The Deep End of the Ocean

  “Uhhhh, no.”

  “And they wanted you to talk to someone?”

  “Well, yes, they think I’m crazy. That is, my dad does. My mom…”

  “Your mother?”

  “Well, my mother didn’t pay much attention to it.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, she’s pretty busy with my little sister and stuff.”

  “Well, sure. But I think, you know, it’s possible that she was very concerned about this and simply didn’t…”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “So, you took the initial manhole cover off…. How did you do that?”

  “Well, you know, we lifted it.”

  “They’re pretty heavy. You just lifted it up?”

  “Yeah, but we had this long piece of pipe. I mean a very long piece, like five feet, and it was metal, not PVC. So we put it in the hole in there….”

  “And you pried up the manhole cover?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wasn’t that really difficult?”

  “Well, you know what they say—‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I can move the world.’ Or something.”

  “They?”

  “Well, he. Archimedes.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” The guy looked a little concerned that a kid would know about Archimedes; adults had this idea of you and what you knew and the limits of it, and they got real hostile if you got outside it—they said you were showing off or being an asshole or whatever. So Reese said, “I saw that on TV.”

  “I see.” The guy looked down at his file, and made a note, and pushed his glasses up on his hair. Now he looked even younger, like sixteen. Piece of cake, thought Reese. “So what do you think, Vincent? Is there any other reason, besides the explosion, that your parents wanted you to talk to me?”

  Reese winced.

  “Vincent.” It sounded like getting stung by a wasp. “Vincent.” It was just a wimpy, doofus name, a foot short of “Vinnie.” He didn’t care so much when his grandma Rosie called him “Cenzo,” that wasn’t so bad. But “Vincent”—hiss.

  “Is something the matter?” Reese glanced at the clock…slowly now…

  “Uh, just the name.”

  “Your name?”

  “It’s just that, it’s not my name. Vincent.”

  “Oh. I see here, from your doctor—”

  “Yeah, but see, what they call me is Reese.”

  “Oh. Why? Is that a nickname for Vincent?”

  Utterly and completely clue-free, this guy. This guy didn’t know whether he was in town or not.

  “No,” Reese said carefully, as if he were talking with one of the Wongs at school, the kids he tutored in math, who learned how to make clam chowder in biology instead of doing the regular stuff; they were all called Wong after the guy who wrote the biology book for simples. “My name is really Vincent Paul. But the guys…see, when I came to Chicago, this was last year, they heard them read my name off in the class, and somebody goes, ‘Vincent Paul? Saint Vincent de Paul? He’s named after the resale store!’ And they all laughed, not real mean-like, but afterward, because I dress…I mean, I like my clothes real comfortable…they would call me ‘Resale! Hey, Resale!’ and then, ‘Reese.’”

  “That’s a pretty neat conversion. I mean, if you like it. But maybe you didn’t like it. Was that painful for you? Did you feel they were making fun of your clothes?”

  “Shit no!” said Reese, and then caught himself. The “hell” was one thing. He could tell from the guy’s face, which suddenly got very still, that “shit” was another. “Pardon me. But no. It didn’t bother me.”

  “Why not?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dr. Kilgore.”

  “No, I mean your name name.”

  “Oh…Thomas. Tom.”

  “Well, Tom, imagine being named Vincent.” Reese glanced at the fat red lighted letter. “Look, Dr. Kilgore, the time’s up. I think my dad’s waiting for me….”

  “Oh, you’re right, I guess. I was just thinking about those manhole covers. Sure. Well, next time we can talk more about…”

  Absolutely, Reese thought. Totally. He figured his dad was paying this guy, like, fifty dollars an hour or something. The next time he saw this guy they’d be roller-skating on the el tracks.

  “Sure,” said Reese. And then he looked up, and goddamn his lousy luck and timing, there stood his dad, in the little kind of arched door to this guy’s office, which didn’t have a door—it didn’t need one, because his office was the whole first floor, and people waited in a kind of porch thing. His dad had walked right in, which was very Dad-like.

