The Deep End of the Ocean (41 page)

Pat looked at Beth with a scalding stare. “What did he tell you, up north?”

“This, basically. But not so much,” she said, lowering her eyes. “I wanted to talk to you about it….”

George stood up hurriedly, knocking the chair over, catching it before it hit the floor. “I’m going, you guys,” he said. “I’m sorry, again.”

They both made as if to rise, but George waved them down with a weary motion of his hand.

Beth and Pat sat at the table, the fresh coffee in three mugs cooling between them. I will make breakfast, Beth thought. I will get up and do that.

“Paddy,” she said. “Go get some sleep, huh?” He shrugged and headed for the stairs. Beth got out a bowl and began to beat eggs. French toast, she thought. It was still a bafflement to her, cooking, after years of Pat bringing home forage from the restaurant on his dinner break for him and the children—for herself, there was always a bagel, a yogurt, a handful of crackers and cheese. But Sam seemed to expect actual meals at predictable hours—salads, side dishes, desserts. George had followed the pyramid plan religiously; Sam weirdly liked such things as bran muffins and dried apricots. Beth peeled apples and oranges and mixed them with yogurt. Fruit salad. That was a good thing for a mother to make. Beowulf slapped his fat graying tail under the bench, the scattering hairs floating in the sun’s spreading glow like little slivers of glass.

Vincent came down, drawn by the scent of cinnamon and butter. Pat, now in shirtsleeves, followed. In silence, one by one, they came to the table and ate. Sam collected the dishes to stack in the dishwasher.

“I’ll help you,” Kerry said.

“It’s my day,” Sam told her, carefully stacking plates and placing the silverware on the top of the heap.

“You want to have a catch?” Pat called to Sam.

“I said I’d mow for the Silbergs,” Sam said.

“But it’s not even seven o’clock,” Pat told him.

“Maybe sleep a while first,” Sam replied. Pat hitched his chair back so he could watch Sam at the sink. He studied Sam’s hands; Pat loved Sam’s capable hands on a ball, any ball. Those masterful catcher’s and shooter’s hands were Pat’s special joy, and Beth suspected, his guilt, too. Pat had been a shortstop, all bluster and speed. Sam’s baseball was different, smart and slow, all thought.

Beth emptied the coffee grounds into the trash. Kerry turned on Looney Tunes. Vincent disappeared into his cave. Now I’ll sit on the porch, Beth thought.

When she went outside, she found Pat watering the roses.

“I can do it,” she told him, with a spurt of irritation; hadn’t Angelo reminded his son a million times you had to water the roots, not the leaves, or the leaves would mold? “I thought you were going to sleep.”

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “Can you sleep?”

“Then Paddy, I guess we’d better talk.”

“If you want,” he said.

“He’s not happy. What happened last night, that’s just the tip of it.”

“I knew you were going to say that, Beth. In a situation that’s almost good, you have to find the all-bad. The social worker warned us about this. She said that it was going to take a long time. Remember? Confusion about his identity. All that stuff.”

“That’s just it, Pat. Do you think he has any confusion about his identity? I don’t. He knows exactly who he is.”

Pat turned his back on her and began scraping at the leaves with a hoe he found against the side of the house. “What are you getting at?”

Beth sat down on the grass. “Pat, remember when we’d read about those cases where the birth parents wanted the baby back after the adoptive parents had the kid for two or three years? And you always said that if you were the judge, you would rule in the best interests of the child? You were always the one who said it was a terrible thing to do to the child?”

“This is different.”

“The effect is the same.”

“The effect is not the same.”

“Paddy, George is his father.”

For an instant, Beth thought Pat would raise the hoe and strike her. What he did instead was drop the hoe, grab the hose and throw it hard against the trunk of a tree, so that it undulated in the air like a cobra, spraying droplets over both of them.

“Listen, Beth,” he said quietly. “I’m going to say this once. I love you, Beth.” He walked over to the spigot and switched off the water. “I love you, and I’ve probably loved you your whole life. We’ve been married twenty years, and I’ve known you your whole life. And you know what I’ve seen about you, your whole life?”

“What?” Beth asked.

“You have made a career out of being unhappy.”

