The Deep End of the Ocean (16 page)

“And you don’t care about my mother or my father, and the fact that they’re as knocked out by this as you are. And that they don’t know what to make of how you’re behaving. Now, I have to admit, I would be curled up on the floor. I couldn’t go on like you do. But you have withdrawn from the whole family. And that’s okay, but if you do that, you can’t control—”

“Tree,” Vincent’s dad warned, very tired. “Tree, wait—”

“No, Pat. You’re all too scared to say this, but I’m not! We try to call, she won’t talk to us. We write, she won’t answer us. We can’t talk about anything in our lives that doesn’t have to do with Beth’s grief. She’s like Deirdre, Mother of Sorrows—nothing in the world can ever be as bad as what she’s going through, so she’s just opted out of life completely.”

“That’s right. That’s my choice.”

“But it isn’t
ours,
Beth. You don’t own every choice about Ben. He was ours, too. And we haven’t decided to give up. We still go over at night and mail bunches of leaflets to people in New York and Kansas and Oklahoma. We still talk to the police. We still want to believe that there’s hope, and you can’t stop us, and I don’t know why you want to, because you aren’t going to find him by sitting on your duff all day and—”

That was when Vincent decided he had to tell his mom that there was a very good chance things were going to be fine by Christmas morning, that Ben would be back.

“Mom,” he said, “I have to tell you what I did.” He wondered if, actually, this was going to be sort of a lie, because he hadn’t actually written a Santa letter. He had simply tried praying to Santa, because Grandma Rosie insisted he was a saint and you could pray to saints any time you wanted; they were up there waiting for it. So he took a deep breath and said, “Wait a minute, Mom. I asked Santa to bring Ben home. I think he’ll do it.”

It was like freeze tag.

Nobody in the room moved. Nobody spoke.

Then his mom got up and carefully put down her cup and dug her hands up under the roots of her hair and stumbled out of the room toward the stairs. Vincent looked at his dad. Once, on Mother’s Day a couple of months after Kerry was born, he and his dad had brought his mother a whole basket full of wild roses, and she had put her face right down into them and cried and cried, and when Vincent asked why, his father told him, “She’s happy, Vincent. I know it sounds funny, but sometimes adults get so happy that they cry.”

Was that it?

Grandma Rosie was leaning her head on Aunt Tree’s shoulder. Grandpa Angelo got up, jingling his car keys, and said he was going to take a ride over to the restaurant and see Augie. Vincent’s dad picked him up and said, “I think it’s time for bed, slugger. Just a few days until Christmas. Gotta get your rest.” Vincent struggled to get down. Why was everyone mad at him? Did they think it was mean to ask Santa for your own brother? But even though for once he was glad to go to bed, he wanted to switch on his tape first. “I just want to look at that one big present, Dad,” he lied.

When they were up in his room, and his father had bounced him on Ben’s bed and laid him down and sung a couple of verses of “Davy Crockett,” Vincent asked, “Remember that one time when all I did was bop Ben on the head very softly and he bit me?”

“Yeah. I put Ben in our room to separate you.”

“When it was actually Ben’s fault.”

“Well, you did bop him.”

“Very softly. And he bit me very, very hard.”

“He liked to bite. But he stopped that after he got bigger.”

“Yeah,” said Vincent. “I just wanted you to know, Dad, I forgive him for that.”

“Good,” said his dad. “I’m glad. Now, go to sleep. The twins are already out. They’re good little girls, not sneaky little monkeys who run around all night. Don’t you dare wake them up.” He kissed Vincent and said, “I love you.”

“Where’s Mom?” Vincent asked then.

“She’s in her room.”

“Is she sick?”

“A little, yeah. A little bit. Even grownups have fights sometimes, Vincent. You know that. It’ll all be better in the morning.”

But in the morning, it only got worse, because instead of talking loud at each other, everyone was so polite. At least the tape had worked pretty well. He heard his dad say to his aunt, “…the amount of stress. And she doesn’t answer it because she thinks half the time it’s going to be the police saying they’ve found another kid or some nut trying to tell her we killed him.”

“But even given all that, Paddy, she needs professional help. She really needs professional help.”

“Maybe,” said his dad. “Yeah.”

Then they started to talk about Monica being stuck up and all kinds of stuff Vincent didn’t even care about.

