The Deep End of the Ocean (9 page)

And so the tech attached a necklace mike to Beth’s shirt and did a sound check.

“Mrs. Cappadora, before we begin,” said Sarah Chan, “I know I shouldn’t be asking you this, but if you could manage not to talk to other media, I think this might have a great deal more impact.”

“Get over yourself, Sarah,” said Candy in a warning tone. And the videographer, a young woman in tight jeans and a huge Harvard sweatshirt, trained the lens on Sarah Chan.

“We’re here in the room of the Tremont Hotel in Parkside where the Cappadora family waits and wonders and grieves,” she said. “Less than twenty-four hours ago…”

“Sarah,” Candy said. “Do the stand-up later. Let’s get this over with.”

Abruptly, Sarah Chan sat down next to Beth and Pat on the sofa. “Now, remember, we’ll be taping, so if you feel as though you haven’t said exactly what you want to say, we can always stop and start over,” she told Beth soothingly.

And then she changed, became glowing, her face that of a veritable madonna of empathy. “Beth and Pat, this is the town where you grew up. Could you ever have imagined that something like this could happen in Parkside, in a lobby filled with all your friends from high school?”

“What kind of question is that?” Pat asked, and Chan made a tiny cutting gesture to the photog. “I mean, of course not. This is a small town. Beth and I grew up with these people. We know these streets like the back of our hand.”

“But the possibility still exists that someone you know actually took your little boy,” Sarah Chan said sorrowfully, gesturing for the tape to roll again.

“It exists, but I don’t believe it’s possible,” said Pat in what Beth considered his best Scout voice. “Whatever has happened to Ben didn’t have anything to do with Immaculata.”

“Mrs. Cappadora…Beth,” Sarah Chan asked then, “your feelings now must be unimaginable….”

Beth said, “Yes.”

“I mean, the combination of fear and wondering how long it will take, the grief….” Beth stared at the line of thin pancake that bisected Sarah Chan’s face neatly at the neck, like a mask, and said nothing. The reporter tried again: “We really have no idea how you must be feeling tonight, the second night—”

“You really have no idea,” Beth agreed.

“So,” said Sarah Chan patiently, “is there anything you would like to ask our viewers, the people of Chicagoland, who care deeply about your loss?”

Beth sat silently.

“Beth?” Sarah Chan urged her.

“Yes,” Beth said. “I want to say something to the person who took my son Ben from this hotel lobby.” Please have mercy on me, Beth thought. Please have an ounce of human heart and bring me my baby, she thought. I beg you to spare him, she thought, and said, “It’s that…it’s that I don’t expect you to bring Ben back.” Sarah Chan gasped audibly, and even the photographer jumped. Beth felt Pat cringe from her, as if he’d been stung.

But Candy Bliss held up her hand, as if to hold back traffic, and Beth looked straight and long into her eyes. As long as she watched Candy’s unblinking blue eyes, she knew with an utter certainty that she could continue. And so she did.

“I don’t expect you to bring Ben back, because you are a sick, heartless bastard.”

“Mrs. Cappadora,” Sarah Chan breathed. “Beth…”

“I don’t expect you to bring Ben back because if you could do this thing, you either don’t understand the nature of the hell we are going through, or you don’t care.”

She cleared her throat. “So, I am not going to appeal to you. But anyone else…anyone who sees Ben’s face, and who has a heart, you know that whoever is with Ben is not me or Pat. It’s not his mom or dad. So if you could, what I want you to do is, grab Ben. If you have to hurt the person, that’s okay. I will reward you; my family will reward you; my friends will reward you. We will give you everything we have.” Beth paused. “That’s all,” she said.

Sarah Chan looked up at Candy. “We can’t use this,” she said in dismay.

Evenly, Candy asked, “Why not?”

“Because it…because it’s not…I mean, pardon me, Mr. and Mrs. Cappadora, but if somebody really does have the little boy and they hear this, it’s going to just infuriate…No one expects her to say—”

“You’re afraid that people are going to dislike Beth because she’s angry at the guy who took her baby? Because she doesn’t want to beg a kidnapper? You think she’s not sympathetic enough?”

“It’s not that…” said Sarah Chan.

