When he’d gotten back, later, from George’s, Sam was lighter, less antsy. He’d played a game of Sorry with Kerry. He’d come right out and asked Vincent to shoot some hoops. But Beth had never forgotten the supplication in his face as he knelt by the chest, the confusion in his voice about the right way to talk to kindly strangers to convince them to help you find your way home.
She had tried to tell Pat about the cedar chest. He’d brushed it away. “Bethie, do you remember being six weeks old?” he’d laughed. “Don’t stew over it. He’ll come around.”
Pat would listen now. He would have no choice.
As the shadows blanketed Rock of Ages cemetery, Beth and Sam locked the cameras in the trunk, and Sam asked if he could lie down in the backseat. “Sure, baby,” she said. “Sleep.”
There was worse and worse, Beth thought; they had given him life, Beth thought, tilting the rearview mirror to look at her sleeping son; that was a covenant. No one would ask them to give their boy back the life he mourned, at the cost of the life that had been restored to him. But wasn’t that part of the covenant, too?
She needed to talk to Pat. She hadn’t the heart to talk to Pat, or the courage. He would turn from her words with all his might and with all justification, and what would be left for her then?
A phone call, Beth thought then—almost stopping, almost forgetting that she would wake Sam, that it was late. No, she would look the number up tomorrow. She knew it was in the book. She’d looked it up half a dozen times over the past few years, noted when the office moved, when the number changed.
With the thought of the phone call secure above her mind, like a strap in a swaying subway car, Beth headed through the dusk, south toward home.
CHAPTER 30
To call first thing the next morning, Beth decided, would seem desperate. That it had taken four years to get to the point of making the call—and that no one but she knew that—was of no consequence.
She would work first. For…an hour. Decency demanded it.
She took out the last proofs of the photo essay that would appear two months from now in Life—the children-walking-away portraits. Life was going to run them as a six-page spread for no other reason than the fact of them. It was an arrival, big-league. But she had to admit that not one of the pictures was really anything that would merit a gold star beside her name in God’s notebook. She still used the same tricks and conceits in her work that she’d developed as a novice. Venturing in new directions would have required thought and concentration, study, the willingness to expend emotional capital. She had not had it to give—and she often thought that she was lucky that a fairly good ability to make pictures had become second nature to her long before she’d taken up residence under the avalanche. Her “new eyes” were as a kind of deformity born of that residence.
Beth recognized the truth that she could do most of her work with the eyes of her mind closed; that meant admiring that the real reason people paid her handsomely was the conjuring power of her last name, the little italicized credit that appeared under every picture of hers someone published, the explanation of who she was. The reason Wedding in the Old Neighborhood was being featured in Bon Appetit only now, when the food and the theme had been a spectacular draw for years. The reason a book publisher had offered Beth and Pat an actual million dollars (it still made Beth wince to think of the crumpling of Pat’s jaw when she insisted they reject it) for rights to their family’s story. The Cappadora name had been dredged from a stale estuary of tears and rumor not only unstained, but no longer just golden: now it was platinum.
This Life layout, for example. The editors naturally assumed that the subject had sprung from Beth’s joust with fate. In fact, Beth had always taken pictures of children walking away. Their backsides appealed to her—a kid’s personality showed in his walk. Before Ben disappeared, it had been, for her, a metaphor for growing up. None of the pictures she’d chosen for Life were of her own children, and lots of them were old: toddlers waddling away through the lilac bowers in the University of Wisconsin arboretum; a boy carrying his skates slung over one finger, crossing Lake Wingra on a winter morning.
There was one picture for which the editors would have paid an even handsomer bundle. But it was too late to include that one. And Beth had washed her hands of the notion, anyway.
Looking up at her tack board, Beth turned her full eye, both her real and her photographers’ eye, on the one walking-away picture she had taken of her own children. It had been at Ellen’s house, after a barbecue a few weeks ago. All three of them were heading up the driveway to the car. She had told herself then that she was intent on the rose-quartz quality of the twilight; but the photo—Vincent elbowing Sam just a little over Kerry’s strawberry blond head as she skipped between them—was beautifully composed, the boys like a bridge over their smaller sister. Last spring, when she’d sold the layout, just after Sam was found, one of the editors had asked, ever so delicately, whether any of the photos depicted “the boy.” Beth understood; the layout wasn’t just poignancy, it was news. She’d almost given in. Just one backshot of Sam. Quickly, she’d told him no, there wasn’t. And the temptation to give them this picture—was it to cash in? to confess?—was still strong. Even now, when she knew that the issue deadline would make changing the layout impossible.
Was she proud of her picture? Or, as she suspected Pat of being, proud of her wounds? Could she pick the two apart, ever? She did know that, whatever their origin, work and money provided satisfaction, however remote. She simply did not know how far that satisfaction went.
Would work sustain her? If everything else were gone?
Forty minutes had passed. She picked up the phone. The company was called Palladin Reconstructions—the yellow pages ad, which Beth thought was clever, said, “Have taste, will travel.” When he was a kid, Nick had always made much of his last name, which he thought linked him with his legendary Sienese ancestors. The underline read, “Historical ruin in distress? We’ll come to the rescue.” That was going too far. But then, as Dan, Ellen’s husband, said, you couldn’t argue with four million bucks a year, which was what Nick turned over, appealing to the lucky convergence of twin trends toward architectural recycling and nostalgia.
