The Deep End of the Ocean Read online

  “Which is what I thought, Beth, and it turned out that the kid was sixteen and he was nineteen, and it was probably just a romance that got some parents all juiced…see? Most of these things turn out to be nothing, but we check them all….”

  Ellen wandered into the kitchen, zeroed in on Beth, and enfolded her. In sweats and a ponytail, Ellen looked reduced, frail and young. She held Beth against her as Candy explained that it would be wise to get the parents’ lie detector tests out of the way. They could visit the technician today or wait until Monday.

  “You think Beth arranged for Ben to be stolen?” Ellen asked.

  “No, but most kidnappings are domestic in origin. They’re custody-related, or they turn out to be problems with relatives or former caregivers,” Candy Bliss explained.

  There were lists and interviews and the first Crime-stopper poster of Ben’s face to approve; Beth—luckily, she thought—looked away at the last minute, so she never saw Ben’s trusting eyes look back at her from the black-and-white photocopy. Ellen helped Beth take a bath, drawing Beth’s jeans down over her hips, handing her into the tub as she would have helped a brittle-boned grandmother. While Beth lay in the water and Pat paced, smoking, in the bedroom, the phone rang almost incessantly. Ellen would answer, crisply, “She’s asleep,” or “No, they’ve lived in Madison more than ten years.” Dressed in Ellen’s clean clothes, so long on her she looked like Nellie Forbush in her sailor suit in South Pacific, Beth sat in front of the mirror and dried her own hair. Some time in the late afternoon, Officer Taylor asked her what she remembered about her classmate Sean Meehan. His second child had died four years before, a crib death that never felt quite right. When Beth began to dry-heave in the sink, the doctor, whose name Beth never knew, showed up again and gave her sample packets of tranquilizers. But when she couldn’t keep those down, either, he gave her another shot; and she slept, hearing everything, even her brother Bick’s voice—she tried to wake up to talk to Bick, but couldn’t fight her way through the slumberous layers. At one point, Pat sat her up and they watched a grainy, early-morning news video of teams of neighborhood volunteers and Immaculata classmates walking the forest preserve and the golf course shoulder to shoulder. When Ben’s baseball-cap picture flashed on the screen and a young woman said, “A community is mobilized to find little Ben,” Beth screamed and Pat turned the set off.

  A bellman from the Tremont staff brought up a tray of cheese cubes and fruit, with a card tucked in it that reminded them they ate compliments of the Tremont, part of the nationwide chain of Hospitality Hotels. Ellen forced Beth to eat grapes and a single cube of cheese. Coffee materialized. Beth drank four cups.

  It was still light when Candy came up into Beth’s room and asked her if she was ready to talk to the press.

  Beth said, “Of course not.”

  Candy winced. “Well, you don’t have to. But I want you to if you can. You don’t have to talk to a bunch of reporters, just one. I have one picked out. She’s okay. And you could talk to everybody. You could talk to Channel Five, Seven, Two, Nine…the Tribune, the local paper, the Sun-Times. They’re all here.”

  “I don’t want to talk to anybody. Let Pat talk. He’s a good talker.”

  “But Beth, you’re the mother. People respond to mothers. They see your emotion.”

  “You want me to cry in front of these people.”

  “No, I don’t want you to perform,” Candy said.

  The sedative’s still-warm brandy in her blood made Beth bold. “I’m not the crying-in-front-of-other-people type,” she said.

  “You are so,” Ellen put in.

  “If I was,” said Beth, “I’m not anymore. This is my kid, my kid….” Beth felt the nausea crest and recede. “You don’t understand.”

  “No,” said Candy. “I don’t. But I understand how far-reaching these reports can be, and how many people watch, and how we can get their eyes working for us.”

  “Look,” Ellen told Beth. “You are going to do this. You are going to do this because it’s one thing you can do to help find Ben. Now, sit up and get ready.”

  “I look like a sack of shit.”

  “That’s okay,” said Candy, and Beth thought, remembering her newspaper days, yes, of course, this is a tableau: the grieving mother she had herself photographed five or ten times, eyes dreadful with sleep deprivation, cheekbones like rocky ridges. “But you don’t want to look frightening,” Candy went on, “or they’ll think…”

  “They’ll think what?”

