The Deep End of the Ocean

  “I took Teeter’s car. I wasn’t going to keep it. I just was going to ride around….”

  “Teeter the coach at the high school?”

  “Yeah, that asshole.”

  “And so why didn’t you just bring it back?”

  “I was going to, but this goon I know, Schaffer, and I, we were goofing around, and then when I saw the cops, I just went faster….”

  “Were you drunk? That’s what Beth said.”

  “I was overserved…yeah, Sam, I was drunk. But I never did anything this bad before….”

  “That you got caught for.”

  “That…right. So, Sam, what do you want?”

  “Nothing.”

  Reese could see his parents sort of scuffling to see in the skinny window, his dad waving a little. Reese waved back. He couldn’t see whether his dad looked sick or not. At least Pat was wearing matching clothes; this was a sign he couldn’t be too bad. Bad. Speaking of bad, he felt bad. Why am I baby-sitting this kid? Why wasn’t one of them in here with Sam? Wasn’t this against some law or something, letting a little kid go in to visit a felon?

  “Well, then, why are you here? Is this, like, the alternative amusement for Saturday morning?”

  “I wanted to see if you were okay.”

  “Well, I’m okay.”

  “Okay.”

  The kid looked around the booth.

  “So? Sam?” Reese, all at once thinking he could maybe sleep, prodded the kid. The sooner this day could end, the better.

  “This is pretty ugly, this place.”

  “It’s ugly.”

  “How fast were you going?”

  “I don’t know…like ninety….”

  Sam’s eyes blinked and fastened on Reese. He grinned. “Ninety?”

  And it occurred to Reese that maybe he should go easier here. That Sam was probably not just ordinarily fucked up, but a little more than ordinarily, just barely back with George and all. A couple of weeks at his own house after the foray into Cappadoraland. And now this shit. He was such a kid…. Oh, Ben.

  “Look, Sam. I don’t know if you know…” Reese dropped his voice. Soundproof, my ass. “I don’t know if you know how incredibly stupid what I did was.”

  “Well…” said the kid. “Yeah. I do.”

  “I mean really, monumentally stupid.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Like, I’m a jerk, Sam.”

  “No,” said Sam.

  “I’m a fuck-up, and it’s not funny, it’s not cool.” Reese was almost whispering now, leaning toward the partition.

  “I just thought…”

  “What did you think, Sam?”

  “I thought we could be…friends.”

  “Friends?” Reese was glad he couldn’t get his hands on the kid. “Look, you idiot. First of all, how would we be friends, Sam? I don’t hang with twelve-year-olds. And second, you come back, you leave, and go in and out the window…I don’t even know you, Sam. You’re a concept, you follow me? And you don’t know me!”

  “That’s not my fault!” The kid looked on the verge of tears. Reese could see Pat motioning for Candy to punch in the code and let him in. He quickly waved Dad off, to try to soothe him—I’m not instructing him in the finer points of car theft here, Dad. You don’t have to save him.

  “I know it’s not your fault,” he told the kid with what he thought was awesome patience, considering. “But I have a life of my own, you know? And it’s unfun right at the moment. What do you want from me?”

  “You’re my brother. I haven’t come around, because I didn’t know if you guys would all be so mad at me you wouldn’t want to see me. But…I missed you. There were even times when I thought I shouldn’t have…whatever. You’re my brother.”

  “I’m not your brother!” Reese gave up; the tears were running down his filthy face; he was just tired out, is all, and this fucking kid…“Look, if I were your brother, what would you want from me? I mean, I’m fucking going to some kind of penitentiary or something! Even Dad thinks I should be in a padded cell! I probably have, like, no future. I probably won’t even graduate….” Reese rubbed his eyes, trying to get himself to stop. His head was filled with that pool-water smell—that drained limpness he remembered from being a little kid, when you cried and cried until your chest was hollow.

  “I just thought…It’s okay,” said Sam. “I’ll leave.”

  “Yeah, leave,” said Reese. Then he winced. “Sam, I’m sorry. I know you probably feel crummy. It was nice of you to come over here. But here’s the thing…I have to get out of this somehow….”

