The Deep End of the Ocean

  The kid was astounded. “All right, sure! I just have to get…get my stuff. We live, like, two blocks.”

  “You don’t need a mower. We have a mower,” said Kerry helpfully. “And my big brother is supposed to do it. He’s in high school. But he’s lazy like a snake.” The boy was already running down the walk, in high gear. Beth grabbed Kerry’s arm, too roughly.

  “Mommy, are you still sick?” Kerry said, looking up.

  “No, I just…Do you know that boy?”

  Kerry blushed; her skin was a video of emotional responses. Pat called her “the Visible Woman.”

  “Mom,” she said seriously. “I was in my own house. That’s not the same as stranger danger. He’s a big kid in school.”

  “Oh,” said Beth, her heart now beginning to slow. Okay, she said to herself, okay, okay. “What’s his name?”

  “Jason,” said Kerry. “He’s on patrol…. No, Mom, no, I’m wrong. Jason is the kid with the Gameboy, and you know, Mom, he got reported, because he was standing there playing Mortal Kombat when he was supposed to be watching the little kids go—”

  “So you don’t know his name?”

  “It’s Sam. He’s Sam Kero—Kero-something.”

  Kerry followed Beth through the back of the house. Beth ran for the basement stairs, shoving their sleeping dog, Beowulf, aside with one foot; he coughed irritably and moved into the family room. Down into the basement, throwing open the door of the darkroom, fumbling for the light switch—the bulb was out, she knew that, had meant to replace it, the safe light would have to do. Searching in the eerie redness for her biggest bag, Beth pulled out her work camera, her Nikon F-90, brand-new, and rummaged in the mini-fridge for film. She thought as she pulled out the film carton and ripped it open with shaking fingers, 200 should be okay, and the color is absolutely essential, and the yard has patches of light; it’s only dark under the trees.

  “Are you going to work, Mommy?” asked Kerry.

  “Kerry!” Beth shouted. Her daughter jumped. “Kerry—yes, you know what? I forgot I have to take some leaf pictures. So, it’s okay if you want to go play with Blythe, okay? Go ahead.”

  Beth snapped open the camera back and pulled the film leader, fitting it to the sprockets. She slapped the back closed and heard the whirr of the automatic winding. Her hands were slick with sweat. Line up, she thought, line up. I will use a telephoto; and I will switch to manual focus. So I can control…Kerry, as if from very far away, over mountains, was calling her. Kerry stood at the top of the basement steps.

  “My hair is still a mess,” she said, bored. “And you always say you have to watch me cross at rush hour.”

  Beth bounded up the stairs, cradling her camera against her breasts; sweat pasted her T-shirt to her sternum. “Just put your band on, okay, Kerry?” Kerry languidly pawed through her backpack, which lay on the hall floor, and found her rubberized band with glitter ladybugs on it. She wound her hair into an askew ponytail while Beth watched her, panting, with a hunger for her to be gone that Beth later realized must have horrified Kerry.

  Georgia was pulling heads off her geraniums across the street. She waved to Beth, breezily, and pointed with exaggerated welcome to the door of her own house; that meant, Beth thought (line up, line up), that Blythe was home; Kerry could play. Line up, Beth thought, and made her own large gesture, pointing to her camera. Georgia made a big okay sign. They traded daughters back and forth all week.

  Her fingers now actually slimy on the camera’s surface, Beth slowly closed the door behind her. She let her eyes skim the line of family Christmas photos that marched along the walls, level with her chin. She leaned against the door. And then she was up, running for the second floor, pawing through Pat’s drawers where he kept his cartons, hidden from her since his surgery, under his baseball programs and the collection of crayon drawings Vincent had once made, and the large paper cap he kept in a flat box, which he had worn during Kerry’s Cesarean birth. Beth ripped the top of a package of Merits—tearing off not just the foil but an inch of the pack, so that the cigarettes tumbled and scattered on the carpet. She pulled open the closet and stuck her free hand deep into one of Pat’s coat pockets. He had matches. He always had matches, though he refused either to lie to her or admit he still smoked outside the house.