“That’s not fair. When Ben was—”

“No, I mean even before Ben was kidnapped. You were always just waiting for an excuse to be miserable. I’m not a doctor, Bethie. Maybe you have some kind of head problem, a personality thing. But see, Beth, I’m not like that. If I get the chance, I’ll be happy. Even before we got him back, I decided I was going to be happy. I was going to die if I didn’t. And then we did get him back. My life is how I want it. I thank God for my life being how I want it. And nothing on this earth is going to make me want to change any part of it, not after what I’ve been through. Not after what Vincent’s been through.”

“You know I don’t want to do anything to hurt Vincent.”

“I don’t think you do. I really think you believe that. But what are you suggesting, exactly? That we give Sam back to the people who stole him when he was a baby? Are you nuts, Beth? Can you imagine what people would think?”

“I don’t care what people think. I care about Sam.”

“Well, then be a mother to him, Beth. If you care about him, help him get better.”

“I’m trying to.”

“No, you’re trying to figure out a way we can all be miserable again. So that you can take another nine-year powder. This is about you, Beth. It isn’t about this kid.”

“Pat, listen, I wasn’t thinking of completely giving him up. Lots of families, when there’s a divorce or something, they share custody. We only live two blocks apart. He could have two families.”

“Beth, he
has
a family! By the mercy of God, he got his family back. He’s my flesh and blood, Beth, my son. And if you think I am crazy enough to go along with anything that would take my son away from me again, after all that hell, I don’t want anything to do with it, Beth. Or anything to do with you. I mean it.”

Beth glanced around the yard and stood up. Pat was yelling now; she was sure the Beckers could hear him through their open windows; they didn’t have air conditioning. “Paddy, we don’t have to decide anything right now.”

“Yes, we do, Beth. This is a pattern. The restaurant’s a hit because people are ghouls. So what? Maybe they are. They’ll forget in time. People forget everything. My sisters hate you because they think you gave up on Ben. Well, maybe they do—they’ll get over it. People get over things, Beth. Sam will get over this. People have survived worse. We’re lucky, Beth. We’re lucky, do you get it?”

“Pat, I can’t. If I love him, I can’t ignore this. Let’s talk to Tom Kilgore, huh?”

“I’m not going to change my mind, Beth,” said Pat.

“It’s not just your decision!” she shouted at him then. “You don’t just say, ‘I like my life, I’ve got my life!’ He’s got a life, too!”

“Yeah, he does! And it’s right here! He’s my kid!”

Tell him now, Beth thought. It’s too late in the day for a coward’s politeness. Tell him so he can’t pretend he doesn’t already know. Lay out the evidence, brick on brick, so that he can’t say later he never really understood—never really knew that their baby, their Ben, had been right.

There was a deep end of the ocean. Ben had gone there, and he had not come back.

They could never go there with him, or know what he had experienced, or truly understand what had made him. They could only see the result.

Ben had walked out of the waves like a sturdier Venus springing from the foam, fully grown, transformed. He had walked out Sam Karras, a fine boy any parent would be proud to have raised; but Beth and Pat had not.

The smell he remembered as parental vigilance in the night was not her soap but George’s cigars. Sam was a whole sediment of accumulated beliefs and impressions that had nothing to do with the Cappadoras: The red eggs of Orthodox Easter were the ones he had held in smaller hands; Alicia Karras, not Rosie, was Sam’s yaya; his nana, the patrician Sarah Lockhart. He slept in pajamas, not underwear and t-shirts, as all the Cappadoras did.

Beth wanted to tell her husband how she’d scrutinized Sam for hopeful signs of breakthrough, for the merest hints. How she had seen Sam study Angelo and wondered, Is there some connection in this? Vague, but real? How she’d waited for results after Sam spent hours with the family photo albums, poring over details with the intensity of an adult at work on a difficult jigsaw puzzle, and grieved when none seemed to come.

