The Deep End of the Ocean (40 page)

But she was unable to help herself. “When?” she asked.

“Oh, when the kids were little. I don’t know. It didn’t mean anything.”

“And with me?”

“Well, of course, Bethie. It meant something with you. Bethie, you know how I felt about you that day. I even thought—” Okay, she breathed then, it will be okay now—“at that time, that we might…see each other more. That maybe we could have—”

“‘See each other more’? You mean, behind people’s backs?”

She couldn’t believe her presumption. What had she expected him to say? “Found the meaning of life”?

“Well, I wouldn’t have put it that way.” Nick smiled. “We’re going to talk now, I see. I think I need a smoke.”

She itched with impatience as he got out his engraved lighter, his neatly folded pack of Lights. “Nick,” she asked again, “did you think that after that day we’d start being lovers?”

“Was that such a bad thing to hope?”

“And never tell anyone?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t think about it.”

“Even after?”

“There was no point in thinking about it after.” Nick drew in on his smoke and folded his hands. “Bethie,” he said then, “did you want to leave Pat? Is that what you want now?”

“No,” she said. “Well, I don’t know.”

“When you never called me, I thought, well, it was just one of those things that happen when you’re under stress. But then, when you called me today, I thought, maybe she feels her life is missing something, too.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“Sure.” Nick smiled. “Doesn’t everybody?” He reached for her, holding her not quite comfortably across the divider between the bucket seats. No wait, Beth thought. It’s not just “Doesn’t everybody?” It’s more than “Doesn’t everybody?”

But Nick was saying, “A long time ago, my brother Richie told me that if you put a jellybean in a jar for every time you made love during the first year of marriage, and then you took one out for every time you made love after, you’d never empty out the jar.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Well…”

“So it was just sexual for you?”

“Wasn’t it for you?”

“No!” she cried. “Yes, and no.”

“Well, yes and no for me, too.”

“And have you had other affairs, since?”

“What does it matter?”

“How often?”

“Beth, numbers are just numbers.”

“No they’re not.”

“Okay, then. A couple of times. But not like this. Beth, they were just no big deal. I don’t want you to think I’m some pig or something, Beth, but it’s…Pat would say this…I mean, maybe not, because you’re so…full of life. But for me, being bored, physically, in a marriage doesn’t mean that it’s not a good marriage.”

Pat, thought Beth in a hot flush of loyalty, would never say that.

She asked Nick then, “Is it a good marriage? Your marriage?”

“Yes, it is,” he said. “I think Trisha is happy, and the kids are great. We are good friends. We respect each other. Other people rely on us. She has a full life of her own.”

Beth thought, Doesn’t everybody? Nick slid his hand, comfortingly, erotically, across the back of her neck, letting his fingers probe her muscles. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want you. That I don’t want us to spend time together. Beth, a part of me will always love you. And probably even more because you’ve been so brave. Nobody else could have gone through this like you did. You were always that way. My ma used to say, ‘Elizabeth will always get what she wants.’ I used to get mad at her for it. But she was right.”

Beth disentangled herself from his arm and peered out the window. She wished she could teleport, deliver herself from this seat to her kitchen in one blinked motion, without the need to taper down this conversation, smile, comb her hair, drive. From the rim of her eyes, she caught Nick tilting the mirror to reform his hair where she had mussed it. He did it well, with the deft assurance of a woman currying her perm.

She turned to him. “It would be easy for me to make love to you. It would always have been easy for me. But it wouldn’t be enough.”

“I’m not saying that would be all there is to it, Beth.”

“What else would there be?”

“What else do you want? Do you want to marry me, Beth? Did something change in twenty years, other than I got older and more money?”

“Yes,” Beth said then, tears forming. “I changed. I wanted…”

“Me? Or just something?”

“Something. I thought maybe it was you.”

“And maybe it is. I’m not saying all the doors are closed, Beth. It’s just…you call me after four years. We have lunch. You ask me if I’ve ever slept with anyone but my wife and you, and if I did, I’m this creep.”

“Not a creep. Just not…”

Not Pat, she thought. Not Pat.

He was out in the yard when she got home. She had examined her face fully in the mirror; it was neither too flushed nor too wan.

It was just a little better than ordinary.