  Beth lit the cigarette, pulling in deeply, unaccustomed, choking. And then she walked into Kerry’s room and out onto the little porch that overlooked the backyard. She sat down against the wall, nudging aside the hell of Barbies that Kerry customarily left lying outside in desolate nudity under the dusting of September leaves.

  She smoked.

  The sweat dried on her shirt, stiffened. The sun burned on her face, but her body was icy, trembling. Adrenaline made her fingers needle and itch. She set the camera down gingerly, afraid she would drop it.

  She heard the kid open the back gate. That was all right. She could tell him that the mower was…but then, no, she saw him trundling it around the side of the house, he’d already found it. He waved to her, looking straight up at her with round gray eyes, eyes that still looked almost lashless. Shielding the camera with her arms like a secret, Beth stood up and yelled to the kid, “I’m taking some pictures of the leaves. It’s my job. I take pictures.”

  He nodded and leaned over, expertly starting the balky Toro on the first tug. And then he squared his shoulders and began to move, cleanly, starting from the back and making lines the length of the yard.

  Beth leaned on the railing to steady her elbows and adjusted the zoom. No time for a tripod. She shot his face in profile as he moved out from the shade of the willow and worked his way past the swing set. When he rounded the patio, she shot him full on, as he lifted his head to wipe a sheen of sweat off with the arm of his flannel shirt. Letting the automatic advance roll, Beth shot at the rate of an exposure every few seconds. And in minutes, long before the kid had finished half of the backyard, she had shot the whole roll of thirty-six. She ran downstairs and searched for her dark bag. She couldn’t find it. Line up, Beth thought, line up. You can do this. You’ve changed film by touch alone in a dozen dark places. She flipped off the lights, closed the door, and reached for her spool, winding the film to dry it.

  And then she kneeled on the floor in the red light, her head pressed against the front of her handmade sink, which Vincent had painted with black marine paint, and said, “Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris; qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis…miserere nobis.”

  She heard Vincent open the door upstairs, heard it swing back and crash against the wall.

  “Vincent,” she whispered, imagining herself summoning him to find her purse, give the kid ten bucks. But her voice was less than a whisper. She dragged herself to her feet and went up the stairs on all fours. The yard was silent. Beth panicked, jerking open the front door.

  He was gone, but there—a note. The kid had left a note, saying the mower had run out of gas. He would come back tomorrow. She ran to the garage. He had stowed the lawn mower neatly in the garage, in the space between the bikes.

  Beth walked wearily up the stairs. Fifteen minutes more and she could print. “Vincent,” she said, outside his door. She could feel the music from his boom box with her feet, throbbing. “Vincent.” She tried to turn the knob. The door was locked. She tapped. No reply. The music wailed and thumped.

  Beth stood back against the opposite wall, raised both feet, and kicked the door with all her force. The music collapsed into silence. Vincent opened the door. Beth saw, but did not analyze, the way his eyes streamed. He was crying.

  “I want you to go downstairs and order a pizza,” she told him. “I want you to do that first. Then, I want you to go get Kerry at Blythe’s and put a tape on for her. Take the money for the pizza out of my purse.” Vincent nodded dumbly. “I have to do some work in the darkroom, right now, and I have to do it all at once. So I want you to give Kerry some pizza, okay? Will you do that?”

  He nodded again, furtively scrubbing at his eyes wi
th the back of his hands. Then he slouched toward the stairs.

  “Vincent,” Beth said sharply. “Did you see the boy who was mowing the lawn?”

  “What boy?” He scowled.

  Checking her watch, Beth clattered down the stairs to the darkroom. Line up, she thought. They’re only pictures. You make pictures twice a week. She made the motions mechanical, deciding to print each shot separately, eight by ten, though it would take forever. A contact sheet would be too small, too torturous. Enlarger. Stop bath. Fixer. Take your time.

  She leaned over the bath. A drop of sweat fell from her chin, plinked on the mirror of the surface, and bloomed like the shape of an atom, widening, shimmying, finally disappearing.

  And then, the edges of a face, growing more distinct, looking up at her, reaching up to her from darkness.

  CHAPTER 20

  Beth left the prints strung on the line with clips.

