No Time to Wave Goodbye Read online

  Would Ma know that these images made him want to put his fist through a wall but that it would have been coy to leave his own family out at the expense of all the others? After all, Ben had been the strangest case of all, the boy who came home but was no longer Ben. What about Ben? Now, after he had seen the same footage, which, to Vincent’s knowledge, he had never in his life watched. Vincent had looked into Beth’s eyes and seen a pane of green glass. He had seen mirth and longing and forgiveness, something seething, something pleading. Now the film was all of a piece, a force.

  After this, what would he see in Beth’s eyes?

  The last banner, for the final segment, was bright yellow: It read Hope’s Long Road.

  A psychiatrist from New York, known for his research on the ripple effect of losing a child, described a skip-tracer—someone who searched for missing people—and talked about what could work and what didn’t have a prayer.

  A therapist spoke of a life lived around crisis, a unique mourning, an open pit with no healed place to lay flowers.

  Twenty-two years ago, Beth had been the poster girl for that world of limbo: She dared not move, not one inch, to the left or the right. The world-after-Ben would have buried her. She told Pat that she would go mad, and leave him to raise the children alone, if he pressed her to be “normal.” She had believed that no one else knew what she knew.

  But Vincent had somehow found these people, different from her only as a crystal is different from another crystal, at the microscopic level. Vincent’s dexterous hands had lifted this subject out of bathos into impassioned gravity.

  The sweet, plump Mexican mother, Rosa Rogelio, nursed her newborn and sobbed. Her prayer chain extended around the world, through China and Greece and Wales and even Russia. Rosa sent out a new prayer each morning.

  Her son Luis had been three years old on the evening three years ago when someone wheeled his stroller away from the lobby of a chain restaurant, during the instant that Rosa was in the washroom changing one of his younger brothers and Ernest turned his back to give the cashier his credit card. Hiccoughing, Rosa said, “I feel like he wakes up every morning and wonders, why did Mama let this happen? When will Mama come? He’s only six now. He would cry for me and his papa. He would not forget us like Ben. We were so close in our family.”

  Like Ben. Beth breathed deeply, again.

  Luis, Beth guessed, would have been the eldest of the family. Since then, they had apparently had another baby, too young to be in the audience with the preschoolers, and were expecting a fifth.

  The beautiful Blaine Whittier appeared again, her ivory face literally sculpted downward by sadness, admitting she had been “shrunk” more times than her favorite sweatpants. She was supposed to get over feeling that she was complicit in Jackie’s loss. Blaine Putnam Whittier had briefly considered suicide. What if Jackie came back? What if she had been molested or otherwise hurt and Blaine were gone? One family could only bear so much.

  One family, thought Beth, breathless with grief for this child, could only bear so much. One child could only bear so much.

  Oh, Vincent…. Beth believed she had come to witness Vincent’s redemption.

  Who was it that Beth had really hoped to absolve?

  “And our family tried a hundred ways for a hundred days to cope too,” Kerry said evenly. “There were a hundred leads, a hundred errors, and one preposterous stroke of luck.”

  There was Penny Odin, now the national director of Compassionate Circle, a support group for families of missing or murdered children, which had begun in Madison, Wisconsin, where Pat and Beth lived after college, until five years after Ben disappeared, when they moved back to Chicago so Pat and his father could start The Old Neighborhood, the restaurant designed around an Italian wedding theme that now had two locations and was a regular feature in gourmet and in-flight magazines.

  The sight of Penny—Beth didn’t hear what she said—hurled Beth back to that overbright fluorescent-buzzing church-basement Sunday School in Madison, where crayoned pictures of baby Jesus at play in his sandals and little Jesus-brown robe looked down on couples Beth had nicknamed Murdered by Boyfriend, Stolen by Boyfriend, Stolen by Nanny, Stolen by Father, and Unknown Disappearance. How long had it been since she thought of those names?

