The Deep End of the Ocean (10 page)

There had been three hundred and twenty Immaculata graduates. And there must have been, Pat later said, a hundred and fifty people connected with the school alone in the church hall basement, leaving out the handful of Rosie’s neighbors, Bill’s lady friend, and the scattering of friends who grew up with Beth’s and Pat’s sisters and brothers. Nick’s wife, Trisha, was there, and all the cheerleaders, and Jimmy Daugherty’s wife, and twenty other mothers, classmates, and classmates’ wives. There was the principal of Immaculata, the only remaining nun on the whole teaching staff, and four other faculty, including Beth’s ancient English teacher, Miss Sullivan, ten years retired. Wayne, whose management training job with AT&T was so intense he estimated he took three days off a year (all Sundays), was there, having canceled all his appointments indefinitely for only the second time in his working life. (The first time, he took a four-week cruise to Australia on a boat with nine hundred other gay men. “We were in the middle of the ocean and I couldn’t get a date,” he despairingly told Beth later. “I might as well work.”) Wayne was in charge of the media, he told Beth. He would screen all requests for interviews and photos and pass on those he thought might advance the search. Even Cecil Lockhart had signed up to come, but then couldn’t at the last minute because her mother had taken ill. “But she sends her love, Beth,” said Ellen. “And I really believe she meant it. She’s going to come and work when her mom gets better. You know, she has a little boy not much older than Ben, from her second marriage—or her third, or her fifth. I didn’t even know that, but she sounded so sick over it. Everyone does, Bethie. Everyone.”

Just after Beth and Pat arrived, Laurie Elwell walked in, carrying a stack of three-ring binders. She looked as though she had been in bed with flu and shouldn’t have gotten up. Since college, Laurie had been Beth’s best friend in Madison; she sometimes thought her only friend. She was no more like Beth than the moon is like a hubcap—even as a college freshman, she was cool and self-assured in a way Beth was relatively sure she herself would never be, even as an adult. Laurie was one of those girls who already seemed to know everyone in the financial aid office; presidents of sororities left messages for
her,
not the other way around. Laurie seemed to have been born with an open trunk to the essential information of the universe, and, as the binders proved, she intended to keep it all on file.

Beth and Ellen fought and hung up on one another at least once a year; but Beth’s relation to Laurie was as free of the dark underpinnings of childhood and common origin as a summer afternoon. They had met at the time people reinvent themselves, talked each other through the panicky boredom, the manifest prides and fears of parenthood and long marriages.

When Beth saw Laurie and the others, she thought, only for an instant, Now is the time of the reunion. Now I will be able to act.

Beth had said that Laurie could win the Nobel Prize for Organization; and she was in laureate form. The long tables usually used to hold the food at parish teas and wedding breakfasts were covered with phones and stacks of leaflets, posters on red and yellow and blue paper. Pat picked one up, and Beth read the bold-print headline,
HAVE YOU SEEN BEN TODAY?
, over a thankfully unfamiliar picture of Ben that Ellen had taken last summer in her yard and a phone number Wayne had commandeered for its unforgettability: the numbers spelled out
FIND BEN
. From one of her notebooks Laurie removed and unfolded a detailed map of the west-side neighborhoods in three panels that, stapled together and tacked up, covered the better portion of one of the walls.

“We’ll have a red team, a blue team, and a yellow team,” she told Beth and Pat, opening another binder to computer-printed lists she had compiled over the telephone with Wayne and Ellen. “The captains of each team will be responsible for assigning blocks for the team members to leaflet. And then each team will have volunteers here who’ll coordinate calls we get from each of the areas.”

“When are you going to start leafleting?”

Laurie looked surprised. “Why, now,” she said.

“How long can you stay?” Beth asked.

“Well, forever,” Laurie told her.

Candy spoke briefly to the assembled volunteers, telling them that every piece of information they gathered was potentially the one nugget of information that could lead them to Ben. “You can’t overestimate the importance of your being here, both to Beth and Pat and to us,” she said. “You are going to be our eyes and ears in this area for the next few days, and however long or brief the time you can give is valuable time.” She told about the shoulder-to-shoulder searches planned for open areas later in the afternoon, and how even those who had to work during the day could join the police in those efforts in the light hours of the early evening. She warned volunteers against attempting to interview residents or to conduct searches on their own. “We have to be one body, with the head of that body right here,” she said, turning to Pat. “Pat, do you have anything to add?”

Pat’s eyes misted. “Just that we thank you. We thank you. Ben thanks you.”

It was Anita Daugherty who stood up and began to applaud, and then everyone else stood and joined in. The peculiarity of the gesture stunned Beth, who turned away and fled for the stairs to the first floor; she supposed it meant encouragement, solidarity. But it sounded like a pep rally, and with volunteers laden with leaflets about to surge up the stairs behind her, she felt like a sick animal in search of a refuge to lie in.

