The Deep End of the Ocean (12 page)

“Is it true, Bethie?” he asked. “Is it Ben?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said into his sport coat lapel, finally, blessedly, able to cry.

“Folks, listen now,” Candy said. “We would ordinarily try to do some fingerprint analysis here first. But in this situation, this body has been exposed to…wildlife elements, and there is damage to the extremities. So Ben’s fingerprint record is not going to do us much good. What we can do is wait for the forensic dentist…this shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to get—”

“No,” said Bick hoarsely. “We want to know if it’s Ben.”

Candy pressed her finger to the spot between her eyes. “Of course you do, of course you do—okay, okay.” She motioned to several officers who stood just inside the back door. “McGuire, Elliott, I’m going to drive Beth and Pat. Taylor and those three from state will stay here with the rest of the family; you two drive whoever else wants to come, or we can get the other guy—what’s his name?—Buckman—to drive somebody. Okay?”

“I am not going,” said Angelo suddenly, the first to speak. He’s old, thought Beth, dumbfounded, as if seeing her father-in-law again after many years. He’s an old man.

“I think I should stay here with Rosie and Angelo,” Bill offered slowly, as his son cast him a glance of pure spite.

“It’s okay,” Beth told Bick. “Don’t worry. So long as you go.”

“I’ll identify the body,” Bick said, holding Beth harder.

“Mr. Kerry,” Candy asked him gently, “are you sure, first of all, sure you want to go through this, and secondly, sure that you know the child well enough…?”

“Ben is my nephew. He’s named after me. I’ve known Ben since the day he was born.”

“But have you seen him often enough recently…?”

“God damn it to hell!” Bick shouted, startling Beth. “I see my nephew all the time!”

“I’ll do it,” Pat whispered.

“Paddy, no,” Beth told him. “No. You can’t.”

“He’s my baby.”

“No, you can’t and I can’t.”

“Okay, let’s go,” Candy instructed, and the officers formed a phalanx of broad shoulders around them, shoulders in blue cotton and corduroy, military in their resolve. Candy opened the door. Ellen held one of Beth’s hands, Pat the other. The cars were lined up nose-to-tail in the driveway. “No news, no news,” Candy called briskly to the now-teeming crowd on the lawn; Angelo’s June roses were a mire of mud and trampled blooms. “Let the family pass by now.”

As the officers threw open the doors, Beth drew back. “I don’t want to ride with Pat,” she said suddenly. Pat stared at her. “I mean, I don’t care if he rides, too, but I want my brother.” What, she thought, what’s wrong with your goofy face, Pat? “I have to tell him something,” she finished, gesturing stupidly, fingers to mouth. Pat turned away. Then there was the airtight swish of the instantly locking squad-car doors. The reporters ran for their cars and vans, but they didn’t dare go as fast as Candy did when she slapped on her portable Mars light and hit the expressway, a hundred miles an hour, talking quietly to the officer beside her the whole time as if they were driving five miles an hour in a parade.

Beth had stood outside a great many morgue doors, some at hospitals, some at prisons, some at disaster sites, photographing stretchers with their cased black-plastic burdens. But she’d never been inside one. It looked like a school corridor, with frosted glass windows in blond doors. Candy led the marching V of officers surrounding them to an elevator. “This is what Cook County defines as a waiting room,” she said, pointing to a shaky collection of green leather sofas and chairs, some gouting stuffing. “I’m going to take Bick upstairs. What he is going to see is a view of the child’s face and pertinent…well, through glass. If he has any questions, we’ll come back for Ellen. Or someone.”

This, thought Beth, was not like the hospital. There were no heroic medical gymnastics taking place out of sight in noisy, isolated, sterile rooms overhead, no frantic last measures to preserve a life, just so everyone could believe that every stop had been pulled out, every last hope, however futile, exercised. She remembered the atmosphere of bustle outside her mother’s door in intensive care; legions of nurses and caissons of equipment rumbled in and out at the speed of light. Here, people Beth assumed were doctors, perhaps even medical examiners, strolled, perusing clipboards; technicians carrying trays of tubing moved briskly but not frantically. Pat leaned against the wall, under a sign that pictured a burning cigarette enclosed in a red-slashed circle, and smoked; Beth noticed the floor was, in fact, littered with butts.

“It’s all over here,” she said, not realizing until Ellen looked at her that she’d actually spoken.

“We don’t know that, Beth. There is every reason to believe Ben is still alive,” Ellen replied firmly, in her very best Ellen voice, the voice that said there was a better than fifty-fifty chance that Nick would come back to her in senior year after he’d fallen in love with the Swedish girl at drama camp. And he had. The voice that had told her, when Kerry didn’t move inside Beth for a full week, that babies near full term sometimes hardly moved at all, that it was perfectly normal. And it was.

