nice. He had no trouble going to sleep that time, and they slept all day.

Most of the time, though, his mother didn’t put him to bed or wake him up. She put the baby in bed and said, “Night-night, Kerry,” and then she would just stand there in the hall, for so long, with her hand on the knob of baby Kerry’s door.

Vincent would get his pajamas on and come back out there. Then he would brush his teeth and come back out there. After a while, he would go and get in bed. He didn’t know if it was his bedtime, because he couldn’t tell time on the upstairs clocks, only the one on the VCR that had actual numbers. A few times, he didn’t get up in time for school, either, but when he told his teacher that his mother forgot to wake him up, they said it was okay, they wouldn’t mark him tardy. After a while, a couple of times, he didn’t go even when he knew it was time, when he could see other kids going to school on the street. He just watched TV until his mother came down with the baby.

She just said, “Did you eat?” She didn’t ask him, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Once she asked, “Is it Sunday?” That time, he got up and left. They were halfway through journals when he got there, but his teacher didn’t say anything except ask him if he had any breakfast. Vincent said no, and the teacher’s face got all hard, like she was going to cry. She gave him part of a doughnut. After that, he just said he ate.

After school, he mostly went to Alex’s. He had heard Alex’s mother say, on the phone, “Yes, of course, Vincent’s here, too. I’m filing the adoption papers next week.” And he had to ask his dad if Alex’s parents were really going to adopt him. His dad told him, “Of course not,” and said, “Maybe you should come home some days after school.”

But Vincent didn’t like to get home too early. Not until Jill got done with classes. The baby would be asleep. And his mom would be sitting in funny places. Once down in the basement in her darkroom, on the floor in the dark, but not doing anything. Once in his bedroom, next to the bed that used to be Ben’s but was now his. Once right in the kitchen, on the floor. That was the scariest time. She had a cup of coffee next to her that had scummy stuff on top and a bug stuck in the scummy stuff, and he’d had to yell, “Mom, ick! Don’t drink that!” because when she saw him, she picked it up and started to drink it. And she’d tried to laugh then, a sort of scary heh-heh laugh. And she just put the cup back down on the floor and sat there.

But even if he went to Alex’s right after school, he couldn’t eat over every night. He had to come home when Alex’s dad got back from work, which was about five o’clock. There were times, of course, when he didn’t go to Alex’s at all.

To get to Alex’s house, he had to pass his own house on the other side of the street. And there were some afternoons that he could see that somebody’s car was in the driveway, like Laurie, who would probably have one of her kids with her, and the kid and Vincent would go play in the treehouse or have jumping contests off the swings.

And even if one of the kids wasn’t with her, when Laurie was there it was like his mom woke up. It was like they turned on her remote control or something. She answered things when they said them, and if they had to sit around and mail and stamp packages of Ben’s Wanted poster, Mom would do that right along with Laurie. If Laurie brought a salad for her, his mom would eat it. She would make coffee. She would seem to see Vincent, too, when Laurie or a neighbor was there. She would say, “Would you get me the stapler, big buddy?” in a voice that sounded almost like her old voice, except if you had actually heard her old voice you knew that this one was a toy version, a lot faster and smaller.

Those nights, things would be really great, because by the time Laurie left, Jill would be there, and she would warm up whatever Laurie brought for dinner—not that he didn’t love the food from Cappadora’s, but you liked to have American food once in a while, too, like fried chicken. That would be a whole day, from the end of school until bed, when he didn’t have to be alone with his mom, if it was one of the nights when Jill didn’t have a night class, which she did three times a week. But if she didn’t, she would read to him and run a bath for him and even stay in his room until he fell asleep.

Once, he woke up in the middle of the night and Jill was still right there, sleeping on the bed that used to be his with her clothes still on and no covers. Vincent got up and put the comforter over her, trying to fit it up around her shoulders without waking her up. But she woke up anyway, and hugged him. He felt awful then; he was afraid she’d leave. But she just turned over and went back to sleep. Vincent liked that so much he told Jill she could sleep there any time she wanted, instead of the guest room she lived in. But when he said that, Jill started to cry, so he didn’t tell her it again. His bed was not as comfortable as Ben’s, it was true. His mattress was older, because Ben had peed his to death and he got a new one, and Vincent’s had a major saggy place in the middle. He didn’t really blame Jill.

Vincent knew Jill was going to go home to her real home, with her mother, his auntie Rachelle, for Christmas anyhow. She’d be gone a whole month. Dad said Stacey, the cashier from Cappadora’s, was going to baby-sit him and Kerry some nights “until Mom feels better.” Stacey wasn’t really mean or anything, but all she ever did was watch TV. And she wasn’t going to come every night. Even when she did come, she wasn’t going to be there at ten o’clock at night, after his mom and the baby were asleep and his dad wasn’t home yet.

That was the part Vincent dreaded, being up when his mom was asleep.

By the time vacation started, a week before Christmas, Vincent had his routine pretty well figured out. He could look forward to Monday nights being pretty good, because Dad was home; Tuesday and Wednesday nights would be pretty bad; Thursdays okay because by that time of the week, one of Mom’s friends usually was starting to call to see if she was okay; Friday would be okay. Saturday okay about half the time because he could usually talk his dad into taking him to the restaurant and letting him fall asleep on the couch in Uncle Augie’s office.

Sundays were the worst. Dad had to open, and so he left right after lunch. He always looked really upset when he left. He kept saying, “Beth? You’re all right now, aren’t you?”

And his mother would say, “Sure. I’m fine.” Then she would watch out the window when his dad left, like she could still see his car pulling down the driveway backwards an hour after he left. A few times, Vincent asked her if he could go out to play. She said, “Okay.” But Vincent didn’t; he didn’t feel too good about going out to play, even if there was new snow, until Kerry was down for her nap. If she threw all her toys out of the playpen, his mom wouldn’t put them back. Vincent did, even though it drove him nuts that Kerry would just throw them out again.