Feel Ben. Ben safe.
It was that palpable sense of presence shoved up against the reality of absence, like hot against cold, that really threatened to buckle the whole mass. Then Beth would have to strain to stop it.
What resulted looked like stoic calm, to editors she worked with, sometimes even to family. And indeed, Beth appreciated that her impairment, like courage, was a state of grace. But only she understood the disadvantages. She knew that for a very long time she had not actually “loved” the children, though she was careful to be mostly kind and sometimes noticing to them. She was certain that Kerry especially, who had never known Beth any other way, didn’t feel the difference.
But Vincent did. Especially on those nights when Beth, on the way to school to pick him up, would forget where she was and why. When she’d finally arrive, sweating, Vincent would be standing outside the school, bouncing his basketball in the gathering darkness, looking at her with a scorn so bold that had she been able to feel anything at all about him, she would have been enraged.
On the whole, however, it worked. What, after all, had she given up to protect herself and her remaining children from abuse, or worse? The odd few years of examined life?
A more-than-fair trade.
So, when she turned over the first photograph—even in the full knowledge that the images could no longer hold any dread—she still felt that minute tectonic shift, and the impulse to run from the landslide.
When she fought that impulse down, Beth recognized, all in a wave, what she had really been seeking from the pictures, especially the last one, taken just as they set off for the reunion. The real reason she’d been unwilling to discard them.
She realized what she was looking for, and that it wasn’t there.
Not in any of them—not in the picture of Vincent fishing at Terriadne, or of Ben feeding Kerry her bottle. Especially in the porch picture, the worst shot on the roll, intended, really, only to capture Pat’s lilacs. She and the children were just a prop for the record of Pat’s horticultural triumph. Even so, it had taken forever. Beth recalled her husband scolding Vincent for fidgeting.
But in fact, Beth saw now, it was Ben who had moved.
She wouldn’t have recognized him. Beth had not seen her son’s three-year-old image for a very long time by then, and in a real sense it was the image of a child she’d never really known. Not her baby Ben. A little-boy Ben she’d only just met.
She stared at the picture, wishing she had her good photographer’s loup. There was Jill, Pat’s nineteen-year-old cousin, who lived with them then and helped out while she went to school, carrying Beth’s cameras and bags. Jill with long hair, looking like a sunny little hippie. There was Kerry, a minuscule infant face above a dress bordered with red and blue and yellow boats. Vincent had still been blond. Beth could not remember her older son, with his brown mat, lush and coarse as bear fur, ever having been blond.
But Ben’s face, that was a blur.
Poised to receive that face like sacrament from the drawer bottom, she saw instead…not much of anything. She saw details—how very many freckles he’d had on his arms, how long and enormously well-muscled his legs were, even as a preschooler. But his face…all you could tell was that his mouth was open. He had been talking. But his features were indistinct. There was no message. Even changed as she now was, on the molecular level—all her old beliefs discarded—she realized that she had still, somehow, expected it.
Beth had been a newspaper photographer and photo editor, working mostly freelance, since college. When she edited, because of the nature of what scholars wrote about, Beth got to see many photos of people who later came to trouble. Soldiers in fresh uniforms with raw shaves. Immigrant families at the metal rails of ships, in layers of clothes, their luggage beside them on the deck. Cowboys. Aviators.
She thought sometimes that in those muddy images she saw a hint, a foreknowledge, of the mishap to come. The clue, she fancied, was the look in people’s faces. A vulnerability? A message of departure in the photo grain? To test her theory, she once showed a picture to Pat, an old picture of a sailboat pilot who drowned on a routine pleasure voyage on a good bright day, after a spectacular career. She’d asked Pat, “Can’t you see that man is doomed?”
And Pat patiently explained to her that she was crazy, that no one ever had a presentiment of tragedy until after it occurred; those stories of precognition were balm for weak minds, stuff his aunt Angela, widowed from birth, would say if a baby was born breech, or the phone rang twice and stopped. “Could you see in Abraham Lincoln’s face as a young lawyer that he was going to be president? That he was going to be murdered?”