Candy pressed one finger against her forehead. “These are your choices, Sarah. Either you use that or you get nothing else. And I will go downstairs and get Walter Sheer or Nancy Higgins or whoever else I see in the lobby, and Beth can say the same thing again, and they will use it, and they will have this exclusive and you will not.”

“Detective, I don’t see why…”

Candy stood behind Beth and placed her hands over Beth’s head. They felt to Beth like a cap of benediction. “Because she told the truth, is why,” said Candy Bliss.

On Monday afternoon, over Beth’s objections, Pat insisted they leave the Tremont. Though she could not begin to tell him why, she knew that the close heat and the cooking smells, the family-funeral atmosphere of Italian coming and going that would permeate her in-laws’ house could strangle her. If that was possible, it would be more unbearable than the hotel, which was, while terrifying, at least muffled and anonymous. You didn’t bump up against someone you owed something to every five seconds.

But Pat was resolute; this was stupid. She had not seen Vincent or Kerry in nearly two days. Pat wanted to be with his parents and his sisters. “And I have to tell you, Bethie, I think you’ll get more of a grip if we go home to my mother’s. You’ll…come around a little,” he said. “Every minute we sit here, we’re just looking at where it happened.”

And so they walked to the car, the manager following them out onto the sidewalk and across the parking lot, explaining more than once that, of course, there would be no charge for their stay, and that the management of the Tremont, and indeed all Hospitality Hotels everywhere (everywhere in the galaxy, thought Beth), was deeply sorry for their ordeal, as if their rest had been disturbed by a noisy air conditioner. Reporters followed the manager, some actually calling out questions: Had there been any word from the kidnappers? Did the FBI have any serious suspects? Beth had never understood before how people besieged by press people managed to ignore their insistence, especially under conditions of enormous stress.

She knew now. You did not hear them. They were not even annoying, like black flies. Angelo had said that the phone rang all day at his house, reporters trying, as they explained, to expand on the “family perspective.” A police officer stationed at the Cappadoras’ usually simply took the telephone, explained politely that no one in the house could comment on an ongoing investigation, and hung up. When Angelo and Rosie’s Golden Hat catering trucks left their store on Wolf Road, news vans sometimes trailed after the drivers. Even as Beth got into the car, a young writer from
People
magazine was putting a business card into her hand and literally closing Beth’s fingers over it, telling her that
People
had a reputation for caring, exactitude, and results. “Talking to us will get the word out in every airport and drugstore in America,” she warned Beth. “So call me.” Beth nodded, closing the door and locking it, rolling up the window. She crushed the card and pushed it into the ashtray.

And yet, she thought, press, police, or family—after all, what did it matter? People could move their mouths at her if they wished. She was not, anymore, real. She was a faux woman, a toupee human. She was already putting into place her cloak of invisibility, tucking the edges of dark cloth around her mind to screen out information and light. She could go to her in-laws’ house, or Madison, or Amarillo, or Uranus. She would find neither stimulus nor peace.

Pat had accused her, softly, of being “spaced out.” His own face was rough with an eruption of hives; he stank of smoke; his hair was oily. When he lay down to sleep, he cried out. Beth offered him her drugs to shut him up, but Pat said he needed to be alert, to help the police any way he could. Beth thought otherwise. The only way she could help the police or anyone was by standing far enough from herself to deflect idiocy, the strong urge to slobber and gibber and scratch.

As they stepped into the living room from Angelo and Rosie’s front porch, Vincent threw himself on Pat, and Beth held him briefly, stroking his hair. Jill presented Kerry to Beth to cuddle and feed; but when Pat saw that Beth did not notice when the bottle became disengaged from the baby’s mouth, he took her and fed her himself, until she fell asleep. Pat’s sister Monica made pot after pot of coffee and could not pass the piano without playing a few bars of something. His sister, Teresa, simply asked everyone who came through the door, “What are we going to do?” until Pat, sharply, told her to stop. Beth sat in a huge wing chair just inside the door, and everyone who passed her, coming into the house, seemed about to genuflect. The Comos came, and Wayne Thunder, twice, and a dozen of Angelo’s business friends, who brought fruit in baskets and pans of lasagne, though Wayne said that bringing lasagne to Rosie’s was even more egregious than coals to Newcastle.