  “I know, and I—”

  “You don’t know. Don’t say you know because you don’t. You never did anything wrong in your whole life! You’re just a kid. And you’re a real good kid. Look, when I come home, I’ll come and get you and we’ll go get something to eat, okay? Or shoot pool or something, okay?”

  “Where?”

  “What?”

  “Where could we go?”

  Reese sighed. “I don’t know, buddy. Anywhere in walking distance. I may not be driving until, like, two thousand and ten.”

  “Can we go to Wedding?”

  “Nah. Not there. I meant like a burger.”

  Then the kid sighed, too. “Okay. I just didn’t want you to think I believe it when they say you’re crazy.”

  “Well, I am crazy. Who says I’m crazy?”

  “My dad.”

  “George.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He said so. In so many words?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What do you mean ‘sort of’?”

  “Well, he said so.”

  “Okay. Come on. How?”

  “He said…he said…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, when I was at your house, he would say, ‘Watch out for that kid, Sam. Watch out for that kid. He ain’t right.’”

  “‘Ain’t right.’”

  “Yeah, and I don’t think…I mean, I love my dad, but he doesn’t understand…. He thought you would hurt me or something.”

  And so I would, thought Reese, and raised his arm in motion for the guard, but the kid said, “Wait a minute. Reese?”

  Reese sighed again. The room would inflate.

  “I got to tell you something.”

  Reese made a weary circular motion with one hand. So? So?

  “I remembered something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I remembered something from when I was a kid.”

  Reese stiffened. He thought, Christ, no. Not today. I don’t want him to remember today. And anyhow, he couldn’t, he was just a baby, he couldn’t remember the words….

  “When I was at your house, Beth showed me this trunk. The trunk at the foot of your bed.” The cedar chest, thought Reese. The big hope chest with the hoop top. “She took out all these baby clothes she said were mine. And she showed me some blankets and stuff. Some pictures.”

  “And? And?”

  “And I didn’t remember any of them.”

  “Oh.” Reese’s weariness was deafening. So long as the kid didn’t remember the lobby, what the fuck did he care? How much, Reese thought, how much more? Isn’t this enough, Mom?

  “But I remembered the smell.”

  “The smell.”

  “I remembered the smell of the cedar chest. From being inside it.”

  Reese let the phone drop, almost. It was as if Mom, gesturing, shrugging her shoulders, outside the window, asking if Sam wanted to come out, was on film instead of real. He could feel his shorter self running up those stairs in Madison, into the little room half-made-over for baby Kerry, where they dumped everything, pulling over the boxes of diapers and clothes and whispering, “Ben, Ben, where are you, Ben?” Running back down. Thinking of the dryer. Thinking, Mommy will kill me if he’s in the dryer again and turning blue. He wasn’t in the dryer. A pulse thudding in his neck. He couldn’t let his mother hear. She would screech. She would grab his hair.

 
“…hide-and-seek,” the kid said.

  “I know,” Reese said, adjusting the telephone, which had gone slimy in his wet hand.

  “And there was this one time I got into the big chest? Did that really happen?”

  “It really happened. You let the lid shut, and it caught.”

  “I knew it! I knew it!” said the kid. “I can really remember lying in there in the dark—there were these cracks of light, so it wasn’t totally dark. I was just lying there on some clothes or something, and the top was so high, I couldn’t even touch it unless I sat up. And at first I tapped on the top, but nobody came, and I thought I couldn’t breathe, but I could. So I just stayed there.”

  “And I was running all over the house, looking for you, telling you to quit fooling around, it wasn’t funny anymore—”

  “But I didn’t hear you—”

  “Because I couldn’t talk loud…Mom would have heard me—”

  “And finally you came and opened the top of the chest—”

  “And you were there. You were just there. Not scared or anything. Just got up and got out.”

  “See, that’s the thing. That’s what I remember.”

  “What?”

  “That I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t scared, because I knew…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I knew you would come and find me.”