Pat was looking up at one of the bedroom windows. “Do you think a dormer would look like hell?” he asked her as she came up behind him. “I’d like to give the boys more space, but I don’t want it to look like a trailer park.” “The boys.” She heard him roll the plural in his mouth, love it. She wanted to swaddle him gently, in a blanket, keep him from harm.

“Come upstairs,” Beth said, surprising herself. “I want to show you something.” He stared at her, then followed.

The house was hushed and cool. She locked the bedroom door behind them and walked out of the cotton pants, amazed at her own boldness—they didn’t do things like this anymore. Leaning back with her palms on the wood of their dresser, planting her legs apart and rising up on her toes, she coaxed Pat out of his belt. Caught between puzzlement and excitement, he tried to figure out which way to move. He kissed her, with his lips trying to draw her to the bed. Sensible. But Beth leaned back farther, her hands up under his shirt, aligning the two of them so they stood ribcage to ribcage. This had always been easy for them, because they were nearly the same height; when they were kids, they had laughed about it. All we’d ever need would be a phone booth, Pat used to say. Obligingly, he slipped out of his pants and bent his knees—Beth was surprised, as always, at how ropy and strong he always emerged from his clothes. Dressed, he looked like a little ghost.

Pat raised his face to her then, and she saw his eyes grow hooded, his jaw tense, as they always had when another element walked into the room—the harshness and urgency of a man simply hot for a woman, any woman, not necessarily his familiar wife. Those had always been the best times, even before, times when they broke out of the tight threads of emotion that surrounded them, threads of weariness and responsibility and jealousy and even love, and the nakedness was more than physical, and a cold concrete floor or six neighbors watching from a window would not have stopped her from pulling him into her.

“For an old lady,” Pat said, low, almost without moving his mouth, “you are some lady. You look twenty, Bethie. You look like you did on the grass behind the fieldhouse.”

She pulled him under her, into her, with her hands along his hips, finding a place on his throat to plant her open lips and suck at him. “Paddy,” she said, “Paddy. Do it. Just do it.”

“Let me…here…” Pat cupped her breasts, awkwardly, diving between them, inhaling her.

“No, no,” she shushed him, “just this way.” The smell of Nick on her forearm, as it chanced to cross her face, confused her, drove her hips against Pat’s with a bluntness that startled them both. “I just, I just…”

It was infuriating. She could not dismiss Nick’s movie-perfect eyes from her mind. Though she and Pat worked together gracefully, making love with the kind of concerted grace of long habit, Beth felt they were fumbling, wearing heavy gloves, taking turns at a campfire poking a single glowing coal with a stick, missing it, sending it rolling, finding it again, missing again.

They were both pouring sweat by the time Beth pushed Pat down on the bed, locking her legs around him, suddenly terrified he would let go before she caught up with him, and that this would mean something it had never meant before, not just an ordinary miss. “Wait for me,” she whispered. “Wait.”

He pulled her arms down then, and pinioned them with his own, so that she lay on top of him but held fast, unable to move. There was no space between them except the space Pat created with the small coring movements of his hips. And then, gratefully, Beth felt him strike the center of the coal with patient, consistent friction, felt the beginning of the burn…and Nick’s face stretched and faded and stretched until, at the instant she felt Pat buck and spill, it vanished as if punctured, popped. She could see Nick, his beauty, his style, outside her, a lovely memory. Pat, suddenly heavy and wet beneath her, smelled like soap and salt and pine: the cleanest man she’d ever known. For years, she now realized, the most she’d managed to feel was a surface sizzle when they linked, the light off a sparkler that quickly sputtered. This time, the burn had gone all through. She hadn’t thought they had that left.

“You…you are so fine, Paddy,” she said then. “You would never leave me, would you?”

Pat’s voice, when it came, was remarkably calm, full of breath, not like her own postsexual rasp. “I don’t know,” he said. “Are you going to make me want to?”

Beth had not noticed the refrigerator chill of the air-conditioned room. She pulled a corner of the quilt over her. Sounds came back: Kerry banging in the kitchen downstairs, Vincent shouting at her to turn off the TV.

