The Deep End of the Ocean (45 page)

“So, Reese?”

Reese couldn’t talk; he nodded.

“That’s why I came. In case you were wondering. To tell you I remembered that. And see if it was real. Because then I’d know. That I was really there once. I didn’t make it up or get it from pictures. And then I could figure stuff out better. Stuff I had to do, or whatever. It might not matter, but I wanted to know.”

“Good,” Reese mumbled, hoarse. “That’s good.”

“And one more thing. What did I call you?”

“What?”

“When I was a kid.”

“Oh…uh…Vincent. You called me Vincent. And you could always say it right. Not like a baby.”

“Vincent. So, okay. So, I’ll see you, Reese, okay?”

“Okay.” Reese motioned to his mother; she opened her mouth. She was telling someone to let Sam out. But as the knob turned, Reese said, quickly, “Sam?”

The kid had already put down the phone; but he grabbed it up. “Yeah?”

“You can call me it. Vincent. It’s okay.”

September 1994

Beth sat down one day in early fall and tried to think of a couple she knew well who’d been through a divorce. And after half an hour, she had to give up. She couldn’t think of a single one. Surely for her age, her generation, the education level of her social circle, that was peculiar.

But unless she counted Candy—and she didn’t really count Candy, that wasn’t a real divorce—she didn’t know anyone to compare things with. Candy’s abrupt but tender parting from Chris had been more in the nature of a return to the organic nature of their friendship after an experimental grafting that had failed to take. It had been decided and was over with in a couple of weeks, decided and acted upon as suddenly, and to Beth, as surprisingly, as the marriage. Chris and Candy had dinner together after court. Surely that wasn’t what most divorces were like. Beth had never seen a couple really sunder from the inside.

Eighty percent of us divorce, she remembered Penny telling the Circle meeting. Eighty percent. Penny’s statistic, Beth reasoned, counted couples whose search ended in an unbearable truth. Or in an endless enigma. For what had happened to her and Pat, there were no predictors.

If people knew how estranged she and Pat were becoming, they would think, Why now? Wasn’t it doubly bitter, doubly unfair, after having “been through” all that together, to split? Why not back then, if ever? Even Sam’s leaving should not have accomplished what the hottest hell of fear had not managed.

But we didn’t care enough to get divorced back then. Having a marriage didn’t seem to matter when all you saw as a goal was staying upright for another hour.

She didn’t blame Pat. When she looked at him, she felt the widest sinking. No one had decided on this. Things just happened. And once they happened, they were irrevocable. Two days after Sam “went home” (and that was how Beth forced them all to put it) Pat had taken to sleeping downstairs. He’d done that before—on hot nights, on nights when he’d worked especially late. But those other occasions had been accidental and sometimes a relief: Pat had always been a restless spoon sleeper, and more than once she’d shoved him away and he’d left in a huff. But this time, when he’d gathered up a pillow and a blanket from Sam’s fresh, abandoned bed, Pat had not done it rancorously, or with show. Next morning, he’d simply folded up his bedroll, before the children were awake, only to bring it down again the next night.

Vincent noticed, Beth was sure. She couldn’t look at Vincent. She was afraid to ask Pat what he thought about as he lay on the sofa. She tried not to think, as she lay upstairs, aware of Pat’s wakefulness, a sort of arrhythmic blip under the deep pattern of the children’s sleep. She read Jane Austen. She popped her Trazodone. She tried not to let her mind climb out of bed, glide down the stairs, and walk down the street to stand yearning in front of the red house.

Returning Sam had been a decorous procedure; only George had wept.

They’d met with the social worker and then had a brief hearing in chambers with a family court judge. The judge had asked each of them, including Sam, who sat rigid in his chair, whether this was a decision made of free will. Beth spoke first. “With a great deal of sadness,” she said. “But yes, freely.”

“And Mr. Cappadora?”

There was a long interval of murderous silence, and then Pat said, “Yes.” He did not look at Beth, but she’d reached out and put her hand on his arm, touching the starched cotton of his long-sleeved shirt. The arm was still as marble; not even a nerve answered her touch. Asked about his willingness, George could only nod mutely. The judge then asked to speak to Samuel Karras Cappadora alone, and emerged, fifteen minutes later, slightly red about the eyes, his palms turned up. There would be, he explained, no formal custody decree granted at this time. The review of Cecilia’s condition was pending; it was necessary to follow Sam in his return transition for a period of time not to exceed, say, three months.

