The Deep End of the Ocean (32 page)

Reese felt all the blood pound into his face. The fat fuck. He’d drawn him out, right into the water, and then let him go.

Teeter went on. “I been watching you, Cappadora. Not just in here. You got a chip on your shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore, and you ain’t got the size or the heart to back it up.”

Feeling the curling of his hands, the telltale signal Reese had come to fear, he answered, “I do okay.”

“You do okay, huh?” Teeter stuck his pork face right up next to Reese’s. “You do okay because everybody feels sorry for you. I knew your father growing up, Vince. Nicer guy never walked the earth. Everybody felt like hell, all the shit he went through, and then, what does he get? This runt who thinks his shit don’t stink.”

Teeter waved one broad finger under Reese’s nose. “You got speed and moves. But you come out for my team, you gotta know right then you ain’t no special case. You’ll be the same as the rest of them, maybe a little lower on the scale because you been living your whole life on getting the breaks….”

“I’ve never—” Reese began.

“Come on, Cappadora! You think you’re such a big man, how about acting like it?
Are
you a big man? Or just a bully?” He scooped up the ball, Reese’s own ball, balancing it in his big ham hands, and bounced it once off Reese’s forehead. Then again. The bridge of Reese’s nose stung like a sonofabitch. His eyes began to run. But he didn’t put up his hands to block Teeter’s attack. Teeter did it again. And again. “Big man, Reese, huh? Wanta go? What’re you going to do now? Can you take it, Cappadora? Or are you just a pussy, deep down?” And he drew back to give the ball a little more punch, but then Reese’s fist came up and he snatched the ball down, almost pulling Teeter off balance.

The big man’s face slackened. And he took a step back. Oh shit, Reese thought, that was the way they all acted. When they saw the look. What did I ever do to you, you fuck? All I was doing was messing around. Maybe trying to do the ordinary thing, just once. And even that got him in the shitter. Reese felt again that ferocious urge to take off, to smash Teeter’s meat nose into his brain and then run, forever, to a place where he didn’t have to carry around every fucking thing he’d ever done or thought like a load of bricks on his back.

“Look,” Reese said, then. “Look, I just—”

“Forget it,” Teeter said, whirling and slouching away. “Your kind of attitude, nobody needs.”

And Reese just stood there, both arms wrapped around his ball, holding it to his chest as tightly as he could, while Teeter flipped off the light switch to the overheads, leaving him in the dark.

What it seemed like to Beth was watching a tiger in the zoo.

There were times when the animal’s eyes locked on yours, but there was nothing in the contact. You could never be sure whether the tiger was aware of you, individually or at all, or whether you were simply scenery, an unremarkable figment of the landscape. Did a tiger recognize a human being as distant kin, even as alive?

As she watched Sam pace, from the front porch to the back window, followed ceaselessly by Beowulf, she wondered whether he recognized her even as a member of the same species. His motion was constant, from the moment he got home from school (it took him two weeks to walk in without ringing the doorbell) until he politely, promptly closed his door at night. Even when he sat doing his homework at the kitchen table, his legs bobbed and jittered. Beth wondered if he needed…something—vitamins, sedatives, more milk. In his laboriously printed eight-page dossier on Sam’s traits, George had indicated that his son always displayed a surplus of energy. “He’s like a half-grown puppy,” George had written. “He’ll run and run and run and then he’ll just fall down and sleep, wherever he is.” Beth had seen no evidence of that. Sam’s eyes were puffy, mornings; his sleep was not like that of an eager, healthy little hound.

The social worker called nearly daily. (“It’s probably the first time in her life she ever did anything interesting that didn’t involve five adults having sex with the kid,” Candy had explained.) Sam’s anxiety was natural, she explained. He was experiencing, on some level, the stages of mourning—shock, denial, anger, alienation.

“How do you know?” Beth asked her one afternoon.

“I…I don’t,” the case worker admitted. “I just…guess a kid in that situation would feel that way.”

Beth remembered the kinds of questions the reporters used to ask the myriad experts whose headshots she took for Sunday specials. “What does the research say?” she asked.

“There isn’t any.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think this ever happened before,” said the social worker. “Kids, if they’re kidnapped, either are found right away or pretty much never found. Alive, I should say. I’m sorry, Beth.”

The social worker described the case of a little girl mistakenly given to the wrong parents at the hospital, literally switched at birth. There had been a lot of publicity; hadn’t Beth read about it? Beth made polite noises; she hadn’t read anything about a missing child in more years than she could recall. This child, the social worker went on, was quite well-adjusted in most ways. Good grades. Popular. The way the natural parents found out was that the daughter they believed to be their biological child died from a congenital heart ailment, and blood tests proved she could not have been their child. There was a big probe into hospital records, and it all came out.

“And did she ever see the father she thought was her real father again? The man she grew up with?” asked Beth. “Do they have contact?”