  Beth knew what must come next and it did: Candy, younger, a rattled but determinedly dignified newly promoted chief of detectives, her “plain clothes” a pale blue silk suit, her composure contradicted only by the bloodless clench of her fingers on the arms of her chair. Yes, Candy admitted, she had interviewed Cecilia Lockhart just three days after the abduction. Yes, Cecilia did lead Candy to look at Ben, asleep in a bunk bed at her mother’s house, where she was staying. Cecilia had already dyed the child’s hair dark brown and probably had given him some cough medicine to make him sleep. Cecilia Lockhart had identified him as her own son and expressed grief for the Cappadoras. No, Candy had not examined the child or awakened him. Cecilia had not aroused her suspicion. Cecilia was an actor, after all, but this was no excuse, said Candy.

  “This is the greatest regret of my career and perhaps of my life,” a present-day Candy on the screen said to the interviewer.

  So, Beth thought.

  So. So … she—Vincent’s mother—had not known about the film.

  But her best friend had.

  What could Beth do about this? Her shoulders sagged: The thing was done. What could she do? It was one more betrayal and yes, probably necessary. Had Beth known, she would have tried to talk him out of this part—if she were honest, she would have tried to talk Vincent out of the whole thing. Had she been successful, it would have been one of the big regrets of her life.

  Now, back on the screen in footage Vincent had shot only a year ago, Candy on the screen said (as Candy in the audience winced and grabbed for Beth’s hand) that the world was more limited nearly a quarter century ago—with no Internet, only the police radio band ISPEN in Illinois and the goodwill of volunteers. She had encouraged the Cappadoras to make public statements. So, finally, there was Beth, her former self in a TV clip, part of the interview she remembered entirely, shamefully, like a dream of standing up naked in church—Beth, dreadful, dazed, saying, “I am not going to appeal to you. But anyone else … anyone who sees Ben’s face, and who has a heart, you know that whoever is with Ben is not me or Pat…. So if you could, what I want you to do is, grab Ben. If you have to hurt the person, that’s okay. I will reward you; my family will reward you…. We will give you everything we have.”

  The final words of the film told of plans and new tracing technology and foundations devoted to eradicating the ugly zeal of the feral, the lonely, the desperate, the sick, the hungry, the twisted who preyed on children….

  “Why did we make this film?” Kerry’s voice asked. “We chose to bear witness to these families, knowing that so-called stranger abductions cannot be eradicated. We chose to do this, as no film ever has, without lurid images or crude exploitation. We chose to be witness to them and to share what the world concerned with missing children has learned since my brother was abducted. We do know that we must teach children that it is the people they trust who will manipulate them most. Last year in the United States, there were two thousand five hundred abductions, only fifty-seven of the rare sort, stranger abductions. But the year that I was born, one of us was one of them. And there is no place like the place where these families stand, nowhere on earth. I didn’t know this until I stood beside them. My brother Ben did not know and not even my older brother Vincent knew entirely. The old adage says that it takes a whole village to raise a child. So is a whole village denatured by a child’s loss? Shakespeare wrote, ‘All days are nights to see till I see thee, / And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.’ We dream of these families whether we wish to or not. We wish they had, at least, time to wave goodbye.”

  The end credits rolled against one of Beth’s photos of her three children walking away from her, on a tiny crescent of beach.

/>   All three of them had exposed her and exposed her to pain.

  They had exploited memories they couldn’t understand.

  They had learned the truth of their lives.

  They had honored it and given it form.

  As Kerry’s voice again began to sing the final verse of “Liverpool Lullaby,” “Oh, you have your father’s face. You’re growing up a real hard case….” Beth got up and strode toward the back of the theater. The last fifteen feet, she ran, one foot bare, her other shoe still on the floor in front of her seat. She didn’t stop to look at any of her children.

  Just as she reached the double doors, they sprang open. From the vestibule, Vincent came barreling through the gap so fast he almost clipped Beth, who had no time to put up her hands. Ben slipped through behind his brother.

  “Ma,” Vincent said. “Ma, listen …”

  “I am just …” Beth said. “I am just so …”

  “I know,” Vincent said, turning up his palms. “Believe me. I know.”

  “I am just so proud of you both,” Beth said, opening her arms. Neither of her sons moved to embrace her. Beth finally let her arms drop to her sides. “What did I do?”

  “You never said that before,” Vincent told her.

  “She has too,” said Ben.

  “I have too,” said Beth.

