None of those things could have happened.
And yet they all had.
No one else in Beth’s nuclear or extended family was concerned about this … this … genetic strain, which Beth considered obvious, like a birthmark, like the certain doom manifest on the face of the young Abraham Lincoln in early photographs. They all acted as though they were like any other family and considered Beth, if not neurotic, then high-strung. But they weren’t like any other family. Beth had to pick up the slack for all of them, turning the events of her life over and over in her mind like a snow globe so that she never forgot.
Hence, she lost her job.
Beth was an accomplished photographer, and though she didn’t need to work for income—her husband’s restaurants were gustatory landmarks in Chicago—she worked for love. In middle age, she was nationally regarded for her black-and-white portraiture and photos of architecture. Her children had burgeoning lives—her oldest, Vincent, making successively bigger films; her beautiful daughter, Kerry, singing progressively bigger roles in bigger operas; and Ben taking a bigger role in the family restaurant business. Because she still liked the challenge of color, and because she loved working with the stylist, one of her regular jobs was shooting long essays and covers for
Sense and Sensibility
, a slick journal that combined the coverage of luxury items for ravishing people with provocative and durable journalism.
She was doing that the day she lost her job.
The dangerously thin and gamine actress Anne Dresden was eating slices of onion, as Beth would have eaten an apple, and struggling to text with her free hand. Every time Dresden twitched, she would knock some beribboned parasol or fold of gown ever so slightly out of place, and Beth, who had set up with her ancient Hasselblad, would have to move her things; then the stylist, the legendary Ginny Culp, would have to study Beth’s Polaroids and the blowup of a fragment of Seurat’s
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
, which was what this shoot was supposed to simulate. Beth was shooting what she couldn’t see—Ginny’s digital pointillism—and the children surrounding Anne Dresden were beginning to scratch and sweat in their full muslin getups.
“We’re good now,” Ginny said. She was famously taciturn, the former editor of
Splendour
, brought low by age, the economy, and the seeming disinclination of her rival at
Vogue
to either grow old or die. Everything was perfect again—the onion coaxed out of Dresden’s hand, the children powdered and mollified—when Anne Dresden’s phone chimed. Dresden, who would soon star in a film based on a Sondheim musical, although she couldn’t sing a note, got up and left. As she passed Beth on her way to privacy, she stepped on the hem of the antique skirt—Beth heard the ancient fabric tear—covered the phone, and confided, “I’m obsessed with him. We can’t go ten minutes without talking. And he’s in France. Like, buying Old Masters. And I’m doing this. Isn’t it ironic? Oh, my God, he just can’t stand not being on the same planet with me.”
“It’s rough,” said Ginny Culp.
“But, Anne,” Beth pleaded. “We have everything so perfect now, and with the children so restless, it’s not going to last. Give me just five minutes. Okay?” Anne Dresden’s publicist, whose bronze hair matched her skin, glanced up from her clipboard.
“She prefers you to call her Miss Dresden, not Anne,” the woman said.
“I can’t do that,” Beth said. “I’m old enough to be her mother.”
“We need you to,” said the publicist.
“I am finished!” Anne Dresden called. “I need to be out of here!”
“It’s a chosen name, don’t you think?” said Ginny Culp,
sotto voce
. “You couldn’t really call yourself Anne Gallipoli, right? Or Anne Hiroshima?”
“Really, it’s me,” Beth said suddenly, collapsing her aluminum reflector. “Really I’m the one who’s out of here. I’m going to be late, and where are we anyhow—Galena? Galesburg?” They were somewhere in rural Illinois (Beth no longer accepted out-of-town assignments, except during school vacations), and Beth knew it would take hours for her to make it to her granddaughter Stella’s school on time. Collecting and stowing her things, she set out for the car. Ginny Culp ran after her.
“Beth, this is a cover! She won’t really walk. She’s twenty-six years old. She’s just being shitty. Those costumes are rentals. They cost a bundle. We can’t reschedule this. You already shot the background.” But Beth knew they could do everything Ginny insisted was impossible.
Sense and Sensibility
could find some hungry youngster tomorrow, probably with a fresher eye, who would kiss Anne Dresden’s skinny butt and charge a hundred bucks for the chance to simply make that cover—which was paired with an interior shot of Dresden with Sondheim that took up a single column in a three-hundred-page magazine.