The phone burred, and Beth felt her stomach grip.
To her chagrin—she had been counting, secretly, on a secretary, even hoping for an answering machine—he picked up himself.
“Nick,” she said.
“This is Nick,” he replied.
“Nick, this is Beth. Beth…Kerry.”
“Uh…Bethie!” He didn’t sound the way she’d planned he would, overjoyed, hushed with gratitude. He sounded…just surprised. “Wait. I got to get rid of a guy.” He was back in a moment, his voice lower, more particularly pitched for her. “Bethie, it’s good to hear you. Is anything wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. And then, “Everything.”
“What do you mean? Is Pat sick?”
“No, he’s fine. I just…Nick, I know I never called after we…It just seemed—I couldn’t.”
“Bethie, I understood. And then everything happened. I never got to tell you how happy I am. Your boy…I know Trisha called you. I wanted to.”
“Thank you. It’s a miracle. We’re…it’s almost too much to understand. But the reason I called was, I think of you, often. And I was wondering if we could have lunch. I know it’s abrupt.”
He paused. Oh no, Beth thought. He’s thinking that I’m asking him to sleep with me. Am I asking him to sleep with me? “I mean,” she said stupidly, before he could reply. “Really lunch. Not…that.”
She could hear Nick smiling. “I must say, I’m struggling with disappointment,” he offered gallantly. Beth sighed. “But really lunch is better than nothing. I can’t wait. When? Today?”
They arranged to meet at some nowhere chain out by his office, near the airport, in two hours. Deliberately, Beth did not rush back to the shower to shave another layer off her legs; she didn’t
redo her hair. She simply put on slacks instead of the ripped jean shorts she was wearing, lipstick—and at the last minute, Rosie’s mother’s diamond studs in her ears.
Nick was slightly, ever so minutely, heavier, as if a child had drawn a crayon outline around him and shaded in a bit more. A prosperous man. When he put his arms around her, he still smelled better than anything human; it made Beth woozy.
It took a full hour just to fill Nick in on Sam’s homecoming; he questioned her with the gentle patience of a good father, drawing out the painful liquor under the surface.
“And Pat? How’s Pat handling this? How are you guys?”
“Pat’s good,” Beth said seriously, rearranging her lettuce under mounds of tuna salad. “He feels like…blessed. I mean, he already had the restaurant, and that was more or less a new beginning for him. He never guessed he’d have this, too. He’s got, you know, all these plans. He says he wants to travel and all that. Though I don’t believe him. I mean, Pat gets nervous after five hours with Kerry’s class at Six Flags and starts calling the restaurant to see if the edges of the ravioli have been crimped….”
Nick laughed. “I can relate. I take a phone to the beach in Virgin Gorda. It’s like you lose your eyes or something. You wait all year for the vacation and then you can’t stand it.”
She told Nick about the million dollars, and how Pat had argued when she refused to consider the offer. “He said that just because I won’t talk about what happened to us doesn’t mean it will go away. He kept reminding me of what I used to say when I took pictures of a guy who jumped off a building.”
“And what was that?”
“I used to say, ‘It happened.’”
“Well…”
“But I told him this was different. It happened, but it happened to us. We didn’t jump off a building. We were pushed.” Without really meaning to go so far, Beth suddenly found herself telling Nick that it was more than a question of style—that she had suspected her husband of coming close to saying that it was an ill wind that blew nobody good. That he had all but said that lemonade could be made from lemons, that prosperity could erase the sour taste of the past nine years.
“Is that so outrageous, Beth? I mean, you can’t say you’re owed, but you are owed. Pat, he’s right. It’s college and retirement and…But it’s not worth fighting over. Because you guys have to be doing okay, anyhow, moneywise. I see the restaurant all the time in the columns. And I see your stuff. So as long as Pat’s health is good and stuff…”
“It’s good. I mean, Pat’s never going to be mellow. He’s always going to be fretting about the staff….”
Nick sighed, a businessman’s sigh. “Tell me about it. You can’t get a decent worker for any money.”
“Yeah,” Beth said. She had not pictured them discussing the shortage of good help. “But he’s happy, as much as he could ever be happy.” Would they never stop talking about Pat? “It’s…Nick, it’s Sam I’m worried about. It’s Sam and…the other kids, because of Sam.” She explained the trip to Minneapolis, the trip to Peshtigo, how it confirmed what she’d feared even before then. As Beth talked, she kept asking herself whether it was their history, or that Nick was just spectacularly easy to confide in, or that she wanted him, or that he comprised a fresh and objective panel of opinion. Even with Candy she wasn’t as open. She couldn’t tell him enough.
“It’s not as though Sam’s ever bad,” she said. “He does just what you tell him to. But he’s…eroding. It’s almost like you can see him being chipped away.” Beth told Nick about the long afternoon with Sam at the cedar chest. About the way his grades had plummeted from stalwart B’s to C’s and D’s. About the way his hustle on the practice field had deteriorated to a shamble. About the day Sam had gotten up from a sickbed, in the midst of a serious bout with strep throat, so as not to miss his weekly two hours with George.