“Yes,” said Beth, then. “I could.”
“Could you see in the newspaper picture of that kid Eric’s face, that kid my sister had in her music class, that he was going to be crushed under a semi on the way to graduation?”
“Absolutely,” she told him, wondering how Pat could have missed it. But Pat just sighed, and called her “the bleak Irish,” the in-home disaster barometer, ready to plummet at a moment’s notice.
But Beth had once put stock in such things. Signs and portents, like water going counterclockwise down a sink drain before an earthquake. When she was seventeen, she believed that missing all the red lights between Wolf Road and Mannheim would mean that when she got home her mother would tell her that Nick Palladino had called. She believed, if not in God, then in saints who had at least once been fully human. She had a whole history, a life structure set up on luck, dreams, and hunches.
And it all went down like dominoes in a gust, on the day Ben disappeared.
There had been no warning. There never was any, at all.
Part One
Beth
CHAPTER 1
June 1985
“I only like the baby,” Beth told her husband, as they stacked plastic bags and diaper bags, and duffel bags and camera bags, and Beth’s big old Bacfold reflector—all in a pile in the hall.
She was surprised when Pat looked at her with disgust; she knew he didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to make trouble on the verge of clearing the whole tribe out for a weekend.
It was foolish in the extreme—her plan to take all the children to Chicago, attend her fifteenth high-school reunion and shoot a job—according to Pat.
But once she insisted, Pat, always happiest solitary, was probably looking forward to a bachelor’s forty-eight hours, to sleeping late, to shooting pool at Michkie’s, next door to the restaurant, after closing. He didn’t dare argue, or Beth would be just as likely to turn around and leave Ben or Vincent behind. Still, the look he gave Beth was ugly, and it never failed to surprise her when he was shocked by the things she said to shock him. “Why?” he finally asked her. “You blurt stuff like that out, you don’t mean it, and Vincent could hear you.”
“I mean it,” said Beth. “I really, really mean it.” And thought, I don’t just torture Pat, I get a kick out of it.
In fact, Vincent did not hear Beth. He was slumped in a corner of the sofa, watching the videotape of Jaws, from which Pat had obsessively edited all the bloody footage, his face clenched in what would have been, if he hadn’t been seven, and still forgivable, a scowl instead of a pout. He didn’t want to go anywhere in the car. He didn’t think the idea of going to a hotel and swimming in a big pool with Jill while Mama saw all her old friends sounded like fun. He wanted to stay home and play with Alex Shore; he wanted to go to the restaurant with Daddy. He had told Beth so this morning, eight times.
“You cannot go to the restaurant with Daddy,” she finally snapped at him, wondering if she would actually lay hands on him if she heard his wheedling voice just one more time. “Daddy will be working.”
“I can sit quiet in the back,” Vincent told her stubbornly. “I did it that one time.”
It had been the peak experience of Vincent’s life thus far—going to spend a Saturday night with Pat at the restaurant he managed for his uncle Augie. He’d been
able to go because Beth had the flu, Kerry was just days old, and the last sitter in America was at the prom. The largest thing Beth did with Vincent (she had let him follow her onto a movie set while she shot stills; Paul Newman had shaken his hand), this was nothing to Vincent compared with the fabled night at Cappadora’s. His white-haired uncle Augie had carried Vincent around on his shoulders, and Daddy had given Vincent anchovy olives while he sat high on the polished bar.
“Mama was sick then,” Beth explained with a patience she did not feel; she hoped, in fact, Vincent could tell how close she was to meltdown. “Mama’s well now, and we planned to go all together to Chicago, and you’ll see Aunt Ellen, and I need you to help me watch Ben and Kerry.”
“I hate Ben and Kerry, and I hate that I have to do everything, and I’m not even going to get dressed.” Vincent hurled himself facedown on the sofa, and when Beth tried to raise him, performed his patented dead-weight drag, until she let him drop in the middle of the family room floor.