  Even from the open door of her darkroom, a distance of no more than four feet, many of them looked like copies, or a sequence in which the shutter had opened and closed, opened and closed, on the same subject in the same position. But when you came closer, you could see that each of the angles was subtly different, each a discrete variation of the boy’s fair face with its sharp chin and raccoon’s mask of light freckles beneath the eyes. Others, a few, captured his whole body. His legs were long—most of his length was right there—but grooved with the kind of effortless musculature he would have all his life.

  The kind he had, indeed, had all his life.

  By the time she came upstairs, Vincent was back in his room, and Kerry, red-eyed, had just completed her second straight hour of cartoon gluttony.

  Beth flicked off the set, and Kerry prepared to launch herself into her bedtime routine.

  But Beth caught her and pulled Kerry gently down with her on the deeply sunken end of the much-used pillow sofa. She held Kerry wordlessly, stroking the child’s feathery globe of cheek with her own, rougher skin, and finally rocking her with a motion so small and slight it could have fooled a passing glance into calling it stillness. Kerry didn’t object, but Beth could feel her arranging herself carefully on the brace of her mother’s arms—Beth’s hugs were not usually so indulgent.

  But no matter what else happened during the rest of this day, what Beth had already seen gave her, for the first time in nine years, sufficient courage to let herself experience the yielding body of her youngest child. Kerry’s fingers were spangled with marker dots; she smelled of fruit and dish soap, and something warmer beneath—down, innocence. Beth looked up over Kerry’s tangled hair at the crest of the avalanche, the mountain of memory and half-memory, of rerun, regret, poignancy, and outrage, poised to hurtle down and paralyze her.

  Nothing moved. Not a grumble. Not a single cold stone dislodged.

  Beth led Kerry up to her room and listened while Kerry read from Little House on the Prairie. She was not a gifted reader, but she was a dogged plodder; her determination blazed from her like a scent. “I’m getting better every day, and I am nine now. Eighteen kids in class are still eight,” sighed Kerry, and Beth wondered where Kerry found a child’s confidence from the scraps of attention she had been fed while growing up.

  “Night-night,” Beth told Kerry, switching off the overhead light.

  “You’re not sick anymore, are you, Mommy?” Kerry asked.

  “No, I’m peachy keen, peachy,” Beth said.

  She passed by Vincent’s door and tapped it. “’Night,” she called. “Thanks for watching Kerry.” There was no answer but a vague growl under the pulse of the music; it was classical now—Perlman playing Mozart. Beth didn’t try the door. She knew it would be locked.

  She glanced at the clock. It was after nine. Pat would be home in an hour.

  Ordinarily, Beth devoted this last hour of the day, the last interval before she could take refuge in a cold glass of water and three Trazodone, with reading English novels. The English didn’t seem to have many children or care much about them when they did. What roused the English breast was a good water spaniel, a gentleman with a stick who’d come back from India to rejoin his ruddy-cheeked wife called Bea who gardened. The best books for Beth were those in which one day varied from the day before only in the variety of sandwiches at tea, in which vicars called on the sick, in which people went out for a drive to look at old button sets or used volumes of Thackeray.

  But tonight, she could not release herself into a village just off the Montford road or a shop in Hastings Crossing.

  She sat in the living room, the taste of cigarettes (she’d smoked three) acrid in her mouth. Pat was late. Then he came through the door humming, carrying an old double-sided cardboard that advertised the winter specials at Wedding in the Old Neighborhood. It would soon be time to put up a summer board, and Kerry liked to draw on the used ones.

  Beth heard him put down his keys and turn on the kettle for his nightly cup of tea. She felt him check once, around the dark first floor, to see if he dared open a window and have a smoke before bed.

  She said then, “Pat.”

  He jumped. “Bethie!” he said. “What are you doing up?”

  Beth walked into the yellow glare of the kitchen and put her arms around Pat. Gratefully he rubbed her back. “What’s up? Is Kerry sick?”

  “No,” she said, wanting to draw out this last stable moment, the last moment of snow bridge she had built and packed hard, so that it felt almost like concrete, you could walk on it. Their fragile suppositions were an ache, but at least they were used to them. Now, what would happen? What would give way?

