The Deep End of the Ocean

  “They live here.”

  “They live here?”

  “He’s not going anywhere, Pat. Like he told Kerry, he’s in sixth.”

  And then, possessed with a lust to touch him, to praise his body for planting the seed in her that became Ben, for not dying yet, Beth took the prints from Pat’s hands and kissed him, releasing her tongue deep into his mouth. He responded weakly, softly cupping one of her breasts, exploring the nipple with hands that barely seemed robust enough to grasp. Beth pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it onto the porch. She unbuckled Pat’s belt and lay back, wiggling out of her tattered jeans, centering him over her, drawing him inside her. She rocked to start him. “Please, Pat,” she whispered. “It won’t hurt anything.” And finally Pat took hold, and gripped her arms and plunged into her hard on the hard step, hurting her, making her feel sore and open and new. In a minute he said, “Shouldn’t we get…?”

  “I’m not going to get pregnant, Pat,” she said. “Forget that. Just go ahead, go ahead, go ahead….”

  Pat buried his tear-wet face against her breast and finished, in a shudder that came up his throat like a groan.

  Just then they heard a voice, a neighbor calling in his cat. They lay still in the dark, cold as sculpture, as Beth felt Pat subside and shrink within her, and her own muscles contract, contract and relax.

  “I’m going to call Dad,” Pat said, when they heard the neighbor’s door snap shut.

  “Don’t tell him. Not until we know.”

  “I won’t. I just…I don’t want to work tomorrow.”

  “Right.”

  Pat got up and arranged his clothing, using his thumbs to straighten his shirt collar as if he were headed for the bank, or for work. He buckled his belt carefully and put the change that had scattered on the porch back in his pockets. Last, he picked up the prints and held them to his chest. “I’m going in,” he said.

  Beth didn’t answer. She drew on her jeans, retrieved her shirt, and lay curled with her hips on the mat, the pebbled cement under her pillowed arms, and strained to see the streetlight beyond the streetlight at their corner—the one two blocks down. She pretended that she knew she was looking at the right one. Call it the intersection of Menard and Downer, she thought. And she began to watch. I will have to make coffee, she thought, so I can be sure to watch until morning. And then she thought, No, I don’t need coffee. The cold will keep me awake.

  She drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees, scanning her mind like a cookbook for a lovely antiseptic thought. Paint colors, tulip bulbs, low-cholesterol chicken Tetrazzini, tables of contents…yes. She would index the book of Sister Kathleen Noonan’s oils for the exhibit catalog.

  Page one, she thought, the bell at the Franciscan House in Saint Francis.

  Page two, the doors of the Baptistery in Florence.

  Page three, three angels above the door frame at a tea shop in the East Village in New York City.

  Beth stared at the orb of radiant light, two blocks away.

  CHAPTER 21

  There was no interval at all that Beth could later recognize as a period of sleep. She was awake, and looking at the light, her forearms prickled with the cold fall air, her eyes burning; and then she was awake, looking for the light, which was off.

  It was morning. She scanned the street quickly for evidence of cars backing out of driveways to be at work by eight. There were none. It was early morning, before seven.

  Beth rose and felt the cold wetness in the crotch of her jeans, looked up at her bedroom window, which faced the street. Was Pat awake?

  Line up, thought Beth. I will wake Kerry; I will wake Vincent. I will measure coffee and put it in the drip. Then I will call Candy. While it’s quiet, I’ll call her. She pushed open the screen door, the moment when she could call Candy fluttering ahead of her like the tail of a kite.

  Pat was at the table, reading to Kerry from the back of the Cheerios box. Vincent was eating toast, standing with his back to Beth. The lines in Pat’s face looked carved in wax; he was ghastly, pouches larger than Angelo’s, reddened bruises beneath his eyes.

  “Kerry’s having breakfast,” he told Beth.

  “I see, I see,” Beth replied, catching a glimpse of her own stained and rumpled self in the bathroom mirror.

  “What were you doing on the porch, Mommy?” asked Kerry.

  “Watching the sun come up,” said Beth, and then asked her son, “Vincent, do you need a ride?”

  “Jordie’s dad,” he said quietly.