“No there isn’t,” Beth said pettishly, wanting to tell Ellen all about the psychic, wanting to tell Pat—had that been just a few hours ago? Had nobody told Pat about Loretta? Where had Pat been anyway? Beth realized with a shock that she hadn’t seen Vincent or Kerry at all—who had her children? Who cared? “No,” she told Ellen again. “There’s not every reason to believe that.” She breathed in slowly. “Anyway, it’s probably better if he isn’t—”

“Oh Christ, Bethie, be quiet now—you’re talking out of your mind,” said Joey, and Pat lit another cigarette.

The elevator doors sighed open. It was Candy. Everyone strained forward. She held up both elegant hands. “They’re getting the procedure ready now. Bick’s fine. I just wanted you to know that this is going to take a little while. Hang on. I’m going to come down here with him as soon as I possibly can. Okay, Beth? Okay, Pat?”

Everyone slumped back against the green leather seats. There was to be a wait, then. Beth felt like a hostess, like she should be offering everyone something to drink. No one spoke—a minute by the huge clock on the wall. What would a regular woman say? Beth asked herself. A regular woman would ask about her children. “Ellenie,” she began carefully, “who’s taking care of—?”

She did not get to finish, because Bick came lurching out of the stairwell, his arm over his eyes, the click of Candy’s heels close behind him, and then she, too, out the door. Wait, Beth thought—we were supposed to get a wait. “Wait!” she said aloud, as Bick fell down on the sofa next to her, hunched over, tears pouring.

“Bethie, Bethie, it’s not Ben,” he said.

“Uh…wait,” Beth said again, trying to lift one of her arms, her impossibly waterlogged and heavy arms.

“Are you sure?” Pat was on his knees in front of Bick, searching his face.

“He’s way too small, and his hair, it’s red hair, but it’s like strawberry blond. He’s really a baby, Bethie—oh, he’s somebody’s baby, Bethie. His little face was like he was asleep—he wasn’t even wrecked, not his face—oh, Bethie, it’s not Ben.”

“Oh, thank you, God,” Pat breathed. “It’s not him, it’s not him! It’s not Ben.” Pat stopped, looking hard at Beth. “Beth, aren’t you glad?”

Beth said, “Glad?”

The house was what she had been dreading, thought Beth, the house after all. When Pat turned off the engine and got out of the car, he did not seem to notice that Beth didn’t get up, even when Kerry, vigorously using one of her lexicon of four words, began wailing, “Out, out, out!”

To Pat’s back, Beth said, “It wasn’t you. It was the house.”

Pat ignored her; he rarely responded to what Beth said anymore. And that was just as well—half of what Beth said made no sense even to her, at least out of context.

“You were hurt because I stayed in Chicago all summer. You kept saying I should come home, and I kept saying I couldn’t,” Beth tried again. “But now I know why, honey. It wasn’t because I thought I would really find Ben. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with you. It was really that I didn’t want to go into my house. See?”

Pat had already gone inside. She was alone in the garage, literally talking to the dashboard as the automatic light winked out overhead and the door slid shut behind her, severing the reach of the pale afternoon sun. Pat had taken the baby out of her car seat and gone inside. I’m cold, Beth thought suddenly. She resisted the urge to hug herself warm and sat in the dark car with her arms neatly aligned along her sides. I’m cold, because it’s a cold day in August. You got them in Wisconsin, even in the baked-hard center of a string of droughty days, a single day of surprise chill that wagged a warning finger under your nose of the season to come.

Fall. A brand-new page. The time that for most of her life felt to Beth like the real beginning of the year, perhaps because the resumption of school seemed to signal a toughening of expectations. That summer, as one hot vivid day slid through a sweaty night into another, Beth had stopped wondering where she was when she awoke, heart racing, alone in Rosie’s guest room. It was as if she had never had a home or a job or a family. She had been born to the routine—out of Rosie’s icy house into the breathtaking blast of the driveway, the murmur of the reporters (whose names she knew by now, who maintained a kind of beach-party atmosphere on the lawn even though no one, not one of the family, not one of the volunteers, ever gave them an interview), into the Find Ben center, the round of paper-folding and stamping people gave her to do, until, after an hour or so, she felt fretful. Out into the heat again, bum a Camel from Joey at the catering company, past a handful of reporters in the lobby of the Parkside station, up past the Cappadora command center in the second-floor conference room (everyone waved), up the short flight, turn, into Candy’s office.