  “Mr. Cappadora,” said the shrink, suddenly all smiles and hands. Reese had seen his dad have this effect on people before. His mom, with her big witch eyes and her skinny face—people backed off from his mom, not that she noticed (talk about people who didn’t know whether they were in town or not). Point is, she creeped people out. But people wanted to give his dad a doughnut or something. Grandma Rosie’s friends, they were all over him, like he was Reese’s age, or Kerry’s. And whenever he met Grandpa Angelo’s friends, or even Grandpa Bill’s, for that matter, they were, like, “Paddy! Paddy, my boy!” and they were giving him stuff. Everybody knew before they even met him, like Dad was their long-lost brother or something.

  “Mr. Cappadora, I wanted to go over a couple of things with you, a little background…. I just didn’t get a whole picture on the phone, because this was sort of in the nature of an emergency and all.”

  And Reese’s dad was, like, smiling, sure, no problem, though Reese knew he had to be at the restaurant in, like, an hour to set up. Reese glanced at the clock. Bottom of the first now, for sure.

  “Vincent,” said his dad. “You can go sit in the car and turn the radio on.” Vincent trotted out the door. Their big old boat of a Chevy was sitting at the curb, actually not right at the curb, about a foot off it, because his dad was not a very godly driver, though he always said, when they goofed around, “Italians are the best drivers, you know. Parnelli Jones. And Mario Andretti. All those guys are Italian.”

  “And the best singers,” Reese would say. His dad was such a sap, but he was a good sap.

  “Oh, absolutely. Frank. And Pavarotti.”

  “And Madonna. Trevor Ricci.”

  “Trevor Ricci?” his dad had asked, that once.

  “From On the Rag,” Reese told him.

  “That’s a band?”

  “Yeah, dad, like Smashing Pumpkins. Or Nine Inch Nails. Or whatever.”

  And his dad would tell him this shit was not music—kids today didn’t have any idea of what melody was—and Reese would say, yeah, for real, Dad, like those tapes in the restaurant, those two-thousand-year-old tenors singing “Santa Lucia” over and over and over till you snapped. Now that was music!

  The frigging car was locked. Reese took a long breath. He turned around and slumped back into the guy’s office, and was about to throw himself down on this kind of swing thing outside the door, when he heard his dad say, “…that his brother was three years old?”

  Oh, terrific, thought Reese, and edged closer.

  “I knew…you’d said on the telephone that there had been another child.” The shrink seemed to be apologizing now. He had heard that tone, that hushed, church tone, like someone was hugging you with his voice, whenever a teacher found out at the beginning of a term about Ben. It was the magic ticket, at first. They gave you soft looks, their heads tilted, and smiled at you no matter what you did, but it didn’t last. By November, he was always riding the bench in the principal’s office, and listening to extreme, rational lectures about how no matter how severe the grief we had to endure was, we needed to keep priorities straight, we needed to be strong, and try to accept responsibility, because the world wasn’t going to cut you slack, you had to make the grade, and you know you have the ability, Vincent….

  “So, Vincent was…seven when his brother died?”

  Ba
stard, thought Reese. He could hear the collapse in his dad’s voice. Dad couldn’t handle much talk about Ben. The dumb bastard was going to drag Dad down a flight of stairs right now.

  Vincent slid behind one end of a bookcase; it only stuck out about a foot from the wall, but he was small and thin for thirteen, so he could stand erect and eavesdrop without being seen. There was a fringe of soft dust along the back of the bookcase; Reese wiped it with his finger.

  “He didn’t die. That is, I guess, yes, he died. But we are not sure. Because Ben was…we believe Ben was kidnapped. In fact, the police are pretty much sure that happened, because of clues they found.”

  “Ahhh,” said the bastard. Guaranteed shocker. “And you never found…?”

  “The case is still officially open, and the police still get leads sometimes. Last year, in fact, well…the thing is, there’s not much hope, but I pray to God we’ll at least find out someday.”

  “Oh, man. Oh, you must…it must…”

  “And Vincent was right next to Ben when it happened. I’m amazed you never read about this.”

  “I don’t read much. You say he saw the boy being abducted?”

  “No…he—Ben—was just a baby, he was three that spring, and he wandered off…. They were in a hotel lobby. We lived in Wisconsin then, and Beth had the children with her here for her high-school reunion.”