  “Okay, that’s good, that’s fine.” Beth walked into the kitchen and began to measure coffee into a filter. But Pat had already made coffee. Lots of coffee. She dumped the fresh grounds into the sink. She heard Pat tell Kerry to mangia, mangia, soon it would be time to walk to school.

  “I’m going to ride my bike,” Kerry told him. “I’m nine now. I’m older than eighteen of the kids in third.”

  “You can’t ride your bike,” Pat told her gently. “Kids in walking distance can’t ride their bikes. And you don’t have a bike lock.”

  “Will you get me a bike lock just in case, Daddy?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Today.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Pat. “I’ll get it right after you go to school, and you can put it on when you get home.”

  Beth listened, amazed. By the time Kerry got home from school, who among the people around this table—whatever happened, whatever the magnitude—would be able to think of bike locks and chains and combinations? Pat, she realized. Pat would. Pat would do it, beforehand, in penance, in petition. And so she wasn’t surprised when he followed Kerry out the door, kissing the child lightly and calling her “Chicòria,” the name in Italian for a wildflower. Beth heard him start the car, heard him pull away….

  Line up, she thought. Line up. Now what? She poured her coffee, raising it recklessly to her lips, burning the soft skin so badly that she felt a welt rise. Vincent was leaving. She caught up with him at the door and, suddenly, fearfully, laid her head against his shoulder, which was exactly at the level of her own shoulder. He stopped, shrugging his knapsack onto the other shoulder, looking out into the street with forceful intensity.

  “Goodbye, Mom,” he said, not looking. She saw his jaw jump and writhe, as though the muscles were being stimulated by jolts.

  “Vincent,” said Beth. “Wait.” She needed urgently to tell him. She had to tell him, but what could she say?

  “It’s possible that a kid two blocks away is your brother, that Ben isn’t dead anymore”? “And we still don’t know anything more about the way we lost him than we did that day you lay on the luggage trolley at the Tremont and slept with Ben’s blanket across your chest”?

  She said instead, “Vincent. I love you. I want you to know I love you.”

  He said, “Right. Thanks.” Not a trace of surprise. He still didn’t look at her.

  Beth said, “Have a good time today.”

  “You too,” he said.

  Beth heard the crunch of gravel as Jordie’s dad wheeled his immense cherry-colored Chevy van into the apron of their drive. As the door closed behind Vincent, Beth saw something lying on the chair where he had stood, eating his toast. Half the chewed bit still lay on the edge of the table, next to Kerry’s empty cereal bowl. There was a slip, no, a sheet of paper, in the chair. She picked it up.

  It was one of the full-face shots of the boy mowing the lawn. It was not one that Beth had given Pat. This shot had been strung on the line last night. It was one of the best. Beth had meant to give it to Candy.

  Beth ran to the door and yanked it open. The van was just turning the corner, lights winking. Still, she yelled, “Vincent, wait!” The brake lights seemed to come on for an instant, but then the van kept going. “No!” Beth cried. Fool. She should have kept him home. He was not a child of seven anymore. To send him off to school today was a mortal insult.

  But it was past eight. She picked up the telephone and looked at it. She cal
led Candy at home.

  “Girlfriend!” Candy cried happily. “I’m running more than one thousand percent late. Can you eat lunch one of the weekdays?”

  “Candy,” Beth said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “What’s wrong, Beth?” said Candy, instantly tensing. “Is Pat sick?”

  “Candy, listen.” She paused for breath. “I think I found Ben.”

  Because Beth had seen her do it so often, she could now watch the silence on the other end of the line as if it were film, watch Candy Bliss let her gargantuan bag slide down her arm like a weary cat, see her raise one perfect finger to the place just between her eyes and press, press, press hard.

  “Beth, do you mean that you got a letter or a phone call?”

  “I saw him, Candy. He came to my door.”

  “He came…he came to your door? Here? He found you here? Ben would be…what…he’d be twelve, Beth. You’re saying he came home?”

  “No. He didn’t know me. He lives here. They…whoever it is that took him, lives in this neighborhood, I guess.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Well, he’s here. Except I don’t know it’s him. For sure.”

  “You do know.”

  “I don’t know. He looks like the age projection. His eyes were always a weird shade of gray, without any blue, and they still are. The shape of his lips and eyes—yes, I would say with ninety-percent certainty that this is my son. He has two cowlicks.”