Candy. Why, Beth wondered then and later, did Candy let her sit there for hours, watching her talk on the phone, listening to her conversations with other officers, her instructions, her interviews, even, occasionally, her rebukes of subordinates, her tense interchanges with the chief or the president of the village board? Probably, Candy had understood from the first that Beth was unable to really take in and record substance, to digest or collate the intricate overlapping webs of the investigation and its politics. Candy let Beth sit in her office, Beth felt, rather like you might indulge an old dog with the kind of worshipful eyes that made you forget how capable he was of fouling the carpet. Only there, under the protection of Candy’s delicate efficiency, did she feel elementally linked to Ben, or even elementally alive.

The rest of the time, there were roles, all with certain motions to perform: brave, obedient daughter-in-law; grieving mother; plucky friend; loyal wife. She could do them, however awkwardly. But the motions were themselves exhausting in their ultimate uselessness. Like brute and repetitive muscle exercise, they ate time and kept Beth in shape for…for what? For the resumption of a life, an altered life, post-Ben, which Beth couldn’t really imagine, but which she figured might sometime be expected of her. What she did know was that some sort of reckoning, some sort of relinquishment, would precede stepping up onto the verge of that life. And though she didn’t know when the step would have to be taken, she did not want to take it without Candy beside her. If she did, oh, it would be worse than dying, worse than remembering the day Ben had called her “my beauteous grape”—the day she had come to believe that Ben was not just good and lovely but stuffed with poetry—worse than the photocopied stories she sometimes got hold of in the center before anyone thought to stop her, stories about sexually tortured babies kept alive for months, photographed in their agonies. Beth was afraid that she might kill people, or masturbate outside, or drive Angelo’s Lincoln Town Car through a crowded preschool playground. So she did all the good-girl things, and hoarded her real consciousness for Candy’s office, for the few moments of the hour or many hours she spent there each day when she could drop all her masks.

For Candy, there was evidently no such thing as too bluntly. She did not look away when Beth said she hoped Ben was dead, not because she could ever stop missing him but because then at least she could know that he had stopped missing her. When she said Vincent and Kerry would be better off without her, Candy didn’t disagree; she simply reminded Beth that she had to play the hand she was dealt. Two weeks after the body of the baby who was not Ben was found, Beth read in the
Tribune
that the odds of finding a child decreased geometrically after the first week. And Candy had simply told her that this was true, but to ignore it, because that the first thing a cop learned was that there were lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Candy further pointed out that the child who’d been found in the reservoir, finally identified as two-year-old Chad Sweet of Glen Ellyn, missing for four months, had not been kidnapped. He’d drowned accidentally when his seventeen-year-old father took him fishing without a life preserver. The terrified kid had been afraid to tell anyone but his equally terrified eighteen-year-old girlfriend, the baby’s mother. So, while Candy did try to give Beth a hopeful spin on the facts where possible, she did not tell Beth to keep making novenas for a miracle, as Tree did. She did not keep bugging her to let just one big, national magazine do an eight-page spread, the way Laurie did (“Why not spread the goddamn net wider, so that the just-one-person who needs to see Ben’s face will? Why not, Beth?”).

Most of all, Candy did not tell Beth to go home. Everyone else—Rosie, Ellen, even Bick and Paul, whose love Beth counted as primal—had made this a litany. Candy had waited for Beth to feel ready to talk about going home.

That happened one evening when Beth was hanging around Candy’s office late, and Candy had seemed to notice Beth afresh as she stood up around seven to turn out her office light.

“Do you want to go get some dinner?” Candy asked.

They took hot dogs from Mickey’s and drove all the way down to the Lincoln Park lagoons, out to the grassy edge of the ponds, while a dozen or so black boys, each sleeker and more beautiful than the one before, threw handfuls of illegal fireworks across the water at one another. The air around them throbbed with old Motown tunes from the open windows of their cars. Beth hesitated when the boys looked their way, at what must have seemed two old and impossibly crazy white women picking their way through the hot night.

“Don’t worry,” Candy said. “I have a gun.” At Beth’s look, she laughed. “For Christ’s sake, Beth. They’re only kids throwing firecrackers. Not that I don’t mean it. If they start to kill each other or us, I’ll shoot them.” They sat down on the dry grass.

Beth said, then, “Everyone thinks I should go home.”

“What do
you
think?” Candy asked, halfway through her own bag of fries and already eyeballing Beth’s. Beth nudged it toward her.

“I think they have a point. I don’t want to, though.”

“Do you think if you leave, we won’t find Ben?”

“Maybe. I don’t think you’ll find Ben anyhow, not really. I just don’t….” Beth leaned back and lay on the grass—how impossibly winsome and sweet, a starry summer night, the kind of night that once invited something, a clean two-mile run, lovemaking, rocking a baby on the porch. “I don’t think I can go back and start up life as if none of this ever happened.”

“Do you think anyone expects you to do that?”

“I don’t mean just Ben missing. I mean, as if there was never any Ben.”

“Do you think anyone—?”

