The Deep End of the Ocean (20 page)

“Shut up in front of the kid,” she said. “Paddy, make them shut up.”

Linda steered him out of the kitchen and gave him a plate of angel hair with white clam sauce, his favorite, which he had just started to eat at the bar, talking to Mickey, the carpet wholesaler, and Tory, the bartender, when Tory got a phone call for his dad.

“Go get Papa, sport,” he told Vincent, and said into the phone, “Bethie, wait up, baby. I can’t hear you. I’m getting him.”

Uncle Augie was sitting on a wooden chair in the kitchen, mopping his face with a big handkerchief and drinking ice water. “Why would anyone ever drink anything but ice water, eh, Vincenzo?” he asked the boy.

“Where’s Dad?”

“Outside. Smoking another coffin nail.” Like Grandpa Angelo, Uncle Augie was a reformed smoker; he didn’t even allow smoking in the bar. Their younger brother, Cosimo, had died from lung cancer.

“Dad,” Vincent called out the door. “Mom is on the phone.” His dad tossed the butt over the fence and picked up the phone. It was hot, so hot in the kitchen Enzo was working in his undershirt, which sort of made Vincent sick to his stomach to see. His dad pulled the cord out into the alley. He motioned for Vincent to come and stand next to him, and Vincent did, watching the pale ribbons of light he used to think, when he was little, were the aurora borealis, but which were really spots from Vanland across the beltline. He was so tired and sort of hypnotized by the lights he didn’t notice how tight his dad’s fingers were around the back of his neck; his dad was actually hurting him. When Vincent pulled away, the neck of his T-shirt was soaking.

“What else did they find?” his dad was saying. And then, “Where the hell is that? Which Hyatt?…Oh, Elm-brook, sure, sure…. Candy what? I thought she was getting married….” Vincent watched the sweat drip like melting icicles off his dad’s upper lip. His dad looked funny; his eyes looked too deep in. “I’m leaving now, sure…. Why? What are you going to do? Is Ellen with you?” He covered the phone and said to Vincent, “Get Daddy a glass of water, pal.” Vincent went inside to the ice machine. He filled the glass three-quarters with ice, the way his dad liked it, and then carried it slowly back, pushing open the kitchen door with his behind. That’s when he saw his dad kneeling—he thought for a minute, He’s praying. Why is he praying? But the phone was on the ground, and a squawky little voice was coming out: “Pat? Pat? Are you there?” His father’s hands were pressed, one over the other, against his chest, and his too-deep eyes looked up at Vincent like one of those saints in museums who’ve seen God.

“I think I’m sick, buddy,” he said to Vincent. “I think there’s an elephant standing on me.” He tried to smile.

Vincent reached over his father, picked up the telephone, lowered the hook long enough to make sure his mother’s voice was gone and he had a dial tone, and called 911.

By the time his mom came tearing out of the night into the intensive-care waiting room, Vincent already knew his dad was going to live.

Though the doctors had tried for hours to talk right over him to Dad’s friend Rob Maltese and Uncle Augie, he mostly heard everything—and he decided the doctor with the cowboy boots to be the guy he believed. Cowboy Boots talked in normal language, and he didn’t act like Rob and Augie were stupid. Everybody else who came in did. From Linda to Laurie’s husband, Rick, to Laurie, they all kept saying to each other, “He’s in the best hands,” “This is the court of last resort,” “Thank God we have the university hospital.”

And then, as if remembering he was there, someone would turn to Vincent and say, “Your daddy’s going to be fine. He’s in the best hands.”

But Vincent knew that was just the kind of thing you said to a kid. He’d heard it a lot of times before.

So he didn’t speak at all; he just listened, and whenever he saw the beige lizard-skin boots come through the swinging doors out of the intensive-care ward, he turned up his listening and used the kind of concentration he used when he built a model motor. It was only about ten o’clock when Boots told Rob and Augie, “Well, in the simplest possible terms, what we were able to do here, I hope, and I think, is stop a heart attack from happening. Until we do an angiogram, we aren’t going to be one hundred percent about the condition of the arteries and so on; but thank goodness we were able to start a TPA right away….”

“What’s that?” Uncle Augie asked.

“A blood thinner, to dissolve any clots, get things moving again,” said Cowboy Boots. “What we always have to assume, when we have a guy this young with this kind of trouble, is that there’s blockage….”

“But he just got this awful news from Chicago,” Augie said. “His wife just called and said they found the baby’s—”

Cowboy Boots waved a hand, but nicely. “It’s true, you always hear that people drop over with an infarct from what we call stress. But you can scare the pants off a guy with normal arteries all day and that guy may sweat or get sick to his stomach and feel lousy, but he’s not going to have a heart attack. All stress does is pop the balloon, essentially—it exposes an underlying condition, probably the result of hereditary…What did your father die from, Mr. Cappadora?”