  And Reese could see it, Ben’s white freckled face, unexpected, staring up at him from the trunk, like a baby in a basket. And his relief, his huge relief, when Ben moved, sat up. He’d jerked Ben’s arm, but not too hard, and called him a dork, and asked him why he didn’t yell, told him to never go in the trunk again. But Ben just started jumping down the stairs, one at a time, saying he was a bunny. Reese could hear him: “Bunny. Bunny. Bunny. Hop. Hop. Hop. Can you do this, Vincent?”

  He tried to erase the image, cover it with anything, any picture, even last night’s gaudy wash of ambulance lights. Reese wondered if this was what Pat had done when he had the coronary, willed himself to die, squeezed himself so pitilessly that his heart burst. Tried to take himself out on purpose because he couldn’t stand thinking of stuff anymore. I would do it now, Reese thought, shading his eyes with one hand. If I could just die now by wanting to, I would, I’d just disappear…. Shame was not a thought. Shame had mass and volume. Right now, thought Reese, I’d blow.

  “So, Reese?”

  Reese couldn’t talk; he nodded.

  “That’s why I came. In case you were wondering. To tell you I remembered that. And see if it was real. Because then I’d know. That I was really there once. I didn’t make it up or get it from pictures. And then I could figure stuff out better. Stuff I had to do, or whatever. It might not matter, but I wanted to know.”

  “Good,” Reese mumbled, hoarse. “That’s good.”

  “And one more thing. What did I call you?”

  “What?”

  “When I was a kid.”

  “Oh…uh…Vincent. You called me Vincent. And you could always say it right. Not like a baby.”

  “Vincent. So, okay. So, I’ll see you, Reese, okay?”

  “Okay.” Reese motioned to his mother; she opened her mouth. She was telling someone to let Sam out. But as the knob turned, Reese said, quickly, “Sam?”

  The kid had already put down the phone; but he grabbed it up. “Yeah?”

  “You can call me it. Vincent. It’s okay.”

  Beth

  CHAPTER 34

  September 1994

  Beth sat down one day in early fall and tried to think of a couple she knew well who’d been through a divorce. And after half an hour, she had to give up. She couldn’t think of a single one. Surely for her age, her generation, the education level of her social circle, that was peculiar.

  But unless she counted Candy—and she didn’t really count Candy, that wasn’t a real divorce—she didn’t know anyone to compare things with. Candy’s abrupt but tender parting from Chris had been more in the nature of a return to the organic nature of their friendship after an experimental grafting that had failed to take. It had been decided and was over with in a couple of weeks, decided and acted upon as suddenly, and to Beth, as surprisingly, as the marriage. Chris and Candy had dinner together after court. Surely that wasn’t what most divorces were like. Beth had never seen a couple really sunder from the inside.

  Eighty percent of us divorce, she remembered Penny telling the Circle meeting. Eighty percent. Penny’s statistic, Beth reasoned, counted couples whose search ended in an unbearable truth. Or in an endless enigma. For what had happened to her and Pat, there were no predictors.

  If people knew how estranged she and Pat were becoming, they would think, Why now? Wasn’t it doubly bitter, doubly unfair, after having “been through” all that together, to split? Why not back then, if ever? Even Sam’s leaving should not have accomplished what the hottest hell of fear had not managed.

  But we didn’t care enough to get divorced back then. Having a marriage didn’t seem to matter when all you saw as a goal was staying upright for another hour.

  She didn’t blame Pat. When she looked at him, she felt the widest sinking. No one had decided on this. Things just happened. And once they happened, they were irrevocable. Two days after Sam “went home” (and that was how Beth forced them all to put it) Pat had taken to sleeping downstairs. He’d done that before—on hot nights, on nights when he’d worked especially late. But those other occasions had been accidental and sometimes a relief: Pat had always been a restless spoon sleeper, and more than once she’d shoved him away and he’d left in a huff. But this time, when he’d gathered up a pillow and a blanket from Sam’s fresh, abandoned bed, Pat had not done it rancorously, or with show. Next morning, he’d simply folded up his bedroll, before the children were awake, only to bring it down again the next night.