But professional help. That, thought Vincent, was a great idea. He hoped his dad really meant it. If his mom had a professional helper, someone who did helping for a job, right in the house all the time, she would have to wash and change her clothes every day, because the helper would make her. She would have to change Kerry more often, so that Kerry didn’t soak through the front of her little sleepers every day before Jill got home. Vincent couldn’t change diapers, because Kerry was too wiggly; he’d tried, and she just rolled over and over until she was away from him. His mom had to do it. If the helper could get his mom moving, so she did more things without taking forever, she would have more time, because as far as Vincent could tell, she wasn’t doing her picture work anymore at all. They could maybe take walks. Maybe make a mobile; she used to like to make mobiles out of wire hangers and cut-out stars. He might be too big for that now, but he didn’t care. He’d do it if his mom wanted to. And after a while of doing normal things again, she would start to realize that even if Ben was gone right now, she still had even more kids than she’d lost. She had double the number of kids she’d lost.

And he was pretty sure he and Kerry together made up for one Ben. Maybe even one and a half.

Not long after the
People
magazine landed on the stands, seven months to the day after Ben was taken, Candy passed through Madison, unannounced, on the way to a forensics conference in Michigan. Beth later believed she had made a special detour; it was like Candy to anticipate how Beth would feel when she saw the cover, which was a full-page bleed of the second Missing poster, with no headline other than “1-800-FIND BEN” and a little kicker that said, “Before Their Very Eyes: The Strange Disappearance of Ben Cappadora.” No teases on movie stars’ pregnancies or stories about diet doctors. Just Ben.

Laurie had brought it to the house the day it came out.

Beth wouldn’t talk to her, even after Pat pleaded through the locked bedroom door. Finally, Laurie told Pat to go away. “Bethie, listen,” she said. “You’re going to hate me for this, and I know it. But it’s been a long time now, Beth. The police are getting nowhere.” Beth could hear Laurie lightly rubbing the door, as if she were patting Beth on the back. Laurie went on, “You see that magazine at every doctor’s office in America, Bethie. And when that reporter called me, well, I decided that I was going to talk to her even though I knew what you’d think. It was the right thing to do, Bethie. I love you. I love Ben. And I’ve just always thought this paranoia about the media was…unreasonable. So, even if you never speak to me again, I’m glad I did it. And you should know, Barbara talked to them, too. And so did Wayne. And so did your sister-in-law Teresa. And if you hate them, too, I’m sorry for you. Beth, when you’re ready, I’ll be waiting to talk to you.” Beth could hear Laurie’s silent presence outside the door, like a drawn breath. “Okay, Beth. ’Bye now.”

The magazine was on the floor outside Beth’s bedroom door when she opened it an hour later. She sat down, right there, in the opening between the lintels, and flipped to page sixty, thinking, absurdly, They always make you wait for the cover story, no matter what it is, they make you wade through sixteen things about the ninth-grade genius who figured out how to make a computer out of a clock radio, or the model who had two babies in eighteen months and starved herself back to perfect flatitude in six weeks.

She thought she could read the first paragraph. That, she would allow herself, though she could feel the cold and crush shimmering above her even as she folded back the facing page, the one covered with photographs she barely glanced at but couldn’t help recognize. She’d taken most of them herself, after all—a Christmas photo of her three kids that had been the centerpiece of a card: newborn Kerry, Vincent, and Ben in Santa hats, all of them with their tongues sticking out. A picture on Laurie’s picnic table of Ben and Laurie’s son in clown makeup. Laurie had that one framed in her living room.

On the first page, it was just the first Wanted poster. Beth could look at that—she’d seen it so often that it had finally become meaningless. She no longer wanted to claw her wrists when she looked at the cockeyed tilt of Ben’s baseball cap, the crease in his nose when he smiled. And down below, a glamorous shot of Candy talking to reporters outside the Parkside station, looking up, clearly irritated by the photographer, but still every-hair-perfect despite the grim set of her jaw.

Okay, thought Beth. You can read one line. Two. “When Beth Cappadora took her children to the fifteenth reunion of her high-school class in Chicago, she expected a time of togetherness with old friends, not the beginning of a nightmare that would tear apart a family, old friendships, and the very fiber of a community….” Beth slapped the covers together.

