The Deep End of the Ocean Read online

  Neither Beth nor her brothers had been able to eat lasagne since their mother’s death, when it had seemed for months that the lasagne in the freezer was like the loaves and fishes—that it would never be gone, was breeding on its own. They had given lasagne to the mailman, to strangers collecting for environmental organizations, to the families of school friends.

  But Rosie now accepted each new offspring with effusive grace. “We haven’t had any time to cook—how kind,” she would say in wonder, when in fact Rosie had done nothing but cook since Saturday morning, obsessively, serving full meals to whoever was in the house, and, even now, in the hot center of a June afternoon, had turned up the air conditioning so that she could bake pork chops with peas and tomatoes in the oven without causing anyone to stroke.

  Just before dinner, when Rosie was elaborately setting the table in the formal dining room with its mirrored wall, Beth heard Angelo in the kitchen talking with another man, an unfamiliar voice. Something tripped an alarm in her, and she got up and walked around the end of the hall, until she stood just inside the door of the bathroom next to the east kitchen wall.

  He saw her anyway.

  “Charley,” said Beth.

  “Bethie honey,” said the man, who wore an immaculate white shirt, red tie, and blue pinstripe with an almost undetectable thread of crimson. “Bethie honey, I swear to God. I swear to God. What is this world?” He held her against him, and in spite of herself Beth felt that unmistakable surrender to the embrace of an Italian man her father’s age, the feeling that you had managed to crawl onto shore and been cut on the sharp stones, but everything would be all right as soon as you got some dry clothes on.

  She didn’t know his real name. Yes, Beth suddenly thought, she did know it. Ruffalo. His daughter was named Janet. Charley Ruffalo. But she had never called him anything except Charley Two, though of course not to his face, because he said everything twice. In some obscure, village-linked way, he was related to Angelo—they called each other “cousin”—and Charley ran what Pat lovingly called the most profitable single-truck delivery company in the Northern Hemisphere. “Bethie,” he said now. “I’ve been doing my best. I’ve been doing my best. I’ve talked with some guys. And Bethie, Angie, I swear to God, I swear to God, there’s nothing. There’s nothing out there.”

  He meant, Beth knew—and Angelo knew she knew—that Ben had not been taken by professional criminals.

  “Thank you, Charley,” she said, and heard Angelo take a breath, sharply. They spoke in Italian. Charley kissed Beth, his cheek soft as a leather glove soaked in Aramis.

  “Eat,” said Rosie, with not even a trace of her usual vigor. Everyone sat down. Vincent ate heartily, and so did the current Parkside cop in residence, a black kid named Cooper, but none of the other adults, so far as Beth could observe, did anything but cut up their chops. Teresa’s husband, Joey, finally threw down his napkin and stormed away from the table, Teresa bustling after him, casting back an apologetic look at her mother. In the middle of the nondinner, Bick showed up to tell Beth that their older brother, Paul, who’d just returned from a business trip, was on his way. “I didn’t know what to tell him, Bethie,” Bick said. “Is there any news that isn’t on the news?”

  From the rim of her eye, Beth saw the young cop stiffen. But she said in her mind, This is my brother, fool, a lawyer, not a gossip columnist, and said aloud, “They found his shoe. They found Ben’s shoe in the newsstand.”

  Bick held her again. “So they think someone has him?”

  “They think someone has him.”

  “So did the local cops call the FBI?”

  And so Pat explained the complexities of kidnapping law, as best he understood it—Beth was certain he didn’t fully understand it—about how it was either a federal crime or it wasn’t, depending on whether the kidnapper crossed state lines or air space above state borders or Lake Michigan or an ocean, and that it was a state crime if the kidnapper took the abducted child from one end of California to the other, even by air, and that every state’s law on the matter differed slightly. And in the middle of it all, Beth’s head began to throb and she went upstairs in search of her drug bottle and fell on Rosie’s bed, while in her dreams voices came and went like tide, Candy’s and Angelo’s and Bick’s and, finally, one voice that said, “Mama?”