  “No she hasn’t. She’s said she loves me. She’s said I could do whatever I wanted if I wasn’t such a screw-off. But not that.”

  “I’ve heard her say that,” Ben said. “Why would she lie now?”

  “Because it’s already done. She knows how much it means to me.”

  “Can I get a word in? I could have just said it was great,” Beth told Vincent. Was he right? Had she never told Vincent that she was proud of him? “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here.”

  “Were you shocked?” Vincent asked.

  “Well, yes, but was that the point?” Beth said and then, in the instant he let his face open, she saw how scared he’d really been—more of her than any critic. Shoulders still rigid, Vincent put his arms around his mother. Ben cupped Beth’s shoulder.

  “No, it wasn’t. The point was to shine on the dark corner. My reasons were pure. For once,” Vincent said. “I thought for sure you’d hate it. And I had to do it anyhow. For me. To know.”

  “I started out hating it. But you won me over,” Beth said. Her sons held her closer.

  All the outer doors sprang open to the sound of applause.

  People stopped for a moment when they saw Beth with her sons in the vestibule. Then a flash went off. Their embrace was the photo that appeared the following Sunday on the front of the Arts section—along with a reprint of Rolling Stone’s gracious, admiring review of No Time to Wave Goodbye.

  Janice Dicksen waited until the paper at work was a day old. Then she sliced the picture out with her thumbnail and, for lack of a better place, she slid it into DuPre’s baby book. It didn’t seem right to throw it away. After she did, she hugged the book close. For the first time, no matter what her minister said about how we must never second-guess God’s plan, she knew she would never see DuPre again. She prayed that this movie would help another mother’s son.

  Bryant Whittier had a blank Levenger’s album to hold stills from the shooting of the film. The photo of Beth with her sons was the tenth one that he glued into place, cutting it with the ceramic knife he used to mat black-and-white photos he took up at the piece of undeveloped mountain land he owned. He then slid the book into a shelf and got out one of his files about various child kidnappings, to add the story about the film to one of the thick folders. But he found himself reaching for the album again. He studied the look on Vincent’s face and wondered if that was what Jacqueline had felt—at the last moment. Surprise.

  Walter Hutcheson sent the picture to his sister, Amy. Before he sealed the envelope, Walter looked again at the photo. How could he have wondered if the woman was Beth Cappadora? Ben … well, Sam … was her double. He remembered the tears on her face, made incandescent by the light from the screen. Again, an acrid taste sprang into Walter’s throat as he remembered Beth toasting her son at the reception afterward, tremulous with joy, exchanging fashion ideas with poor, sweet Janice Dicksen. Her giddy demeanor offended Walter so much that he made his apologies and pleasantries to the Cappadoras after barely an hour. It was better that Sari hadn’t come. How dare Beth laugh, so soon after a movie that explored the agony of his family and four others?

  And where was his little darling, his Laurel?

  Walter felt his breath come quicker. He tried to wrest the thought away. But it would not leave him. In the dark, he thought.

  In the dark.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The morning after the screening, Beth went out to pull the heads off her roses above the three-leaf and wondered which of her neighbors had finally crossed the line and became so affected that they actually owned a limousine. The gray car, idling at the verge of her driveway, pulled away almost as Beth stepped outside, the rear window silently closing. I’d want to hide my face too, she thought. She would ask Pat if he knew anyone who owned a limo.

  Back inside, she drank three cups of coffee before eight a.m. and by nine was peeing so often she was afraid she’d miss Vincent’s call. He had spent the night at his grandparents’ house. Though Beth’d fallen into bed extinguished by the emotional medley relay of the film and the reception, she’d risen early to clean, only to find the house spotless. Pat had done it all.

  Later that day, the cleaner would come and do it all again.

