The Deep End of the Ocean (27 page)

He nodded again, furtively scrubbing at his eyes with the back of his hands. Then he slouched toward the stairs.

“Vincent,” Beth said sharply. “Did you see the boy who was mowing the lawn?”

“
What
boy?” He scowled.

Checking her watch, Beth clattered down the stairs to the darkroom. Line up, she thought. They’re only pictures. You make pictures twice a week. She made the motions mechanical, deciding to print each shot separately, eight by ten, though it would take forever. A contact sheet would be too small, too torturous. Enlarger. Stop bath. Fixer. Take your time.

She leaned over the bath. A drop of sweat fell from her chin, plinked on the mirror of the surface, and bloomed like the shape of an atom, widening, shimmying, finally disappearing.

And then, the edges of a face, growing more distinct, looking up at her, reaching up to her from darkness.

Beth left the prints strung on the line with clips.

Even from the open door of her darkroom, a distance of no more than four feet, many of them looked like copies, or a sequence in which the shutter had opened and closed, opened and closed, on the same subject in the same position. But when you came closer, you could see that each of the angles was subtly different, each a discrete variation of the boy’s fair face with its sharp chin and raccoon’s mask of light freckles beneath the eyes. Others, a few, captured his whole body. His legs were long—most of his length was right there—but grooved with the kind of effortless musculature he would have all his life.

The kind he had, indeed, had all his life.

By the time she came upstairs, Vincent was back in his room, and Kerry, red-eyed, had just completed her second straight hour of cartoon gluttony.

Beth flicked off the set, and Kerry prepared to launch herself into her bedtime routine.

But Beth caught her and pulled Kerry gently down with her on the deeply sunken end of the much-used pillow sofa. She held Kerry wordlessly, stroking the child’s feathery globe of cheek with her own, rougher skin, and finally rocking her with a motion so small and slight it could have fooled a passing glance into calling it stillness. Kerry didn’t object, but Beth could feel her arranging herself carefully on the brace of her mother’s arms—Beth’s hugs were not usually so indulgent.

But no matter what else happened during the rest of this day, what Beth had already seen gave her, for the first time in nine years, sufficient courage to let herself experience the yielding body of her youngest child. Kerry’s fingers were spangled with marker dots; she smelled of fruit and dish soap, and something warmer beneath—down, innocence. Beth looked up over Kerry’s tangled hair at the crest of the avalanche, the mountain of memory and half-memory, of rerun, regret, poignancy, and outrage, poised to hurtle down and paralyze her.

Nothing moved. Not a grumble. Not a single cold stone dislodged.

Beth led Kerry up to her room and listened while Kerry read from
Little House on the Prairie.
She was not a gifted reader, but she was a dogged plodder; her determination blazed from her like a scent. “I’m getting better every day, and I am nine now. Eighteen kids in class are still eight,” sighed Kerry, and Beth wondered where Kerry found a child’s confidence from the scraps of attention she had been fed while growing up.

“Night-night,” Beth told Kerry, switching off the overhead light.

“You’re not sick anymore, are you, Mommy?” Kerry asked.

“No, I’m peachy keen, peachy,” Beth said.

She passed by Vincent’s door and tapped it. “’Night,” she called. “Thanks for watching Kerry.” There was no answer but a vague growl under the pulse of the music; it was classical now—Perlman playing Mozart. Beth didn’t try the door. She knew it would be locked.

She glanced at the clock. It was after nine. Pat would be home in an hour.

Ordinarily, Beth devoted this last hour of the day, the last interval before she could take refuge in a cold glass of water and three Trazodone, with reading English novels. The English didn’t seem to have many children or care much about them when they did. What roused the English breast was a good water spaniel, a gentleman with a stick who’d come back from India to rejoin his ruddy-cheeked wife called Bea who gardened. The best books for Beth were those in which one day varied from the day before only in the variety of sandwiches at tea, in which vicars called on the sick, in which people went out for a drive to look at old button sets or used volumes of Thackeray.