  Beth screamed. She sat up in bed and screamed again. And then Vincent, who stood next to the bed in his T-shirt and underpants, screamed also and burst into tears. Rosie came running down the hall with Monica at her heels and scooped up Vincent, muttering, “Dormi, dormi, Vincenzo, sweetheart.”

  “What the fuck, Beth?” Pat grabbed her arm ungently.

  “I thought—I thought it was Ben.” He let her go then and cradled the back of her skull in his hand. Ben was their come-into-bed child. Though he fought the process of going to his room, once asleep, Vincent had slept, sprawled, independent and entirely confident, from babyhood. But Ben rarely passed a night without slipping into his parents’ room, vaulting his crib bars like a gymnast until Beth took them down in defeat, crawling and then walking into his parents’ room, sometimes leaving the sheet between Beth and Pat soaking cold in the morning. “I walk-sleeped,” he would explain to them in recent months, since his language had become fluent. It was Ben, also, who called Beth “Mama,” not “Mom” or “Ma,” as Vincent did. In her sedative blanket, Beth had not recognized Vincent’s voice.

  Staggering, she got up and made her way down the hall to the guest room. It was the first time in all the years she had known Rosie—basically all the years she could remember—that her mother-in-law had looked at Beth with true scorn. Cradling Vincent, who was falling out of sobs into a hiccuping sleep, she motioned Beth away. Beth walked out onto the terrace off the guest room. Joey and Teresa were staying in there, though evidently they were not yet asleep. There were cars parked all up and down the block, reporters sitting on blankets sipping coffee and Coke from paper cups as if they were at a music festival. They did not see her. There was a Parkside squad parked at the corner of the block, an orange sawhorse set up as a desultory roadblock—as Beth watched, a Channel Nine van drove right around it. Behind her, Joey opened the bedroom door.

  “Joey, have you got a butt?” Beth asked.

  “Bethie, I didn’t know you smoked anymore,” Joey, the gentlest of men, told her softly.

  “I don’t,” she told him.

  They sat side by side on the terrace and watched the reporters mill, some doing stand-ups for the early broadcasts, their backs to the lighted, entirely presentable shuttered front of Rosie and Angelo’s white stone ranch.

  “We’ll find him, Bethie,” Joey said fiercely.

  “Oh, Joe,” said Beth, putting her arms around him, overcome with tenderness for this kid brother-in-law, tenderness she could not seem to smooth over her own, real little boy, at last asleep again down the hall. And why not?

  “Bethie, I would give my right arm, my leg, to find Ben.”

  “I know, honey,” she said.

  Teresa came out in her nightgown. “I’m pregnant,” she said abruptly.

  “Jesus fucking Christ on a pony, Tree,” her husband hissed, getting up.

  “Joey, it’s okay. Congratulations, Tree,” Beth told her. “Buona fortuna. How much?”

  “Two months,” said Teresa.

  “Does Pat know?”

  “No. Should I tell him? Rosie knows. She said I shouldn’t tell you. I’m sorry I told you. My mouth just opened. I’m crazy in the head, Bethie. We’re all crazy.”

  “I know,” said Beth. “Got another butt, Joey?”

  After Joey and Teresa lay down on top of the quilt, Beth sat watching the sky drain of darkness. She repeated in her mind the periodic table. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Carbon. Silicon. Sodium. Chlorine. Neon. Strontium. Argon. She knew there were some they hadn’t had when she was in high school. Technetium? Californium? Or was she just making that up? The cigarette burned her fingertips. She lay down on the painted wooden floor. Ker
ry was crying. Someone would feed her.

  At eight, Candy came to take Beth and Pat to a lab in Elmbrook for their lie detector tests. Later, Pat told Beth the young technician had made the same speech to both of them: “Relax,” he said. “Physically, this will be the least painful thing that ever happens to you. I always tell people to relax, but of course they can’t relax, it’s a polygraph—who can relax? But it doesn’t even really matter if you can’t relax, because I’ll be able to read your baseline whatever state you’re in. And I imagine your state right now is pretty rough. Now, I’m going to start with the question that’s the hardest. What’s your name?” Both Beth and Pat learned afterward that their answers indicated deception when they were asked if they were responsible for Ben’s disappearance.