“The social worker says he’s in transition, but if he’s in transition, shouldn’t there be some sign of progress?” Beth asked Nick, who was cutting his remaining half of Reuben neatly into fourths. Sam, she went on, was in their house but not of it; he kept his room as neatly as a guest, carrying his own shampoo and toothbrush back and forth as if their home was a boarding school. When he was late coming home from school, she knew he’d ridden his bike to one of George’s construction sites, or spent long minutes sitting in front of his old house. Beth could liken him to nothing else but the foreign-exchange students Ellen used to take in—bright, helpful, polite, excruciatingly out of place and uncomfortable, mimicking rituals they didn’t understand, quiet and given to long, late silences spent staring out of their neatly arranged rooms at the patterns of stars in the night sky.
“The only thing that keeps him going is the visits with George,” she said, pushing her plate away. “And even Candy doesn’t think that’s such a good idea. I mean, people think we’re giving him mixed messages about who his real parents are.”
“Maybe she’s right,” Nick broke in. For a moment, Beth thought she’d imagined it; had he glanced, ever so delicately, at his watch? “Blood is blood, Bethie. And what else can you do but see him through it?”
“That’s what Angelo says.”
“Well, it’s true. All those things, the grades and stuff—even normal kids go through that stage. I did. It sounds like he’s just in a period of adjustment.”
“That’s what Pat thinks.”
“I think Pat’s right,” Nick said. “Kids adapt. They’re survivors.”
“I hope so,” she said. “Still, I wonder if—”
“Are you happy, Bethie?” he asked then, leaning forward and covering her jittering hand with his own—his small, blunt, perfectly manicured hand. Is this a pass? Beth thought.
“I’m relieved,” she said carefully. “But I don’t know if you could say I’m happy. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to be happy after all this. Or if I’m just expecting too much. Or if…” She looked up at him, reaching up for his fingers with her own. Is this a pass? she thought. “Maybe what I need to be happy has nothing to do with my children.”
“I’ve missed you,” Nick said. “I thought about you so many times.”
“Oh, me too,” Beth said. “Me too. A million times.”
“Do you want to go…somewhere?”
“I don’t know.”
They drove to a small field where someone was building a landing strip for gliders. Beth let him take her in his arms, leisurely, gently open her mouth with his tongue. She let him lift her shirt and cup her breast, feeling the shivering begin in her waist and percolate up. But her potential for lust, Beth thought, taking hold of herself forcibly, wasn’t what she’d come here to measure.
What was?
“Nick,” she said, breaking off, kissing his neck as she sat up. “Did you ever do…this before?”
“Before today?”
“No, I mean, before we did.”
“Not very often,” he said.
“But before? Before we did?”
“A few times, maybe.” She looked at him. He had removed his sport coat and now he smoothed it, tenderly laying it on the leather of the backseat, making sure every fold was just so. Don’t, she thought. Don’t self-destruct in front of me, Nick. Then she reversed, sternly telling herself, Don’t look for it. Don’t go prospecting for grief. He wants you. He’s gorgeous. He’s good and kind, and the history you have with him is sweet prehistory.
But she was unable to help herself. “When?” she asked.
“Oh, when the kids were little. I don’t know. It didn’t mean anything.”
“And with me?”
“Well, of course, Bethie. It meant something with you. Bethie, you know how I felt about you that day. I even thought—” Okay, she breathed then, it will be okay now—“at that time, that we might…see each other more. That maybe we could have—”
“‘See each other more’? You mean, behind people’s backs?”
She couldn’t believe her presumption. Wha
t had she expected him to say? “Found the meaning of life”?
“Well, I wouldn’t have put it that way.” Nick smiled. “We’re going to talk now, I see. I think I need a smoke.”
She itched with impatience as he got out his engraved lighter, his neatly folded pack of Lights. “Nick,” she asked again, “did you think that after that day we’d start being lovers?”
“Was that such a bad thing to hope?”
“And never tell anyone?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t think about it.”
“Even after?”
“There was no point in thinking about it after.” Nick drew in on his smoke and folded his hands. “Bethie,” he said then, “did you want to leave Pat? Is that what you want now?”
“No,” she said. “Well, I don’t know.”
“When you never called me, I thought, well, it was just one of those things that happen when you’re under stress. But then, when you called me today, I thought, maybe she feels her life is missing something, too.”
“Is that how you feel?”
“Sure.” Nick smiled. “Doesn’t everybody?” He reached for her, holding her not quite comfortably across the divider between the bucket seats. No wait, Beth thought. It’s not just “Doesn’t everybody?” It’s more than “Doesn’t everybody?”
But Nick was saying, “A long time ago, my brother Richie told me that if you put a jellybean in a jar for every time you made love during the first year of marriage, and then you took one out for every time you made love after, you’d never empty out the jar.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Well…”
“So it was just sexual for you?”
“Wasn’t it for you?”
“No!” she cried. “Yes, and no.”