Without a word, Pat got up and began taking his suit and shirt for work out of the closet, absently selecting a tie. Beth closed her eyes. In a moment, she heard the rush of the shower across the hall. This should be the part where I have a good, hard cry, she thought. And then I’d be cleansed, and I’d know what to do. But I can never cry when I need to. Or faint when I need to. Or sleep when I need to. She lay with her eyes open, remembering a feeling from girlhood, from days when she’d come out of a movie theater, blinking into the ebbing light of a Friday afternoon, disoriented in time, sick with the sense that something had been wasted. She pulled a pillow over her face, willing the slams and muffled calls, the activity of the house, to recede.

The next sound she heard was Pat’s voice, from far off, shouting to her that Sam was gone.

“He’s outside,” Beth, still fuddled with sleep, told Pat as she stumbled down the stairs. “What time is it? Is it morning? He went down to the school to shoot baskets.” She glanced around the empty kitchen. “Is Beowulf here? Maybe he took the dog out.”

Hearing his name, Beowulf obligingly slid out from under the dining room table and chuffed over to nose Beth’s hand.

“It’s five o’clock in the morning, Beth,” said Pat. “He wouldn’t go out to shoot baskets at five in the morning.”

“Five o’clock in the morning?” But Pat was still dressed in creased and gravy-fragrant work clothes. “Where were you?”

He looked away. “I had a few drinks.”

Ahhh, Beth thought then, her panic over Sam receding for a moment, like water off the hull of a rising submarine.

Had Pat been with…someone else? How many people had there been in their bed yesterday afternoon? Three, four? Not only Nick, but some lovely Claudia or Roxanne of Pat’s dreams? Maybe one of the three rotating hostess-brides at Wedding, all actors or models and cute as Mediterranean buttons?

After what had happened between them yesterday?

Beth felt no stab of jealousy, only a consuming curiosity: Before yesterday, would she have cared? Or mourned? Now, she wondered if one last big, fat irony was in store: she had loved Pat all along, but thawed to the recognition of that love only just…too late. Months late? Days? Despite all her own digressions and frank absences, in thought and deed, in spite of the terrible words both of them had spoken over the years, she had never even considered the possibility that it would be Pat who would turn away from her.

She looked at her husband’s face, shadowed with overnight stubble, shorn of the restorative balm of sleep. Her biggest fear, yesterday, had been of the reckoning, of facing with Pat the possibility that by claiming Sam, they would destroy him, and by letting him go, they would destroy their family.

Now she felt again the sinking she’d dismissed with sleep the previous day. Pat might not go the distance. Perhaps whatever reckoning was to be faced, each of them would face alone.

“It was Joey and me,” Pat said then, in a hurry, as if receiving her thoughts. “And the one bride and groom, Roxanne and Dustin. We went to that hippie place on Belmont.”

Beth asked, “Until five in the morning?”

The room was icy. Beth reached into the hall closet and pulled out a sweater. Why did they have to keep the air at arctic levels, anyhow? She fumbled for the thermostat.

“Then back to Joey’s. We watched
The Wild Bunch.
What the fuck do you care, anyhow, Bethie? You know how many times I don’t come home until morning, and you don’t even know? You think I was robbing a train or something? Were you waiting up or what? And where the hell is Sam?”

My God, she thought. Sam.

“He could be in the basement watching TV,” she said. “Did you ask Vincent?”

“He’s asleep. His door’s locked. I knocked. Kerry’s asleep—wasn’t she going to stay over at Blythe’s?”

“She got homesick. You know how she does. Georgia brought her home. I heard her come in.”

“Anyhow, I looked everywhere. Jesus Christ, Beth. Jesus Christ, where is he?”

Beth reached automatically up over the coffee machine for his angina pills. “Stop now, Pat,” she instructed, struggling to pop open the bottle. “Let’s just think a moment. Maybe he’s running. He started running….”

“Beth, this house has been on the news, pictures, everywhere,” Pat gasped. “You don’t have to have the address to cruise by and see a kid out in front…a kid whose face had been on every front page in the country.”

“You mean,” Beth asked him then, incredulous, “you think someone took Sam? Kidnapped Sam?”

“It could happen!” Pat screamed. “All the fucking publicity! Some pervert could have…”

The doorbell rang. Beth watched as Pat’s face literally leaked color, like an ink wash in a bath, down across his cheekbones, his neck. “Oh, Bethie, oh God, no.”

