The Deep End of the Ocean (11 page)

“Well, I don’t want to tell Pat. When can we see her?”

“I’ll call her now,” said Candy; but the telephone rang, and Candy made a despairing motion that sent Beth out the door. As she watched through the glass, she got the impression Candy was arguing; her hands gave her away—she cradled the phone between her cheek and shoulder to gesture as if the caller could actually see her. She hung up and immediately made another short call.

Finally, looking spent, she came out and smiled. “Bender. He’s decided as how he might mosey on over. Later,” she said thinly. Beth, suddenly remembering the cannoli, handed over the box. Opening it, Candy said, “You keep doing this and I’m going to need Rebecca to mail me the
other
size.” Grabbing a chunk off one end of the cannoli, she said, “Let’s go see Loretta. She’s home.”

Loretta Quail’s house was in what Beth’s dad liked to call a “changed neighborhood”—in other words, in Bill’s opinion, a block that had long since lost the battle. Black middle schoolers, including one girl that Beth noticed to her shock was hugely pregnant, were playing pavement hockey in the street. Loretta’s house looked like a threadbare fairyland in the midst of boarded windows and defeated lawns. From one end of the long hedge to the other, garishly painted ceramic elves disported themselves in various pursuits, from carving pumpkins to playing cards on a toadstool. When Loretta herself opened the door, a gust of trapped interior air, smelling of onions and spray starch, fastened itself to Beth’s face like a wet washcloth. The inside of the house was as precious as the outside—every available surface was covered with china cats, carved wooden cats, stuffed cats, and not an insignificant number of the breathing variety. Beth counted six cats as Loretta took Candy’s hand and led them inside, bustling back from her kitchen with a tray of mugs and a covered pot of tea. It must have been eighty degrees in the room, and Beth could see stray hairs clinging to the mug even at a distance; but she followed Candy’s lead and bravely accepted herb tea and took one of the muffins that Loretta, to Beth’s dismay, said she’d made herself.

“So, Loretta, you know we’re here about Beth’s son,” Candy began.

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Loretta. “And I knew you would come. But I thought it would be Friday. I had a dream last night that it was going to be Friday. I saw Beth in it.” Dear God, thought Beth, madly glancing around the room at the hell of cats, she’s nuts. Why do nuts women always have cats? Why not dogs, dogs who are just as excited to see you after you drive up to the corner to get milk as they were when they first met you, instead of cats, who, as Pat always said, regarded people as warm-blooded furniture? To keep her eyes to herself, Beth stared down at Loretta’s ample thigh in its armor of polyester, a blue that did not exist in nature. Why did nuts women aged about sixty-five who kept cats also wear stretch pants? With flowered blouses that looked chosen carefully for their potential to make the wearer look like ten miles of bad road under a tablecloth? Because something like these clothes had looked good on them when they were young? Because everything else looked worse? As she let her glance slide upward to Loretta’s tightly furled perm, like a head full of late-spring buds, she heard the woman ask Candy, “So, do you want me to do a trance? Or just give you some impressions?”

Beth thought, How about a side of slaw with that? She felt wildly, hideously embarrassed. Not ever in her life—not once, even the single time she’d dropped acid as a college senior—had Beth ever had an experience she considered truly extrasensory. Hunches, feelings, semiprayers overlaid with coincidences—those, yes; her family of origin ran on those things, as if superstition were gasoline. But though the inside of her brain was lined with her grandmother Kerry’s tales of dead aunts whose spirits jetted to Chicago without benefit of airplanes to warn that Katie or Mary from Louisiana had died in the flu epidemic, Beth herself had never smelled Evie’s cologne, or felt her mother’s spirit brush past her, even though several intelligent friends who had lost parents had assured Beth that these things would happen to her.