The Chapel of Our Lady opened directly to the right of the altar. There, Beth had taken her flowers to lay in front of the Virgin as a first communicant in her white miniature of a bridal dress. There, she had always believed, she would come as a bride. Now, she wished only that the little sky-blue room with its faded gilt stars on the ceiling had a door to close behind her. Beth knelt and folded her hands. “Hail Mary, full of grace…” she said softly. But they were words. They came from nowhere but the back of her throat. In all her life, Beth had felt only twice that she had actually prayed—that is, established a connection between herself and some other consciousness: once in her mother’s hospital room shortly after Evie had died; once the day the bleeding stopped, when she’d believed she was miscarrying the pregnancy that turned out to be Ben. For most of the rest of her life, though she knew her Confiteor, her Rosary, her creeds (in Latin at least) as well as she knew the spelling of her name, she had felt outside herself when she said them, even when the linguistic power of the words themselves made her throat close with emotion. “Holy Mary,” she whispered again, thinking, If I cannot believe now, if I cannot ask for help now, even given the strong doubt that I would ever be heard except by atmosphere, that I would ever receive anything but the borrowed peace of meditation, if I cannot uncurl my closed hand even a little, I am not deserving of Ben. I have to pray for Ben, she thought. “Holy Mary,” she said, the words clicking, dry against the dry roof of her mouth, sounds. “I can’t,” Beth said.

She smelled Candy before she saw her, smelled the distinct lemony bite that underlay her cologne, like a telegram of cleanliness. The row of blue-velvet-padded kneelers extended a full five feet along a gold rail in front of the white marble folds of the Virgin’s gown. A few feet from Beth, Candy knelt, one hand over her eyes.

“Are you Catholic?” Beth asked.

“No,” said Candy. “I was just waiting for you.”

“There’s nothing to wait for,” Beth sighed. “I’m done. I never got started. I can’t pray.”

“My mother always said there’s no right way to do it.”

“I don’t believe.”

“In anything?”

“I mean, I don’t believe in God.”

“Atheist?” asked Candy.

Beth snorted. “No. That takes too much courage.”

“Maybe it’s faith that really takes the courage. The belief in things unseen.”

“Sounds like you were raised Catholic,” Beth said.

“Well, I was raised Jewish,” Candy told her, standing up. “And there are plenty of comparisons. Guilt. Misogyny. You name it.” She reached out her hand and touched the Virgin’s marble fingertips. “But some other stuff, too. Like you move the house to take care of someone. You sacrifice everything for a child—and of course you remind the child of that for as long as you live.” Candy looked up at the serene face of the Madonna. “She was a Jewish mother, Beth, you know? And if anyone would help you now, maybe it would be a Jewish mother.”

“I guess that should be easy to accept right now. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, right?”

“Beth,” said Candy, not pausing, “maybe you don’t have to believe everything. Maybe you don’t have to know how to pray. Maybe you have all you can do right now just to hold on. Maybe holding on is enough.”

Beth looked up at the statue of the Virgin. “Hold on, huh?” she whispered. “To what? To
her
?”

“If you want. Maybe.”

“And what if there’s nothing there?”

“Then…you can hold on to me.”

Even Laurie really couldn’t stay forever.

“I’ll come back every weekend until Ben’s found,” she told Beth, her hand cupping Beth’s chin, her eyes fastened unwaveringly on Beth’s eyes with Laurie’s special earnestness. They both knew she could not come back every weekend—would not—and yet nothing about that reality negated the loving hope that underlay the promise. “There’s still a lot more that we can do. Everybody says so. The woman from Crimestoppers says. This week, we’ll do the bulk mailings to all the states where every graduate lives now, and they’ll be distributed by volunteers there. I’ll do a bunch of them from home. By Sunday, we’ll have the highway billboard the Firefighters’ Association is buying—Bethie, a hundred thousand people are going to see that every day. Jimmy’s wife is going to work on that connection with the National Center for Missing and Abused Children. And then there’s that TV special coming up, the one called
Missing
—Sarah Chan says we have a very good chance of getting on that, especially now that Ben’s been…” She stopped.

“Gone so long,” Beth finished for her. “Gone so long that the fact of him being gone so long is the story now.”

“Oh, God,” Laurie said.