It was Beth who crossed to open the door, her own heart now jerking like a cat in a sack. On the porch, in the first morning sunlight, stood Sam and George, George’s arm gently propelling Sam forward. Sam’s face was creased with tears and sleep. Beth could smell the milk on his breath. He half-turned back toward George, who nodded, urging him, and followed Sam inside.

“I’m sorry, Beth, Pat,” George said. “I’m real sorry he did it again.”

Pat was clawing at his hair. “Did what? Did what again, George?”

George looked, confused, from Beth to Pat, then back over his shoulder, where the newly risen sun’s glare above the rock garden was brightest. Someone was standing just at the turn of the drive. Someone…Beth shaded her eyes. It was Vincent.

“What?” she asked softly. “What?”

The first time Sam climbed out of his room in the middle of the night, climbed up the rose trellis outside his old room, knocked out the screen, and got into his bed, George explained, had been another of those nights when Beth had gone to bed early and Pat had been at the restaurant. And of course, he, George, was ready to bring Sam right back—“I mean, I love my son,” he said. “I’m sorry, Beth, I love Sam is what I mean. But I knew you’d be out of your mind with worry, and you’d think that I, like, let him do this.” But as soon as he’d given Sam some toast and a hug and taken him outside to the front porch, well, there was Reese, hunched in his jacket, astride his bike. Reese, who gave George a worldly shrug and assured him that he’d see the wanderer home and explain everything to the folks.

That same thing had happened the second time. And the third time. And this time, too.

“Vincent never told us,” Beth said, mostly to Sam.

“I know,” Sam muttered. “We agreed to not tell you.”

Beth turned to Pat, absurdly pointing out, “I thought you said Vincent’s door was locked.”

“It
was
locked,” Vincent said, elbowing past George and Sam and turning toward the stairs. “You can lock a pop lock just by closing it behind you if you’re a mechanical genius. There’s more than one way to leave a room. Ask Sam.”

“Listen, Vincent….” Pat clenched his teeth.

“Give it up, Dad.” Vincent pulled off his slantwise Sox cap and tossed it on the banister. “I’m going to bed. He’s home, right? He’s home this time, anyhow.”

Watching herself from without, understanding the poverty of the gesture at such a time, Beth offered George coffee. Eagerly, he accepted. Sam reached down and zipped up his jacket.

“Go up to your room, Sam,” Pat said, so sternly everyone, including Sam, was visibly surprised.

“What did I do?” Sam asked, with sudden heat.

“You ran away! You scared the hell out of your mother and me, that’s what you did! And you’ve done it before! You could have broken your neck, or gotten hit by a car, or worse!” Pat pushed his face close to Sam’s. “Hasn’t enough happened to this family? Hasn’t there been enough hurt to go around for everyone?”

“Yeah,” Sam answered, but as Beth watched, he seemed to gather himself, thrust forth his chest. He was nearly as tall as Pat, and broader. Oh, she thought, he is not going to back off now. He has a Cappadora’s temper. He has a Kerry’s stubbornness. He is going to say it. And then, ashamed of her glancing jolt of relief, she thought, Then at least I won’t have to. “Yeah, there’s been enough. I mean, I’m sick of this whole thing.”

“What whole thing?” Pat asked quietly.

“This…whole thing.” Tears gathered in the corners of Sam’s eyes, and slowly, beautifully spilled from the fan-shaped ends of his long lashes. “I’m sick of this. I want to go home. I want my dad. I can go to court and get you to give me to my dad. I read it at school.”

“Look,” said Pat, “whatever you read, you can’t be serious thinking you could get us to give you to the husband of the woman who stole you, who kidnapped you?”

“It’s not my dad’s fault!” Sam said then. “Dad, you want me to come home, right? Tell him!”

George’s misery was so overwhelming, so palpable, it was like another body in the room, a sweating, laboring presence. He looked from Sam to Pat, and then, beseechingly, at Beth, who mechanically measured out six spoons of coffee and carefully unfolded the brown paper filter.

“What?” Pat said finally. “What is he saying?”

George sat down heavily. “He’s been asking me, over and over, Pat. Why he can’t live with me. I keep telling him…what his mother did, what Cecilia did, was so wrong, and what you folks have gone through—”

“But it wasn’t really her fault, either,” Sam trilled. “My mom is mentally ill, Beth. She’s mentally ill. You said that when we went to that little town up there. I told you all about it. She didn’t know what she was doing. She really thought I was her real little boy. Right?”

