The Deep End of the Ocean (7 page)

Ben was a real child in the urban night.

“Ben!” Beth screamed. And again, as the fragile crust of her muddled restraint cracked and then broke entirely, “Ben! Ben! Ben! Ben!” It got easier. “Ben!” Beth screamed. “Ben!” When Pat put his hand over her arm to try to ease her down, she leaned over and seized it in her teeth, biting hard, drawing blood. The room took on the aspect of a hospital emergency room, a sudden bustle. Pat and Jimmy tried to strong-arm Beth; but she tossed them off as they scrabbled to grab different parts of her. She was an eel, a thing coated with resistant gel. The manager ran for the purple security guards, who watched in pity as Beth thrashed, blocking her path to the door every time she got to her feet. She was strong, famously strong. She noticed everything: Pat’s bleeding hand; the fearful, furtive glances; the looking away of the departing couples who had to pass through the lobby. She saw Nick with his shiny charcoal-brown head of curls in his hands; she thought he might be crying. His back was heaving up and down. Beth stopped stock-still for a deep breath, and then she screamed again, “Ben! Ben! Ben!”

Candy Bliss told the manager tersely, “Call a doctor.”

“I don’t know a doctor,” said the formal, chubby manager.

“Well, don’t you have an emergency physician on call to the hotel?”

“We’ve never had…What does she want?”

“You simple—” said Candy Bliss, letting out stored breath in a huff. “Shit. Call 911.”

Beth was wearying; her arm muscles burned. But she only had to look at the bright banquet of children’s photos—primary-colored, gleaming—on the coffee table and she would feel the scream percolate up again, as impossible to resist or contain as an orgasm. “Ben! Ben! Ben!”

The manager brought Candy Bliss a portable phone. “The mother is having trouble…. Yes, exhausted…. Yes, you can hear her…. Well, no, not a transport…. Send someone out.”

“Christ God, Beth, please stop!” her father told her firmly.

“Ben!” she screamed at his heavy, veined face. He looked like a hound, sad-eyed and pouching. A bluff, once-handsome man, features blurred by years of gin gimlets. “Beeeeennnnn!” Tears formed in Bill’s eyes. Pat was repelled—shivering, he backed away from the couch where Beth struggled.

Beth looked at the clock. It was blurred. Could it be eleven? She screamed, “Beeeennnn!”

A paramedic, very cute, slipped a blood-pressure cuff around Beth’s arm. And the doctor who arrived, minutes later, in a jogging suit, squirted golden liquid out of a syringe; the drops flicked down. “We need to get you some rest, here,” he told her, swabbing parts of her arms and hands with alcohol, whatever patches of skin he could reach as she flailed. “Listen,” he said to the room at large, “we need—”

Nick charged across the room then and half-lay on top of Beth; he smelled wonderful, spicy. His chest was harder than Pat’s, bigger. He held her left arm against her body while the paramedic extended the right. The shot was painful, stinging, aching as it seeped in. “Bethie,” said Nick. “I know, I know.”

“What the fuck?” Beth said, laughing. “You don’t know.
I
don’t even know.”

The medicine was spreading her legs, stilling her chest, compressing her jaw; she felt a line of saliva gather at the corner of her mouth. It was anesthetic. “You can operate now,” she told the doctor; he didn’t know it was her small joke.

And then black wings brushed her face. And fell.

When Beth awoke, she was tucked hard into a huge bed. Tucked so hard she was nearly straitjacketed.

Ben.

Every available light in the room was on. Directly beside her, in a second king-sized bed, Pat was asleep on top of the bedspread. “Pat?” she whispered. He was oblivious, snoring.

