No Time to Wave Goodbye Page 5

  “Well, fucking congratulations,” Vincent said. “Fucking hallelujah. But how does this rule out my movie? And how does Eliza figure to be a mother when she’s what? Twenty?”

  “She’s twenty-one. And Eliza knows how to wash her face and pick up her clothes, Vincent. She’s been washing clothes since she was five.”

  “Right, sure. I know that,” Vincent said, penitent. When Eliza’s slang made her sound like a born West Sider, they forgot that she’d spent the first part of her life in one of the poorest places in the poorest country on earth. At Saint Francis Orphanage in Bolivia, eight-year-old Eliza had been considered one of the older children, expected to take care of the babies.

  It wasn’t until Vincent got into the car that he started to freaking cry like an asshole. Jesus. Ben was going to be a dad. Ben, married and a father. Ben was like Dad, the marrying kind. Vincent was like nobody. He didn’t even resemble anyone in the family as far as he could tell. Kerry looked like their mother, Ben like Dad. Maybe he was a throwback. Or the milkman’s kid.

  “Which ones were the hardest?” Beth asked now. “I’ve had shoots that took five hours before the person got halfway settled down …”

  “The Whittiers were hard to convince, but they were easier to do. Once we got there. I don’t think either of them was really sold on the idea. The guy was totally, totally against it. The girl, Blaine, the one who was so shy at the party? She was great. And the mom was just so sweet and soft. But Bryant Whittier is such a pompous guy. The first thing he asked was what we hoped to accomplish, and while we were talking he made some comment about the footage of earthquake victims. He said that people liked to feel good about themselves but compassion had its … I don’t know … something … that those stories gave people who saw them a compassion high or something that they didn’t deserve. The Caffertys were willing, but oh wow…. We left the Caffertys at six that night, Ma. We got there to set up at eight in the morning.”

  “Why?”

  And so Vincent took a huge breath and told Beth about the Caffertys. From the corner of his eye, Vincent saw a gray limousine glide past and wondered if Charley Seven was making sure he’d drop off a payment before he went back to California.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Beth asked him, “First of all, tell me about how you found them. The Caffertys. And all of the families.”

  “Penny found them. Penny? From Compassionate Circle?”

  Beth said, “I remember Penny.”

  “I couldn’t think how I could do it. I couldn’t run an ad. I couldn’t search police files. I wanted to find people who would want to do this or at least agree to it so I could try to interview them. Now, Ma, it was over ten years ago she last talked to me. And when she came to the phone, she knew right away who it was.” She even called him “Reese,” the teenage nickname Vincent had once adopted to keep older guys from calling him “Vinny” when an elbow to the gut didn’t suffice. He’d told her he was regular old Vincent now and had been for more than ten years.

  “It’s still great to hear from you,” she told him. “How old are you, Vincent?”

  “Every year I’m pushing thirty with a shorter stick,” he said. She laughed.

  “Wow, that’s old!” she said. “How can I help you?”

  Penny Odint was Penny Amos now, mother of two daughters born after the child who had been murdered by her ex-husband while Penny was speaking to him on the telephone. All Penny heard was “-Bye-bye, Mommy,” and the handgun blast. Compassionate Circle now had sixty-eight chapters with Penny as the national director. Sixty-eight chapters … that many children, Vincent marveled, that much grief. And yet, most of them were presumably safe, or at least whole, snatched by their noncustodial parent in the parting salvo of a divorce. But even with Penny’s ex-husband, her child hadn’t been safe.

  Her child was a child who fell between the statistics—like Ben—except that Penny’s little boy fell on the wrong side of the percentages.

  The first thing that Penny asked him was, “Why? Why are you making a movie about families who never found out what happened? Why can’t you do a movie about the happy endings? Your family was one of the lucky ones.”

  Vincent answered as honestly as he could. “Penny, to tell you the truth, I guess it’s because we were lucky. It makes you wonder about the others. How their lives go on and what helps them be strong.”

  “They’re not all strong,” Penny said.

  “I know,” said Vincent. “But look. Your story didn’t have a happy ending. But your work helps other people.” And she had to agree with that.