  “That you’re nuts and you did it,” said Ellen as she went to get her makeup bag. Candy watched as she smoothed Beth’s hair back and secured it with a gold clip.

  “Put on a little eye shadow, Beth,” Ellen said. Beth stared at the pot of greens and blues and beiges.

  “Let me do that,” Candy suddenly said briskly. “I’m very good at makeup.” And, Beth would later reflect, more times than she could ever imagine why, Candy really was good at it: the discreet taupe orbs she sketched under Beth’s brows made her look wan but not wild; the minimal amount of cover-up she applied did not hide the pouches that flanked Beth’s nose, but muted them.

  “Now, what I’m going to do,” Candy explained, brushing gently, “is bring Sarah Chan up here with her crew. And we’ll do her first, because she’s on deadline, and they troubled to send an anchor, and Channel Two is the top-watched news. And then if you want to do anybody else, you can—they’re all going to have reports anyhow. There will be a lot of lights, Beth.” Beth thought briefly of a gynecological exam, of her doctor telling her the patient litany, “Now, I’m going to insert the speculum….” She interrupted Candy.

  “I know about lights, I’m a photographer.”

  “Okay. And all you’ll have to do is answer her questions. They’re taping, so if you need to go back over something, if you’re nervous—”

  “I’m not nervous,” Beth said, more violently than she meant; she didn’t need to compel Candy to despise her, too. “Can I see the press release?” she asked then, trying to sound helpful, even sane. Someone went to get a copy and Beth scanned it; it was not lyric prose: “No witnesses as yet to the disappearance…several promising leads…a full-scale investigation.”

  “You don’t mention the shoe,” Beth said.

  “And we’re not,” Candy told her. “That’s our hole card. Only one person, probably one, knows why that shoe was there. We’ll never get anything physical off the canvas, like—”

  “Like fingerprints?”

  “Right. But that’s what we’ll use for the confessors.”

  “Confessors.”

  “The people who say they took Ben, when they call.”

  “People will call?”

  “Oh, they have, Beth. They already have. There are chronics out there who just want the attention, and maybe some people who are genuinely guilty of something and so tormented they have to confess to something else. They all come out of the woodwork, Beth.”

  And Beth locked on an image of a darkened room, a moon-pale face with a phone receiver clutched tight next to it, speaking quietly, whispering, perhaps afraid someone in the next room would hear…and then Sarah Chan, slim as a pleat and fragrant in her blue suit, knocked at the door and the room filled with a bristle of cables and light poles. Pat sat down next to Beth on the sofa.

  “Touch her,” said Candy. And Pat placed his arm along the back of the sofa, resting it just shy of Beth’s shoulders.

  “Mrs. Cappadora,” said Sarah Chan, “I want you to know that all of us want to do everything we can to help find your little boy. You know how these things are. They really draw people together. A whole city will be praying for Brian—”

  “Ben.”

  “For Ben. I’m very sorry about that. I just got here and I haven’t really brought myself entirely up to speed.”

  Beth couldn’t say anything.

  “Mrs. Cappadora?” Sarah Chan prodded.

  “I understand,” Beth gulped, finally.

&n
bsp; She suddenly recalled a moment from her newspaper days—shooting a family whose only son, a teenager, had died hours before in one of those hideous northern Wisconsin county-trunk car wrecks. All at once the boy’s old grandmother said loudly, “Oh, well, we used to do the same thing. My husband and his buddies would have a big tin bucket of beer on the floor in the back of the car, and they’d drive up and down raising hell. Oh, my yes, we did. They all do it.” Beth was dumbstruck, her fingers fumbling with her old Hasselblad (the editor wanted mournful portraits, not news shots). Was she supposed to agree: kids will be kids, kids will be incinerated in old Chevys?

  Sarah Chan’s breezy reference to “how these things are” stunned Beth in exactly the same way, she realized, but now she was on the other end of the lens.

  “Mrs. Cappadora, are you ready?” asked Sarah Chan.

  “Let Pat talk,” Beth pleaded.

  “We agreed,” Ellen told her firmly. “I’ll be right here.”