Pat’s face was shut, truculent. Could she tell him? Or would it be wasted breath? Didn’t Pat know that all of Sam’s memory molecules had been altered, and not with horrors? Didn’t Pat remember the day that the county social worker told them that things might have been clearer, though far more harrowing, if Sam had grown up with sexual abusers or vagrants? That then, at least, he might see his biological parents as fairy-tale heroes? Instead, she said ruefully, “I hate to say this, but he probably feels like you were the ones who stole him, from his dad.” Pat had been outraged, even after the worker apologized. He’d fumed for days.

Remind him, Beth thought.

And then said, “Pat, I think there are a lot of things going on you just don’t want to see. And one of them is that I’m not the enemy here. Don’t you think I want the same thing you want? If I could take a pill, or Sam could, and we would all forget this ever happened, don’t you think I would?”

Pat paused before he answered, then said, with care, “I don’t know whether you would, Beth.”

“Jesus, that’s cruel. You think I enjoy this?”

“Not enjoy it. No, I wouldn’t accuse you of that. But you thrive on it. I mean, what would you have to keep you going if you didn’t have your…your holy suffering?”

“Pat!”

“Well, there it is. It’s like you finally found the big misery, Bethie. The thing that made it okay to be the bleak Irish. And now you’re going to look for more. Losing just one kid one time wasn’t enough.” He stopped.

She said, “You mean, I could accept losing him again. It wouldn’t hurt me as much as it did you.”

And even though Pat stood silent, Beth heard him say it again, as if he’d spoken. The words he’d used. “Losing
just
one kid once.”

“‘Just one,’” she said. “You think that I lost them both, don’t you? Sam
and
Vincent? That it was all me?”

Pat said, “No. Christ, no. I’m sorry.”

“That’s what you meant, though.”

“I didn’t, Bethie, no, and I don’t.” Pat looked sincerely horrified.

I could hate him now, Beth thought, and it would probably help both of us. But the only feeling she could touch, rummaging inside, was regret as soft-edged and familiar as old flannel. Regret and guilt already worn by years of touching, long before the day of the reunion ever came, the day the long-simmering virus of her mother deficiency flared into frank symptoms.

Okay.

She hadn’t been the best of mothers. In her affection as well as her wrath, rough-and-tumble. Impatient. Madly loyal, but not always sympathetic. Not always willing to make enough room.

Maybe, Beth thought, and almost said, even before the kidnapping, there were too many of them and not enough of me. I couldn’t give them everything I had, the way really good mothers do, because I had to keep some for my work.

But what about you, Pat? You were in the restaurant business, for God’s sake, a twenty-four-seven job your whole adult life. Why did you do it? Why didn’t you sell computers instead? Did you maybe like the hours, and the life, in spite of all your bitching? Was that okay, just because you were the father? And that was how
your
father was? Because when you
were
home, you were naturally sweet, not like me?

Beth kneaded her forehead. Stop, she thought. Don’t buy this. Don’t use the past as a prelude to the day of the reunion and everything after as simply a reprise of the theme—Mom half-there, kids half-served, then, finally, the payoff.

No. She struggled for a single good, settling breath.

“The thing is, Pat,” she said, “if it wouldn’t have happened, everything would have turned out all right. For us and for the kids.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we’d have been happy. We were. You think Ben got lost because I was a sloppy mother. And I
was
a sloppy mother….”

“That wasn’t—”

“Yes, it was, Pat. It was what you meant. But that didn’t bother you then. Not so much. And even if I had been worse, they would have turned out okay. You want to see things in terms of ‘if this, then that.’ That’s how you are, Pat. If things go down, it’s because there was a flaw in the structure. But there wasn’t. Not really. When you were growing up, Angelo was always having his little phony Italian breakdowns, and Rosie was always at the shop, and you turned out. Maybe things were easier then. There was church and the Moose lodge and you lived in one place all your life. But what there wasn’t when we were kids—” she paused, looking for the word—“was…awareness. The fact that we knew how hard it was for kids who had parents who have to hustle for everything. My parents just thought that was ordinary life. They sort of dressed you and fed you and hit you if you didn’t do your homework. But
I
knew. I knew I was selfish to want lots of kids and work, too. So I tried to make it up to them, so they would understand, no matter how I failed them in little ways, I never failed them in the one big way.” Beth stood up and took Pat’s arms. “I knew I wanted them. They knew it, too. They knew that I was as good as I could be.”