  “That’s no biggie,” Candy told Beth. “We can always run it again if we have to.”

  When they got back to Rosie and Angelo’s, Ellen was there to drive Beth to the volunteer center in the basement of Immaculata’s church hall. Beth asked, “What volunteer center?”

  “You know,” Ellen said. “Leafleting and searches. This lady came yesterday morning from Crimestoppers and taught us how to set it up. These first seventy-two hours are critical.”

  There had been three hundred and twenty Immaculata graduates. And there must have been, Pat later said, a hundred and fifty people connected with the school alone in the church hall basement, leaving out the handful of Rosie’s neighbors, Bill’s lady friend, and the scattering of friends who grew up with Beth’s and Pat’s sisters and brothers. Nick’s wife, Trisha, was there, and all the cheerleaders, and Jimmy Daugherty’s wife, and twenty other mothers, classmates, and classmates’ wives. There was the principal of Immaculata, the only remaining nun on the whole teaching staff, and four other faculty, including Beth’s ancient English teacher, Miss Sullivan, ten years retired. Wayne, whose management training job with AT&T was so intense he estimated he took three days off a year (all Sundays), was there, having canceled all his appointments indefinitely for only the second time in his working life. (The first time, he took a four-week cruise to Australia on a boat with nine hundred other gay men. “We were in the middle of the ocean and I couldn’t get a date,” he despairingly told Beth later. “I might as well work.”) Wayne was in charge of the media, he told Beth. He would screen all requests for interviews and photos and pass on those he thought might advance the search. Even Cecil Lockhart had signed up to come, but then couldn’t at the last minute because her mother had taken ill. “But she sends her love, Beth,” said Ellen. “And I really believe she meant it. She’s going to come and work when her mom gets better. You know, she has a little boy not much older than Ben, from her second marriage—or her third, or her fifth. I didn’t even know that, but she sounded so sick over it. Everyone does, Bethie. Everyone.”

  Just after Beth and Pat arrived, Laurie Elwell walked in, carrying a stack of three-ring binders. She looked as though she had been in bed with flu and shouldn’t have gotten up. Since college, Laurie had been Beth’s best friend in Madison; she sometimes thought her only friend. She was no more like Beth than the moon is like a hubcap—even as a college freshman, she was cool and self-assured in a way Beth was relatively sure she herself would never be, even as an adult. Laurie was one of those girls who already seemed to know everyone in the financial aid office; presidents of sororities left messages for her, not the other way around. Laurie seemed to have been born with an open trunk to the essential information of the universe, and, as the binders proved, she intended to keep it all on file.

  Beth and Ellen fought and hung up on one another at least once a year; but Beth’s relation to Laurie was as free of the dark underpinnings of childhood and common origin as a summer afternoon. They had met at the time people reinvent themselves, talked each other through the panicky boredom, the manifest prides and fears of parenthood and long marriages.

  When Beth saw Laurie and the others, she thought, only for an instant, Now is the time of the reunion. Now I will be able to act.

  Beth had said that Laurie could win the Nobel Prize for Organization; and she was in laureate form. The long tables usually used to hold the food at parish teas and wedding breakfasts were covered with phones and stacks of leaflets, posters on red and yellow and blue paper. Pat picked one up, and Beth read the bold-print headline, HAVE YOU SEEN BEN TODAY?, over a thankfully unfamiliar picture of Ben that Ellen had taken last summer in her yard and a phone number Wayne had commandeered for its unforgettability: the numbers spelled out FIND BEN. From one of her notebooks Laurie removed and unfolded a detailed map of the west-side neighborhoods in three panels that, stapled together and tacked up, covered the better portion of one of the walls.

  “We’ll have a red team, a blue team, and a yellow team,” she told Beth and Pat, opening another binder to computer-printed lists she had compiled over the telephone with Wayne and Ellen. “The captains of each team will be responsible for assigning blocks for the team members to leaflet. And then each team will have volunteers here who’ll coordinate calls we get from each of the areas.”

  “When are you going to start leafleting?”

