And was he happy now? On their few desultory visits—one outing to Great America, once to dinner at Rosie’s—both she and Pat had felt keenly Sam’s nearly pitiful willingness to indulge them.
On the way home from dropping him off the last time, Pat had told her suddenly. “It’s like he’s trying to pay us back by being glad to see us. He’s grateful to us for setting him free.”
There had been nothing else to say. Years ago, during their one stab at marriage counseling, the cheerful MSW had suggested that they simply try to act as if they were happy. “It has a way of becoming habitual, just as a pattern of conflict does,” he’d said. Beth understood that. She’d done it for the latter half of the nine years at least. And then after Pat’s illness, she’d become a method actor, a loving wife or be damned. But only during the brief sojourn of Ben’s return had there been the beginnings of a renewed, real tenderness between them. A few times, before the weekend of the Fourth of July when they had lain together, after lovemaking, and Beth had actually believed they were going to be whole again, in spite of themselves. By the time she knew for sure that was what she wanted, Beth reflected now, it was probably already too late.
Even now, she sometimes caught herself hoping that the simple habit of a lifetime of Pat-and-Beth would span the gulf. But Pat had given up after Sam left. And so emotion leaked steadily out of the air between them, until there was no shape or structure that didn’t have to do with Vincent’s habits or Kerry’s schedules. Pat’s rage on the morning after Vincent stole the car had been the most emotion he had showed toward Beth in weeks. Even anger had felt almost…heartening, in the sterility of their lives.
Pat’s focus was now given over entirely to Vincent’s rehabilitation. He drove his son to every counseling appointment with Tom, waiting for him outside; he visited the youth officer with Vincent; he closed Vincent’s door behind them at night when he went in to say good-night. Even when Beth offered to spell him, to take Vincent to see Tom on nights when she knew the session would make Pat late for opening at Wedding, Pat had refused. “I owe him, Beth,” he told her. “I owe him, and even if I didn’t owe him, he’s the only son I have.”
The day he said that, Beth sent for the catalogues, applications for the master’s program in Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin. She’d filled them out, sending her fee, not entirely certain what she was trying to accomplish. Did this mean she actually meant to leave Pat? Move away? Or was she simply trying to see if there would be a twig of pride for her to cling to if he demanded she go? And what if she did go back to school? Would she aim at teaching? Opening a studio of her own, back in Madison?
She’d left some papers lying on a coffee table, several days after they came, and caught Pat’s glance on them.
“I thought,” she said, stopping him in one of his headlong dashes in the door from some Vincent thing to grab his jacket for work, “I might consider taking some time, maybe a semester, so we can think things over….”
And she was surprised how much it cut her when Pat said, “Whatever. Do whatever you want, Bethie.”
So he would not try to stop her. Why had she thought he would?
Stubbornness, the Kerry family curse, had driven her on, then, to say more, make the point harder. “I thought I could maybe rent a little place…. Kerry and Vincent could go to school at Edgewood, maybe, if we can afford it….”
He’d come full stop then, his look as if he were taking her by both shoulders, squaring her to face him.
“My children,” he said, as slowly as if he were talking to a woman whose first language was not English, “are going no place, Bethie. My children’s home is here.”
“Paddy,” she began, “Kerry’s still so little…”
And he seemed to relent, if only slightly. “Maybe…it’s possible that Kerry would be okay. But Beth, she has friends here, and Scouts, and sports. She has Blythe, who’s like her sister, and Georgia, who’s like her—” He didn’t, bless him, say “like her mother.” “She might be okay, and it’s something we can talk about after you make up your mind. But Vincent is not going to leave this house with you. Not ever. He is not going to leave this house until he goes to college, if, I pray to God, I can figure out how to get him out of high school in one piece, and get him to believe he can do anything except screw up his life.” Beth loved him then, loved him desperately, his deep, utter Pat Cappadora goodness. It was, after all, a kindness, in a sense, that she might leave. If she had ever been worthy of him, she wasn’t now.