Vincent hated his mother. Beth knew it, believed it was because she had waited until he was more than four, old enough to understand the significance of being her one and only love, to have Ben. Vincent liked Ben; he was drawn to Kerry’s shell-like smallness; he adored Pat with a ridiculous, loverlike devotion that almost made Beth pity the child. But Beth was sure her older son considered her a food source and an occasional touch for a toy. When she punished him, Vincent looked at Beth in a way that instantly reminded her of what Pat said about house cats: they were miniature predators; if they were big enough, they would eat you. Beth, on the other hand, was drawn to Vincent with an intensity she didn’t have to feign. She didn’t just want to love him; she wanted to win him. And, Beth thought, he knows that.
Vincent was not forgiving. Ben was. He was delighted to be going out of town with his mother and his brother that morning, as delighted as he would have been to go to the hardware store or sort laundered socks. Ben wasn’t just accommodating; he simply expanded, with great good humor and faith, to fill any space you put him in. When Ben was a baby, Beth had actually taken him to a doctor because he smiled and slept with such uninterrupted content. She asked the doctor if Ben could be retarded. The young man, a Russian immigrant, had not mocked her; he had told her, gently, that he supposed the baby could be impaired—anyone could be—but was there a reason for her fears? Did Ben rock, or bang his head against his crib bars—did he seem to be able to hear her, did he look into her eyes?
Beth told the doctor that, no, Ben didn’t rock or avoid her eyes. She tried to avoid the doctor’s eyes as she told him, “But Ben’s so…so quiet, and so content,” sounding like the ninny she was. “He doesn’t scream, even when he’s got a dirty diaper, even when he’s hungry. He’s so patient.”
“And your older boy?”
“He was more…present.” Vincent had been a thin, wakeful, watchful baby, walking at nine months, talking at ten, telling Beth “Me angry” at a year. The doctor smiled at her. Beth still kept the copy of the bill on which the doctor had scrawled his diagnosis: Good baby. Normal.
Ben had remained undemanding and cheerful. Beth could not imagine how from Pat’s cynical idealism, his tense bonhomie, and her melancholy had sprung this sun child. Beth didn’t love him more than she did Vincent but she had nothing harsh to say to him. Even when Ben was nuts—and he was nuts frequently, like when he’d come to breakfast with a surgical mask on his head like a beret and two sanitary pads wrapped around each bicep, loot from Kerry’s birth he’d found stashed under a bathroom sink—Beth could not find it in her to scold him.
Today, as he waited to get into the car, Ben was lying on the hall floor in a dust-dappled shaft of sunlight, using his heels to pedal himself around in a wheel. “I’m underwater,” he told her, drunk on the yellow light in his face, as Beowulf, the family dog, leaped sideways to avoid the human pinwheel. He had begged Beth that morning to make what he called “mommy bread” (actually, it was “monkey bread,” a sort of cinnamon-scented apology for nonbaking mothers that Beth concocted from store dough rolled into pretzel shapes and slathered with whatever sugary spices she could find). But when she told him she was too busy, he didn’t whine. He wandered off, always busy, absorbed. “Ben’s on a mission,” Pat said.
Ben’s preschool teacher had once, gently, suggested Beth might have Ben evaluated for hyperactivity. Beth never did. She and Pat thought Ben was simply like one of those dogs you see advertised in the free classifieds: “Needs room to run.”
But even his charm was wearing thin today: Ben had just decided to take all the medicine and makeup out of Beth’s bags and line the bottles up, like toy soldiers, against the door. Now she stepped on a bottle, cracking it, and vitamins exploded everywhere.
“God damn it,” she hissed. And when Pat arrived, gracefully, to help her, she had told him the momentary truth: she liked only Kerry, who was unformed, dependent in simple ways, and could barely sit up.
“Just get on the road,” Pat told her. “They’ll settle down. They’ll go to sleep.” It was like Pat to think so; the boys hadn’t slept in the car since they were two, and Pat still thought a great pair of Levi’s cost $15.95. But Beth had the idea that she was old enough for tension to show on her face; and she wanted to be as close to youthfully attractive as it was possible for her to be tonight. So she and Pat dragged everything out to the Volvo, and strapped Kerry and Ben into their car seats, and got Vincent and Ben out again to make sure they went pee and had their toothbrushes, when Pat suddenly remembered he wanted to finish the roll of film from their camping trip.