“He died in the first war. He was a young man. In his twenties.”

“Any other folks got heart disease in the family? Uncles?”

“Sure,” said Augie. His voice seemed to say, Is this a big surprise or something? “Two of his brothers died real young from heart attacks. One was just maybe forty-five or something. But the fourth brother, he’s still alive. He’s ninety. And we had a brother die from lung cancer. And my brother Ange, he had to get a pacemaker. He’s fine now, though.”

“So there you see. And—” Boots glanced at his clipboard—“Pat has a history of smoking, not quite a twenty-twenty history, but he started really young, he says. What, thirteen, fourteen?”

“He’s talking then? He’s conscious?” Rob pleaded. “He told you this himself? He’s not brain-dead?”

“Oh, no, not at all. He’s quite alert. He hasn’t lost consciousness. He’s very, very anxious, naturally. We had to give him something to quiet him down….”

“Are you going to operate?”

Boots pursed his lips. “Well, let’s just take one world at a time here. Our job right now is to get Pat nice and stable, and then, as soon as we can, take a real good movie inside that chest. But I can tell you, his cardiogram doesn’t look very bad at all. We aren’t seeing Q waves, which often means we headed off the most serious—”

And then his mom burst in through the door, her eyes all smeary with makeup running down under them. She had on her ordinary jeans, and gym shoes unlaced, with no socks, but this really fancy satin blouse that looped way down in front, and one, just one, big dangly pearl earring.

“Where’s Pat?” she asked Boots, grabbing his forearm. He didn’t jerk it away—Vincent liked that—he just put his hand over hers and told her what he’d been saying all night, like, “The first thing you need to know is that your husband is out of immediate danger,” that the prospects for recovery, cautiously, at least, were quite good…. Mom didn’t listen, of course. “I want to see Pat,” she said.

That was Vincent’s cue. He could say stuff now. So he spoke up: “I want to see my father. I want to see Dad, too.”

Both Boots and his mother looked down at Vincent. “Have you had anything to eat?” Beth asked.

Eat? “Yes,” Vincent said.

“We want to see Pat,” his mom told the doctor.

“Well, I suppose, just for a minute or two…”

They were ushered into a lane of tile between curtained cubicles. Somebody—it sounded like an old man—was yelling about “nigger nurses.” A baby was wailing out in the waiting room. The nurse, who reminded Vincent of the sisters at his school, Mount Mary, motioned to a cubicle right in the middle; the curtain was drawn back, and there was his dad. He looked a lot worse even than he had on his knees in the alley. His skin was blue around the mouth, and two tubes forked up his nose that ran to a metal plate in the wall. One of his dad’s arms was tied down to a board and a bag of water hung above it, dripping, dripping; Vincent timed it, exactly two seconds per drip.

“Pal,” he said softly. “Come here.” Vincent walked up to the bed, sideways. He wanted to hold his dad, and was afraid that his dad would touch him. “You saved my life, pally. I think you saved your old man’s life. You’re a brave kid.”

Vincent felt tears pull at the bottom lids of his eyes, and he got busy trying to see his dad’s chest, to see if his heart was beating under the flowered hospital dress. He barely noticed his mother get down on her knees next to the high bed and put her face down on his father’s arm. But he started to pay more attention as the black makeup ran all over the gauze. What a mess, Vincent thought. That junk is probably not very sterile.

“Bethie,” said Pat. “Oh baby. I feel like shit.”

“Paddy, you look like shit. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here. If I had known, anything, anything, my God, Paddy, I’d have been here….”

With an enormous tug, like he was lifting Vincent up to change the light bulb in the garage, Pat put his hand on Vincent’s mother’s hair, which was normal in front but all matted up in back, the way Kerry’s was when she got out of bed in the morning—tangles and knots, like she hadn’t brushed it in days. It gave him the creeps.

“You’re my girl,” said his father, and his mother started to cry, so hoarsely Vincent first thought she was puking, but then it was embarrassing. The nurse looked in, sucked her lips in one of those sad smiles, and then drew the drape closed.

“Bethie, tell me,” his dad said. “Tell me now.”

She turned her big, dripping-black eyes on Vincent. “Not now.”

“Listen, Beth, he called 911 tonight. He can hear.”

