The Deep End of the Ocean (24 page)

“The case is still officially open, and the police still get leads sometimes. Last year, in fact, well…the thing is, there’s not much hope, but I pray to God we’ll at least find out someday.”

“Oh, man. Oh, you must…it must…”

“And Vincent was right next to Ben when it happened. I’m amazed you never read about this.”

“I don’t read much. You say he saw the boy being abducted?”

“No…he—Ben—was just a baby, he was three that spring, and he wandered off…. They were in a hotel lobby. We lived in Wisconsin then, and Beth had the children with her here for her high-school reunion.”

“I see, I see….”

“Did he talk about Ben? About how he feels about what happened to Ben? Because I think, it makes sense, doesn’t it, if a kid is like this, the way Vincent is, that there’s a link?”

“Well, we have to presume that something that utterly traumatic…But no, Mr. Cappadora, he didn’t bring it up. And that’s not necessarily bad, especially at a first meeting. Kids aren’t like us in a therapeutic setting. An adult will try to go straight for the problem. You know, ‘I want to leave my wife’…‘I hate my boss.’ We’re aware that we need to consider issues, and we have the economics of the situation on our minds. But with a child…a child might not come out and say, ‘I have a problem with this.’ An adolescent child, particularly, and he’s what?…nearly thirteen…will approach things in an oblique way, and the importance is establishing trust….”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

Frigging shit, thought Reese. He’s going for it.

And then his dad asked, “So, when he talked about the explosion? Did he tell you people were hurt?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s good, because nobody was hurt. Though this old lady fell off a chair in her kitchen and got an egg on her head the size of…fortunately, she knows Beth’s dad. But I hope Vincent gave you some idea of the…scope of this.”

“He told me about the calcium carbide.”

“What they did, him and this Jordie Cassady kid, they poured a whole bunch of those crystals down the storm sewer. And they waited a long time. If they hadn’t waited a long time, it might not have been so big…but see, Vincent knows about this stuff. It wasn’t Jordie Cassady, though his father or his grandfather or whatever had the chemicals—in the garage, for Christ’s sake. But Jordie’s a good kid. I’m not saying my son is bad, I mean. But it was Vincent who knew how long to wait. He waited until the crystals were sufficiently mixed with the water in the main so that they could really…and then they lit this fatwood log—you know, the kind of thing you use to start a fire in a fireplace….”

“He told you all this?”

“The police told me all this. And he told the police. I guess. They had to look down at the paper for the name of the gas it creates. Acetylene gas. When they lit it, you never heard anything like it. It was like…ten percussion grenades. Windows broke. Stuff fell off people’s shelves. The goddamn ground shook. Beth and I are like…‘The furnace blew up!’ And the manhole covers for three blocks—boom! Up in the air. It’s one a.m. we’re talking about.”

Reese could hear his dad get up, and though he couldn’t see him, he knew his dad was reaching for a bone, realizing he couldn’t smoke in the guy’s office, putting the pack back in his side pocket, and then pacing. He went on, “Thirty feet up, and these are big, heavy cast-iron mothers. We’re lucky somebody’s cat didn’t get flattened—and if it had been daytime, Jesus, somebody would’ve been killed.” Reese’s dad sighed, hard, like he did at the end of a Saturday night, when he came in the door, in the dark, smelling of smoke and garlic. Reese would hear him; no one else was ever awake. He would hear his dad sigh, loudly, and then start rummaging through the drawers, and he would want to run down to him and jump him from behind, like he did when he was a really little kid. Back then, his dad would never put him back to bed. He’d make him cinnamon toast.

“The thing is,” Reese’s dad was saying now, “Beth, his mother, and I…we’ve had a…it’s been very, very hard. And the kid, the kid is this outlaw. He does, so far as I know, no homework. I mean, he’ll write a twenty-page report on something like the Monty Hall problem….”

“The Monty Hall problem?”

“It’s this probability deal. If you have three doors, and there’s a big prize behind one, and you first choose number one, and it’s not there, I think they ask, is there any greater statistical likelihood that the prize is behind number two or number three?”

“Is there?” said the shrink, sounding as dumb as Kevin Flanner, whom Reese had once had to punch.

“Hell if I know. I run a restaurant. And these mathematicians all over the country, they write to each other on the computer and debate this thing…And anyway, once Vincent wrote a whole paper on this; he even called this guy in California in the middle of the night.”

“That’s very impressive. This is clearly a really bright kid.”