“Er…yes,” said the social worker. “Actually, she still lives with him. She didn’t want to return to the natural parents, and a judge ruled in her favor. But then she…”

“What?”

“Changed her mind.”

“Oh.”

“And went back to her real…er…first family.”

“Oh,” said Beth.

“But she was much older, a teenager, and the circumstances…” The social worker’s voice trailed off.

The circumstances in their house were so different, Beth sometimes felt they were all strangers brought together to act in a play without rehearsal.

As vigorously as Beth resisted it on the first Saturday, the family began arriving before any of them were even awake. Angelo. How could she close the door on Angelo? And he could not have done better; he didn’t leap on Sam and crush him, though Beth knew he must have wanted with every beat of his straining, mechanically charged old heart to do just that. He sat, tears streaming down his face, and told Sam about the frescoes at Wedding in the Old Neighborhood. “They look down on the
matrimonio,
the wedding. Each one of them is one of the operas, Ben,” he said.

“It’s Sam, Ange,” Beth reminded him softly.

“Sam, of course. This is a good, strong name, Sam. I am an old man, Sam, and foolish,” said Angelo. “But let me tell you. In the one, it is
La Bohème,
the face of Rodolfo, the artist made the face from a picture of your papa, of my son, Patrick. And do you know Menotti?
Amahl and the Night Visitors
?”

Sam, to Beth’s astonishment, nodded. “I saw it at school, on the big TV,” he said.

“The little boy? With the crutch?”

“Yes?”

“That is you, Ben…Sam. That is you. The little boy is you.”

“Cool,” said Sam. “Can I see it?” Angelo looked up at Beth, his faded eyes brimming.

“Soon,” said Beth. “Let him settle down a little, Ange.” She hadn’t insisted for nothing that no one except her, Pat and the kids visit Sam at first. Now, on his first real full day home, she could feel Sam’s fragile shell giving way, feel his confusion. She wanted to stand and motion for everyone to leave. But it would have been like trying to divert a river.

“Who’s Reese?” Sam asked then.

“Reese,” Angelo said. “Ah. Of course. He is Pinkerton, in
Madama Butterfly
. A bad man, unfortunately. I told Vincent, make another choice. So he chose Don Giovanni, a worse man! So, we left it be Pinkerton.”

“Lot of walls,” Sam commented.

“Lot of walls?” Angelo bellowed. “You should see it. This is a big place, Sam!” He turned his head as Tree came in. “And your auntie, she is the mama in
Amahl
. She is your mama on the walls.”

“Ben,” Tree said, kneeling, holding out her arms. Looking at Beth all the while, Sam walked into them, uncertainly, and Tree burst into tears. “Oh, Ben. Oh my God.” Poor kid, thought Beth; she wanted to hang a sign around his neck that said “The Name Is Sam.”

And so it went, the same scene, over and over, all weekend and into the week. By the simple sight of him, everyone, Paul, Bick, her father, seemed driven to attitudes of penance, of worship, as if he were a vision in a grotto instead of a twelve-year-old with badly scabbed knees.

After hugging him, holding him at arm’s length and hugging him again, Bill thanked Sam for coming home while his grandfather was still alive to see it.

“You’re welcome,” Sam replied gently. “Are you sick?”

“No, no,” Bill told him, heartily. “No, I’m not sick. Don’t you worry. I’m just so happy, son.”

“I’m your uncle,” Bick told Sam eagerly. “And you were named after me. They call me Bick, but my real name is Benjamin.” And without waiting for Sam to open his mouth, Bick asked, “Do you remember me? Do you remember the time I pulled you out of Lake Delavan…?”

If anything was accomplished by all of it, Beth thought later, it was the fact that Sam, hopelessly confused and exhausted, desperate to give appropriate responses to questions for which he had no answers, began to hang close to Beth’s side or, if she was out of the room, to follow Reese wherever he went. As the living room filled with a teeming crowd of neighbors and family, police, and the occasional reporter who slipped in grinning brilliantly and continued to grin, protesting innocence, while being ejected, Beth watched Sam and Reese dig mitts out of the garage, lock the gate, and wordlessly begin fastball catch in the yard.

They would get to maybe three apiece and then another pilgrim would arrive. Another blessing, another profession of amazement, another pronunciation. Rachelle. Aunt Angela. Charley Two’s daughter and his son. The Bonaventuras. The Rooneys and the Reillys. Recently retired Chief Bastokovitch from Parkside. Paul’s best friend, Hank.

Barbara Kelliher and her two daughters.

Barbara, who for some reason was the only face that caused Beth to blubber like a fool—Barbara, her neat cheerleader’s haircut still pert and suspiciously chestnut-brown against over-pink cheeks, her Chanel still preceding her into a room, who had known Beth only slightly in high school but who had decided, on the basis of something Beth could only understand as the same quality of resolve that once made Barbara able to smile and raise a fist cheerfully while doing Chinese splits, to simply suspend her own life and rush chivalrously to the defense of Beth’s. Beth caught her around the waist and would not let go; and after a moment of shocked resistance, Barbara returned Beth’s embrace, and began to rock her, rocking her as a mother rocks a baby on her hip.