  “I see, I see….”

  “Did he talk about Ben? About how he feels about what happened to Ben? Because I think, it makes sense, doesn’t it, if a kid is like this, the way Vincent is, that there’s a link?”

  “Well, we have to presume that something that utterly traumatic…But no, Mr. Cappadora, he didn’t bring it up. And that’s not necessarily bad, especially at a first meeting. Kids aren’t like us in a therapeutic setting. An adult will try to go straight for the problem. You know, ‘I want to leave my wife’…‘I hate my boss.’ We’re aware that we need to consider issues, and we have the economics of the situation on our minds. But with a child…a child might not come out and say, ‘I have a problem with this.’ An adolescent child, particularly, and he’s what?…nearly thirteen…will approach things in an oblique way, and the importance is establishing trust….”

  “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  Frigging shit, thought Reese. He’s going for it.

  And then his dad asked, “So, when he talked about the explosion? Did he tell you people were hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s good, because nobody was hurt. Though this old lady fell off a chair in her kitchen and got an egg on her head the size of…fortunately, she knows Beth’s dad. But I hope Vincent gave you some idea of the…scope of this.”

  “He told me about the calcium carbide.”

  “What they did, him and this Jordie Cassady kid, they poured a whole bunch of those crystals down the storm sewer. And they waited a long time. If they hadn’t waited a long time, it might not have been so big…but see, Vincent knows about this stuff. It wasn’t Jordie Cassady, though his father or his grandfather or whatever had the chemicals—in the garage, for Christ’s sake. But Jordie’s a good kid. I’m not saying my son is bad, I mean. But it was Vincent who knew how long to wait. He waited until the crystals were sufficiently mixed with the water in the main so that they could really…and then they lit this fatwood log—you know, the kind of thing you use to start a fire in a fireplace….”

  “He told you all this?”

  “The police told me all this. And he told the police. I guess. They had to look down at the paper for the name of the gas it creates. Acetylene gas. When they lit it, you never heard anything like it. It was like…ten percussion grenades. Windows broke. Stuff fell off people’s shelves. The goddamn ground shook. Beth and I are like…‘The furnace blew up!’ And the manhole covers for three blocks—boom! Up in the air. It’s one a.m. we’re talking about.”

  Reese could hear his dad get up, and though he couldn’t see him, he knew his dad was reaching for a bone, realizing he couldn’t smoke in the guy’s office, putting the pack back in his side pocket, and then pacing. He went on, “Thirty feet up, and these are big, heavy cast-iron mothers. We’re lucky somebody’s cat didn’t get flattened—and if it had been daytime, Jesus, somebody would’ve been killed.” Reese’s dad sighed, hard, like he did at the end of a Saturday night, when he came in the door, in the dark, smelling of smoke and garlic. Reese would hear him; no one else was ever awake. He would hear his dad sigh, loudly, and then start rummaging through the drawers, and he would want to run down to him and jump him from behind, like he did when he was a really little kid. Back then, his dad would never put him back to bed. He’d make him cinnamon toast.

  “The thing is,” Reese’s dad was saying now, “Beth, his mother, and I…we’ve had a…it’s been very, very hard. And the kid, the kid is this outlaw. He does, so far as I know, no homework. I mean, he’ll write a twenty-page report on something like the Monty Hall problem….”

  “The Monty Hall problem?”

  “It’s this probability deal. If you have three doors, and there’s a big prize behind one, and you first choose number one, and it’s not there, I think they ask, is there any greater statistical likelihood that the prize is behind number two or number three?”

  “Is there?” said the shrink, sounding as dumb as Kevin Flanner, whom Reese had once had to punch.

  “Hell if I know. I run a restaurant. And these mathematicians all over the country, they write to each other on the computer and debate this thing…And anyway, once Vincent wrote a whole paper on this; he even called this guy in California in the middle of the night.”

  “That’s very impressive. This is clearly a really bright kid.”