“But the thing is, it wasn’t assigned! It wasn’t his homework; he had long division to do, and he totally blew that off, and didn’t turn it in. So the school calls. They call ten times a week. They must have us on the speed dial by now, and I know, I know, we’ve all been through hell, but my God, the kid is going to go to the pen….”

“I don’t think there’s any danger of that, really. But the thing is, next time, we really need to get the rest of the family in here—your wife and—”

“Beth won’t come.”

“I’m sure she’s as troubled as you are.”

“Well, of course Beth cares about what’s happening to Vincent. But since Ben’s been…since this happened, she’s not that willing to open up anymore. She went to a grief group, and we’ve gone to counseling, Beth and me, right after I was sick, last year. Once. There’s been a lot of pressure. She’s just…she won’t deal with it anymore….”

“Why don’t you let me talk to her? I’m sure we can work something out. And…are your parents alive? And Beth’s?”

“My folks are. And Beth’s dad.”

“Well, this is a whole family thing, Mr. Cappadora. There’s been a lot of pain here, and maybe not enough of a chance for everyone to sort it out.”

“I can’t imagine my parents in a psychologist’s office.”

Kilgore laughed. “Nobody can ever imagine it. But it grows on you. So why don’t we try to set something up?” Kilgore ruffled some papers. “You know, I can’t stop thinking about this. Manhole covers went thirty feet in the air? Somebody saw it?”

“Yeah. Two people actually saw it. And Jordie and Vincent, of course.”

“Cool.”

“What?”

“I mean, I’m sorry, Mr. Cappadora. Pat. What I should be saying is that this is definitely dangerous, oppositional behavior, in a sense, risk-taking to the point of self-endangerment. Of course it is.” Vincent strained to hear the shrink. He had gotten up, was moving away, out of earshot. Vincent leaned forward a fraction of an inch, and the guy said, “But thirty feet in the air? Boom?”

Reese heard his dad laugh, softly, very softly. “Did he tell you he’s a bookie?”

“Get out of here!”

“Yeah, he’s a bookie…football, baseball, hockey. Not the ponies. He just handicaps those for my buddies.”

“This is some kid you have here.” They laughed together, louder this time. They were laughing about a kid blowing up a neighborhood.

Jesus, thought Reese. I’m fucked.

Though in his opinion Kilgore had missed his calling as a vet (he had more horse pictures on his wall than they had at Churchill Downs), Reese didn’t entirely mind going back a second time.

It was partly the look on his dad’s face when Reese agreed to try seeing the shrink again.

It was the same look Pat got when he’d finished raking the oak leaves for the third time in the fall. Like he could pretend that during the winter, some magic thing would change and it would never be fall again and he would never have to do the same job. It was a look that in Reese’s mind was accompanied by the sound of someone dusting his hands together—there, that’s done. On the whole, Reese would have preferred scraping paint off the Sears Tower to another little get-together with Clue-Free Kilgore (“Call me Tom, or even Doctor Tom, if you want”—Reese couldn’t believe it). But he liked that it smoothed some of the wrinkles off his dad’s forehead, made his dad’s eyes open a little wider, like eyes that weren’t always trying to read little print. He knew that his dad had been after his mom, and Rosie and Angelo and Bill, to go to a meeting with Kilgore, too. Rosie didn’t care, but Bill wasn’t too cool on the idea (or so Reese could gather from the one side of phone conversations he was usually able to get, because his dad had this, like, sixth sense about someone being on the extension, even if you put a handkerchief over it and held your breath).

The real reason Reese didn’t mind going back to Kilgore had to do with Kilgore being a psychiatrist instead of a school social worker or something. Which Reese could easily tell, having spent a lot of time with school counselors when he was little over some goddamn school thing or other. Was he clinically depressed? Did he have (Reese’s favorite; it made him sound like the reverse-vitamin-enriched kid) underachiever syndrome? Reese could tell Kilgore wasn’t like the others because his office was decorated so cool, skinny white panels of handmade paper lined up with only one, the second to the last, violet, which went with some pillows Kilgore had on his couches. Now, if there had been two panels with purple, one on each end, it would not necessarily mean the guy had money. But the one, just the one, sort of thrown in there, was classy.

And sure enough, before he went back, Reese looked Kilgore up in the phone book and there he was, Thomas K. Kilgore, M.D.