“I really have to go, Ginny. I mean it. I have to get someplace. Right now.” Beth kissed Ginny Culp’s deeply lined cheek. “I’ll see you if they ever hire me again.”
“They’ll never hire you again.”
“Oh, well,” Beth said. “Oh, you know. Oh, well.”
Stella’s other grandmother, Candy Bliss, was the police chief in Parkside. Ben and Eliza lived there with Stella, in a brownstone for which Candy had cleverly given them the down payment as a wedding gift. Because Beth’s husband, Pat, was (in Beth’s opinion) overly concerned with ostentation—he drove a Cadillac and wore custom-made suits, calling this good sense and good business—Beth lived in some horsey suburb on two acres with a pool only visitors used. In good traffic, she had to drive an hour to see Stella. It was already nearly noon. Candy had reassured Beth that she was one minute from Stella’s school, could drive by anytime, and had promised to check on Stella every day when the child got off the bus (it was Stella’s first year on the bus and she was enchanted). But Candy behaved a bit too nonchalantly for Beth’s tastes, like all the rest of them.
“What if you’re in a high-speed chase or something at three in the afternoon?” Beth asked.
“I’ll have somebody else check on her. I’ll have a squad drive by the house.”
“What if you get shot and forget?” Beth asked. “The sitter will be late and Stella will be kidnapped.”
Candy laughed—she laughed.
She said, “Beth, I think about stuff like that all the time too. But we have to get … past the past.”
Ben and Eliza agreed. They would not allow Beth to pick Stella up from school each day and drive her home, delivering her into the plump arms of the sitter. Both of them believed that too much anxiety would frighten Stella rather than reassure her.
Were they insane?
Beth drove as though pursued by Nazi robots in hovercraft and barely made it to Stella’s school before the last bell. She had just parked her car when she heard a single muffled
whoop
from the police car that pulled in behind her. Had she been speeding? Since Stella started school in September, Beth had gotten a ticket in Algonquin and two warnings in Harrington, her first traffic violations in twenty years.
But it was only Candy.
“You see that stoplight back there, lady?” Candy said, leaning into Beth’s car and placing her elbows on the open window. She wore a cream-colored blazer and long, slim pants, with a scarf at her neck printed in peacock tones, and looked as though she had just stepped out of the shower. Candy didn’t chase subjects on foot anymore, but when she had, she would have looked exactly this same way.
“Shit no. I ran a red light?” Beth said.
“You didn’t run a red light.”
“What then?”
“Bethie, I’m getting these calls about someone hanging around the school every day.…”
Beth sat up so abruptly she knocked off her sunglasses on the visor. “So! How do you feel now? Still think I’m crazy for being afraid for Stella?”
Candy pressed one perfect French-manicured squoval against her forehead, between her eyes, a gesture so singular to Candy that Beth could almost hear the sigh that was its invariable companion.
“It’s
you
they’re complaining about,” Candy said. “My guys ran your plates and they were scared to tell me. But parents describe this lady who never gets out of the car. She just watches. People think you’re a kidnapper, so to speak.”
Beth glanced around her at the other cars sliding into place to gather their children.
“So what are you doing here?”
“I was in the neighborhood. Sort of.”
“You mean, the neighborhood as in the Midwest?”
“Sort of.” Beth made a face.
“You have to stop this, Bethie. The sitter hasn’t been late in five months, not by a minute. And I said, if I can’t check it out myself, I will send someone to do that. It’s not like I think you’re paranoid—”
“I am paranoid.”
“Well, so am I. But we have to go on living as though we aren’t or we’re going to give ourselves strokes, and then Stella will grow up without grandmothers and be weird.”
And so Beth was at home when Marie Caruso phoned that February afternoon. Marie was a nice person; she’d started out as one of the hundreds of reporters who interviewed Beth during the days and years after Ben’s kidnapping, so long ago, and had become a minor acquaintance. She had grown up in the town where Beth’s in-laws, Rose and Angelo, still lived. Pat had known Marie’s older sister, Gia, and all of them knew the terrible story of Gia’s own family.
Another family peopled with statistical impossibilities!