  Laurie looked surprised. “Why, now,” she said.

  “How long can you stay?” Beth asked.

  “Well, forever,” Laurie told her.

  Candy spoke briefly to the assembled volunteers, telling them that every piece of information they gathered was potentially the one nugget of information that could lead them to Ben. “You can’t overestimate the importance of your being here, both to Beth and Pat and to us,” she said. “You are going to be our eyes and ears in this area for the next few days, and however long or brief the time you can give is valuable time.” She told about the shoulder-to-shoulder searches planned for open areas later in the afternoon, and how even those who had to work during the day could join the police in those efforts in the light hours of the early evening. She warned volunteers against attempting to interview residents or to conduct searches on their own. “We have to be one body, with the head of that body right here,” she said, turning to Pat. “Pat, do you have anything to add?”

  Pat’s eyes misted. “Just that we thank you. We thank you. Ben thanks you.”

  It was Anita Daugherty who stood up and began to applaud, and then everyone else stood and joined in. The peculiarity of the gesture stunned Beth, who turned away and fled for the stairs to the first floor; she supposed it meant encouragement, solidarity. But it sounded like a pep rally, and with volunteers laden with leaflets about to surge up the stairs behind her, she felt like a sick animal in search of a refuge to lie in.

  The Chapel of Our Lady opened directly to the right of the altar. There, Beth had taken her flowers to lay in front of the Virgin as a first communicant in her white miniature of a bridal dress. There, she had always believed, she would come as a bride. Now, she wished only that the little sky-blue room with its faded gilt stars on the ceiling had a door to close behind her. Beth knelt and folded her hands. “Hail Mary, full of grace…” she said softly. But they were words. They came from nowhere but the back of her throat. In all her life, Beth had felt only twice that she had actually prayed—that is, established a connection between herself and some other consciousness: once in her mother’s hospital room shortly after Evie had died; once the day the bleeding stopped, when she’d believed she was miscarrying the pregnancy that turned out to be Ben. For most of the rest of her life, though she knew her Confiteor, her Rosary, her creeds (in Latin at least) as well as she knew the spelling of her name, she had felt outside herself when she said them, even when the linguistic power of the words themselves made her throat close with emotion. “Holy Mary,” she whispered again, thinking, If I cannot believe now, if I cannot ask for help now, even given the strong doubt that I would ever be heard except by atmosphere, that I would ever receive anything but the borrowed peace of meditation, if I cannot uncurl my closed hand even a little, I am not deserving of Ben. I have to pray for Ben, she thought. “Ho
ly Mary,” she said, the words clicking, dry against the dry roof of her mouth, sounds. “I can’t,” Beth said.

  She smelled Candy before she saw her, smelled the distinct lemony bite that underlay her cologne, like a telegram of cleanliness. The row of blue-velvet-padded kneelers extended a full five feet along a gold rail in front of the white marble folds of the Virgin’s gown. A few feet from Beth, Candy knelt, one hand over her eyes.

  “Are you Catholic?” Beth asked.

  “No,” said Candy. “I was just waiting for you.”

  “There’s nothing to wait for,” Beth sighed. “I’m done. I never got started. I can’t pray.”

  “My mother always said there’s no right way to do it.”

  “I don’t believe.”

  “In anything?”

  “I mean, I don’t believe in God.”

  “Atheist?” asked Candy.

  Beth snorted. “No. That takes too much courage.”

  “Maybe it’s faith that really takes the courage. The belief in things unseen.”

  “Sounds like you were raised Catholic,” Beth said.

  “Well, I was raised Jewish,” Candy told her, standing up. “And there are plenty of comparisons. Guilt. Misogyny. You name it.” She reached out her hand and touched the Virgin’s marble fingertips. “But some other stuff, too. Like you move the house to take care of someone. You sacrifice everything for a child—and of course you remind the child of that for as long as you live.” Candy looked up at the serene face of the Madonna. “She was a Jewish mother, Beth, you know? And if anyone would help you now, maybe it would be a Jewish mother.”

  “I guess that should be easy to accept right now. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, right?”