So that meant Reese could tell him about the heart thing. Which he couldn’t tell his dad. Since Dad had the heart attack, Reese didn’t even feel like telling him when he had a sore throat. The heart thing—which had been going on for a while—would be a good way to use up time when he saw Kilgore again. It would distract Kilgore from Reese’s eye—which he knew Kilgore would bring up; in fact, he knew his father had told Kilgore about it in advance. But not just that. Because it was getting concerning. The heart thing was happening almost every night now, not just once in a while, and sometimes in school, too. His heart would just take off, like a flapping seagull getting up steam to rise off the water,
bash, bash, bash.
The first time it happened, Reese thought, I’m fucking dying. And he tried to get up out of bed, but he was out of breath, so he lay back down. And gradually it slowed, until it felt like a regular heart again, which is to say it felt like nothing, like you didn’t notice it. At first, because it didn’t start happening until after the fight, he thought Asshole Kramer had broken a rib or something when he decked him. But it didn’t hurt other times, like, at all.

So Reese figured it was inherited heart disease, getting started early. And when he went to the office, when Dad was talking to Kilgore in the sort of porch place outside, he got one of Kilgore’s green books down—
Growing Up: Bio-Emotional Aspects of the Adolescent
—and tried looking up early-onset heart disease. He didn’t get the book back in fast enough, though, because Kilgore had shoes like Mister Rogers (probably to keep from knocking up that lovely polished maple floor) and he was standing right there before Reese could do anything. Reese almost shed a skin.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” said Kilgore, all nice.

“It’s okay.” Reese was sweating. He took a deep breath. “Actually, I don’t care, because there was this one thing I wanted to ask you about since I was going to be here anyway.”

Kilgore sat down on the chair opposite Reese. “Ask away,” he said.

“Where’s my dad?”

“We’re done.”

“Okay, you’re a doctor, right?”

“I’m a psychiatrist.” Shit, thought Reese, okay. Let’s make this as prissy as possible.

“But you have to be a regular doctor to be a psychiatrist? So you were a doctor once, right?”

“Yep, and I still am. I can prescribe antibiotics and everything.” Kilgore smiled. “What happened to your eye?”

“You already know. I heard my dad tell you I got jumped by some asshole.”

“I just wanted to see if you got the license plate.”

“The what?”

“Of the truck that hit you.” Oh, what a riot, thought Reese.

“Well, actually, yeah, I know the guy. He’s a sort of professional jerk.”

“Jerk-about-town.”

“Yeah,” Reese said. He liked that phrase. Jerk-about-town. “But whatever. I’m having this problem at night…when I’m in bed….”

“Most guys your age have—”

Oh, Christ, thought Reese. “I don’t mean
that
! I think I’m having a heart attack is what, and I don’t want my dad to know, because he’ll go totally crazy.”

“Why do you think you’re having a heart attack?”

Reese told him about the seagull in his chest. Kilgore got up for a minute and looked at a horse. Then he picked up a little spiral notebook and made a note, just like shrinks in the movies.

“Vincent, has this been a problem for a real long time?”

“Reese.”

“Reese, of course. I’m sorry. It’s just…you know, it’s actually kind of weird. Not bad weird. Kind of neat. You don’t meet that many kids who changed their own name. Just adults. Mostly ex-cons.”

“I guess.”

“But about your heart, Reese—how long have you been noticing this?”

“I figured you’d ask, so I actually thought about it. For months, off and on. But all the time since the fight.”

“Was the fight a really bad experience? I mean, your eye looks like an undercooked Big Mac, but even so…”

“It wasn’t any worse than any other fight.”

“Been in a lot of fights?”

Reese sniffed, unconsciously. “My share.”

“But this time you got hurt.”

“I get hurt a lot.”

Kilgore laughed. He fucking laughed! “Has anybody ever told you the meaning of the word ‘counterintuitive’?”

“No.” Reese bristled.

“I mean, if you get hurt a lot, are you the kind of guy who never makes the same mistake once?”

“Listen, Dr. Kilgore—”

“Tom.”

“Tom—the reason I got beat is ’cause I wasn’t ready for him, and also, the guy is like, five-ten, one eighty….”

“So why’d you piss him off?”

Why? thought Reese. Why is a good question. He knew why. He’d set out to find Kramer and piss him off, he knew that. Picked Jordie up on the way. They had to look two places: in the conservation park, where Kramer normally smoked like a big boy, and at the playground near the hoops, which was where they finally did find him. Kramer and his sensational friend, the rubber dick, Angotti. “I don’t know,” Reese said. “He annoys me.”

“More that day than any other time?”

“No.”

“So why that day?” Reese thought hard. And as he did, Kilgore said, “Did you have trouble with your mom? Your dad? Something going on at school?”