  And so the tech attached a necklace mike to Beth’s shirt and did a sound check.

  “Mrs. Cappadora, before we begin,” said Sarah Chan, “I know I shouldn’t be asking you this, but if you could manage not to talk to other media, I think this might have a great deal more impact.”

  “Get over yourself, Sarah,” said Candy in a warning tone. And the videographer, a young woman in tight jeans and a huge Harvard sweatshirt, trained the lens on Sarah Chan.

  “We’re here in the room of the Tremont Hotel in Parkside where the Cappadora family waits and wonders and grieves,” she said. “Less than twenty-four hours ago…”

  “Sarah,” Candy said. “Do the stand-up later. Let’s get this over with.”

  Abruptly, Sarah Chan sat down next to Beth and Pat on the sofa. “Now, remember, we’ll be taping, so if you feel as though you haven’t said exactly what you want to say, we can always stop and start over,” she told Beth soothingly.

  And then she changed, became glowing, her face that of a veritable madonna of empathy. “Beth and Pat, this is the town where you grew up. Could you ever have imagined that something like this could happen in Parkside, in a lobby filled with all your friends from high school?”

  “What kind of question is that?” Pat asked, and Chan made a tiny cutting gesture to the photog. “I mean, of course not. This is a small town. Beth and I grew up with these people. We know these streets like the back of our hand.”

  “But the possibility still exists that someone you know actually took your little boy,” Sarah Chan said sorrowfully, gesturing for the tape to roll again.

  “It exists, but I don’t believe it’s possible,” said Pat in what Beth considered his best Scout voice. “Whatever has happened to Ben didn’t have anything to do with Immaculata.”

  “Mrs. Cappadora…Beth,” Sarah Chan asked then, “your feelings now must be unimaginable….”

  Beth said, “Yes.”

  “I mean, the combination of fear and wondering how long it will take, the grief….” Beth stared at the line of thin pancake that bisected Sarah Chan’s face neatly at the neck, like a mask, and said nothing. The reporter tried again: “We really have no idea how you must be feeling tonight, the second night—”

  “You really have no idea,” Beth agreed.

  “So,” said Sarah Chan patiently, “is there anything you would like to ask our viewers, the people of Chicagoland, who care deeply about your loss?”

  Beth sat silently.

  “Beth?” Sarah Chan urged her.

  “Yes,” Beth said. “I want to say something to the person who took my son Ben from this hotel lobby.” Please have mercy on me, Beth thought. Please have an ounce of human heart and bring me my baby, she thought. I beg you to spare him, she thought, and said, “It’s that…it’s that I don’t expect you to bring Ben back.” Sarah Chan gasped audibly, and even the photographer jumped. Beth felt Pat cringe from her, as if he’d been stung.

  But Candy Bliss held up her hand, as if to hold back traffic, and Beth looked straight and long into her eyes. As long as she watched Candy’s unblinking blue eyes, she knew with an utter certainty that she could continue. And so she did.

  “I don’t expect you to bring Ben back, because you are a sick, heartless bastard.”

  “Mrs. Cappadora,” Sarah Chan breathed. “Beth…”

  “I don’t expect you to bring Ben back because if you could do this thing, you either don’t understand the nature of the hell we are going through, or you don’t care.”

  She cleared her throat. “So, 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. It’s not his mom or dad. 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; my friends will reward you. We will give you everything we have.” Beth paused. “That’s all,” she said.

  Sarah Chan looked up at Candy. “We can’t use this,” she said in dismay.

  Evenly, Candy asked, “Why not?”

  “Because it…because it’s not…I mean, pardon me, Mr. and Mrs. Cappadora, but if somebody really does have the little boy and they hear this, it’s going to just infuriate…No one expects her to say—”

  “You’re afraid that people are going to dislike Beth because she’s angry at the guy who took her baby? Because she doesn’t want to beg a kidnapper? You think she’s not sympathetic enough?”

  “It’s not that…” said Sarah Chan.

  Candy pressed one finger against her forehead. “These are your choices, Sarah. Either you use that or you get nothing else. And I will go downstairs and get Walter Sheer or Nancy Higgins or whoever else I see in the lobby, and Beth can say the same thing again, and they will use it, and they will have this exclusive and you will not.”