“No. No, nobody expects me to go on like that. Except maybe
I
expect me to do that. Because I think it’s the only way I can go on at all.”

“I know that when people lose a child or anyone significant in their lives, they often find it helpful to get some counseling.”

“Detective Supervisor Bliss, you sound so professional.”

“Come on. There are groups, Beth, grief groups. They do really good work—I mean
really
good work.”

“If I go to one of those things, that means it’s all over.”

“No, it doesn’t. It means that a part of it is beginning. The part where you try to take stock of what you can do and how you can do it. You have to survive, Beth.”

“That’s it. That’s just it. I don’t want to survive Ben. I don’t want to try to outrun him—it—this. I don’t want to survive it and I don’t want to face it.”

“So you stay here and live in the corner of my office. Which I don’t mind. But I’m going to have to start hanging my coat on you eventually.”

“I should go home.”

“Beth, you do whatever you need to do. But however lousy a mother you feel like right now, you are the only mother Kerry and Vincent have.”

“What a bargain.”

“I think they could do a whole lot worse.”

“Oh, I don’t.”

“I do. And if you go home, Beth, it doesn’t mean that…” Beth looked up from the ground into Candy’s dove-colored eyes, which were always all-iris, eyes that looked made for a camera. “It’s not a trade, Beth. I’ve told you this. If you give everything else up, it doesn’t mean you get Ben. If that was the way it worked, I’d tell you to do it.”

“I know.”

“You have these two great kids, Bethie. I would give my right arm to have a kid like Kerry.”

“People do it. People…like you do it all the time.”

“No, not people like me. Gay women, yes. But not people like me. I mean, I could. But Beth, you don’t become a cop because you’re a rebel. I’m a deeply conventional person, Beth. I know that sounds crazy, given my…well, just leave it at that. I always thought I’d have a husband and kids. I just couldn’t ever see the husband.”

“But you could…”

“No. Sometimes I think…” Candy paused to stuff her mouth with a fistful of fries. “There’s this guy. We’re old buddies. He was my law professor—I went to a year of law school, during my Watergate period. He had a crush on me, a bad crush, and I had to tell him I didn’t do men, that is, not anymore. Which is to say, I have, in my life, though I can’t imagine why I’m telling you that. Jesus. Anyhow, Chris and I, we hang out. We get Chinese, maybe once a month. Watch Spencer Tracy movies. He’s probably, Chris is probably forty-seven or something now. And he’s this perennial bachelor. Dates young women. Coeds. I have sweaters older. And then, of course, me. We go to the ballet and stuff. To his big firm gala things. I tell him, Chris, I’m your beard—you know what that means, Beth?” Beth nodded; she didn’t. “I’m like his surrogate wife for places he can’t take the young chickies.”

Candy lay back on her elbows, Beth wincing over the contact of the grass with the fine beige linen. “A few Christmases ago, I had this party—I told you I’m a bad Jew—and he brought this girl. Beth, I don’t think she could drive yet. And I told him, ‘Chris, you’re going to be hanging around the middle school soon. This is getting fairly despicable.’ And he looked at me so sadly. I thought, I had this flash, he’s gay, or he’s something, and he’s not out to himself. Not at all. But what he said was, ‘I’m tired, Candy. I want a son. I would marry you, Candy. You name the day.’”

Candy went on, “And since that Christmas, I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought, why not? We have a lot of laughs. He’s still looking at the teenagers, but they aren’t looking back that much anymore. With what I make, if I had a kid, I’d have to chain it to the bed while I’m at work; and my work is crazy. But if I had enough money to cover it all…Chris is richer than God. I mean, why not? He’d have his kid…I’d have a kid.”

“But you’d be betraying…who you are.”

Candy smiled slowly. “Don’t we all do that, Beth? Shit, can you please point out why I am telling you all this?”

The teenagers were drifting back to their cars. The air smelled of cordite from the last wisps of firework smoke.

“I don’t mind,” Beth said, thinking, That was lame. “I’m glad you did.”

“I guess I am because this is horrible, what’s happening to you, Beth. It’s the worst, the absolute shits. But it doesn’t mean you should throw away everything else with both hands.”

She doesn’t see, thought Beth sadly. Not even Candy. She doesn’t see that if I can’t be Ben’s mother, I not only don’t want to be anyone’s mother, I don’t want to be anyone. Even being dead would be an effort. I want to be a lay sister, scrubbing the same patch of stone cement floor every day, scrubbing, scrubbing.

“And one more thing,” Candy said, wadding up the paper wrappings. “If you go home, it doesn’t mean I’ll forget you or stop working to find Ben. I’ll work every day, Bethie. As long as it takes. And if you want to call me every day and make sure I’m working, you can. And I’ll call you, too. All the time. I promise.”