“I think our goal should be to restore this boy’s life to as much normalcy as possible as quickly as possible,” the judge told George, Beth, and Pat. “I confess that I am troubled by this, by all your suffering, and touched by all your evident concern and love for this boy. I wish all of you luck and peace.”

Sam, he said, would be permitted weekly visits, unsupervised, with his natural parents, the duration of those visits to be determined by George in concordance with the Cappadoras. “I hope that he will have some interaction with his birth siblings,” the judge added. “For their emotional well-being as well as his own.”

Kerry reacted to the news of Sam’s imminent departure with frank grief, running up to her room and sobbing into her whale puppet until the plush was soggy. “We just found him,” she told Beth. “Why doesn’t he like us?” Miserable as the question was, Beth was relieved. Vincent greeted the departure with his trademark frost; but Beth knew that he would talk it over with Tom.

No one, except Beth, really understood what had happened. Even Candy, who struggled to retain a shred of professional detachment, could not hide her disgust. To Beth’s gratitude, Rosie and Angelo were only sad, not outraged; but she was sure she would never spend another holiday in Monica’s house or in Tree’s. Her brothers, sideswiped by what they considered an impulsive Beth-move, tried to counsel a wait-and-see plan. Laurie was struck speechless, and Ellen had asked, “How can you, Beth? I don’t mean, how could you? I mean, how can you bring yourself to do it?”

Fortunately, nobody had the energy to alert the media, and Sam was reinstated at George’s house for a full week before they got wind of it. Then, there were ponderous quotes from psychologists about the quest for identity during adolescence and the nature of memory in the constitution of family. There were stories about how rarely the “reunions” of children adopted at birth with the parents who’d given birth to them gave rise to actual extended-family bonds. There were stray quotes from neighbors—Beth almost had to laugh at them—about how Sam had seemed quiet and content enough; they reminded her of the comments neighbors made after quiet, helpful men got up one day and shotgunned whole families.

But really, how could anyone grasp it? They had not seen Sam’s face at the cedar chest. They had not seen his eyes.

It was the image that Beth kept in her mind throughout the formalities of the return. It sustained her. She could not describe it to anyone; it was like trying to describe “yellow” to a child sightless from birth. The feel of the sun? The velvet of a daffodil? Beth could only cling to the certainty that she had known, when Sam looked up at her after the inspection of his baby clothes, that she and Pat had guardianship only over Sam’s physical body. She had felt the way Cecilia, in the sad safe room of her riddled mind, could never feel, and probably had never felt—like a kidnapper holding a child against his will.

And was he happy now? On their few desultory visits—one outing to Great America, once to dinner at Rosie’s—both she and Pat had felt keenly Sam’s nearly pitiful willingness to indulge them.

On the way home from dropping him off the last time, Pat had told her suddenly. “It’s like he’s trying to pay us back by being glad to see us. He’s grateful to us for setting him free.”

There had been nothing else to say. Years ago, during their one stab at marriage counseling, the cheerful MSW had suggested that they simply try to act as if they were happy. “It has a way of becoming habitual, just as a pattern of conflict does,” he’d said. Beth understood that. She’d done it for the latter half of the nine years at least. And then after Pat’s illness, she’d become a method actor, a loving wife or be damned. But only during the brief sojourn of Ben’s return had there been the beginnings of a renewed, real tenderness between them. A few times, before the weekend of the Fourth of July when they had lain together, after lovemaking, and Beth had actually believed they were going to be whole again, in spite of themselves. By the time she knew for sure that was what she wanted, Beth reflected now, it was probably already too late.

Even now, she sometimes caught herself hoping that the simple habit of a lifetime of Pat-and-Beth would span the gulf. But Pat had given up after Sam left. And so emotion leaked steadily out of the air between them, until there was no shape or structure that didn’t have to do with Vincent’s habits or Kerry’s schedules. Pat’s rage on the morning after Vincent stole the car had been the most emotion he had showed toward Beth in weeks. Even anger had felt almost…heartening, in the sterility of their lives.

Pat’s focus was now given over entirely to Vincent’s rehabilitation. He drove his son to every counseling appointment with Tom, waiting for him outside; he visited the youth officer with Vincent; he closed Vincent’s door behind them at night when he went in to say good-night. Even when Beth offered to spell him, to take Vincent to see Tom on nights when she knew the session would make Pat late for opening at Wedding, Pat had refused. “I owe him, Beth,” he told her. “I owe him, and even if I didn’t owe him, he’s the only son I have.”