And what, after all, Beth thought that night as she listened to Pat’s drawer rummaging downstairs, was a marriage really except a collection of wishes that, after years of association, took on the coloration of facts? Shewondered whether she and Pat, except in the early years of their college passion—which, she reasoned, could have ignited between any two healthy young people—had ever been more than a kind of brother and sister, raised to the assumption of safety in one another. She would settle even for safety now.
Beth woke one night, shaking, from a dream of Vincent. Vincent…injured. Aged about five, in the hospital, a broken wrist. She’d dreamed of bursting through swinging doors—not one, or two, but an endless series—to follow the trail of wails to Vincent.
She could have her son, Beth thought, sitting up. Her lost-on-purpose son. Not the one lost by accident. If she had the guts, if she had the time, if she could find the ropes. If miracles could really happen.
If miracles could really happen.
If she didn’t leave him. If she took him with her…but how could she do that? If she stayed…but how could she do that?
And from Vincent’s point of view, would it make any difference?
Beth remembered how, in college, she’d toyed with the idea of a career in special education (Laurie called it Beth’s Annie Sullivan phase). Beth had read that all children experienced to some degree the phenomenon of erased recollection. It was one of the most difficult crossroads between parents and children: adults could remember the enraptured tenderness of the early bond; children, whose job was to fracture that bond, couldn’t. At six, Vincent had looked at her with flinty eyes and explained that he hated her. Beth was aghast. Where behind those eyes was her princeling, who only a year before would quiet from fear in no other arms but hers, not Rosie’s, not Pat’s? Where was that child, back then?
Where was he now?
Oh, Vincent, Vincent-turned-Reese, another changeling child in a house that already, impossibly, contained America’s best-known changeling child. What did Vincent remember? Anything, at all, of mother love unscored by family casualties? And not remembering was the same as not knowing. If Vincent thought of her in those terms, it was probably a gauzy recollection of the amusement and affection she’d felt for Ben just before he was lost. She had, yes, given Ben more of that. Ben was easier. She’d liked him better. But love? Amusement and affection no more comprised the sum of love than sex on your honeymoon compared with going through labor and delivery—pleasure compared with the world-without-end amen. Beth was struck with a sudden, vivid picture of herself, coming up the walk at night after an all-day shift at the afternoon daily in Madison where she’d worked when the boys were babies, seeing Ben dancing in his diaper on the window seat, and Vincent scooting through Jill’s legs to jump on his mother. She remembered thinking, more than once, Imagine! I made them. All this beautiful, intelligent flesh I made. Actual, comical humans. And how she would think, then, aching with her abundance, I would die for them. For each of them, equally painfully, and eagerly.
If Vincent could look through her lens…but that was it. That picture was hers, not his. There was no way to graft it onto his heart.
Suddenly panicky, Beth thought, I’ll go downstairs and wake Pat and tell him: It had gotten colossally out of hand, this notion of separating; it was just a pose. Together, they would forge a relationship with Sam, and help Vincent and Kerry do that, too. It could happen. She would go down there, and get Pat to slide over on the c
ouch, so she could scrunch in next to him, as she had in his hospital bed. She pulled back the quilt and swung her bare feet to the floor.
And then she pictured Pat’s mouth, as it had looked when he told her, “Vincent is not going to leave this house with you.” She pulled up her quilt and lay flat, her hands laced on her chest.
Candy dropped by one night—girlish in jeans and a paint-spattered shirt. She kissed Pat in passing as he left for work, and plopped down on the porch.
“Give me vodka,” she told Beth. “I have spent all day painting my disgusting single-girl flat, in preparation for my disgusting single girl’s life, and I feel old as dirt.”
They sat on the porch, and Beth wondered if she only imagined Candy shooting glances down toward the corner around which Sam lived. Both of them tipped their feet up on the railing and listened to the crickets.
“How’s my man Reese?” Candy asked, midway through her second drink. “Does he brag to his friends about doing time? Even though it was only two days?”