But tonight, she could not release herself into a village just off the Montford road or a shop in Hastings Crossing.

She sat in the living room, the taste of cigarettes (she’d smoked three) acrid in her mouth. Pat was late. Then he came through the door humming, carrying an old double-sided cardboard that advertised the winter specials at Wedding in the Old Neighborhood. It would soon be time to put up a summer board, and Kerry liked to draw on the used ones.

Beth heard him put down his keys and turn on the kettle for his nightly cup of tea. She felt him check once, around the dark first floor, to see if he dared open a window and have a smoke before bed.

She said then, “Pat.”

He jumped. “Bethie!” he said. “What are you doing up?”

Beth walked into the yellow glare of the kitchen and put her arms around Pat. Gratefully he rubbed her back. “What’s up? Is Kerry sick?”

“No,” she said, wanting to draw out this last stable moment, the last moment of snow bridge she had built and packed hard, so that it felt almost like concrete, you could walk on it. Their fragile suppositions were an ache, but at least they were used to them. Now, what would happen? What would give way?

Beth said, “I have to show you something.”

Pat took off his sport coat and followed her down the stairs. Beth remembered the spent light. “Paddy,” she said, “Get a light bulb for me, okay?” He turned and left the room. Beth could see the pictures in the faint wash of light from the upstairs hall—his hair now darker, almost maroon in the sun. He would call it brown, she supposed.

This boy.

Sam.

Pat came back with the light bulb and snatched out the old one, tossed it in Beth’s huge rubber trash can. Replaced it in the dark. The light flickered, then shone steadily. Pat looked at the pictures. He stepped forward and tore one down, then two.

He said, “Beth.”

She said, “It is, isn’t it?”

They sat down side by side on the bench that ran along one wall in Beth’s darkroom. Pat pulled down another fistful of pictures. They moved into her office. Beth sat at the desk, Pat on the overstuffed chair.

“Is this possible?” he said, his voice strangled in a way that made Beth wonder if he should have a tranquilizer or a nitroglycerin. She could almost feel the flutter of his toiling heart.

“He came to the door,” Beth told Pat softly. “To mow lawns. I let him mow the lawn. He’s coming back tomorrow. Because we ran out of gas for the mower.”

Tears filled Pat’s eyes and streamed down his jaw, dripping onto the front of his shirt. In every other respect except the tears, he did not seem to be crying; his breath was measured, even.

“Where does this boy live?”

“Two blocks, he said.”

“Two blocks?” Pat cried. “Two blocks? Did they just move here?”

“Pat. I don’t know how long they’ve lived here. But Kerry knew him, and she’s been in school at Sandburg four years.”

“Did she…?”

“No, Pat, for God’s sake. I would have never known unless…well, maybe I would have. But he looked just like the aging projection Morris made. And I shot in color so that we could see…His hair is so dark…. It’s possible, Pat, that it’s just a kid who looks that way.”

“Yeah,” he breathed.

“And I wanted to show you, to ask you, before we called Candy or…or anyone.”

“Let’s call them now,” said Pat. “Let’s get up there and call, and get down to that house.”

“No,” Beth said. “It’s late night, Pat. He’s asleep. And we don’t even know his last name.”

“His last name? Christ, Beth, his last name?” He yanked off his tie, fumbled at his shirt pocket for the place he once kept his cigarettes, before the surgery, before he began hiding them from Beth. “But what if they’re…doing things to him right now?”

“He didn’t look or talk like an abused kid, Pat. And if he is, Pat, it’s been nine years….”

“Oh, Bethie—oh, Bethie—two blocks. When he saw you, did he…?”

“Nothing, Pat. Nothing. He had no idea. Pat, he was three.”

“And he wouldn’t know this house.”

“No.”

“Maybe he’d know me.”

Beth felt a sudden, powerful splash of rage rise; she wanted to slap Pat hard, in the face. But she breathed in and out, slowly, taking her time.