  Vincent noticed, Beth was sure. She couldn’t look at Vincent. She was afraid to ask Pat what he thought about as he lay on the sofa. She tried not to think, as she lay upstairs, aware of Pat’s wakefulness, a sort of arrhythmic blip under the deep pattern of the children’s sleep. She read Jane Austen. She popped her Trazodone. She tried not to let her mind climb out of bed, glide down the stairs, and walk down the street to stand yearning in front of the red house.

  Returning Sam had been a decorous procedure; only George had wept.

  They’d met with the social worker and then had a brief hearing in chambers with a family court judge. The judge had asked each of them, including Sam, who sat rigid in his chair, whether this was a decision made of free will. Beth spoke first. “With a great deal of sadness,” she said. “But yes, freely.”

  “And Mr. Cappadora?”

  There was a long interval of murderous silence, and then Pat said, “Yes.” He did not look at Beth, but she’d reached out and put her hand on his arm, touching the starched cotton of his long-sleeved shirt. The arm was still as marble; not even a nerve answered her touch. Asked about his willingness, George could only nod mutely. The judge then asked to speak to Samuel Karras Cappadora alone, and emerged, fifteen minutes later, slightly red about the eyes, his palms turned up. There would be, he explained, no formal custody decree granted at this time. The review of Cecilia’s condition was pending; it was necessary to follow Sam in his return transition for a period of time not to exceed, say, three months.

  “I think our goal should be to restore this boy’s life to as much normalcy as possible as quickly as possible,” the judge told George, Beth, and Pat. “I confess that I am troubled by this, by all your suffering, and touched by all your evident concern and love for this boy. I wish all of you luck and peace.”

  Sam, he said, would be permitted weekly visits, unsupervised, with his natural parents, the duration of those visits to be determined by George in concordance with the Cappadoras. “I hope that he will have some interaction with his birth siblings,” the judge added. “For their emotional well-being as well as his own.”

  Kerry reacted to the news of Sam’s imm
inent departure with frank grief, running up to her room and sobbing into her whale puppet until the plush was soggy. “We just found him,” she told Beth. “Why doesn’t he like us?” Miserable as the question was, Beth was relieved. Vincent greeted the departure with his trademark frost; but Beth knew that he would talk it over with Tom.

  No one, except Beth, really understood what had happened. Even Candy, who struggled to retain a shred of professional detachment, could not hide her disgust. To Beth’s gratitude, Rosie and Angelo were only sad, not outraged; but she was sure she would never spend another holiday in Monica’s house or in Tree’s. Her brothers, sideswiped by what they considered an impulsive Beth-move, tried to counsel a wait-and-see plan. Laurie was struck speechless, and Ellen had asked, “How can you, Beth? I don’t mean, how could you? I mean, how can you bring yourself to do it?”

  Fortunately, nobody had the energy to alert the media, and Sam was reinstated at George’s house for a full week before they got wind of it. Then, there were ponderous quotes from psychologists about the quest for identity during adolescence and the nature of memory in the constitution of family. There were stories about how rarely the “reunions” of children adopted at birth with the parents who’d given birth to them gave rise to actual extended-family bonds. There were stray quotes from neighbors—Beth almost had to laugh at them—about how Sam had seemed quiet and content enough; they reminded her of the comments neighbors made after quiet, helpful men got up one day and shotgunned whole families.

  But really, how could anyone grasp it? They had not seen Sam’s face at the cedar chest. They had not seen his eyes.

  It was the image that Beth kept in her mind throughout the formalities of the return. It sustained her. She could not describe it to anyone; it was like trying to describe “yellow” to a child sightless from birth. The feel of the sun? The velvet of a daffodil? Beth could only cling to the certainty that she had known, when Sam looked up at her after the inspection of his baby clothes, that she and Pat had guardianship only over Sam’s physical body. She had felt the way Cecilia, in the sad safe room of her riddled mind, could never feel, and probably had never felt—like a kidnapper holding a child against his will.