So when Loretta began explaining the origin of her gift, how smells had begun “throwing” her into trances when she was six, Beth had to struggle with muscles jumping in her face. It was impolite, but on reflection Beth realized that Loretta was probably used to clients who behaved oddly. She didn’t seem bothered when Beth put her hand over her eyes as if the light were too bright. Sounding as though she were reciting from a script, she explained to Beth that the first time it happened was after she’d survived an attack of measles, and that in the trances “it was always the same thing—I’d see things in the funniest places. Things I couldn’t explain. They weren’t mine. A wallet under the wheel of a wagon. A man in a bus station, trying to hide his face behind a bandanna. A ring in the vent of a clothes dryer. And after a couple of years of these things going on about twice a month, I started to tell my mama, and my mama started to tell her friends, and it turned out that every single one of these things was lost. The people, too. And when I remembered every single one of the pictures—I used to call them ‘my pictures’—I’d seen, well, God in heaven, people found all kinds of things.”

“Are you ever wrong?” asked Candy.

“I’ve never been wrong,” said Loretta.

“Never?”

“There have been times when people haven’t found the things they were missing. I can’t always say, ‘This jewelry, or this document, is in a file cabinet in the basement of a house on Addison Street.’ I can’t give everybody an address. There have been times when I haven’t been able to trance, usually because the people who had lost the things didn’t really want to find them. You know, like a teenage girl might be a prostitute. That happens a lot. But every time I do see something, I really see it. It’s where I see it. I know that. Most of your psychics average about fifty percent; and the ones in the magazines and the newspapers, I don’t think even twenty percent of the things they say will come to pass ever does. They’re just good public relations people is all. Most of them will tell you this is a gift from God, even while they’ve got their hands out for the gimme. Well, I believe in the Lord, but I don’t think this is a gift from God; I think it’s a wiring problem in my head. I’ve helped out more than five hundred people. But I’ve got this idea I shouldn’t trade on it. I’ve never taken a nickel for it and I never will. I’ve never talked to the press and I never will.” She glanced ironically around her tiny living room. “If I had, I’d be living at One Michigan Boulevard instead of here. I’ve found some…pretty valuable things.”

She held out her hand for Ben’s shoe, which Candy slid from its sealed plastic evidence bag, put her nose inside the heel of the shoe, and inhaled deeply. She grinned at Beth. “New shoes,” she said. “But you can definitely tell he’s in there. Yes indeed.”

Loretta took another bite from her muffin, turning the shoe one way and then another in her large hand. Then, all at once, she dropped the muffin. Beth yipped. The big woman lolled back in her chair; her mouth dropped open and a line of saliva slid slowly down the crease between her lip and the edge of her jaw. Beth stared at Candy, who held up her hand warningly. Just as abruptly, Loretta sat up and dusted the crumbs from her legs.

“Well,” she said. “This is a funny one. I saw the little boy, but I only saw him for a second. Saw
him,
that is. The rest of the time, I saw what he was thinking. That’s only happened to me about twice before in my life.”

“What was he thinking?” Candy whispered, slowly, hunching forward in her chair.

“Well, he wasn’t so much thinking…it was, he was dreaming. Yes, that’s absolutely it. Dreaming. Asleep. He was in a polished wooden box. He was lying on some soft lacy material. The box had a big lid that was shut over him, curved….”

“He was dreaming he was in this box?” Candy urged her.

“In this…kind of box. Longer than he’s tall….”

There was nothing else it could be, nothing. Beth didn’t want to scream. She tried to hold her mouth closed with both her cupped hands, but she opened her mouth anyway and screamed, “I knew it!” Her knuckles against her front teeth began to bleed.

“Beth, wait! Hear her out!” Candy tried to keep Beth on her chair, but Beth was up, trying to shake Candy off. All the cats in the room stood up, hissing.

Mildly, Loretta turned to Candy, shaking her head. “Sometimes, this is what happens when you tell them. They don’t want to hear. Do you want me to stop?”

“I don’t know why cognac,” said Candy, shoving the snifter at Beth as she sat down at the table in the first chain fern restaurant they came across. Candy had squealed into the parking lot as if the motor were on fire. “Maybe because in the movies, they always give you a shot of brandy if you have a shock. Works for me.”