“On the contrary,” said Beth. “I really think he’s ashamed of it.”
“That’s good,” Candy said. “And life on probation?”
Relieved to be able to say anything, Beth told her, “It seems better.” She sketched in Vincent’s evident interest, or at least his show of interest, in the basketball camp for inner-city fifth graders he’d been assigned to help coach twice each week.
“He been driving up any oak trees lately?” Candy asked.
“Vincent will probably be drawing Social Security the next time he gets behind a wheel, if Pat has his way,” Beth said. “His wings are basically clipped. I mean, he goes to community service, he goes to Wedding to help out, he goes to see Tom—”
“What does Tom say?”
“I…I haven’t talked to him. I…usually don’t.”
“And has Reese seen Sam? Again?”
“No.”
They rocked a little longer, and Beth added, “The one thing that seems to have made the biggest impression on him is taking away the boom box.”
“What?” Candy sat up.
“That was my idea. Since he was a little kid, Vincent just…he gets lost in music. It’s way beyond a teenager thing. I stripped it all,” Beth said. “Tapes. CDs. I kept them; but I donated his boom box. I gave it to Saint Vincent De Paul. I told him it was a privilege. He had to know we mean business, and after all, it’s the thing he loves the most….”
She didn’t notice, in the gathering dusk, how Candy’s face had changed, so when Candy brought the chair she’d been balancing on two legs down with a crack and leveled a finger at Beth’s face, Beth almost flinched.
“What he loves most,” Candy said, “is right here in front of me. That’s what he loves most, Beth.”
Rage splashed in Beth’s throat; she almost couldn’t speak.
“I’m so sick of hearing it,” she said finally. “I hear it even in my sleep! I’m so sick of hearing how this boy is only a delinquent because his mother didn’t love him…. Candy, forgive me, it’s not so simple. Vincent never…even before any of this ever happened, Vincent was convinced I loved Ben better.”
“Did you?”
“Jesus God! Did I? How do I know? Candy, do you love your heart better than your brain? Your arm better than your leg? But then this happened, all of it, and Ben at the center, so there was no way I could ever convince Vincent…”
“Even if you tried.”
“Which I didn’t, yes, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. But anyhow, shouldn’t he have known? Shouldn’t a normal kid have known? Did I have to tell him every day?”
“Did he have to tell you every day? I mean, shouldn’t you know, too?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Are you taking up Freudian analysis now, Candy?”
“Beth, I’ve seen this kid when he looks at you. He wants you to forgive him so bad….”
“Forgive him? Forgive him?”
“For all the shit he’s pulled. Or for something, some dumb thing you don’t even know about. Why don’t you talk to Tom? Why don’t you? I have.”
“And he said?”
“He said Reese is what they call a symptom bearer. He lives out everybody else’s pain with the stuff he does. And now, with Sam gone, how do you think he feels?”
“I have no idea,” Beth said wearily, and then, “You know what? I think Pat and I are separating.”
Candy tossed the remains of her drink out into the bushes and slammed down the glass. “Good Christ, Beth, why?” Beth shrugged. “Isn’t enough enough?”
“Candy, he wants it.”
“Did he say that?”
“He didn’t have to. I can tell.”
“No. No. I refuse to believe that. Pat thinks the sun comes up—”
“Not anymore. Not for a long time, I guess.”
“Bethie, you have to do something about this. You guys can’t take another loss. Come on.”
“Candy, people get divorced all the time. Most people who…lost a child get divorced. Look it up.” Beth struggled to restore a lightness to her tone. “Even you got divorced.”
“You can’t sit here and compare Chris and me with…You were meant for each other, Bethie. You and Pat.”
“Another thing I’m sick of hearing. You know? I feel like I was born with Pat’s last name. Damn it. Maybe I can have a life, you know? Maybe what I need is what you have—real work, and a little place, by myself. Pat doesn’t care.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. And he said, ‘Do what you want.’”
“That’s just pride.” Candy got up and sat on the railing. “He’s just played out. You don’t make these decisions after a summer like the one you had. And what about Reese? And Kerry?”
