The Deep End of the Ocean (23 page)

The second time Candy came over, the visit had just been social. They sat on the porch, Beth drinking coffee with brandy in it, Candy drinking seltzer because she thought she might be pregnant. (“I’m nauseated, but then I’m always nauseated,” she’d sighed. “I probably have ulcers.”) Beth nattered about Vincent. By September, Vincent had established a school record for missed homework assignments. The school counselor was evaluating him for an attention disorder, though Beth was sure he didn’t have one: he spent long hours every night poring over the newspapers and watching TV, writing down game scores and filing them away in notebooks color-coded by sport. When Candy got up to leave, she’d half-turned and told Beth, “If you ever want to tell me what’s wrong…”

Guiltily, Beth had broken in, “I hate being here is all….”

But Candy had shaken her head. “I factored that in, and I meant that if you ever want to tell me what’s
really
wrong…”

But Beth would never tell. Not Ellen. Not Candy. It was part of the pact she’d made, to have to carry this final betrayal of Ben, of Pat, inside her, alone.

She was almost drowsing in the sun when Pat came out and sat down beside her. “Dad and Kip the designer are having a fight now. So they’re happy. Everything’s going to be okay, though this bitch is going to cost an arm, a leg, and a torso.”

He was worried. Beth breathed in softly through her nose; he was worried, so he was fine.

“That’s good, Paddy,” Beth said. And they got up to drive back to their new home.

November 1991

“They keep the stuff in gallon containers, plastic, like it was milk or something.”

“But it’s a solid.”

“Yeah, it’s like a cake, it’s made of compressed crystals, and you just chip off as many of the granules as you need.”

“How many did you need?”

“Well, we needed a lot. A hell—” Reese measured the shrink across the table; what would he think if a thirteen-year-old kid cussed? He’d probably think it was evidence of his mental illness. So that could work; Dad ought to get something for his money. “A hell of a lot. Almost a whole gallon.”

“Where do you get…uh…?”

“Calcium carbide.”

“Where do you get this? Did you, like, have to lift it?”

“Lift it?”

“You know—steal it, Vincent.”

This guy, thought Reese, was a very clue-free guy. “No,” he said. “We did not steal it, partly because you can’t steal it, they don’t sell it anywhere anymore—except like a construction or a building place. Or a mining place.”

“Mining?”

“Yeah, like copper mining or coal mining or something?” Reese glanced at the clock with the fat, red liquid-crystal numbers displayed behind the shrink. This had already taken twenty minutes. Reese immediately felt more hopeful. At this rate, he could spend the next forty minutes spinning out this yarn about the explosion; and, if Leadoff Man was on at one o’clock, and if he figured on Dad’s customary twenty minutes to say goodbye to his pool buddy, Deuce—and the drive, the drive was, like, ten minutes on a Saturday—hey! he would be home by the bottom of the second, top of the third, no problem. Not only his favorite match (the Milwaukee Brewers, his old team, and the White Sox, his dad’s team) but a game on which a lot was riding—quite a lot. He hated to miss a game he had money on, especially his own. If you had an operation the size of Reese’s, you would miss some games. It figured. He wasn’t, like, Tom Boswell or somebody. He didn’t write about it for a living, being, basically, a kid. There were Stanley Cup playoffs on past his bedtime. And games during the day when he was at school. He kept up—with the papers and the radio and ESPN—you had to keep up—but it took a lot of organization, and he sometimes felt like he wasn’t really watching the game for the fun of it. But this would be excellent. Quite precisely cold, it would be, if he could wrap up this little interview here and head on home.

“Coal mining?” said the clue-free one. He looked about the age of Reese’s cousin Jill, whom Reese could easily make cry.

“Yeah, they used to use what they would call carbon lanterns, this little light, and then there was a water tank thing, and you’d put a few grains of this stuff in there, and the reaction would, you know, power the light a really long time.”

“Why didn’t they just use batteries?” the guy asked, a long curl of his hair falling forward right between his eyes in a way Reese found disturbing.

“Well, duh, you should pardon the expression, they didn’t
have
batteries at first, and then, you know, batteries are real expensive. If you have to have this helmet light burning, like, twelve hours, you go through them pretty fast. And if you got a whole bunch of guys, and every one of them has to have one of these helmets.”

“Sure, I see, Vincent—economics.” The shrink leaned back in his chair, comfortable-like.

“Right.”