It was the end of something. No one would say it, but they felt the decline, saw it in the faces of the Parkside officers, fewer each day, in the eyes of the volunteers, down after two weeks to a core group of twenty or so. The scent of Barbara Kelliher’s Chanel No. 5 had become a kind of leitmotif in Beth’s days; it preceded Barbara into the basement room at Immaculata, and behind it would come Barbara’s unfailingly strained smile, and the single-minded devotion with which she attached her stack of marked maps and phone messages that had come in the night before. It had occurred to Beth that for a few of the volunteers, the search for Ben was a real labor of love—but not love for her. They hoped, by finding him, to keep lightning from striking their own houses. It was the best, most defensible kind of guilt, the kind that made bystanders jump into freezing water to save collies or derelicts—and thereby save themselves. Beth loved the center, its smell of newly opened reams of medium-weight bond and stale coffee, with a near-romantic fervor. It, and Candy’s obsessively cluttered office on the second floor of the Parkside Police Station, were the only places Beth felt sheared, however briefly, of Ben’s loss; of the weight she sometimes felt would compress her into a flake of skin.

It was at the center, just after saying goodbye to Laurie, that Beth found out about the tip. A sighting that, unlike others, sounded real. A woman from Minnesota, who refused to leave her name, had called to describe a little boy she had spotted in a shopping center in Minneapolis, walking beside a gray-haired woman in a huge hat and sunglasses. The little boy, she was certain, was Ben. He had been eating a hot dog. It was the hot dog that somehow certified the tip for Barbara. “I think you should go talk to Candy and see if she’s going to follow it up,” suggested Barbara. “I could drive you.”

“I can drive,” Beth told her. “Thank you.”

She didn’t, in fact, have to drive. The car piloted itself into the Parkside Police Station parking lot; she simply had to hang on to the steering wheel. But without quite recognizing why, once she got there she drove out again, the few blocks to Golden Hat Gourmet, where she went into one of the cold cases and got a few cannoli.

Joey, who was working the lunch takeout, wrapped them up for her. “Hungry, Bethie?” he asked hopefully, glancing at Beth’s loose jeans, cinched tight with one of Pat’s belts. Her hipbones now poked at the pockets like bunches of keys.

“Yep,” she told him, stretching her mouth in what she believed still looked like a smile. “Got a cannoli craving, like Tree.”

He hugged her, slipped her a Camel, and Beth left, settling the white box with its bowed string beside her in the passenger seat.

No one in the locked offices at Parkside questioned Beth’s presence anymore; they simply buzzed her in wordlessly. Though there was an elevator, Beth always took the stairs, and today when she opened the steel door that would lead directly around a corner into Candy’s open office, she heard Candy say, “…to have somebody go up there and check things out.”

“You have to pardon me, Candace,” an unfamiliar male voice replied, “but there’s no way he’s going to free up a team to drive to fucking Minneapolis to talk to some coupon shopper who thought she saw a kid. I mean, Minneapolis? There wasn’t one person at that reunion from Minneapolis. There are sixty full-time cops on this department, not six hundred.”

“How far the hell away is Minneapolis? People drive all the time, McGuire,” Candy said, her voice stiffening. “It’s a mobile society.”

Beth made herself still to listen.

“Candace, I know how you feel about this, but this kid is dead. This kid is dead, and from his point of view that’s probably a good thing, and—”

“Don’t say I know it, because I
don’t
know it.” Beth heard the familiar sound of Candy tapping her eraser on her blotter. “Anyway, this is interstate. I’m going to call Bender.”

“And he’s going to say, ‘Good afternoon, Detective, call me some time in the next century or when hell freezes over.’”

“It’s a legitimate alleged sighting across a state line.”

“It’s just another—” The plainclothes cop, whom Beth had never seen before, turned and noticed her. “Uh, hi, Mrs. Cappadora.” Beth smiled.

“Beth, come in,” Candy told her fiercely. “See you later, McGuire.” The detective left. “You heard, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

“I heard the part about some guy named Bender.”

“No, you heard the whole thing. But what you need to know is that this is going to be my excuse to call the FBI, and that’s who Bender is—Robert Bender, he’s the agent who heads up the bureau in Chicago.”

“The FBI,” said Beth. “Why?”

“Well, not because we couldn’t do the work ourselves,” said Candy Bliss. “Though we do have this delicate resource problem. We do have this problem of brass who get fretful if we don’t solve a case and get an airtight confession by lunch.” She coughed. “But this is supposedly the reason why the FBI exists, to support local jurisdictions involved with federal offenses.”

She got up and paced. “My own personal perspective on FBI agents is that as criminal investigators, they’re great accountants. The actual reason they exist is to hoard computer data banks and show up briefly when it’s time to make an arrest. Particularly if there are cameras. But I don’t want you to share this sick perspective. So why am I telling you? I’m thinking out loud. Tired.” She pressed her forefinger on the minute lines between her eyes. “Fucking suits. But hell, maybe Bender’s having a good day. I think I’ll call him. He tried to pat my rear once. Maybe there’s a sentimental attachment.”

Beth sat down, without being asked, and watched as Candy dialed the telephone.