“I’m not getting out of this car,” Beth said. “I’ll pull it up in front of the door on the grass, if you want. Or I’ll yell for one of the neighbors to pose by the lilacs.”
“Come on,” Pat urged her, with the kind of sexual growl that reminded her of a gentle yen she hardly ever felt for him—at least not in the same way she had ten years before.
But to acknowledge the fact that Pat had tried to move her, she agreed to get out, despite Vincent now frankly on the verge of tears, and Ben singing one line from “House of the Rising Sun” at the top of his voice, over and over.
They stood in the bower the lilacs formed. Pat scolded and then snapped; Beth leaped into the driver’s seat. She didn’t kiss him. She would see him in two days, anyway. In fact, she would see Pat before the sun went down, Beth later recalled—and she had not kissed him then, either, not then or for months afterward, so that the first time she did, their teeth knocked, like junior-high kids’, and she noticed, for the first time, that his tongue tasted of coffee—a thing she had never noticed before, during all the years when his tongue was as familiar in her mouth as her own.
The drive down Route 90 to Chicago was never a pleasure, though she and Pat used to have some fun petting in their old Chevy Malibu, years before, coming home from college for Christmas, to families who were speechless with delight that the two of them were in love. These days, it was simply what it was, a stupid, boring, flat-farms-and-then-suburban-sprawl shot for 150 miles. They made the trip often, because most of both their families lived in the Chicago area. Beth and Pat were considered adventurous for living “up north,” in the Madison outpost Pat’s uncle had pioneered in 1968.
Pat and Beth had belonged to each other from her junior year at the University of Wisconsin—and even, in a sense, before, as the children of parents who didn’t consider it a holiday unless they played poker together. They’d played with each other at picnics, and in friendship emergencies. They went to each other’s first communions, to each other’s high-school graduation parties.
But they never really saw each other as gendered until the day they ran into one another on the library mall in Madison, three hours before they fell into bed at Pat’s attic dump and missed the next two days of classes.
By then, her junior year and Pat’s first year of grad school, Beth was frankly frightened. She had had a miscarriage, at six weeks, while sitting in the waiting room of a
clinic preparing to have an abortion. Her last boyfriend had used a telescope to spy on her after she broke up with him. She believed that bad men would fly into town to ask her out. The only sex she’d ever had that was “good” had been a front-seat interlude with a friend’s fiancé. She was working two jobs—waiting tables in the morning, and at night selling china, with stupefying humiliation, door-to-door to perennially engaged sorority girls. She had no money left for senior year, and she was failing two classes. She felt old. She felt used.
She saw Pat.
He was not handsome, not even when he was young. He had a wide, white smile and straight teeth—“perfect collusion,” he called it—but he was short and slight, with unruly curly brown hair and face-saving huge eyes. His shoulders were broad, but his legs were skinny, almost bowed. Pat looked waifish, starving, and was so uncomfortable around people, so eager to please them, that they believed he was the friendliest guy they ever met. Only Beth knew how pure Pat was, how pathologically just. Even when he grew comfortable enough with Beth to know she would stay, and began to enumerate her failures of honesty, tact, and self-discipline, Beth still believed she slept with a sort of knockoff saint.
She was not in awe of her husband—she came to take for granted in Pat everything she admired so lavishly in Ben. But it had been she, not Pat, who had gotten up from that hard bed, more than a dozen years ago, certain they would marry. She knew at last she was safe. The match quickly became family legend: Evie and Bill’s only girl, Angelo and Rosie’s only son. Beth couldn’t help feeling happy for their parents. Pat had gone to college in Madison because his uncle’s restaurant was there, and Pat wanted into the business; and so they stayed, marrying in relief after a couple of uncomfortable years of proving they could live together and force their parents to acknowledge it. When she told the judge—another struggle; their parents actually brought a priest to the ceremony in hopes the young people would see reason at the eleventh hour—she promised to honor and cherish Pat, Beth meant it absolutely.