But the comfortable stuff was a wrong number, because right away the guy bored in again. “Okay, so, how did you get these chemicals?”

“They used to sell it in camping stores.”

“But they don’t now.”

“No. They have Coleman gas and stuff.”

“So, how did you get it?”

Reese looked at the clock. Very good, very, very good. Thirty minutes gone now.

“My friend Jordie’s grandpa had it. He’s an engineer.”

“Did he know you took it?”

“No.”

“And what did he do when he found out about…the incident? I mean, it’s a pretty creative use of chemicals, but you can see how Jordie’s grandfather might—”

“He was definitely unpleased. He was real unpleased.”

“And your parents? Bet they were unpleased, too.”

Reese gazed into the young man’s eyes. He had practiced this, trained himself not to blink, lying awake in the dark until his eyes felt like they were coated with gum. It was worth it, though; it was a very excellent maneuver on teachers, for example, when they said, “Vincent. Can you explain this?”

“My parents were also unpleased. That’s, uh, why I’m here.”

“Your parents weren’t satisfied with your explanation….”

“Uhhhh, no.”

“And they wanted you to talk to someone?”

“Well, yes, they think I’m crazy. That is, my dad does. My mom…”

“Your mother?”

“Well, my mother didn’t pay much attention to it.”

“Why?”

“Well, she’s pretty busy with my little sister and stuff.”

“Well, sure. But I think, you know, it’s possible that she was very concerned about this and simply didn’t…”

“Anything’s possible.”

“So, you took the initial manhole cover off…. How did you do that?”

“Well, you know, we lifted it.”

“They’re pretty heavy. You just lifted it up?”

“Yeah, but we had this long piece of pipe. I mean a very long piece, like five feet, and it was metal, not PVC. So we put it in the hole in there….”

“And you pried up the manhole cover?”

“Yeah.”

“Wasn’t that really difficult?”

“Well, you know what they say—‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I can move the world.’ Or something.”

“They?”

“Well, he. Archimedes.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” The guy looked a little concerned that a kid would know about Archimedes; adults had this idea of you and what you knew and the limits of it, and they got real hostile if you got outside it—they said you were showing off or being an asshole or whatever. So Reese said, “I saw that on TV.”

“I see.” The guy looked down at his file, and made a note, and pushed his glasses up on his hair. Now he looked even younger, like sixteen. Piece of cake, thought Reese. “So what do you think, Vincent? Is there any other reason, besides the explosion, that your parents wanted you to talk to me?”

Reese winced.

“Vincent.” It sounded like getting stung by a wasp. “Vincent.” It was just a wimpy, doofus name, a foot short of “Vinnie.” He didn’t care so much when his grandma Rosie called him “Cenzo,” that wasn’t so bad. But “Vincent”—hiss.

“Is something the matter?” Reese glanced at the clock…slowly now…

“Uh, just the name.”

“Your name?”

“It’s just that, it’s not my name. Vincent.”

“Oh. I see here, from your doctor—”

“Yeah, but see, what they call me is Reese.”

“Oh. Why? Is that a nickname for Vincent?”

Utterly and completely clue-free, this guy. This guy didn’t know whether he was in town or not.

“No,” Reese said carefully, as if he were talking with one of the Wongs at school, the kids he tutored in math, who learned how to make clam chowder in biology instead of doing the regular stuff; they were all called Wong after the guy who wrote the biology book for simples. “My name is really Vincent Paul. But the guys…see, when I came to Chicago, this was last year, they heard them read my name off in the class, and somebody goes, ‘Vincent Paul? Saint Vincent de Paul? He’s named after the resale store!’ And they all laughed, not real mean-like, but afterward, because I dress…I mean, I like my clothes real comfortable…they would call me ‘Resale! Hey, Resale!’ and then, ‘Reese.’”

“That’s a pretty neat conversion. I mean, if you like it. But maybe you
didn’t
like it. Was that painful for you? Did you feel they were making fun of your clothes?”

“Shit no!” said Reese, and then caught himself. The “hell” was one thing. He could tell from the guy’s face, which suddenly got very still, that “shit” was another. “Pardon me. But no. It didn’t bother me.”

“Why not?”

“What’s your name?”

“Dr. Kilgore.”

“No, I mean your
name
name.”

“Oh…Thomas. Tom.”

“Well, Tom, imagine being named Vincent.” Reese glanced at the fat red lighted letter. “Look, Dr. Kilgore, the time’s up. I think my dad’s waiting for me….”