Candy sat down across from Beth at the sticky four-top. “I want to eat something. You want to eat something?” The more time she spent with Candy, the clearer it became to Beth that Candy ate enormous amounts of food, always, and never looked anything but concave; perhaps, Beth thought idly now, she was bulimic. As Beth shook her head, dismissing food, experimentally sipping the cognac, Candy told a waitress, “I’ll have a…smoked chicken pizza, with double cheese and…shrimp too.” Leaning over, she told Beth, “If my mother were dead, she’d be rolling in her grave.”

“Why?” Beth asked.

“Because the cheese and the meat and the shrimp—this is probably the most trayf thing you could eat.” She grinned at Beth’s bewildered look. “You know, not kosher. My mother had a kosher kitchen. But I got to be eighteen, you know, I grew up in Florida, for God’s sake. And I thought, If you’re not going to eat lobster, why live? Anyway, that’s just the smallest part of why the Jewishness never caught on—religiously, that is.”

“It never seemed like much of a religion for women,” Beth ventured.

“Not like Catholicism, huh?”

“No, I didn’t mean that. It’s just as bad. But I don’t really do Catholicism. I told you that.”

“But at least you don’t have to immerse yourself in scummy water once a month so you’ll be clean enough to sleep with your sacred husband.”

“Did you ever do that?”

“I told you, Beth. I don’t have a husband, right?”

“Sure, right.”

“But of course, if I did, I wouldn’t. That’s the real dark side of religious belief. You might as well handle snakes or something. Drink some more of your brandy.”

Beth drank. She could picture the beaker of her stomach being coated, the outline of it glowing red, maybe purple.

“Do you feel better now?” Candy asked. “Because I want to tell you something.”

“You can tell me.”

“I don’t think what Loretta meant was what you thought she meant.”

“It was obvious.”

“No, she never said that. After you were out in the car, she repeated to me that if she didn’t
say
the child was dead, she didn’t
mean
the child was dead. She would have said that.”

“You heard her. You heard what she said about the curved wooden box.”

“Well, Loretta can’t account for what she sees in trance, Beth. She says that all the time; people have to tell
her
what stuff means. That box could have been anything. A symbol of some kind. I mean, this woman has a little light in the piazza. We can’t know for sure what she meant, but when I go back and talk to her—I’m not taking you—I’m going to ask her for more to go on. More impressions. I just don’t want you to give up because of what some loony said. I mean, Loretta is a very nice loony, but really, Beth, we have no proof that anything at all has happened to Ben.”

Candy ordered Beth another drink and went on. “I shouldn’t have brought you there.”

Beth said, “I wanted to.” Candy eating her pizza was like a fire ant, tiny, delicate, and absolutely voracious. She whacked the pizza into six neat slices and nibbled each methodically to the crust. “Don’t you eat your crust?” Beth asked, embarrassed by her motherly tone.

“My mother told me it would make my hair curly,” said Candy. “So, of course, I wanted my hair just exactly the opposite way.”

“You look like Gloria Steinem,” Beth said, wondering if she was getting drunk.

“So says everyone,” Candy replied, polishing off the pizza, ordering herself a vodka and tonic. She looked up sharply. “I’m not on duty, Beth. I just want you to know. I wouldn’t have a drink if I was on duty. I mean, I’m not on duty any more than I’m ever not on duty. I come in on almost all my days off.”

“Why?”

“Very tedious personal life.”

“Come on.”

“No, I really do have not much of a life. It’s not uncommon for female cops.”

“Why?”

“Well, this life, this work, it’s hard enough for a guy who has a wife and the wife runs the house and stuff to have a normal life. But for a woman, who doesn’t have a wife at home, it’s almost impossible. You can just do so many things. I mean, if I join the book club, I’m going to make it to one meeting a year, and at that meeting my beeper’s going to go off.”

“Don’t you go on vacation?”

“Once a year, up north in Wisconsin, with my sister’s family. And a few days in spring to see my mother in Florida when she’s there.”

“And don’t you have a…partner?”

“Not now.” Candy brushed her forehead.

Beth didn’t know what to say next. Was she being too personal? What the hell, Beth thought.