She knew what the rest would entail—a couple thousand words of breezy, bathetic prose wrapped around pictures that would make even women waiting for mammograms count their blessings as they read. Enough. It was done. It was there and existed and she knew it and that was it. Since she need never leave the house again, she thought gratefully, she was not going to have to see supermarket eyes averted in recognition and shame. She was not going to have to see the tight, pained half-smiles of teachers. Pat would, though. He would probably revel in the sympathy; he seemed, she reflected, to like sympathy in direct inverse proportion to the loathing Beth felt for the same glances, notes, and little hand-hugs. He’d even said, one night, how heartwarming it was, how startling a confirmation of the basic good in human beings, the letters and the offers of support that caused the mail carrier literally to heft armfuls of stuff up onto their porch; it would never have fit in any mailbox. Laurie, Beth believed, took the letters home. She could see Laurie eye the growing piles nervously every time she came over, and then, a few days later, Beth would notice the piles were slim again. She could not imagine, nor did she try, what manner of pity and grotesquerie those letters contained.

On her bad days, after Kerry fell asleep on her bottle, Beth took baths. She sat in the water until it was scummy and cold, looking at her spindly arms and legs, white as carp, floating under the surface. By the time she came out, it was four or after, Jill was often home if it wasn’t a late class day, and she’d gone to get Vincent at the Shores’. Beth could start waiting for dark. Deep dark came early now, and as soon as it was deep dark, a person could go to bed. Bed, for Beth, was a nearly erotic sensation. The falling away of the day was her most precious moment of existence. The nights when Jill had class were nearly intolerable. She had to sit on the couch while Vincent read his chapter books or went over his spelling lists, knowing she should get up and tell him that children did not do homework effectively in front of television, but unable to do it. After a while, he would get up, gingerly kiss her, and go to bed.

And then Beth would have the last fifteen minutes, the fifteen minutes to get through that she usually spent watching Paul Crane, across the street, doing endless chip shots on his frost-nipped lawn under the lights from his garage. After fifteen minutes—it was a reasonable interval—she could run for the stairs. Vincent would be in bed. She would even look in on him, blurring her eyes to avoid seeing the bed he lay in, and say, “’Night, honey.” He never answered. He fell asleep quickly. That was good.

On good days, Beth sometimes went downstairs into her office and threw things away. She filled bags with out-take shots, old negatives and contracts, her clips, her anthologies, phone numbers she would never need again. She liked the feeling of stripping away her former life, liked the release from any obligation except living until night. One afternoon, Pat had discovered her throwing away her Rolodex and stopped her. Beth let him—she could always throw it away some other day, when he was at the restaurant.

She thought, briefly, of actually dismantling her darkroom, but she knew that she would never be able to dispose of huge stable objects such as sinks and trays without Pat’s noticing. At night, she would mentally scan her own room, thinking of what things she could throw away the next day. Shoes, perhaps. She had far too many.

When Candy showed up on the porch that afternoon, Beth had had a good morning. She had showered and fed Kerry her cereal on her own. She let Candy come in, returned her hug, and felt puzzled by the way Candy held her at arm’s length and looked her over, top to bottom.

“Beth, what you are wearing is very strange,” Candy said.

Beth asked if Candy wanted coffee. Candy said, “Sure.” And Beth went into the kitchen to measure out the coffee in spoons. Laurie always said it tasted better if you measured it.

“Did you hear me, what I said before?” Candy asked, when they were sitting at the kitchen table, Candy holding a drowsy Kerry in one arm.

“Yes,” Beth said. She tried to remember.

“You are wearing something that looks funny.” Bethwas, in fact, wearing ordinary wool pants. They were pants from the seventies, which she had discovered not long ago during a closet raid. She had no idea how much weight she’d lost, but on impulse she had tried on these pre-childbearing pants, with their wide legs and eccentric wraparound belts, and found that they nearly fit. There had been perhaps three pairs, which Beth now wore regularly, with either one of her sweatshirts or one of Pat’s shirts.

“I’ve lost a lot of weight,” she told Candy. “And these are just fine for working around the house.”

“What about for
working
working?” Candy asked then.

“I’m…uh…retired,” Beth said. “I can’t imagine…you know. I took pictures of news things and people and weddings and stuff, Candy. I couldn’t do that now. I don’t think I could take pictures of…food, even.”

“But you might want to—you know, sometime,” Candy said. “Don’t you think? I mean, didn’t you always work?”