Beth said, “I know.”

“And no offense, Beth,” Sam said then, sensing an opening, measuring it. “It’s not like I hate you. I mean, I tried for three months! Three months!”

“Sam, son, come on,” George said, taking Sam’s arm.

“No, Dad, listen! We talked it over. Beth knows.” Beth could feel Pat’s scouring look along her arm. She avoided his eyes. “I told her how I don’t see why I have to live here, two blocks away from my own house, with people I don’t even know, because of something that happened a long time ago that I didn’t even do.”

“Sam,” Pat said. “Sit down.” Sam sat down, careful to put George between the two of them. “Sam, listen. We know how hard this has been. We know how much you miss your…you miss George. But this is a fact we have to face: you’re
our
son. You don’t remember being our son, but the fact is, you are our son. We gave birth to you. And you belong with your own family.”

“But that’s just the thing!” Sam was sobbing now. “I was maybe born in your family, but I never, like, saw you before in my life. I didn’t remember anything, except the…well, I didn’t remember anything about your house or anything! You see?” Pat nodded, closing his eyes.

“But look,” Sam went on, shaking, trying to smile, “it can be okay, after all. I read…I looked it up on the microfiche—I didn’t tell you this, Beth, but there was this one kid who divorced his real parents because he wasn’t happy with them, and he got to be with his foster parents from before…see? He was used to them, because he lived there, like, five years. Then, all of a sudden, his mom got a job or something and she’s like, ‘I’m taking him back.’ Now, I don’t think I would actually have to get a lawyer or anything—right, Dad?” He looked at George searchingly. “I could just…move home. And maybe sometimes, I would come over or something. Like I do with my dad now. See?”

“But that was a case where the child wasn’t being taken care of,” Pat said, wearily. “That mother was probably neglectful or bad to the boy. We didn’t do anything wrong, Sam.”

“Well, neither did I!” he shouted.

Pat continued, softer, “And, Sam, I don’t think you could do this even if we wanted it and—”

“Yes you could,” Sam told him urgently. “I read. You could do it if you wanted to. It’s all legal and everything.”

“But we don’t. Sam. We love you. We wanted you back and we still want you and we’ll always want you.”

Sam put his head down on his folded arms, and both Pat and George reached for him instinctively. Beth bent over the coffee pot, feeling Kerry, for once silent, come up behind her and grab hold of the tail of her shirt.

“What’s the matter with him, Mom?” she asked. “What’s the matter with Sam?”

“He so sad, Ker Bear,” Beth told the girl, stroking her silky, knotted hair. “He’s just so sad.”

“Go upstairs now, Sam,” George said steadily. “Lie down for a while. I’ll come and see you before I go. Okay? And ball tomorrow night? Huh? Okay?” Sam lurched from the table, nearly shoving George off-balance.

“I hate you!” he screamed. “I hate you—and I hate you, too, Dad! And I hate your dumb ugly house and your dumb freako son with the peanut-butter name! I’m never coming back!” Knocking over a chair, Sam ran for the stairs and up, two at a time. Beth could hear him strike the wall, three times, in the upper hall, and then the echo of his slamming door.

“I’m so sorry,” George whispered. “The poor little sucker.”

“George, nobody blames you,” Beth said, rushing to finish making the coffee, bringing napkins, bringing cream in a pitcher, bringing matching spoons—all things she never did.

“I want to do right by him!” George cried then, slamming his palm down on the table. “I want him to be happy. And if you guys are the guys that can give him the family he deserves, goddamnit, then you give him that! But I got to tell you, Beth, Pat, this kid is the saddest kid in the world right now. I have never seen this kid sad more than twelve hours in his life. It’s…it’s not in Sam. I mean, even when Cecilia…he was
sorry
for her, Pat. He would hold her hand, and her hand was limp like a washrag, and say, ‘It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay.’ And now…my God. Maybe it’ll get better….”

Pat said then, a gulp, almost a croak, “And maybe it won’t.”

“And maybe it won’t,” George said. “But I gotta tell you, it’s killing me. To come in his room like I do every morning and then, once in a while, to see him curled up there in his bed. See him there, with the pillow my ma made for him tucked under his leg. Beth! Pat! Of all people on God’s good earth, you know how I feel!”