“Is there a lot of—” Beth paused, gulped, and went on—“a lot of prejudice against you on the department?”

“Not as much as in my own family,” said Candy, smiling broadly, her even teeth so perfect Beth wondered, Can they be real? “No, not anymore. You can’t be overt about that stuff much anymore. But when I was a kid, and I started, you had to be really sure nobody ever knew. I mean
nobody.
”

“Not even your…chief guy?”

“Especially not brass. Because you couldn’t get hired on a department if you were what they called then a ‘deviate.’ They would do these background checks on you, talk to your family…they still do this stuff if you’re going to be…”

“What?” Beth asked, speaking carefully now, aware that she would slur if she didn’t enunciate. “A spy?”

“No, even if you’re going to be in the FBI, I think. Certainly, politicians and judges and stuff.”

Candy then described her rookie-cop self, a twenty-five-year-old self, as resembling, for want of a better comparison, James Dean. Beth, increasingly sleepy, tried to imagine dainty, long-legged Candy in leather biker boots tucked into jeans, with her long, soft, straight hair ear-length and slicked back from her forehead. “It’s hard to picture,” she said.

“For me, too.” Candy laughed. “I always liked pretty clothes. I was on homecoming court, high school and college. You ask my mother, she’ll say that my desperado period was my first attempt to kill her.” Candy combed her hair with four fingers. “But I think it was, I’d figured out I was gay and I thought there was one way you had to look. That you had to look like a man.” It was in a gay bar, she said, that someone had passed Candy, who was then working as a research assistant for a lawyer, a want ad for Tampa city “police matrons,” and dared her to apply. “That’s what we were then. We couldn’t go to the academy. We couldn’t work with anything but juveniles. That was the standard.” She applied, and got the job largely because of the glowing recommendations of her neighbor, a nearsighted old woman who had her confused with the sweet-faced teacher at a Christian preschool who lived across the hall. “She’s a wonderful girl,” Candy recalled the neighbor telling the officer who came to check out applicant Bliss. “Very quiet and religious.”

And who could doubt a sweet little old lady? “They regretted it, though,” sighed Candy. “Because after a couple of years, I started noticing guys I’d trained advancing through ranks, getting paid twice what I was, and I sued, and I won…I won my gun.”

“You didn’t have guns?”

“The chief used to say, ‘I don’t want my female officers to be killers.’ Jesus.” Candy shook her head. “Now they pick the daintiest little cutie-pie things they can find to go undercover with the drug wolves. They play better.”

“Are those cutie pies gay, too?”

Candy motioned for another drink, and as she did, her eyes narrowed and locked on a space just over Beth’s shoulder. But she tried to go on as if she weren’t staring. Did Beth dare turn her head, follow Candy’s eyes? “Uh, no,” Candy said. “Not all. There are plenty of female officers who are straight now, not that there are plenty of female officers, I mean…Beth, will you excuse me a moment?”

Beth did turn then. She didn’t recognize the officer, who wore a state trooper’s ample felt hat and kept his arms folded in front of him the entire time he talked to Candy, towering over her, looking down at her as if she were a child. Only his head moved, gesturing repeatedly to the right, as if he were pointing outside the window to his sleek black-and-silver squad. Candy looked back at the table, and Beth thought instantly, She’s sober. She’s sober, and that means this has to do with something big, awful, with me. She felt the crotch of her jeans dampen minutely as her bladder, never strong since Kerry, began to let go—got up and rushed for the washroom, where she cursorily threw up the brandy, scrubbed her tongue and her face with soap and paper towels, and combed her hair.

When she came out, Candy was standing in the foyer with Beth’s purse over one shoulder and her own over the other. The table had been cleared; the state trooper was standing outside, next to his car. Crossing the room, Beth thought, would not be possible. Would the other diners notice if she got down on all fours and began to crawl? She was sure she could make it then, with the stability of four limbs and the nearness of firm ground. She took one step, wavered, and Candy came striding over to her and took hold with a vise-clamp grip under Beth’s armpit. They walked out into the parking lot, dazzled with the late-afternoon sun.