Beth nodded.

“Oh,” Candy said. “That’s what I thought.” She went on to tell Beth that the seminar she was attending was being held at the big new conference center west of town. “The Embassy’s cheaper, though, so I’ll get a room there.” But Beth told her no, of course not, she must stay here, it would be fine. Candy smiled. “I’d like that.” What the conference was about, she went on, was the psychological profiling of felons. “It’s the big new thing,” Candy explained. “You get to find out that almost every criminal is between twenty and forty, medium height, white or black, drank milk as a child, had a little trouble with alcohol in college, and had a mother who always bugged him to practice the piano.”

“I think I dated that guy,” Beth said.

“I think my brother was that guy,” Candy agreed. “It’s my belief that this is all bullshit, actually. I don’t really think there are any more bad guys percentage-wise than there ever were. What I think is that there are simply more people, you know? There are more people, and less room for them, and less money.”

She was not mentioning Ben, Beth noticed. That wouldbe because there was nothing new to say. Beth had learned not to ask. Candy would tell her anything, no matter how seemingly minute or insignificant. But attention was shifting away from the case. Beth knew that.

“Did you see the story in
People
last week?” she asked Candy then.

“I was hoping you didn’t,” Candy told her. “But actually, Bethie, much as I despise most of the sharks, I really think this isn’t such a bad idea. It’s like free leafleting. Every kid goes to a doctor’s office sooner or later. It could be our key, you know? One of those reality TV shows would probably be a good idea, too.” She paused, swirling the coffee gone cold in her cup. “You or Pat would probably have to chat, though.”

Beth said, smiling, “No.”

“No for you or no for Pat?”

“I’m not his mother. I don’t care what he does.”

“Oh, so that’s how it is, huh?”

“I mean, I don’t care who he talks to. He doesn’t seem to do it much, anymore, though.”

“Maybe he can sense you don’t like it.”

“Maybe.”

“Beth—” Candy said then, and waved to Jill as she came in the door from school, handing her the baby, who woke up and kicked in delight, saying “Joo! Joo!” and gurgling. “Do you have any money?”

“Do you need some money?”

“No, I meant, do you have any money in the house? I thought we could go shopping.”

Beth started to laugh. She thought she might laugh hard enough that the coffee would come up in brown strings, so she tried to keep it under some semblance of control. Everything, it seemed, made her stomach revolt in recent months. “Candy,” she finally gasped. “I don’t go shopping. What would I go shopping for?”

“Some clothes, maybe.”

“I don’t want any clothes.”

“Would you do it for me?”

“No.”

“That’s not very hospitable. Maybe
I
want some clothes.”

“You live in Chicago. They have much better clothes there than they have in Madison. Anyway, you always wear the same thing. And they have beige blazers anyplace.”

“Beth, that’s not true. I have a quite varied wardrobe at home. Leather studded with nails, mostly. Some gold lamé. What I want, I want to go shopping. Jilly,” she called, “where’s a good mall?”

Jill, changing the baby, called back, “West Towne. The Limited and stuff.”

“Sounds good.” Candy got up. At that moment Vincent opened the door. To Beth’s astonishment, he flew into Candy’s arms, holding her, wrapping his legs around her as she picked him up—easily, Beth noticed, fragile as Candy looked.

“Did you bring Ben?” he asked.

“Sport, not yet.” Candy looked about to cry. “I’m sorry. I’m going to keep on looking till I find him, though. I promise. So, Vincent, school okay? Playing basketball?”

Vincent slid his eyes over toward his mother. “I’m not playing this winter.”

“Oh, well, time enough for that. Listen, Vincent, I have a big problem.”

“What?”

“I’m taking your mommy to the store, and I have to have someone to guard my badge while I’m gone.” She took out the leather case that held her gold shield. “This is a detective’s badge. It’s very valuable.” She winked at Beth. “It’s real gold, for one thing. And it has powers. Do you have any idea of anybody who could guard this thing, I mean guard it with his life, while I’m gone?”

Vincent lowered his voice. “I think I could do it.”

“I don’t know.” Candy pretended to back off a step. “I don’t know, Vincent. You’re a smart kid and all, but you’re only what—eight? This is the kind of responsibility I wouldn’t normally let even a kid, like, twelve do for me. It would have to be a very trustworthy kid.”