Pat said, “I gotta have a cigarette, Bethie. I’m sorry.” He grabbed a sheaf of the photos.

They sat on the porch, with the lights off. The sweat from Pat’s hands had already smudged the prints.

“Two blocks,” Pat said. “Two blocks. I never saw him.”

“You’re never around. And I never go anywhere walking. Just school. The drugstore. There are probably fifty kids in this neighborhood I’ve never seen in four years living here.”

Beth leaned against her husband. Be a rock for me now, Patrick, she thought. I don’t even want to see tomorrow, because even if it is Ben, we might have to know things that could bury us. Looked back upon, her nine years of quiet avoidance seemed…almost peaceful. Not like this clammy present fear.

But she felt Pat’s fragility through his wet shirt, felt the slender rasp of his damaged breaths as he smoked.

Okay, Candy, she thought. Be my rock Candy.

“I think we should call Bliss now. Or Bender. Or Jimmy.”

“Not tonight, Pat.”

“Beth,” he told her with desperate urgency. “What if he’s not there tomorrow? What if whoever…And why would they still be here? What if they take him and get out of Dodge?”

“They live here.”

“
They
live here?”

“He’s not going anywhere, Pat. Like he told Kerry, he’s in sixth.”

And then, possessed with a lust to touch him, to praise his body for planting the seed in her that became Ben, for not dying yet, Beth took the prints from Pat’s hands and kissed him, releasing her tongue deep into his mouth. He responded weakly, softly cupping one of her breasts, exploring the nipple with hands that barely seemed robust enough to grasp. Beth pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it onto the porch. She unbuckled Pat’s belt and lay back, wiggling out of her tattered jeans, centering him over her, drawing him inside her. She rocked to start him. “Please, Pat,” she whispered. “It won’t hurt anything.” And finally Pat took hold, and gripped her arms and plunged into her hard on the hard step, hurting her, making her feel sore and open and new. In a minute he said, “Shouldn’t we get…?”

“I’m not going to get pregnant, Pat,” she said. “Forget that. Just go ahead, go ahead, go ahead….”

Pat buried his tear-wet face against her breast and finished, in a shudder that came up his throat like a groan.

Just then they heard a voice, a neighbor calling in his cat. They lay still in the dark, cold as sculpture, as Beth felt Pat subside and shrink within her, and her own muscles contract, contract and relax.

“I’m going to call Dad,” Pat said, when they heard the neighbor’s door snap shut.

“Don’t tell him. Not until we know.”

“I won’t. I just…I don’t want to work tomorrow.”

“Right.”

Pat got up and arranged his clothing, using his thumbs to straighten his shirt collar as if he were headed for the bank, or for work. He buckled his belt carefully and put the change that had scattered on the porch back in his pockets. Last, he picked up the prints and held them to his chest. “I’m going in,” he said.

Beth didn’t answer. She drew on her jeans, retrieved her shirt, and lay curled with her hips on the mat, the pebbled cement under her pillowed arms, and strained to see the streetlight beyond the streetlight at their corner—the one two blocks down. She pretended that she knew she was looking at the right one. Call it the intersection of Menard and Downer, she thought. And she began to watch. I will have to make coffee, she thought, so I can be sure to watch until morning. And then she thought, No, I don’t need coffee. The cold will keep me awake.

She drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees, scanning her mind like a cookbook for a lovely antiseptic thought. Paint colors, tulip bulbs, low-cholesterol chicken Tetrazzini, tables of contents…yes. She would index the book of Sister Kathleen Noonan’s oils for the exhibit catalog.

Page one, she thought, the bell at the Franciscan House in Saint Francis.

Page two, the doors of the Baptistery in Florence.

Page three, three angels above the door frame at a tea shop in the East Village in New York City.

Beth stared at the orb of radiant light, two blocks away.

There was no interval at all that Beth could later recognize as a period of sleep. She was awake, and looking at the light, her forearms prickled with the cold fall air, her eyes burning; and then she was awake, looking for the light, which was off.