  Vincent told Beth that Grandpa Angelo had asked him the same question. Turning up the collar of his wool cardigan, Grandpa gripped his espresso cup and pushed the glider back as far as it would go. “So much grief, ’Cenzo. Your mama and papa and Nana and I waited so long. Now you would bring the grief back to us? To build a new house of grief? Pain already lives next door. Even now, I see your father’s face sometimes and it’s all there.”

  Vincent said, “The best answer is, I won’t really know why I need to do this until I do it, Grandpa. I don’t think it’s going to be fun.”

  Over a period of months, long before he told even Grandpa Angelo and Candy what he was doing, Vincent and his business partner Rob winnowed down the possibilities. The choices were finally easy: It came down to a combination of the target families’ poignant willingness and the chemistry between them and Vincent. Vincent went to Washington State; then to Durand, California, outside San Francisco; to Texas; to Wisconsin’s Lake Madrigal; and to Chicago, to make sure he had a film, even before he approached Charley Seven for the money. He shot hoops with the Dicksen boy. He ate the Hutchesons’ ranch eggs and sourdough and drank the Caffertys’ endless cups of coffee—because these families drank more coffee than anyone except people at an AA meeting. He watched their television programs with them, knowing that they forgot the thread of a TV mystery during a commercial for cream cheese. Swallowing hard, Vincent let them show him home videos and family picture albums. He admired first steps and class graduation and candles on a Sweet Sixteen cake. They began to think of him as someone who could walk back in after getting something out of his car without having to knock. Vincent didn’t really have as much of a way with people as Rob did. But he had intensity and he had the history.

  He and Rob scouted out the best deals on used lights and cameras and found a Canon XL high-def, the boom, and the other mikes, while Rob began setting up a schedule to make sure they had cheap hotel rooms and good pasta. The quality of a film—any film, even The Godfather—depended on the quality of the food.

  And finally, the last piece fell into place.

  To woo Ben, Vincent had to fight the pull of the restaurant, the restaurant, the restaurant—which was almost genetic. Back when his ma was basically living but brain dead, when she forgot what you said about ten seconds after you said it, Vincent’s dad also was always gone—he had the restaurant to run to. For a while, an older girl cousin took care of them, and then Dad presumed Ma could, but he presumed wrong. Except for Ben, who was nurtured by George, the good-guy husband of his goddamned kidnapper, the Cappadora kids lived on leftover bracciole and all the creative child care that Vincent could provide—which was not much, given how busy he was building his bookmaking operation.

  Still, Kerry turned out to be a good kid and a great woman.

  “Did Ben ask why you wanted to do this too?” Beth asked.

  “Only about a thousand fucking times,” Vincent answered and winced. “I’m sorry, Ma. I apologize for swearing.”

  “Accepted. What did you tell him?”

  Vincent shook his head. How much could he say? Try the truth, Tom used to say; it catches people off guard. “I told Ben, ‘What, do you think there’s an excess of awareness about missing kids?’ I reminded him that Candy looked right at him sleeping in Cecilia’s mother’s house and that if people thought more, if they knew how nuts Cecilia was, they could have brought him home aft
er a week. A lot of shit would have remained out of the fan.”

  Beth winced. She looked out over the pristine and absolutely unused pool. Vincent went on, “What I really told him that was most important was that I didn’t think every documentary film has to be about politics. I said there was a strong emotional narrative in the reversed life these people have had to live….”

  “You were right.”

  Vincent said, “Thank you.”

  “Your father will get over the financing thing.”

  “I couldn’t ask you two,” Vincent said.

  “You could have asked us.”

  “I’d have had to tell you what it was about.”

  “You don’t get enough from Tutu Amore ‘chocolatto for lovers’? I love how they’re swimming in chocolate in the commercial.”

  “That was risqué when we made it,” Vincent said. “And no. We don’t get enough. Not even close.”