This niece was the subject of the call. Marie asked if she might come over some weekend morning. Her niece—what was the girl’s name, Sylvia? Serena?—had a project to suggest to Beth. Beth had no idea why, but she agreed. Not that she had anything better to do. With only local assignments for newspapers and magazines, and now absent the daily penitential drive to ensure Stella’s safety, Beth found herself with long, pensive, surplus days at the dullest time of the year, as Chicago grudgingly gave up winter for spring.
She tried home projects.
Although a nice young man cleaned the whole house each week, Beth told him not to bother with the grout in any of the five bathrooms; she was going to bleach that herself. The grout-bleaching kit became a fixture in the bathroom. Beth and Pat stepped around it. Sometimes, Beth used a sheet of paper toweling to dust it.
“I have an idea,” Pat said one morning, when he finished bellowing after he’d stepped on the business end of the grout brush. “Let’s just try letting the cleaning guy clean the grout. If he fails, we can fire him and have him kneecapped by my father’s friends.”
“That’s nonsense,” Beth said. “I’ll clean the grout. I have time.”
“That brush and bleach have been there for more than a month.”
“I’m going to get to it.”
“Why,” Pat asked, “would you want to live in a house where the grout hasn’t been cleaned since the tile was laid just so you can say you have a project? Why don’t you do something? Do you have that disease where people don’t like big spaces? What do you call it?”
“Pat, that’s a crazy thing to say.”
“That’s a crazy thing to say? I don’t know, Bethie. What are you waiting for?”
Pat was finishing his daily routine of dolling himself up. Their family’s trials had nearly killed him. And now Pat was the same chipper-phony guy, dapper and quick with a joke, still able to convince almost anyone that he had truly hoped to run into no one on earth more than that person on that day. Pat had fully inhabited his previous self, a knot of nervous energy masquerading as a fella without a care in the world, bouncing up on the balls of his feet in his four-hundred-dollar shoes as he waited for the restaurant to open its doors—as avidly as he had waited the first time—day after month after year.
Now Beth sat in the nook at the turn of her stairs, pawing through the camera bag she hadn’t opened for months, looking for the leather-bound day book—a birthday gift from Pat—in which she might, just might, have written down the time of the planned visit. Dust moozies decorated the strap of the bag like eiderdown. She removed her still-new digital Nikon D3, squat-bodied and powerful, and her profusion of Fuji lenses, then markers and paper, receipts and empty cans of Life Savers singles, and, finally, the book. Now months old and utterly pristine. She had no idea when these people would arrive her house. It was either at ten or two. Beth was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt from the Atlanta Opera.
If it was two, Beth would run out and buy some chips and dip and wine—wine! It was nine in the morning. Some … juice or something. If it was ten, she had forty-five minutes to make coffee and nothing to serve with it except the end of a loaf of bread, hard as horn.
The doorbell rang.
Jesus! No way. It wasn’t ten
or
two. It was nine fifteen.
Beth set her cameras down on the stairs.
Through the tall door sidelight, Beth could see Marie, in a winter-white suit and a scarf made of some beautiful, colorless stuff—were these called neutrals? And the girl. She was tall, taller than Candy, maybe five-six or five-seven, with long wavy hair. She gazed the other way, at the DeGroots’ horses, which were picturesquely cropping their hay in what would have been, in any other town, the front yard.
As Beth opened the door, the girl flipped her shiny hair and turned toward Beth. For an instant, Beth was afraid that she might cry out. “You must be—” Beth began. Her voice sounded like a fork dragged over tin. She cleared her throat.
“Sicily,” the girl said, extending her hand. Beth took it, and then Beth and Marie exchanged a brief shoulder hug.
“Come in,” Beth said. “I lost the message about when to expect you, so if you want some stale bread and coffee with nothing, you’ve come to the right place. Or I can run up and get dressed and we can go to a restaurant …” This was stupid. The girl, Sicily, would not want to go into a restaurant, or so Beth thought.
“If you don’t mind, Beth, the coffee with nothing sounds good,” Marie said. “This is a little private.”
“And I was out so late last night my aunt practically had to roll me out of bed,” Sicily said, canting her eyes skyward. Okay. So, unless Sicily went jogging in the dark, she evidently didn’t avoid public places, despite how painful it was to look at her.