  “The birthmark?”

  “I didn’t pull his pants down, Candy.” As she said it, a revulsive thing squirmed under her heart. Who had…who had? Which scenario was it? Come on, Mrs. Cappadora, choose door one, two, or three? The con artist, the yearner, the molester?

  Was this Ben?

  Nine years had telescoped into a day and a night and a day. Was it over?

  “I’ll be right there,” Candy was telling her.

  Because it was one of her arts, Beth knew precisely how long it would take for Candy to drive from her own apartment to Beth’s house, depending on the time of day. She glanced at the clock. She had twenty-five minutes.

  Running upstairs, she stripped off her gummy jeans and shirt, which still stank of developing chemicals. She showered and carefully pulled on middle-level work clothes—cotton trousers, a tunic. She dried her hair instead of merely combing it with her fingers. She put on mascara. She sat down on the bed and forcibly tried to still herself. Dead legs, limp arms, hands that felt animate only around the edges of a camera, dead stomach that had learned to receive food as a matter-of-factly as a supermarket scanner, dead heart with its battened receptors, all surged and tingled.

  Could he be her Ben—her freckled babe, her rain-eyed darling, folded so long in death, silent as his baptismal gown lying in the cedar chest—come miraculously alive?

  It was stupefying. Wonderful beyond imagining. It was terrifying.

  And then, Beth thought, oh, God, my God, I will be able to touch Ben’s hair. If she could do that, she would not care if her hand was then set on fire.

  The doorbell rang; but before Beth could answer it, Candy walked in and took Beth into her arms without greeting. They stood in the fractured sunlight of the lower hall, where Pat found them when he came home, dutifully carrying Kerry’s bike lock and chain.

  “Are you scared to death?” Candy asked.

  “To death, to death,” Beth told her.

  “Scared?” asked Pat. “Scared of what? Let’s go. I can’t wait, Candy—we have to go there, right now.”

  “Go where?” Beth asked him irritably. “We don’t know what house he’s in, or if he’s really in a house two blocks away. And anyway, he’d be in school.”

  “It’s the short day,” said Pat. School ended at 1:30 p.m. on Mondays.

  All three of them looked at their watches. It was just after nine. Candy silently picked up the print Vincent had left behind and studied it, as Pat shifted the bike chain and lock from hand to hand.

  “He said he’d come back,” Beth said. “To finish the lawn. He ran out of gas.”

  “I didn’t get gas!” Pat nearly screamed.

  “He’s not really going to mow the lawn, Pat,” Beth told him, nearly laughing before she could stop herself.

  “Of course, no one thinks we’re going to sit here and wait for this kid to remember to show up and mow the lawn,” Candy said softly. “You’re just not thinking clearly. I can’t imagine how you would. Or how I will. But I’m going to try, and the first thing we have to is—Beth, you said he goes to Kerry’s school?”

  “She says he’s in sixth. At Sandburg.”

  “And they’re two separate buildings, the elementary and the middle.”

  “Yep. Connected. There’s one gym and all.”

  “Okay, so that’s where we’ll start. I’ll call…well, I guess I’ll call Jimmy Daugherty, though strictly speaking, this isn’t what he does anymore, but I know how much he’ll want to be involved if…if this is it. And we’ll go down there and find out the kid’s name and the identity of whoever’s listed as his parent or guardian.” She got up, pouring herself coffee no one had thought to offer her, and went on, as if dictating a list to an assistant. “Might need a subpoena. If the school isn’t sufficiently impressed with the necessity of cooperating with the release of this information. Not a problem. Harry Brainard will help….”

  Beth looked at Pat. “Circuit court judge,” she said.

  “But if we start with school pictures, yearbooks, this shouldn’t be too much trouble. I would want to cooperate with helping solve one of the most intractable missing-persons cases in recent history, wouldn’t you?” Candy tapped her teeth with her nail. “But first, I need to see the rest of the pictures.”

  Beth said, “On the hall table.”

  “Did Reese see them?” Candy asked rummaging in her bag for paper and a pen.

  “I think he did,” Beth told her. “One, at least.” Pat looked up horrified.

  “You showed Vincent?”

  “I didn’t show him. He looked.”