It was morning. She scanned the street quickly for evidence of cars backing out of driveways to be at work by eight. There were none. It was early morning, before seven.

Beth rose and felt the cold wetness in the crotch of her jeans, looked up at her bedroom window, which faced the street. Was Pat awake?

Line up, thought Beth. I will wake Kerry; I will wake Vincent. I will measure coffee and put it in the drip. Then I will call Candy. While it’s quiet, I’ll call her. She pushed open the screen door, the moment when she could call Candy fluttering ahead of her like the tail of a kite.

Pat was at the table, reading to Kerry from the back of the Cheerios box. Vincent was eating toast, standing with his back to Beth. The lines in Pat’s face looked carved in wax; he was ghastly, pouches larger than Angelo’s, reddened bruises beneath his eyes.

“Kerry’s having breakfast,” he told Beth.

“I see, I see,” Beth replied, catching a glimpse of her own stained and rumpled self in the bathroom mirror.

“What were you doing on the porch, Mommy?” asked Kerry.

“Watching the sun come up,” said Beth, and then asked her son, “Vincent, do you need a ride?”

“Jordie’s dad,” he said quietly.

“Okay, that’s good, that’s fine.” Beth walked into the kitchen and began to measure coffee into a filter. But Pat had already made coffee. Lots of coffee. She dumped the fresh grounds into the sink. She heard Pat tell Kerry to
mangia, mangia,
soon it would be time to walk to school.

“I’m going to ride my bike,” Kerry told him. “I’m nine now. I’m older than eighteen of the kids in third.”

“You can’t ride your bike,” Pat told her gently. “Kids in walking distance can’t ride their bikes. And you don’t have a bike lock.”

“Will you get me a bike lock just in case, Daddy?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Today.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Pat. “I’ll get it right after you go to school, and you can put it on when you get home.”

Beth listened, amazed. By the time Kerry got home from school, who among the people around this table—whatever happened, whatever the magnitude—would be able to think of bike locks and chains and combinations? Pat, she realized. Pat would. Pat would do it, beforehand, in penance, in petition. And so she wasn’t surprised when he followed Kerry out the door, kissing the child lightly and calling her “Chicòria,” the name in Italian for a wildflower. Beth heard him start the car, heard him pull away….

Line up, she thought. Line up. Now what? She poured her coffee, raising it recklessly to her lips, burning the soft skin so badly that she felt a welt rise. Vincent was leaving. She caught up with him at the door and, suddenly, fearfully, laid her head against his shoulder, which was exactly at the level of her own shoulder. He stopped, shrugging his knapsack onto the other shoulder, looking out into the street with forceful intensity.

“Goodbye, Mom,” he said, not looking. She saw his jaw jump and writhe, as though the muscles were being stimulated by jolts.

“Vincent,” said Beth. “Wait.” She needed urgently to tell him. She had to tell him, but what could she say?

“It’s possible that a kid two blocks away is your brother, that Ben isn’t dead anymore”? “And we still don’t know anything more about the way we lost him than we did that day you lay on the luggage trolley at the Tremont and slept with Ben’s blanket across your chest”?

She said instead, “Vincent. I love you. I want you to know I love you.”

He said, “Right. Thanks.” Not a trace of surprise. He still didn’t look at her.

Beth said, “Have a good time today.”

“You too,” he said.

Beth heard the crunch of gravel as Jordie’s dad wheeled his immense cherry-colored Chevy van into the apron of their drive. As the door closed behind Vincent, Beth saw something lying on the chair where he had stood, eating his toast. Half the chewed bit still lay on the edge of the table, next to Kerry’s empty cereal bowl. There was a slip, no, a sheet of paper, in the chair. She picked it up.

It was one of the full-face shots of the boy mowing the lawn. It was not one that Beth had given Pat. This shot had been strung on the line last night. It was one of the best. Beth had meant to give it to Candy.