Beth had to pee. She got up, danced sideways for a step, then made her way into the lush, cream-tiled bathroom. She peed, steady, calm, purged, as if the medicine had deadened a section of brain stem. She wanted to brush her teeth. I am doing the things people do, Beth thought, still wanting to eliminate my body’s wastes, clean myself, quench my thirst. Unbidden, Beth thought how even when her mother died, she and Ellen were stunned, not that life went on, but how quickly life went on, and how unchanged it was. People could not wait to eat or to get a newspaper. The young priest had told Beth this eating, this talking, these were affirmations of life. He was the humanist kind; he thought he could trick people into Catholicism by pretending the program had been revamped. Beth knew very well, back then, that she did not want to affirm her life and health. She knew that even more securely now. She simply wanted to be shed of bodily urgencies. She forced open a window crosshatched with wire, and craned her neck up and out. There was an alley down there, narrow, and a wall, the other wing of the hotel, that went up farther than Beth could see. A cat was down there, stirring among the Dumpsters. Beth tapped the glass; the cat looked up. She saw its gold eyes snap and its maniacal grin. She did not feel Ben, neither his death or his reaching. She slammed the window closed. Pat gargled a snore. You dumb boy, she thought, looking at him. I don’t like you.

Opening the closets, cracking the drawers, she found no luggage. Nothing of hers. She could not find a clock. Pat winced in his sleep.

Beth looked out into the corridor. It was absolutely hushed, dim-lighted. She could not find her shoes. Faintly, from outside, she could hear the whump of beating helicopter blades.

Down in the elevator, in the lobby—it was lighter, but still. At the desk, a young blond woman slumbered on her cupped hand. When Beth approached, she sat up and stifled a little shriek.

“Where are the police?” Beth asked her.

“Oh,” said the clerk, instantly sympathetic. “They left.”

“They left?”

“Well, that is, they didn’t
leave
—there are a lot of them outside. But they took the phones and stuff down and went back to the station.” She brightened up. “Channel Five was here. And Seven—Eyewitness News. They set up stuff right here in the lobby for the ten o’clock news. But the lady police chief wouldn’t let them wake you up.”

Beth nodded.

“I need my things.”

“Ah, toothpaste? A toothbrush? I can get you one.”

“No, my own things. My bag.”

“I think it’s locked up.” The young clerk pawed through a ring of keys, found Beth’s duffel, handed it over to her. Beth dragged it to a washroom off the lobby. She removed her reeking shirt and pulled on a T-shirt over her jeans. She found a cotton sweater, bright with red and gold beads. For the luncheon on Sunday. Red shiny flats. She put all of it on. Bodily urgencies. She washed her face and brushed her teeth. As she shoved the toilet articles back into the bag, she saw Ben’s clothes tumbled among her own underwear, and Kerry’s tiny tights, her footie pajamas. Ben’s rubber sandals. His Blackhawks jersey. She was such a bad, haphazard packer. Beth zipped her duffel and lay down on it, her forehead on the tile floor.

Then she rose, lugged the duffel back out to the counter.

“I have to go out,” she told the clerk.

“Do you want me to call someone? Your friend—” she glanced at a clipboard in front of her—“Ms. DeNunzio?”

“I just have to go out.”

“It’s the middle of the night. No stores are open.”

Ben had been missing more than twelve hours. This girl thought Beth wanted to go shopping. The girl asked, “Do you want a coffee?”

Beth said, “No thank you,” and walked out into the night, which was balmy, Floridian, cleansed.

A half-dozen squads ranged around the circle drive in a loose ring, including a van Beth assumed from the array of electronic plumage on top housed a portable communications center. Cables snaked from the van across the sidewalk, under and through the doors of the Tremont. The fabled Eyewitness News truck was still there as well, its white-eyed lights giving the whole dark stretch of pavement an Oscar-night feel; and a group of what Beth assumed to be print journalists were talking with one of the young detectives.
They
were talking, but he was just smiling and shaking his head. She watched the photogs, their arms draped with the heavy groceries of their profession, lining up to shoot the squad cars under the arch that said “Tremont Hotel.” Boring stock shot, Beth thought; that should be me taking it. Or I should be in it, to make the shot better. She crossed behind the van, and not a single person seemed to notice her passing.

Out on the quiet street, street lamps—the hazy, muted halogen kind her father put so much stock in—threw the only illumination.

Ben. A moonless night.