“Beth,” said Candy, “you’re right. I know you’re scared, but this isn’t necessarily anything either. We have to know, that’s all. We have to know.”

“What?” Beth gasped. “What?”

“We…that is…they have found a body,” Candy said. “It is a child, and it is a boy. But that’s all we know, Beth. That’s absolutely all we know.”

“Where?”

“Well, the body was found by birdwatchers in Saint Michael’s Reservoir—that’s near Barrington, you know? North of here, maybe an hour. It’s been there some time, maybe much too long for it to be Ben. But we have to know.”

“I meant, where is he? Where is he now?”

“Beth, I am going to drive you to your in-laws’ house, and then we will decide who will go to the county with me to do an identification. It does not have to be you. It does not have to be Pat. It does have to be someone who could make a reasonably certain identification of Ben if Ben had died. Someone who knows Ben very well.”

“I’ll go.”

“No, I think—” Candy opened the door of her car and absently ducked the back of Beth’s neck with the heel of her palm, as if Beth were handcuffed and liable to hit her head on the side of the car—“I think we’ll just get to Angelo’s and then we’ll decide on this. No one is going anywhere. I mean, we have time.” Candy slipped the buckle of Beth’s seat belt into the notch and locked it.

“Is he dead?” God, thought Beth, how she is looking at me! “No, I mean, I know he’s dead, but
how
did he die? Was he murdered? Did he drown?”

“There hasn’t been any time to determine what the cause of death was, Beth,” said Candy. “The body was only found a couple of hours ago, and the state guys did the match from our bulletin, and the child will be taken by ambulance to the county about the same time as…”

They pulled into Angelo’s driveway, which was thronged with photographers and print reporters, who for once seemed to have outflanked the TV people; it was, after all, a long time until the ten o’clock news. But a Channel Two truck screeched into the driveway before Candy could even open her door, blocking her. She was out and crouched like a prizefighter before Beth could move. The reporter’s feet hit the pavement at the same moment.

“Move your car,” Candy said quietly.

“Chief,” pleaded the reporter, a blond man in his early thirties, “is it true? Did they find Ben Cappadora’s body?”

“Move your fucking car,” said Candy, not raising her voice. “You are obstructing a police vehicle.”

“Just wait one minute—”

“Taylor,” called Candy, and Calvin Taylor came loping down from Angelo and Rosie’s porch. “Can you please arrest this man for obstruction while I get Beth in to her family?” Taylor made as if to reach into his back pocket, and the young reporter turned and fled, the truck backing out of the drive directly into the path of another of its species. Candy rushed Beth up the front stoop, while reporters called, softly, as if from a great distance, “Have you seen the body, Beth? Is it Ben? Are you okay, Beth?”

A reporter on the porch stepped in front of Candy as she shoved open the door. “I’m from the
New York Times,
” he said with well-bred earnestness.

“Good career move,” said Candy, closing the door behind her.

Beth was reminded of a child’s picture book, in which a ring of wide-mouthed frog brothers and sisters gathered each night around the edge of the bog to hear their mother tell a story. Angelo and Rosie, old-people fashion, had their three sofas arranged end-to-end against three walls—no fancy conversation nooks and parlor tables at odd angles for them. And on all three sofas were arranged the silent cast of main characters, at least those who could be assembled so quickly: Ellen, Pat, Monica, Joey and Tree, Pat’s parents, Barbara Kelliher. Pat got up immediately and enfolded Beth in a hard hug; she could smell his sweat—a wild, high animal odor unlike anything she’d ever smelled on her husband’s body. No one else moved. The two phone lines in the house, the police line and the family’s, rang incessantly, though Beth could hear officers, more than a few, talking in the kitchen. As Pat held her, Beth’s father and her brother Bick burst through the back door; Beth heard her father say, “Jesus bleeding Christ, these vampires, these vampires! Where’s Bethie?” She ran from Pat’s arms into her brother’s; Bick was big, and she could lean on him without feeling she was going to have to bear the weight.