“He’s going to fight to keep them here. He doesn’t want me to take them back to Madison.”
“To Madison?”
“Well, Candy, what’s left for me here? Annual follow-ups of the many permutations and combinations of the Cappadora saga in the Tribune magazine? Even more nasties from his sisters? My father looking at me like I shot his favorite dog? No. Shit. I’m not doing it.” Beth got up and sat down on the cement stoop. “Candy, I don’t know how to even think of leaving Reese or Kerry. And Iknow that if I move, I’ll hardly ever…I’ll lose all my contact with Sam.”
“But you’re played out, too, aren’t you, girlfriend?” Candy kneeled next to Beth’s chair. “Oh, Bethie, Bethie.” Candy rocked her then, and Beth felt her tears come like the letdown of milk when she’d nursed the babies, unstoppable, purging. “Okay now, okay. Listen. I just want you to do one thing for me. One thing. Will you?” Beth nodded, and Candy said, “Don’t bolt the door behind you is all. Close it partway if you have to, but don’t lock it. Give him one more chance to talk. You and Pat haven’t lived apart for your entire adult lives. If you go, don’t forget to listen to how that really feels. Don’t talk yourself into anything, Bethie. You’re fully capable of talking yourself into anything, remember? Just…wait and see.”
Beth nodded.
“When are you leaving?” Candy asked.
“I don’t know…maybe soon,” Beth murmured. “If I go at all. School starts in January. And I’d be taking classes at the university.”
“Oh, my God, my God,” Candy said. “Pat’s going to miss you like he’s lost an arm.” She stood up and gathered up her mammoth bag. “And Bethie, he’s not the only one. I will, too.”
“You sure you don’t want another drink?” asked Beth, suddenly loath for Candy to leave.
“No, I don’t want to have to give myself a field sobriety test. Even though I’m now out of the fertility sweepstakes for good.”
Beth said, wondering if she was going too far, “I kind of hate that, Candy. I wanted you to have your baby.”
“Yeah, yeah…I did, too,” Candy said. “I wanted it, for real. I’m sorry for Chris, too, though he’ll do a lot better with the next twenty-five-year-old to come d
own the pike. And maybe, now that I don’t have to live on slave wages, I think sometimes there’s this little girl living on a mountain in Chile somewhere who wants a crazy mama who carries a gun. So maybe…”
“I think that would be wonderful. You’d be a wonderful mother,” Beth said.
“So would you, Beth,” Candy said softly, and walked down the steps.
Reese
CHAPTER 35
It was after eleven when Reese thought he heard the clang of a basketball on the driveway. He stopped; he’d been writing, or trying to write, something in the stupid journal Tom insisted he mess with every night.
Yeah. Definitely. It was crazy hot for September. With the air on, and the house sealed like a pie under plastic wrap, he wouldn’t have heard it if he’d had even a little music on. Which he would normally have had. Even so, he wasn’t sure, until he raised the window and put his head out, that he wasn’t imagining it.
But no. Somebody was down there.
Reese couldn’t see; his dad had told him to replace the bulbs in the floods on the garage a month ago, and of course he hadn’t. The night was moonless, murky, the only light from the street lamp a block away. The ball hit again, twice, sharply. Reese had to flip the bedside lamp off to be able to tell who it was.
It was Sam.
“What the hell are you doing?” he hissed. Mom and Dad’s window was next to his, and though he knew they were long gone to dreamland, and that Mom, especially, wouldn’t be back until dawn, he didn’t want to start anything.
“Nothing,” said Sam.
“Does your dad know where you are?” asked Reese.
“Yeah,” Sam replied.
“I’ll just bet,” said Reese, leaning out on his elbows.
“You want to play some?”
“Uh, roundhead, it’s nearly midnight, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Past your bedtime?”
“What I mean is, you waste, I’m in enough fucking trouble without getting Mrs. Pellicano or Mr. Becker to call me in for disturbing the peace, too.”