  Tutu Amore paid for how Vincent and Rob lived, which was decently, “drinking champagne on a beer gut,” as Grandpa Angelo said, in a typical expression. When he said something vaguely insulting, he would tell you he didn’t mean to “cast assertions.” Vincent’s house in Venice Beach had once been a garage, but all two rooms were his own. He had a mortgage. So what, he lived in a dump and dressed like a prince? Didn’t all Italians do that? Italians in Italy? Didn’t they put everything they had on their backs or on their tables?

  “Tell me more about the Caffertys,” Beth urged him. The past half hour comprised the largest sum total of sentences in sequence Vincent had spoken to her since he was sixteen.

  “Ben got weird. He was fine until we got to the Caffertys’ house. Then he stayed outside.”

  He didn’t tell her that, half the time, Vincent wished he had stayed outside too. The night before he shot the Caffertys, two Benadryl and an Ambien hadn’t made a dent in Vincent’s chronic insomnia, which abated only when he slept at his parents’ house. It was while he was with the Caffertys that the gut pain that bothered him for the rest of the shoot first began. It was just him and Rob and Ben with Charley Seven’s bizarre nephew Marco, called Markey—the precondition for the loan. It wasn’t until after they’d finished the interview that Vincent realized he had felt, the whole time, as though he was walking around the house of his early childhood, with the lumpy green sofa and the Wisconsiny checkered curtains, the things Pat and Beth had had before the restaurants got famous and they got what Ben called the Villa Cappadora in WASPville and did everything over in a variation of beige.

  “Do you know Markey Ruffalo?” Vincent asked.

  “Not really. Just to see. We know his sister, Adriana.”

  “The pretty girl. With the hair.”

  “Yes,” Beth said. “That one. Who worked at the restaurant.”

  Beth got up from the bench and snapped a few more blown heads off the roses that circled the pool. She liked her roses, the only flowers she bothered taking care of herself. They’d gone on blooming through the long, warm fall. Then she sat back down.

  “So … about Markey…. What does this have to do with Ben acting weird?”

  “He’s nineteen. He wouldn’t go to school. He wouldn’t hold any job. So finally Petey sent him to work for Charley, who sent him to me because, I’m quoting here, Ma, not swearing, the kid’s ass was merging into the sofa in the office.”

  “I’ve been in that office,” Beth said. “The one with nothing in it but a desk, not even any file cabinets …”

  “Yeah, and a Coke machine with only one kind of Coke?”

  “Was Markey awful?”

  “No!” Vincent said. “He was great! That was the thing. He never touched a piece of equipment before, but the light and the sound stuff … he was like some kind of savant! He followed us into that dark little room with the camera on creepers and he somehow made it look like humans could live there.”

  Beth said, “Huh.”

  Vincent went on to describe Markey’s bizarre combination of grace and cluelessness. The purpose statement specified a no-smoking-on-set shoot; and so there was Markey, smoking Marlboros one after the other, snapping the filters off and dropping them on the Caffertys’ lawn as fast as Vincent could pick them up. He had to wipe the equipment with baby wipes every five seconds … but besides that, he was totally invisible. Vincent said, “He didn’t talk. Didn’t have any facial expressions.”

  Beth added, “And there’s nothing worse when you’re trying to get something done and it’s sensitive and somebody’s standing there like … talking on the phone and texting someone….”

  “Yeah! Exactly! Do you even know how to text, Ma?”

  “Actually, I do,” Beth said. “Where was Ben all this time?”

  “That was it. He just sat on the porch. And if Rob and I were the hors d’oeuvres, then Ben’s the dessert, okay? And so finally I go out there and he gives me the finger. I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’” The telephone rang, repeatedly and insistently, inside the house, but Beth waved away the glance Vincent shot at it.

  “What was it?” she asked.

  “He said it was the trampoline. He saw the trampoline and junk. He said it was then that he realized it was real. Like a real little kid. He said, ‘It’s like me, asshole. Like a copy of our house. As if you didn’t know that when you brought me here.’