  Her consciousness sharpened by caffeine, Beth slowly remembered hearing, through the submerged bubble of her sleep the previous night, the loading of the dishwasher, the storing of the serving pieces, the snare drum strokes of sweeping. It hadn’t occurred to Beth to get up and help. Puttering before sleep was Pat’s auditory signature, and his father, Angelo’s, before him. And this was true not only on busy nights or party nights but every night, no matter what time they got home from work. They circled the rooms, drawer to drawer, cabinet to cabinet, making sure the pencils were in separate bins from the markers and that none of the long roofing nails had got mixed in with the tacks, lining up the cereal boxes in order by height. Beth thought that Pat’s sleep requirement per week was roughly the average person’s nightly need. Vincent was like him that way. (“Maybe it’s because they’re Romans,” Beth’s brother Bick had once suggested, some long-ago Christmas just after she and Pat were married, when Bick spent a night with Beth at her in-laws’ house.) They giggled upstairs over the midnight ramblers. Bick was Beth’s favorite brother, just a year younger than she. Paul, five years older, who lived in Seattle now, seemed to have always lived in a grown-up world. Beth had even named her second child after her younger brother. Ben’s real name was Victor Benjamin, as was Bick’s. (The nickname came from two-year-old Beth’s rendering of her brother’s first name: “Bicker.”)

  Beth sat down on the lower landing, her favorite place to tuck herself into a corner and think. When she perched on the oversized furniture picked out by the decorator—who looked about twelve years old—Pat brought home to “do” their new house after she “did” the new restaurant, on one of her vast prairie-colored sofas, for example, Beth still felt like the kind of doll grandmothers sat on a bed.

  What would Vincent tell her? Beth wondered. The ordinary mom-type interrogatory easily with Kerry was almost unheard-of with her sons. Kerry had so little memory of her babyhood, or of the lost years after Ben’s disappearance, wrapped in the gray bunting of Beth’s self-imposed exile from life. Vincent, only nine or ten, would arrive home to find Kerry happily sitting in her own crap, in the diaper he’d put on her that morning, or lying in her play yard with a juice bottle. Beth would be asleep on the sofa. Beth slept like a dog then—sixteen, twenty hours a day.

  After Ben was found, and then Ben left them on his own, to go back to George Karras, Cecilia’s husband, whom he still considered his real father, the
already torn fabric of their lives ignited. She and Pat dueled, considered divorce; Beth packed to move back to Madison. And then Ben came home again. Finally, he divided his life between his biological family and George, whom he still called his “real” dad.

  Everyone was nice to each other, once the decision was made. George and the Cappadoras were like an amicably divorced couple. No one yelled, the way they had before when Pat vocally and fiercely refused to share his boy.

  So what did Kerry know of normal?

  In Kerry’s life, why wouldn’t the kindly husband of the crazy woman who had kidnapped your brother give you a cameo for graduation? Why wouldn’t George come for Thanksgiving? He was like some crazy kind of uncle to her. Beth supposed their lives’ personal prism was no more peculiar to Kerry than her own youth had been: It was normal for Beth’s father, Bill, the village fire chief, to come home late at night singing “Red Is the Rose,” his arms slung over the shoulders of two rookies. The rookies still worshipped their fire chief. No one looked funny at them at church the next morning.

  Beth glanced up at the clock in the kitchen—the clock as big as a wagon wheel. The decorator had found it in a hotel under demolition. Trash that had cost Pat five hundred bucks. Vincent must have waited for the morning traffic to thin out before driving back from Rosie and Angelo’s. Beth heard the upstairs shower flip on. Pat would be at the restaurant to unlock the door—before anyone else, as usual.

  But where was Vincent? It was late now, the rush hour well under way.

  Beth sat back down and reviewed the previous evening. Despite the coffee, she could easily have gone back to sleep. The party had gone well. Pat’s nice sister, Teresa (Monica was another story), and her sweet husband, Joey, had never met a stranger. Their quiet, infectious geniality put everyone at ease. Soon most of the people who were in the film were chatting and had dived gratefully into the crab puffs and focaccia. Food was always a great bridge and these people were strangers who had virtually watched each other in the shower. Awkwardly and then with greater ease, the people who’d been interviewed approached Beth and Pat and complimented them on raising such decent young people. Janice Dicksen asked Beth where she’d gotten her wide-legged silk pants and actually laughed when Beth confided that they were from JCPenney. After that, except for Janice Dicksen, whose job started at seven on Saturdays, everyone stayed late. Before they left, Blaine Whittier came back and hugged Beth, her sons, and Kerry, hard.