“Oh, you’re right, I guess. I was just thinking about those manhole covers. Sure. Well, next time we can talk more about…”

Absolutely, Reese thought. Totally. He figured his dad was paying this guy, like, fifty dollars an hour or something. The next time he saw this guy they’d be roller-skating on the el tracks.

“Sure,” said Reese. And then he looked up, and goddamn his lousy luck and timing, there stood his dad, in the little kind of arched door to this guy’s office, which didn’t have a door—it didn’t need one, because his office was the whole first floor, and people waited in a kind of porch thing. His dad had walked right in, which was very Dad-like.

“Mr. Cappadora,” said the shrink, suddenly all smiles and hands. Reese had seen his dad have this effect on people before. His mom, with her big witch eyes and her skinny face—people backed off from his mom, not that she noticed (talk about people who didn’t know whether they were in town or not). Point is, she creeped people out. But people wanted to give his dad a doughnut or something. Grandma Rosie’s friends, they were all over him, like he was Reese’s age, or Kerry’s. And whenever he met Grandpa Angelo’s friends, or even Grandpa Bill’s, for that matter, they were, like, “Paddy! Paddy, my boy!” and they were giving him stuff. Everybody knew before they even met him, like Dad was their long-lost brother or something.

“Mr. Cappadora, I wanted to go over a couple of things with you, a little background…. I just didn’t get a whole picture on the phone, because this was sort of in the nature of an emergency and all.”

And Reese’s dad was, like, smiling, sure, no problem, though Reese knew he had to be at the restaurant in, like, an hour to set up. Reese glanced at the clock. Bottom of the first now, for sure.

“Vincent,” said his dad. “You can go sit in the car and turn the radio on.” Vincent trotted out the door. Their big old boat of a Chevy was sitting at the curb, actually not right at the curb, about a foot off it, because his dad was not a very godly driver, though he always said, when they goofed around, “Italians are the best drivers, you know. Parnelli Jones. And Mario Andretti. All those guys are Italian.”

“And the best singers,” Reese would say. His dad was such a sap, but he was a good sap.

“Oh, absolutely. Frank. And Pavarotti.”

“And Madonna. Trevor Ricci.”

“Trevor Ricci?” his dad had asked, that once.

“From On the Rag,” Reese told him.

“That’s a band?”

“Yeah, dad, like Smashing Pumpkins. Or Nine Inch Nails. Or whatever.”

And his dad would tell him this shit was not music—kids today didn’t have any idea of what melody was—and Reese would say, yeah, for real, Dad, like those tapes in the restaurant, those two-thousand-year-old tenors singing “Santa Lucia” over and over and over till you snapped. Now that was music!

The frigging car was locked. Reese took a long breath. He turned around and slumped back into the guy’s office, and was about to throw himself down on this kind of swing thing outside the door, when he heard his dad say, “…that his brother was three years old?”

Oh, terrific, thought Reese, and edged closer.

“I knew…you’d said on the telephone that there had been another child.” The shrink seemed to be apologizing now. He had heard that tone, that hushed, church tone, like someone was hugging you with his voice, whenever a teacher found out at the beginning of a term about Ben. It was the magic ticket, at first. They gave you soft looks, their heads tilted, and smiled at you no matter what you did, but it didn’t last. By November, he was always riding the bench in the principal’s office, and listening to extreme, rational lectures about how no matter how severe the grief we had to endure was, we needed to keep priorities straight, we needed to be strong, and try to accept responsibility, because the world wasn’t going to cut you slack, you had to make the grade, and you know you have the ability, Vincent….

“So, Vincent was…seven when his brother died?”

Bastard, thought Reese. He could hear the collapse in his dad’s voice. Dad couldn’t handle much talk about Ben. The dumb bastard was going to drag Dad down a flight of stairs right now.

Vincent slid behind one end of a bookcase; it only stuck out about a foot from the wall, but he was small and thin for thirteen, so he could stand erect and eavesdrop without being seen. There was a fringe of soft dust along the back of the bookcase; Reese wiped it with his finger.

“He didn’t die. That is, I guess, yes, he died. But we are not sure. Because Ben was…we believe Ben was kidnapped. In fact, the police are pretty much sure that happened, because of clues they found.”

“Ahhh,” said the bastard. Guaranteed shocker. “And you never found…?”