Beth ran to the door and yanked it open. The van was just turning the corner, lights winking. Still, she yelled, “Vincent, wait!” The brake lights seemed to come on for an instant, but then the van kept going. “No!” Beth cried. Fool. She should have kept him home. He was not a child of seven anymore. To send him off to school today was a mortal insult.

But it was past eight. She picked up the telephone and looked at it. She called Candy at home.

“Girlfriend!” Candy cried happily. “I’m running more than one thousand percent late. Can you eat lunch one of the weekdays?”

“Candy,” Beth said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“What’s wrong, Beth?” said Candy, instantly tensing. “Is Pat sick?”

“Candy, listen.” She paused for breath. “I think I found Ben.”

Because Beth had seen her do it so often, she could now watch the silence on the other end of the line as if it were film, watch Candy Bliss let her gargantuan bag slide down her arm like a weary cat, see her raise one perfect finger to the place just between her eyes and press, press, press hard.

“Beth, do you mean that you got a letter or a phone call?”

“I saw him, Candy. He came to my door.”

“He came…he came to your door? Here? He found you here? Ben would be…what…he’d be twelve, Beth. You’re saying he came home?”

“No. He didn’t know me. He lives here. They…whoever it is that took him, lives in this neighborhood, I guess.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Well, he’s here. Except I don’t know it’s him. For sure.”

“You do know.”

“I don’t know. He looks like the age projection. His eyes were always a weird shade of gray, without any blue, and they still are. The shape of his lips and eyes—yes, I would say with ninety-percent certainty that this is my son. He has two cowlicks.”

“The birthmark?”

“I didn’t pull his pants down, Candy.” As she said it, a revulsive thing squirmed under her heart. Who had…who had? Which scenario was it? Come on, Mrs. Cappadora, choose door one, two, or three? The con artist, the yearner, the molester?

Was this
Ben
?

Nine years had telescoped into a day and a night and a day. Was it over?

“I’ll be right there,” Candy was telling her.

Because it was one of her arts, Beth knew precisely how long it would take for Candy to drive from her own apartment to Beth’s house, depending on the time of day. She glanced at the clock. She had twenty-five minutes.

Running upstairs, she stripped off her gummy jeans and shirt, which still stank of developing chemicals. She showered and carefully pulled on middle-level work clothes—cotton trousers, a tunic. She dried her hair instead of merely combing it with her fingers. She put on mascara. She sat down on the bed and forcibly tried to still herself. Dead legs, limp arms, hands that felt animate only around the edges of a camera, dead stomach that had learned to receive food as a matter-of-factly as a supermarket scanner, dead heart with its battened receptors, all surged and tingled.

Could he be her Ben—her freckled babe, her rain-eyed darling, folded so long in death, silent as his baptismal gown lying in the cedar chest—come miraculously alive?

It was stupefying. Wonderful beyond imagining. It was terrifying.

And then, Beth thought, oh, God, my God, I will be able to touch Ben’s hair. If she could do that, she would not care if her hand was then set on fire.

The doorbell rang; but before Beth could answer it, Candy walked in and took Beth into her arms without greeting. They stood in the fractured sunlight of the lower hall, where Pat found them when he came home, dutifully carrying Kerry’s bike lock and chain.

“Are you scared to death?” Candy asked.

“To death, to death,” Beth told her.

“Scared?” asked Pat. “Scared of what? Let’s go. I can’t wait, Candy—we have to go there, right now.”

“Go where?” Beth asked him irritably. “We don’t know what house he’s in, or if he’s really in a house two blocks away. And anyway, he’d be in school.”

“It’s the short day,” said Pat. School ended at 1:30 p.m. on Mondays.

All three of them looked at their watches. It was just after nine. Candy silently picked up the print Vincent had left behind and studied it, as Pat shifted the bike chain and lock from hand to hand.

“He said he’d come back,” Beth said. “To finish the lawn. He ran out of gas.”

“I didn’t get gas!” Pat nearly screamed.

“He’s not really going to mow the lawn, Pat,” Beth told him, nearly laughing before she could stop herself.