Neither Beth nor her brothers had been able to eat lasagne since their mother’s death, when it had seemed for months that the lasagne in the freezer was like the loaves and fishes—that it would never be gone, was breeding on its own. They had given lasagne to the mailman, to strangers collecting for environmental organizations, to the families of school friends.

But Rosie now accepted each new offspring with effusive grace. “We haven’t had any time to cook—how kind,” she would say in wonder, when in fact Rosie had done nothing but cook since Saturday morning, obsessively, serving full meals to whoever was in the house, and, even now, in the hot center of a June afternoon, had turned up the air conditioning so that she could bake pork chops with peas and tomatoes in the oven without causing anyone to stroke.

Just before dinner, when Rosie was elaborately setting the table in the formal dining room with its mirrored wall, Beth heard Angelo in the kitchen talking with another man, an unfamiliar voice. Something tripped an alarm in her, and she got up and walked around the end of the hall, until she stood just inside the door of the bathroom next to the east kitchen wall.

He saw her anyway.

“Charley,” said Beth.

“Bethie honey,” said the man, who wore an immaculate white shirt, red tie, and blue pinstripe with an almost undetectable thread of crimson. “Bethie honey, I swear to God. I swear to God. What is this world?” He held her against him, and in spite of herself Beth felt that unmistakable surrender to the embrace of an Italian man her father’s age, the feeling that you had managed to crawl onto shore and been cut on the sharp stones, but everything would be all right as soon as you got some dry clothes on.

She didn’t know his real name. Yes, Beth suddenly thought, she did know it. Ruffalo. His daughter was named Janet. Charley Ruffalo. But she had never called him anything except Charley Two, though of course not to his face, because he said everything twice. In some obscure, village-linked way, he was related to Angelo—they called each other “cousin”—and Charley ran what Pat lovingly called the most profitable single-truck delivery company in the Northern Hemisphere. “Bethie,” he said now. “I’ve been doing my best. I’ve been doing my best. I’ve talked with some guys. And Bethie, Angie, I swear to God, I swear to God, there’s nothing. There’s nothing out there.”

He meant, Beth knew—and Angelo knew she knew—that Ben had not been taken by professional criminals.

“Thank you, Charley,” she said, and heard Angelo take a breath, sharply. They spoke in Italian. Charley kissed Beth, his cheek soft as a leather glove soaked in Aramis.

“Eat,” said Rosie, with not even a trace of her usual vigor. Everyone sat down. Vincent ate heartily, and so did the current Parkside cop in residence, a black kid named Cooper, but none of the other adults, so far as Beth could observe, did anything but cut up their chops. Teresa’s husband, Joey, finally threw down his napkin and stormed away from the table, Teresa bustling after him, casting back an apologetic look at her mother. In the middle of the nondinner, Bick showed up to tell Beth that their older brother, Paul, who’d just returned from a business trip, was on his way. “I didn’t know what to tell him, Bethie,” Bick said. “Is there any news that isn’t on the news?”

From the rim of her eye, Beth saw the young cop stiffen. But she said in her mind, This is my brother, fool, a lawyer, not a gossip columnist, and said aloud, “They found his shoe. They found Ben’s shoe in the newsstand.”

Bick held her again. “So they think someone has him?”

“They think someone has him.”

“So did the local cops call the FBI?”

And so Pat explained the complexities of kidnapping law, as best he understood it—Beth was certain he didn’t fully understand it—about how it was either a federal crime or it wasn’t, depending on whether the kidnapper crossed state lines or air space above state borders or Lake Michigan or an ocean, and that it was a state crime if the kidnapper took the abducted child from one end of California to the other, even by air, and that every state’s law on the matter differed slightly. And in the middle of it all, Beth’s head began to throb and she went upstairs in search of her drug bottle and fell on Rosie’s bed, while in her dreams voices came and went like tide, Candy’s and Angelo’s and Bick’s and, finally, one voice that said, “Mama?”

Beth screamed. She sat up in bed and screamed again. And then Vincent, who stood next to the bed in his T-shirt and underpants, screamed also and burst into tears. Rosie came running down the hall with Monica at her heels and scooped up Vincent, muttering, “
Dormi, dormi,
Vincenzo, sweetheart.”

“What the fuck, Beth?” Pat grabbed her arm ungently.