  “And I told him, Sam, you weren’t even there. You don’t remember the things you had when you were little. And he’s like, … first of all, you don’t have a family, you are not expecting a baby. And second, you don’t know what I remember.” Vincent paused. He was sweating in the soft air. “So we did atmospheric shots for a while,” he said. With the camera on creepers, they followed Eileen Cafferty into Alana’s room. “Ma, the clothes in her closet were so little that they barely took up any vertical space.”

  Beth found herself breathing harder. She remembered savagely tearing down folded little corduroys with Sesame Street characters on them, little dinosaur T-shirts—putting away the few things her friend Laurie had left behind when she came in and boxed up most of Ben’s scattered belongings. While Pat and his family watched her in horror, Beth seemed determined to erase Ben after he was abducted.

  Vincent told his mother about postcards from Alana’s grandma that were stuck around the mirror. Her doll was missing one shoe. She had written down the words to an old Disney song, but written them down wrong: I know you. You walked with me once upon a bridge …

  “Do you remember how Ben used to sing some old song the wrong way?” Vincent asked.

  Beth said, “If a bunny catch a bunny …”

  “What is it really?” Vincent asked.

  “I can’t sing but it’s really … um, if a body catch a body, coming through the rye. Everybody has somebody, nay they say, have I. But all the girls they smile at me when coming through the rye,” Beth sang softly. “Why?”

  “They said their little girl used to sing some Disney song. Over and over. Like Ben did. That’s all. Anyhow, they took us out to the yard with the huge trampoline and told us Alana got it for her sixth birthday, the last birthday before they lost her.” Beth was quiet. “They said she always made Adam, that’s the little brother, jump too high … he was four then.”

  “I yelled at you for doing that,” Beth said.

  Vincent played the track in his head, Ben, don’t be a baby! You big baby! I won’t let you fall if you jump … and Ma saying, Vincent! He’s too little for that slide! Stop it! You were scared to death of that slide when you were three….

  “Then, we went back to the living room….” The Caffertys had held a picture of the little girl, grinning with big, white teeth that looked oversized in her face. Eileen must once have looked this way. In the photos, Alana’s big eyes were touched with eye shadow, her outfits carefully put together. Eileen had herself been a gymnast—first an Olympic hopeful, then a few seasons high on the ropes with Cirque du Soleil, then a coach at her own gym. She didn’t coach anymore.

  Now, Eileen Caffe
rty stayed home, writing endless letters in support of early-alert technology for missing-child cases.

  Her husband, Al, was as big as she was tiny, a thickly muscled, blond man whose face didn’t seem to match his Irish last name. Al’s guys did most of the work now at his construction firm. He went to the office twice a week. He worked out at the gym. He slept. Among the decks of photos picturing Eileen with Alana were a few of her brother, Adam. He wore hockey gear, or held a baseball or a big brown trout. But there were no more family Christmas pictures, fireplace or tree-farm snaps of two kids in matching sweaters they must have hated. Something had seeped out of the Caffertys, the Hutchesons, all of the families: It was as though they’d lost some kind of affective pigment. Their lives ground forward only because people had to breathe and eat so that their missing child wouldn’t come back to find them dead.

  “They didn’t come to the screening,” Beth said. “Well, she didn’t.”

  “She just had a baby,” Vincent said. “Al didn’t think she could. Sari Hutcheson just plain didn’t come. I was surprised that the Whittiers’ girl, Blaine, did. She was … it was funny … it was like she was worse off than the father when we were there.”

  Even the Whittiers, though, as self-possessed as they were, still searched Vincent’s eyes for hope. At least the mother and sister did. So did Rosa and Ernest Rogelio, Luis’s parents. Vincent was once removed from Ben, the full-solar-eclipse being. They didn’t know the fine print and didn’t care. There was Ben, who came back. That was all they needed to know, forever and ever, amen.

  Should he tell his mother more? About his own nightmares, which had come back full-strength—nightmares he hadn’t had since he was a teenager? Vincent decided to stick to the facts. His mother was still so fragile, bright and busy but so thin and all on-purpose. He had no idea what Beth really thought. Like, should he tell her about what Al Cafferty said about the phone number, about how people used to call them all the time? He knew she would want to know. But would it turn the knife?