“No,” Reese said. “Honestly. It was an ordinary Saturday morning. I didn’t have to get back for any games or sports scores until like two or three. So I was just riding my bike.”

“Riding your bike…”

“I was riding my bike around the neighborhood. I went down to where these younger kids play street hockey, at this one kid’s house….”

“Do you play, too?”

“No,” Reese laughed. “They’re like nine.”

“So why’d you go there?”

“I like to…” Reese looked up at Kilgore. He felt a single wing beat in his chest, subside. “I just like to watch this one kid play. He’s really good.”

“He a friend?”

“I told you, no, he’s like eight. I don’t even know him.” Kilgore looked puzzled. “I just saw him in the neighborhood this one time and then I went past his house and he was playing street hockey. So I watched.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Months. A few months.”

“Months ago?”

“Yeah.”

“So, when you go over there and watch, do you talk to this kid?”

“No, I just sit there on my bike and watch.”

“Have you done this more than a couple of times?”

“What’s the point?”

“Just curious.”

“Well, like a dozen times. Maybe more. He’s a really good street hockey player. And you know, I’m interested in sports.”

“Does he remind you of somebody?”

What? thought Reese. “Like who?”

“Like maybe you, when you were younger.”

Reese said, slowly, “No. He’s really big for his age, for example No, he doesn’t look like me at all.” The gulls, suddenly, gathered with determination. Reese leaned forward on the couch and hugged his arms to his chest.

“Reese? Reese?” Kilgore was on his feet.

“It’s happening right now.”

“The heart thing.”

“Yeah.”

“Reese.” Kilgore sat down on the couch beside him. “I’m going to tell you exactly what’s happening to you. You’re not dying. You’re not having a heart attack. You’re having a panic attack, and though it feels very frightening and very real—and it
is
very real—it’s not dangerous. It’s not going to kill you.”

“I didn’t really think…” Reese gasped.

“But maybe you did. I know it feels like it’s going to kill you because I had some once.”

Kilgore put his hand on the middle of Reese’s back. He pushed. Not like he was hugging Reese or anything. He just sort of pushed like Reese was a bicycle pump—press, release, press. “Blow gently and slowly out through your mouth, Reese. But keep it steady. Pretend you’re blowing up a balloon.” Reese did it, and as he did, he could sense the topping of the hill, the change that meant that, although the gulls kept beating, it was going to end, it was going to settle down. He gulped, waiting for the sensation of stopping. And as soon as it came, Kilgore didn’t keep sitting there; he got right up and acted like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

“So it was after the street hockey game?”

Reese still felt kind of sick, but he figured, if Kilgore was going to blow it off—actually, kind of a relief—he would play along. “Yeah. I went to get Jordie and we went to the playground.”

“And you ran into…?”

“I ran into Kevin Kramer.”

“Jerk-about-town.”

“Yeah.”

“And what started the fight?”

“Well, they were playing basketball, and I sort of rode past.”

“And that was it? Just right then, you were having at it?”

“No. Because I rode in between them.”

“Ahhhhh.”

“And this guy, his friend, Angotti, this guy with, like, gray hair, he’s been held back so many times, had to jump out of the way.”

“Oh.”

“And they’re like, ‘Cappadora, you little freak’…”

“And you didn’t want to put up with that.”

“Would you?”

“No.”

“It wasn’t so much that they were making jokes about…my height….”

“No crime to be short. You know, Reese, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be short all your life, either.”

“What they were saying was, I was, you know, stunted…all over.”

“I see.”

“This guy is like a sophomore. Kramer.”

“I see.”

“So I just said some thing, some ordinary thing, like…‘Don’t talk about your old man like that,’ and he goes out of his mind….”

“Is this the first fight you’ve had with Kramer?”

“Yeah. Well…” Reese considered it. “Not really the first
verbal
fight.”

“First physical fight.”

“Well, he just moved here.”

“I see.”

“Right.”

“But your other fights?”

“Look, people just can’t keep their mouths shut.”

Reese got up off the couch and went to stand in front of one of the horse pictures—he realized that the man holding the horse’s bridle was Kilgore, and there was a little girl sitting on it, a little girl with blond hair like Kerry’s. She had on this miniature-sized riding hat, a black thing with a big brim. You could hardly see her face. “Is that your kid?”

“My little sister.”

“Your sister?”

“She’s ten now. Big Irish family. There are eight kids. I’m the oldest and she’s the youngest. I was already in medical school when she was born.”