When Beth’s sobs subsided to hiccoughs, Barbara asked to see Ben. Beth went to the window to call him.

“No,” Barbara told her. “Just let him be. Just let me watch him a moment.” She turned to Beth as Ben spun to grab a high fly. “It’s you he looks like,” she said.

Sam fell asleep on a lawn chair, still holding a rubbery slice of pizza about eight o’clock that night. Beth had to help him up to bed and at nine the next morning was still heavily, soddenly asleep. Beth hated to haul him out, but Rosie and Angelo had arranged and paid for a special mass at Immaculata. Pat insisted all of them go, and go humbly, and was already arguing with Vincent about the condition of his chinos before Beth had had her first cup of coffee.

Blocks from the church, Beth already noticed a kind of electricity in the streets, an extra stillness only enhanced by the presence of more than the usual number of cars, nose to tail, even blocking driveways. It felt like an Easter or Fourth of July morning, a concealed and unaccustomed bustle belied by the absence of workday traffic. When they turned off Suffolk Avenue onto the boulevard, even Vincent gasped. The street in front of the church was blocked at both ends and clogged with satellite trucks and a welter of police squads—from a dozen villages and the city of Chicago, from the state—all with hood lights flashing, the concussion of rotating spots and floods creating a sort of artificial sunrise. On both sides of the plastic-tape cordon, whole families stood craning over the heads of reporters, knocking over sawhorses. “There must be a thousand people,” Vincent breathed, his voice almost childish with awe.

As it turned out, the Cappadoras could park nowhere near the entrance; and they had to fight their way to the door of the church as the bells tolled for eleven o’clock mass. None of the assembled crowds seemed even to recognize them until they were on the threshold of the foyer door. Beth was almost disappointed on behalf of the press; something in the nature of this was making them expect to see a little red-haired boy, led by beatific young parents, instead of a bleary-eyed adolescent with his baseball cap ruefully turned backwards, flanked by short, dark, nearly identical men (one young, one middle-aged, neither beaming), a nondescript graying brunette in ill-fitting clothes, and a strawberry-blond girl in a miniskirt and tights. What truly stunned Beth was the fact that the church somehow was filled not with leakage from the curious throngs outside but with faces she recognized. Every face was lifted entire from her past and Pat’s. What kind of screening process could have accounted for the uniformity of it? You rarely knew every face even at a family wedding. Who had been the arbiter? Who had known enough to let only the insiders pass? Beth later learned that, in fact, there had been no gatekeeper; somehow, those who knew they should enter had done so, and, with the exception of reporters, those who knew they should only look on had not tried to do more.

As Beth and Pat walked up the aisle with the children to where Rosie, Angelo, Bill, and Bick stood, with Paul and Sheilah behind them, dressed in night-class finery and holding open seats in the first pew, they passed dozens of outstretched hands and lifted, tearful faces. Classmates and neighbors; Candy, of course, as well as cops Beth had never seen out of uniform, even many who’d long since transferred to other departments; a whole contingent of Madison friends: Laurie, of course, with her husband and children, and Rob and Annie Maltese, but others, too—the blind man on the corner who had given Ben and Vincent Life Savers when Beth strolled them around the block with their Big Wheels a generation ago, and Linda, the waitress from Cappadora’s.

The opening hymn was “Amazing Grace,” and Father Cleary, who had known Beth and Pat all their lives, lost no time in forging the link. “We meet today in the midst of what the Church calendar refers to as ‘ordinary time,’” he said. “That is, we are not in the wake of or anticipating one of the great festivals of our liturgical tradition. But clearly, there are indications, including the fact that all the seats are filled”—self-conscious laughter—“that this is not an ordinary occasion; it is in fact a festival that celebrates not only the reaffirmation of our faith—and, as some of you may not recall, we do this every Sunday—” more laughter—“but of the power of faith and the mercy of God, which surpasses all our poor power to understand or estimate. Today, we celebrate, as we did in song, the mercy of God as symbolized by the homecoming of a child who was once lost, but now is found.” Father Cleary coughed, once, nervously, and Beth forgave him for his obvious awareness of the cameras, and his ambivalence; she wondered if he’d set the VCR in the rectory to tape the noon news.

“We celebrate,” Father Cleary continued, “the presence among us, in its wholeness, of the Cappadora and Kerry families, families with long roots in this Church, this school, this community, whose tragic loss nine years ago was a sorrow from afar for people all over the world, but a personal sorrow for those of us who have known Rose and Angelo and Bill and Evelyn, and Pat and Beth—children I baptized on a couple of fine Sundays some years ago. As you all know, their son Ben was taken from them nine years ago, when he was only three—and, by what can only be called a modern-day miracle, returned to them just weeks ago, not maimed, not torn, but healthy and whole.