  Beth said, “I have to show you something.”

  Pat took off his sport coat and followed her down the stairs. Beth remembered the spent light. “Paddy,” she said, “Get a light bulb for me, okay?” He turned and left the room. Beth could see the pictures in the faint wash of light from the upstairs hall—his hair now darker, almost maroon in the sun. He would call it brown, she supposed.

  This boy.

  Sam.

  Pat came back with the light bulb and snatched out the old one, tossed it in Beth’s huge rubber trash can. Replaced it in the dark. The light flickered, then shone steadily. Pat looked at the pictures. He stepped forward and tore one down, then two.

  He said, “Beth.”

  She said, “It is, isn’t it?”

  They sat down side by side on the bench that ran along one wall in Beth’s darkroom. Pat pulled down another fistful of pictures. They moved into her office. Beth sat at the desk, Pat on the overstuffed chair.

  “Is this possible?” he said, his voice strangled in a way that made Beth wonder if he should have a tranquilizer or a nitroglycerin. She could almost feel the flutter of his toiling heart.

  “He came to the door,” Beth told Pat softly. “To mow lawns. I let him mow the lawn. He’s coming back tomorrow. Because we ran out of gas for the mower.”

  Tears filled Pat’s eyes and streamed down his jaw, dripping onto the front of his shirt. In every other respect except the tears, he did not seem to be crying; his breath was measured, even.

  “Where does this boy live?”

  “Two blocks, he said.”

  “Two blocks?” Pat cried. “Two blocks? Did they just move here?”

  “Pat. I don’t know how long they’ve lived here. But Kerry knew him, and she’s been in school at Sandburg four years.”

  “Did she…?”

  “No, Pat, for God’s sake. I would have never known unless…well, maybe I would have. But he looked just like the aging projection Morris made. And I shot in color so that we could see…His hair is so dark…. It’s possible, Pat, that it’s just a kid who looks that way.”

  “Yeah,” he breathed.

  “And I wanted to show you, to ask you, before we called Candy or…or anyone.”

  “Let’s call them now,” said Pat. “Let’s get up there and call, and get down to that house.”

  “No,” Beth said. “It’s late night, Pat. He’s asleep.
And we don’t even know his last name.”

  “His last name? Christ, Beth, his last name?” He yanked off his tie, fumbled at his shirt pocket for the place he once kept his cigarettes, before the surgery, before he began hiding them from Beth. “But what if they’re…doing things to him right now?”

  “He didn’t look or talk like an abused kid, Pat. And if he is, Pat, it’s been nine years….”

  “Oh, Bethie—oh, Bethie—two blocks. When he saw you, did he…?”

  “Nothing, Pat. Nothing. He had no idea. Pat, he was three.”

  “And he wouldn’t know this house.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe he’d know me.”

  Beth felt a sudden, powerful splash of rage rise; she wanted to slap Pat hard, in the face. But she breathed in and out, slowly, taking her time.

  Pat said, “I gotta have a cigarette, Bethie. I’m sorry.” He grabbed a sheaf of the photos.

  They sat on the porch, with the lights off. The sweat from Pat’s hands had already smudged the prints.

  “Two blocks,” Pat said. “Two blocks. I never saw him.”

  “You’re never around. And I never go anywhere walking. Just school. The drugstore. There are probably fifty kids in this neighborhood I’ve never seen in four years living here.”

  Beth leaned against her husband. Be a rock for me now, Patrick, she thought. I don’t even want to see tomorrow, because even if it is Ben, we might have to know things that could bury us. Looked back upon, her nine years of quiet avoidance seemed…almost peaceful. Not like this clammy present fear.

  But she felt Pat’s fragility through his wet shirt, felt the slender rasp of his damaged breaths as he smoked.

  Okay, Candy, she thought. Be my rock Candy.

  “I think we should call Bliss now. Or Bender. Or Jimmy.”

  “Not tonight, Pat.”

  “Beth,” he told her with desperate urgency. “What if he’s not there tomorrow? What if whoever…And why would they still be here? What if they take him and get out of Dodge?”