Looking across the street, Beth could see the blue roof lights of Immaculata. There was no traffic to dodge. Beth crossed the street, growing stronger on gulps of air. She peered into the door of C Building. Inside, all was darkness. Think of C Building, she told herself—that’s something that won’t hurt if you think about it. In C Building, the juniors and seniors would congregate before school. A sophomore could come in if she was dating a junior guy; but these miscegenetic relationships were barely tolerated. Beth could see the door to the student council office—the door for which Beth, as an officer, had her own key. She and Nick would draw the curtains after third lunch, lock the door, and lie on the meeting table, sweating and probing. All through the afternoon’s trigonometry and English III, Beth’s stomach would ache and contract. She had believed then that everyone who looked at her knew, could see Nick’s handprints on her as if they had been impressed with luminous paint.

She walked through the courtyard, past the statue, past the marquee that read “See ‘Dracula!’ at Olde Tyme Dramatics” and “Welcome Home Immaculata Class of ’70!” Out past the field house, the tennis courts, out to the field.

Just before the gate to the bleachers, she crossed the red wooden bridge that spanned a tributary of Salt Creek. For a generation, village engineers had tried to dam the little stream; in spring, its swollen overrun made the football field a slippery marsh. Nothing worked. The creek always reestablished its course. The bridge was so defaced with carvings the paint was virtually nonexistent. It looked red only from a distance. Teenagers from years that followed Beth’s own youth, teenagers more skilled at tagging with a spray-paint can, had scrawled ominous messages: “Men of the 2-and-2, Arise!” “Spick Power Rules!” There were also the usual romantic epitaphs: “Justin Smashed My Heart,” “Christine Blows Ryan.”

Beth once would have swung herself down, briefly, to see whether the heavily etched marks that proclaimed “Steven and Ellen 4-Ever More” were still there. “4-Ever” had not even spanned junior year; Ellen later said Steven Barrett’s band-major lips made her flesh creep, though it had taken her six months to decide that it wasn’t her fault. But Beth knew the carving remained, a chestnut. Tonight, instead of looking, Beth stood over the stream, no more than half a foot deep, intent on seeing a clue.

But she knew she needn’t look for Ben here.

Ben would not willingly go near water. “It is impossible,” the YMCA instructor once wrote to Beth, “to evaluate Benjamin’s progress at swimming because he refuses to get into the water.” When they swam, even in a bright, shallow pool, Ben attached himself to Beth’s waist like a python. He would relax his legs and kick near the steps, with tentative joy. But if Beth walked out farther, even if the water was only up to her ribcage, he would brace himself around her, seem to want to meld into her. A solid, sloppy swimmer who loved water, Beth could not imagine the origins of this fear—had she ever terrified the children with drowning tales? Held them under for a panicky instant, intended for a tease? Never, not ever. There had been that one time when Ben fell off the pier at Lake Delavan. But hadn’t her brother snatched Ben out of the water instantly, almost before his face got wet? With Beth screaming like a Comanche the whole time at Vic to be more careful…Vincent swam with quicksilver efficiency, had since he was four. Even baby Kerry now struggled to get out of Pat’s arms and paddle.

When they visited Pat’s aunt in Florida, Vincent ran into the waves; Pat had to chase him and explain the undertow. Ben would not even walk on the damp sand. “There is too much water,” he told Beth, solemnly.

“Ben,” she had coaxed him then, “come in, just a little. Mama will hold you.”

Ben, stolid in his neon-pink trunks, pointed. “Is that the deep end?” His terror was like a scent on him. He didn’t even trust Beth to get too close to him, as if she would overwhelm him and rush him into the water. Beth thought, back then, he’s hostage to us—to people so large we could compel him to do almost anything. She could not remember ever being so small, vulnerable, so dependent on goodwill.

“There’s no deep end of the ocean, Ben,” she told him gently. “That’s the shore. And it goes on and on, all along here, for miles. You have to go out and out a long way before it gets deep. That’s way out there, where the boats go.”

“So this is the three feet?” Ben persisted.

“Not even that, Ben. It’s not even as deep as a pool, along the edge here. Look, it isn’t even up to Vincent’s knees.”

“I don’t want to go in the deep end of the ocean,” Ben told her. “Sharks are there. Do I have to go?”

“No, no, Benbo,” Beth had said, scooping him up, unsure whether she should just stomp out there and dip him, get it over with. She didn’t want her boy to grow up timid, shy of this, of that. “Don’t be afraid. I would be with you. Mama would never let the ocean snatch you away. I would hold you tightest and tightest, wouldn’t I?”