  “But the thing is, it wasn’t assigned! It wasn’t his homework; he had long division to do, and he totally blew that off, and didn’t turn it in. So the school calls. They call ten times a week. They must have us on the speed dial by now, and I know, I know, we’ve all been through hell, but my God, the kid is going to go to the pen….”

  “I don’t think there’s any danger of that, really. But the thing is, next time, we really need to get the rest of the family in here—your wife and—”

  “Beth won’t come.”

  “I’m sure she’s as troubled as you are.”

  “Well, of course Beth cares about what’s happening to Vincent. But since Ben’s been…since this happened, she’s not that willing to open up anymore. She went to a grief group, and we’ve gone to counseling, Beth and me, right after I was sick, last year. Once. There’s been a lot of pressure. She’s just…she won’t deal with it anymore….”

  “Why don’t you let me talk to her? I’m sure we can work something out. And…are your parents alive? And Beth’s?”

  “My folks are. And Beth’s dad.”

  “Well, this is a whole family thing, Mr. Cappadora. There’s been a lot of pain here, and maybe not enough of a chance for everyone to sort it out.”

  “I can’t imagine my parents in a psychologist’s office.”

  Kilgore laughed. “Nobody can ever imagine it. But it grows on you. So why don’t we try to set something up?” Kilgore ruffled some papers. “You know, I can’t stop thinking about this. Manhole covers went thirty feet in the air? Somebody saw it?”

  “Yeah. Two people actually saw it. And Jordie and Vincent, of course.”

  “Cool.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I’m sorry, Mr. Cappadora. Pat. What I should be saying is that this is definitely dangerous, oppositional behavior, in a sense, risk-taking to the point of self-endangerment. Of course it is.” Vincent strained to hear the shrink. He had gotten up, was moving away, out of earshot. Vincent leaned forward a fraction of an inch, and the guy said, “But thirty feet in the air? Boom?”

  Reese heard his dad laugh, softly, very softly. “Did he tell you he’s a bookie?”

  “Get out of here!”

  “Yeah, he’s a bookie…football, baseball, hockey. N
ot the ponies. He just handicaps those for my buddies.”

  “This is some kid you have here.” They laughed together, louder this time. They were laughing about a kid blowing up a neighborhood.

  Jesus, thought Reese. I’m fucked.

  CHAPTER 17

  Though in his opinion Kilgore had missed his calling as a vet (he had more horse pictures on his wall than they had at Churchill Downs), Reese didn’t entirely mind going back a second time.

  It was partly the look on his dad’s face when Reese agreed to try seeing the shrink again.

  It was the same look Pat got when he’d finished raking the oak leaves for the third time in the fall. Like he could pretend that during the winter, some magic thing would change and it would never be fall again and he would never have to do the same job. It was a look that in Reese’s mind was accompanied by the sound of someone dusting his hands together—there, that’s done. On the whole, Reese would have preferred scraping paint off the Sears Tower to another little get-together with Clue-Free Kilgore (“Call me Tom, or even Doctor Tom, if you want”—Reese couldn’t believe it). But he liked that it smoothed some of the wrinkles off his dad’s forehead, made his dad’s eyes open a little wider, like eyes that weren’t always trying to read little print. He knew that his dad had been after his mom, and Rosie and Angelo and Bill, to go to a meeting with Kilgore, too. Rosie didn’t care, but Bill wasn’t too cool on the idea (or so Reese could gather from the one side of phone conversations he was usually able to get, because his dad had this, like, sixth sense about someone being on the extension, even if you put a handkerchief over it and held your breath).

  The real reason Reese didn’t mind going back to Kilgore had to do with Kilgore being a psychiatrist instead of a school social worker or something. Which Reese could easily tell, having spent a lot of time with school counselors when he was little over some goddamn school thing or other. Was he clinically depressed? Did he have (Reese’s favorite; it made him sound like the reverse-vitamin-enriched kid) underachiever syndrome? Reese could tell Kilgore wasn’t like the others because his office was decorated so cool, skinny white panels of handmade paper lined up with only one, the second to the last, violet, which went with some pillows Kilgore had on his couches. Now, if there had been two panels with purple, one on each end, it would not necessarily mean the guy had money. But the one, just the one, sort of thrown in there, was classy.