And that’s when she told them both about the shoe. About how she’d been having lunch or dinner or something at a hotel with Aunt Ellen, and all of a sudden Candy showed up in her beige silk wedding dress, and she had Ben’s red baby tennis shoe. Vincent was puzzled; big deal, they had Ben’s shoe a hundred years ago. But it wasn’t that. It was, as far as the police could tell, Ben’s
other
shoe, or one just like it, and it was left on a desk in the dining room of the hotel where Beth’s class, that very day, that very weekend, was holding her twentieth high-school reunion. A big Hyatt out by the golf course where Grandpa Bill played. Not the Tremont. Not the hotel Vincent dreamed about sometimes when he had the running dream; he could picture those tiles, the color of meatballs, any time he wanted to, if he just closed his eyes. Sometimes, when he lay in bed at night, he tried to think about the tiles and the smell and standing on the luggage trolley first, so he wouldn’t have the running dream. But it hardly ever worked. The dream came any time it wanted to.

“So this means,” his dad gasped, “they’re going to reopen the—”

“Shhhhh,” said Vincent’s mother. “Rest now. They never really closed the case, Pat.”

“What do they think, that whoever—?”

“Candy says maybe someone found it a long time ago, and it’s a sick joke. Or maybe it was a different shoe, and some crazy just thought it would be a thrill, you know….”

“Did Ellen stay with you?”

His mother didn’t answer right away. Didn’t she know? Vincent wondered.

“Ellen didn’t even tell me the reunion was that night. She told me, but not until I got there. I guess she thought I wouldn’t come. And Candy didn’t even get to go to her own wedding reception. I never took any pictures for her. Her husband seems very nice….”

“So what are they going to do now?”

“Candy?”

“No, Jesus, Bethie—the cops. Bender.”

“We’ll talk when you’re better, baby.”

“Beth.”

“They’re going to try to figure out if someone who came to the first reunion, or was there that day, brought the shoe back this time. Candy says they can get good prints off the rubber this time; they already did.”

“And if they did, it could mean that Ben is—”

“It could mean anything, Paddy. It could mean that it’s the person who took Ben and that they were trying to leave a message—”

Vincent jumped when the little beeper on the TV screen over his dad’s bed began to shrill; the nurse appeared instantly. “No problem,” she said cheerfully. “No change. Doesn’t mean a thing. Just a little malfunction.” No one spoke as the nurse ran her hands over his dad’s tubing and put a little probe in his ear that immediately beeped. “Everything’s going just fine, Mr. Cappadora. But you have to rest soon.”

“A minute. My wife just got here…Bethie, listen. ‘A message’?”

“Maybe even like, to comfort us….”

“Beth! To comfort us?”

“We’ll go now,” his mom said. Where? thought Vincent. Where would they go? Would they leave his dad alone here? What if the machines all went off at once? What if there was a power failure?

“Where are we going, Mom?”

“Well, home, I guess. I mean, I guess I’ll take you to Laurie’s and then I’ll come back here and sit with Daddy. You can’t stay up all night….”

Vincent began to cry. “I want to stay here with Dad. I don’t want to go to Laurie’s. I have to take care of Dad….”

“Shhhh,” said Beth, as the old person’s voice began quavering. “What’s that? What’s the goddamned racket?”

“I’ll take care of Dad,” said Beth, pulling Vincent to her for an instant. He pulled back. His mother smelled, she really smelled like…he could almost remember the smell, like the kind of cologne Grandpa Angelo used to use, maybe he still did, the kind that reminded Vincent of an old jewelry-box lining. She smelled as though she’d dipped her head in it, and it was weird, because his mother only ever smelled of Noxzema. She didn’t even have any perfume that Vincent knew of. But before he could sniff her again, Laurie’s husband, Rick, appeared and took him by the arm.

“Let’s go with Laurie, okay, big buddy?” Rick said, winking over Vincent’s shoulder at his dad. As Rick pulled him away toward the doors, Vincent saw his mother kneel down by the bed again and heard her whisper, “Paddy. I’ll go anywhere. I’ll do anything. The restaurant with your Dad. We can do that. I…want you to. Just get better, Paddy. Don’t die on me. Don’t die.”

Now she’s sorry, Vincent thought. She always wanted to kill him, and now she’s sorry she almost killed him. Or maybe just pretending she’s sorry. That’s nuts, he thought. But what if she really had done it on purpose, like a curse? What if his dad had died right there in the alley, and Vincent had to go home alone with her, forever, and his dad was never going to come back, never be with him?

And what if one day she found out? About stuff? He felt the tap again in his tummy, the scratch, scratch of fear as he stared at the black back of his mother’s matted curls, almost purple in the underwater hospital light. He had to tell himself that even when she squeezed him, or yanked on the back of his neck, she wasn’t trying to hurt him, just her hands were. Her hands were rough. Sometimes she looked at him as if she wanted to lie on top of him, like a blanket. At those times, her hands were as gentle as a dental hygienist’s, feather hands.

But if she knew…For a long instant, he had no doubt that if that ever happened, she would kill him, too. She would have no choice.