  Candy asked, “Can I see them now?”

  Beth laid them all out, except the one Candy still held, end to end on the kitchen table, in lines like the child’s game called Memory. Candy put her glasses on and stood over them. As Beth watched her concentration, she realized Candy was crying—prettily, quietly, without either pretense or fuss, the way Candy did everything. “I’m sorry,” she told Beth.

  Beth said, “I can make more.”

  “This face…this face.” And Beth thought of the side-by-side photos of Ben that Candy kept above her desk, tacked to her bulletin board, not dog-eared, not wrinkled, carefully smoothed. All of them: his baseball-mitt picture; the first Missing poster; the second; the computer projection of Ben’s face at six, at eight. “This face. When I went…Philadelphia, Santa Fe, Jersey. The child in Palo Alto. The little Grainger boy in Michigan. And then afterward, when we all presumed, even I presumed, that he had died, wherever I went—conferences, vacations, to see my mother in Tampa—I carried those copies. I still have them.” She extracted a manila envelope from her purse and spilled the contents on the table. “And I realized, after the first few years, that I could no more stop looking for that face than I could stop breathing in and breathing out. It was like the fantasy of the perfect lover. ‘Be there, Ben,’ I would say. ‘In this park. At this fair. Let me see you on the street. Let me bring you home to Beth.’”

  Candy scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “And then there’d come a time, when I knew it was only a day or a few hours before I would have to leave, and I’d call and say I was in town. ‘There was this kid…. Right, you remember, the Cappadora kid…. ’ And I would ask about their unidentifieds. Their Baby Does. Autopsy pictures and graves. Potter’s fields and beautiful plots. Wanting and hoping it would be Ben. Terrified it would be Ben. But mostly hoping. That Ben would be found. Done. Even if I had to tell you he was dead, that he’d been dead for years.”
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  She reached out for Pat’s hand. “I wanted to see this face. I wanted to have Ben back. For you. And me.”

  Then, shaking herself visibly, she stood up to find the phone. “I’m going to call my lieutenant and the chief and tell them, and we’ll get things started.”

  “What should we do?” Pat asked. “Should we go down to the school?”

  Candy paused. “Paddy, until we can ID this kid—I mean, prove for absolutely one-hundred-percent-beyond the-remotest-shadow-of-a-doubt that this is Ben—you can’t start calling the shots. And right now, this kid is the legal responsibility of whomever we learn are his parents….”

  “His parents?” Pat cried.

  “I mean, until we’re sure it’s Ben, we can’t just go and grab some kid who might have gotten that red hair from his uncle Harold and take him to Wedding in the Old Neighborhood for braciole.”

  “So how are we going to find out for sure?”

  “The whole routine. Blood tests. Identifying marks. The fingerprints, of course, of course. Dental charts…”

  “He was three, Candy. He didn’t have charts,” Beth said. “We went through all that a million times when it happened. You remember.”

  “Well, right. I’m not all there. Could you folks excuse me for a few moments?”

  “You folks”? It shocked Beth.

  Wasn’t Candy family? Or nearly? Hadn’t she shared nights of too many beers, picnics in a humid field, Candy and Chris’s second anniversary at Wedding in the Old Neighborhood, a barbecue at Rosie’s, Candy taking Kerry horseback riding for the first time—all of these had telescoped on a dime, as had the span of Ben’s absence. It was the day after the night of the day.

  Candy was still a detective. They were civilians.

  “Now I’m going to go down to the school with—” Candy scanned the table—“with this picture. And the others, of course. You guys stay here and listen for the phone. Jimmy will be calling as soon as they can find him. He knows to come here first. Sit tight now. Sit tight.” She left, trailing her bag.

  Beth left Pat in the kitchen and went upstairs, where she lay down on her neatly made bed. A few moments later, Pat came up and lay beside her. They did not speak or touch. The telephone startled both of them, but neither reached to pick it up. When the answering machine clicked on, they could hear Jimmy shouting, “Jesus Christ, Bethie! We’re going crazy over here. Bethie? Pat? Are you there? Well, I don’t know if you’re there or not, but I’m on my way.” He seemed to speak for a moment to someone else: “I know. Can you believe this shit?” And then, “I’m on my way. Hang in there, Beth, Pat, Vincent.”