“Of course, no one thinks we’re going to sit here and wait for this kid to remember to show up and mow the lawn,” Candy said softly. “You’re just not thinking clearly. I can’t imagine how you would. Or how I will. But I’m going to try, and the first thing we have to is—Beth, you said he goes to Kerry’s school?”

“She says he’s in sixth. At Sandburg.”

“And they’re two separate buildings, the elementary and the middle.”

“Yep. Connected. There’s one gym and all.”

“Okay, so that’s where we’ll start. I’ll call…well, I guess I’ll call Jimmy Daugherty, though strictly speaking, this isn’t what he does anymore, but I know how much he’ll want to be involved if…if this is it. And we’ll go down there and find out the kid’s name and the identity of whoever’s listed as his parent or guardian.” She got up, pouring herself coffee no one had thought to offer her, and went on, as if dictating a list to an assistant. “Might need a subpoena. If the school isn’t sufficiently impressed with the necessity of cooperating with the release of this information. Not a problem. Harry Brainard will help….”

Beth looked at Pat. “Circuit court judge,” she said.

“But if we start with school pictures, yearbooks, this shouldn’t be too much trouble. I would want to cooperate with helping solve one of the most intractable missing-persons cases in recent history, wouldn’t you?” Candy tapped her teeth with her nail. “But first, I need to see the rest of the pictures.”

Beth said, “On the hall table.”

“Did Reese see them?” Candy asked rummaging in her bag for paper and a pen.

“I think he did,” Beth told her. “One, at least.” Pat looked up horrified.

“You showed Vincent?”

“I didn’t show him. He looked.”

Candy asked, “Can I see them now?”

Beth laid them all out, except the one Candy still held, end to end on the kitchen table, in lines like the child’s game called Memory. Candy put her glasses on and stood over them. As Beth watched her concentration, she realized Candy was crying—prettily, quietly, without either pretense or fuss, the way Candy did everything. “I’m sorry,” she told Beth.

Beth said, “I can make more.”

“This face…this face.” And Beth thought of the side-by-side photos of Ben that Candy kept above her desk, tacked to her bulletin board, not dog-eared, not wrinkled, carefully smoothed. All of them: his baseball-mitt picture; the first Missing poster; the second; the computer projection of Ben’s face at six, at eight. “This face. When I went…Philadelphia, Santa Fe, Jersey. The child in Palo Alto. The little Grainger boy in Michigan. And then afterward, when we all presumed, even I presumed, that he had died, wherever I went—conferences, vacations, to see my mother in Tampa—I carried those copies. I still have them.” She extracted a manila envelope from her purse and spilled the contents on the table. “And I realized, after the first few years, that I could no more stop looking for that face than I could stop breathing in and breathing out. It was like the fantasy of the perfect lover. ‘Be there, Ben,’ I would say. ‘In this park. At this fair. Let me see you on the street. Let me bring you home to Beth.’”

Candy scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “And then there’d come a time, when I knew it was only a day or a few hours before I would have to leave, and I’d call and say I was in town. ‘There was this kid…. Right, you remember, the Cappadora kid…. ’ And I would ask about their unidentifieds. Their Baby Does. Autopsy pictures and graves. Potter’s fields and beautiful plots. Wanting and hoping it would be Ben. Terrified it would be Ben. But mostly hoping. That Ben would be found. Done. Even if I had to tell you he was dead, that he’d been dead for years.”

She reached out for Pat’s hand. “I wanted to see this face. I wanted to have Ben back. For you. And me.”

Then, shaking herself visibly, she stood up to find the phone. “I’m going to call my lieutenant and the chief and tell them, and we’ll get things started.”

“What should
we
do?” Pat asked. “Should we go down to the school?”

Candy paused. “Paddy, until we can ID this kid—I mean, prove for absolutely one-hundred-percent-beyond the-remotest-shadow-of-a-doubt that this is Ben—you can’t start calling the shots. And right now, this kid is the legal responsibility of whomever we learn are his parents….”