“I thought—I thought it was Ben.” He let her go then and cradled the back of her skull in his hand. Ben was their come-into-bed child. Though he fought the process of going to his room, once asleep, Vincent had slept, sprawled, independent and entirely confident, from babyhood. But Ben rarely passed a night without slipping into his parents’ room, vaulting his crib bars like a gymnast until Beth took them down in defeat, crawling and then walking into his parents’ room, sometimes leaving the sheet between Beth and Pat soaking cold in the morning. “I walk-sleeped,” he would explain to them in recent months, since his language had become fluent. It was Ben, also, who called Beth “Mama,” not “Mom” or “Ma,” as Vincent did. In her sedative blanket, Beth had not recognized Vincent’s voice.

Staggering, she got up and made her way down the hall to the guest room. It was the first time in all the years she had known Rosie—basically all the years she could remember—that her mother-in-law had looked at Beth with true scorn. Cradling Vincent, who was falling out of sobs into a hiccuping sleep, she motioned Beth away. Beth walked out onto the terrace off the guest room. Joey and Teresa were staying in there, though evidently they were not yet asleep. There were cars parked all up and down the block, reporters sitting on blankets sipping coffee and Coke from paper cups as if they were at a music festival. They did not see her. There was a Parkside squad parked at the corner of the block, an orange sawhorse set up as a desultory roadblock—as Beth watched, a Channel Nine van drove right around it. Behind her, Joey opened the bedroom door.

“Joey, have you got a butt?” Beth asked.

“Bethie, I didn’t know you smoked anymore,” Joey, the gentlest of men, told her softly.

“I don’t,” she told him.

They sat side by side on the terrace and watched the reporters mill, some doing stand-ups for the early broadcasts, their backs to the lighted, entirely presentable shuttered front of Rosie and Angelo’s white stone ranch.

“We’ll find him, Bethie,” Joey said fiercely.

“Oh, Joe,” said Beth, putting her arms around him, overcome with tenderness for this kid brother-in-law, tenderness she could not seem to smooth over her own, real little boy, at last asleep again down the hall. And why not?

“Bethie, I would give my right arm, my leg, to find Ben.”

“I know, honey,” she said.

Teresa came out in her nightgown. “I’m pregnant,” she said abruptly.

“Jesus fucking Christ on a pony, Tree,” her husband hissed, getting up.

“Joey, it’s okay. Congratulations, Tree,” Beth told her. “
Buona fortuna.
How much?”

“Two months,” said Teresa.

“Does Pat know?”

“No. Should I tell him? Rosie knows. She said I shouldn’t tell you. I’m sorry I told you. My mouth just opened. I’m crazy in the head, Bethie. We’re all crazy.”

“I know,” said Beth. “Got another butt, Joey?”

After Joey and Teresa lay down on top of the quilt, Beth sat watching the sky drain of darkness. She repeated in her mind the periodic table. Oxygen. Nitrogen. Carbon. Silicon. Sodium. Chlorine. Neon. Strontium. Argon. She knew there were some they hadn’t had when she was in high school. Technetium? Californium? Or was she just making that up? The cigarette burned her fingertips. She lay down on the painted wooden floor. Kerry was crying. Someone would feed her.

At eight, Candy came to take Beth and Pat to a lab in Elmbrook for their lie detector tests. Later, Pat told Beth the young technician had made the same speech to both of them: “Relax,” he said. “Physically, this will be the least painful thing that ever happens to you. I always tell people to relax, but of course they can’t relax, it’s a polygraph—who can relax? But it doesn’t even really matter if you can’t relax, because I’ll be able to read your baseline whatever state you’re in. And I imagine your state right now is pretty rough. Now, I’m going to start with the question that’s the hardest. What’s your name?” Both Beth and Pat learned afterward that their answers indicated deception when they were asked if they were responsible for Ben’s disappearance.

“That’s no biggie,” Candy told Beth. “We can always run it again if we have to.”

When they got back to Rosie and Angelo’s, Ellen was there to drive Beth to the volunteer center in the basement of Immaculata’s church hall. Beth asked, “What volunteer center?”

“You know,” Ellen said. “Leafleting and searches. This lady came yesterday morning from Crimestoppers and taught us how to set it up. These first seventy-two hours are critical.”