  “Detective, I don’t see why…”

  Candy stood behind Beth and placed her hands over Beth’s head. They felt to Beth like a cap of benediction. “Because she told the truth, is why,” said Candy Bliss.

  CHAPTER 5

  On Monday afternoon, over Beth’s objections, Pat insisted they leave the Tremont. Though she could not begin to tell him why, she knew that the close heat and the cooking smells, the family-funeral atmosphere of Italian coming and going that would permeate her in-laws’ house could strangle her. If that was possible, it would be more unbearable than the hotel, which was, while terrifying, at least muffled and anonymous. You didn’t bump up against someone you owed something to every five seconds.

  But Pat was resolute; this was stupid. She had not seen Vincent or Kerry in nearly two days. Pat wanted to be with his parents and his sisters. “And I have to tell you, Bethie, I think you’ll get more of a grip if we go home to my mother’s. You’ll…come around a little,” he said. “Every minute we sit here, we’re just looking at where it happened.”

  And so they walked to the car, the manager following them out onto the sidewalk and across the parking lot, explaining more than once that, of course, there would be no charge for their stay, and that the management of the Tremont, and indeed all Hospitality Hotels everywhere (everywhere in the galaxy, thought Beth), was deeply sorry for their ordeal, as if their rest had been disturbed by a noisy air conditioner. Reporters followed the manager, some actually calling out questions: Had there been any word from the kidnappers? Did the FBI have any serious suspects? Beth had never understood before how people besieged by press people managed to ignore their insistence, especially under conditions of enormous stress.

  She knew now. You did not hear them. They were not even annoying, like black flies. Angelo had said that the phone rang all day at his house, reporters trying, as they explained, to expand on the “family perspective.” A police officer stationed at the Cappadoras’ usually simply took the telephone, explained politely that no one in the house could comment on an ongoing investigation, and hung up. When Angelo and Rosie’s Golden Hat catering trucks left their store on Wolf Road, news vans
sometimes trailed after the drivers. Even as Beth got into the car, a young writer from People magazine was putting a business card into her hand and literally closing Beth’s fingers over it, telling her that People had a reputation for caring, exactitude, and results. “Talking to us will get the word out in every airport and drugstore in America,” she warned Beth. “So call me.” Beth nodded, closing the door and locking it, rolling up the window. She crushed the card and pushed it into the ashtray.

  And yet, she thought, press, police, or family—after all, what did it matter? People could move their mouths at her if they wished. She was not, anymore, real. She was a faux woman, a toupee human. She was already putting into place her cloak of invisibility, tucking the edges of dark cloth around her mind to screen out information and light. She could go to her in-laws’ house, or Madison, or Amarillo, or Uranus. She would find neither stimulus nor peace.

  Pat had accused her, softly, of being “spaced out.” His own face was rough with an eruption of hives; he stank of smoke; his hair was oily. When he lay down to sleep, he cried out. Beth offered him her drugs to shut him up, but Pat said he needed to be alert, to help the police any way he could. Beth thought otherwise. The only way she could help the police or anyone was by standing far enough from herself to deflect idiocy, the strong urge to slobber and gibber and scratch.

  As they stepped into the living room from Angelo and Rosie’s front porch, Vincent threw himself on Pat, and Beth held him briefly, stroking his hair. Jill presented Kerry to Beth to cuddle and feed; but when Pat saw that Beth did not notice when the bottle became disengaged from the baby’s mouth, he took her and fed her himself, until she fell asleep. Pat’s sister Monica made pot after pot of coffee and could not pass the piano without playing a few bars of something. His sister, Teresa, simply asked everyone who came through the door, “What are we going to do?” until Pat, sharply, told her to stop. Beth sat in a huge wing chair just inside the door, and everyone who passed her, coming into the house, seemed about to genuflect. The Comos came, and Wayne Thunder, twice, and a dozen of Angelo’s business friends, who brought fruit in baskets and pans of lasagne, though Wayne said that bringing lasagne to Rosie’s was even more egregious than coals to Newcastle.