The day he said that, Beth sent for the catalogues, applications for the master’s program in Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin. She’d filled them out, sending her fee, not entirely certain what she was trying to accomplish. Did this mean she actually meant to leave Pat? Move away? Or was she simply trying to see if there would be a twig of pride for her to cling to if he demanded she go? And what if she did go back to school? Would she aim at teaching? Opening a studio of her own, back in Madison?

She’d left some papers lying on a coffee table, several days after they came, and caught Pat’s glance on them.

“I thought,” she said, stopping him in one of his headlong dashes in the door from some Vincent thing to grab his jacket for work, “I might consider taking some time, maybe a semester, so we can think things over….”

And she was surprised how much it cut her when Pat said, “Whatever. Do whatever you want, Bethie.”

So he would not try to stop her. Why had she thought he would?

Stubbornness, the Kerry family curse, had driven her on, then, to say more, make the point harder. “I thought I could maybe rent a little place…. Kerry and Vincent could go to school at Edgewood, maybe, if we can afford it….”

He’d come full stop then, his look as if he were taking her by both shoulders, squaring her to face him.

“My children,” he said, as slowly as if he were talking to a woman whose first language was not English, “are going no place, Bethie. My children’s home is here.”

“Paddy,” she began, “Kerry’s still so little…”

And he seemed to relent, if only slightly. “Maybe…it’s possible that Kerry would be okay. But Beth, she has friends here, and Scouts, and sports. She has Blythe, who’s like her sister, and Georgia, who’s like her—” He didn’t, bless him, say “like her mother.” “She might be okay, and it’s something we can talk about after you make up your mind. But Vincent is not going to leave this house with you. Not ever. He is not going to leave this house until he goes to college, if, I pray to God, I can figure out how to get him out of high school in one piece, and get him to believe he can do anything except screw up his life.” Beth loved him then, loved him desperately, his deep, utter Pat Cappadora goodness. It was, after all, a kindness, in a sense, that she might leave. If she had ever been worthy of him, she wasn’t now.

And what, after all, Beth thought that night as she listened to Pat’s drawer rummaging downstairs, was a marriage really except a collection of wishes that, after years of association, took on the coloration of facts? Shewondered whether she and Pat, except in the early years of their college passion—which, she reasoned, could have ignited between any two healthy young people—had ever been more than a kind of brother and sister, raised to the assumption of safety in one another. She would settle even for safety now.

Beth woke one night, shaking, from a dream of Vincent. Vincent…injured. Aged about five, in the hospital, a broken wrist. She’d dreamed of bursting through swinging doors—not one, or two, but an endless series—to follow the trail of wails to Vincent.

She could have her son, Beth thought, sitting up. Her lost-on-purpose son. Not the one lost by accident. If she had the guts, if she had the time, if she could find the ropes. If miracles could really happen.

If miracles could really happen.

If she didn’t leave him. If she took him with her…but how could she do that? If she stayed…but how could she do that?

And from Vincent’s point of view, would it make any difference?

Beth remembered how, in college, she’d toyed with the idea of a career in special education (Laurie called it Beth’s Annie Sullivan phase). Beth had read that all children experienced to some degree the phenomenon of erased recollection. It was one of the most difficult crossroads between parents and children: adults could remember the enraptured tenderness of the early bond; children, whose job was to fracture that bond, couldn’t. At six, Vincent had looked at her with flinty eyes and explained that he hated her. Beth was aghast. Where behind those eyes was her princeling, who only a year before would quiet from fear in no other arms but hers, not Rosie’s, not Pat’s? Where was that child, back then?

Where was he now?

Oh, Vincent, Vincent-turned-Reese, another changeling child in a house that already, impossibly, contained America’s best-known changeling child. What did Vincent remember? Anything, at all, of mother love unscored by family casualties? And not remembering was the same as not knowing. If Vincent thought of her in those terms, it was probably a gauzy recollection of the amusement and affection she’d felt for Ben just before he was lost. She had, yes, given Ben more of that. Ben was easier. She’d liked him better. But love? Amusement and affection no more comprised the sum of love than sex on your honeymoon compared with going through labor and delivery—pleasure compared with the world-without-end amen. Beth was struck with a sudden, vivid picture of herself, coming up the walk at night after an all-day shift at the afternoon daily in Madison where she’d worked when the boys were babies, seeing Ben dancing in his diaper on the window seat, and Vincent scooting through Jill’s legs to jump on his mother. She remembered thinking, more than once, Imagine! I made them. All this beautiful, intelligent flesh I made. Actual, comical humans. And how she would think, then, aching with her abundance, I would die for them. For each of them, equally painfully, and eagerly.