“Bob!” Candy’s voice was so genuinely jovial Beth couldn’t believe her previous rancor had been equally authentic. “Yeah…. Oh, sure, well preserved, that’s me.” She paused. “No, actually, three guesses and I’ll give you a bump on the first two…. Bob, yes, you are a genius. The thing is, we have a sighting in Minnesota.” Pause, during which Candy took the receiver from her ear and placed it against her forehead. “No, Bob, it feels just right…. How did you hear that?…Well, of course, we’ll check it out first, but she could’ve walked in off the street, too, Bob. Shit, there’s nothing that prevents old ladies from walking into hotel lobbies…. Okay…. Okay. I’ll call you back.”

Candy buzzed her secretary and asked her to send Taylor to go over the Tremont guest lists again for unaccompanied senior citizens, women or men, and chat with the manager and the staff. As she talked, an anxious-looking intern brought in the mail. Candy began to slip through it absently, finally coming to an oversized bubble-lined book mailer stuffed nearly to bursting. Hanging up the telephone, she grinned at Beth.

“Another one,” she said.

“You mean, stuff from a confessor?” They’d sent hand-drawn maps leading to nonexistent addresses and abandoned buildings where they said Ben was being held. They’d sent articles of brand-new clothing they said were Ben’s. They’d sent photos of husbands they believed were responsible for the kidnapping, and—eeriest to Beth—long, rambling audio tapes in which they described how happy Ben was now that he was finally living in a Christian home. She suspected there were other tapes, sinister ones, that Candy never shared.

Candy had told her early on that there were only three reasons someone would take a child: to get at that child’s parent, economically or personally; to want a child and be crazy enough to think it was okay to take someone else’s; or, in the very slimmest slice of a single percentage, to savage that child. Of the three, Candy told Beth, you hope for the crazy wanna-be parent, because that person will care for the child tenderly.

So the package could contain anything: a bloody T-shirt, a pair of already threadbare purple shorts, slashed and stiff with—

But Candy said, “No, I mean stuff from Rebecca, my former buddy in the academy, who is now a stockbroker.” Using her thumbnail, Candy stripped open the mailer and shook out an astonishing pile of fuchsia and aqua garments—a tunic, elastic-waisted pants, a scarf, and a belt. “See, my buddy Rebecca gains and loses about thirty pounds every six months or so. It’s a very expensive habit, because as soon as she starts getting fat, she starts mailing all her thin clothes to me.” Candy shook her head. “The thing is, even when she looks good, Becks looks like the fortune-teller at a street fair. And so I end up taking these clothes to Saint Vincent De Paul—fortunately, Becks lives in California, so she never knows. And they probably cost hundreds of bucks.”

Beth smiled. “Sounds like a muffled cry for help to me.”

Candy held up the mailer. “Actually, it’s a padded cry for help.”

And Beth, to her horror, laughed, instantly covering her eyes and feeling that she was about to choke. Candy was on her feet and around the desk in seconds.

“Beth, Beth, listen,” she said. “You laughed. You only laughed. If you laugh, it doesn’t mean that’s a point against our side. If you laugh, or read a book to Vincent, or eat something you like, it’s not going to count for or against us on the big scoreboard of luck.” Beth began to cry. “You have to believe me,” Candy went on. “It feels like if you watch a movie, or listen to a song or do anything that makes you feel anything more than like absolute shit, that little moment of happiness is the thing that’s going to be punished by losing Ben forever. But Beth, that’s just not it. You’re not going to kill your son because you laughed.”

Humiliated even as she did it, Beth reached out and took Candy’s hand, holding it against her cheek. Abruptly, Candy snatched it away, and Beth jumped up, nearly knocking over the chair.

“I didn’t mean anything…” Beth said.

“I know, I know,” Candy said. “I’m a jerk. There was absolutely nothing wrong with what you just did. I’m just an oversensitive jerk.”

“You can’t get involved,” Beth said uncertainly.

“No,” said Candy. “I mean, yes, to an extent. You can’t get so involved you lose sight of things that could help people. But what that was about was…I’m a woman, I’m a detective supervisor, I’m Jewish. And I’m gay, did you know that? Every possible kind of weirdness. So, I feel like the eyes of Texas are upon me, all the livelong day. I feel like every time I hug Katie Wright from Crimestoppers, somebody thinks I’m making a pass at her….”

“I wasn’t trying—”

“I know you weren’t. Jesus, I’m a jerk.” Candy sat down. “But you know what? These bad clothes have given me a good idea. There’s somebody I want us to go see, okay, Beth? You game?”

“Who?”

“There’s this lady—the guys call her Crazy Mary; her name is actually Loretta Quail. Bad enough. Anyhow, what Loretta does is she helps people find stuff. Lost dogs. Lost money.” She looked hard at Beth. “And sometimes, lost people.” Once, Candy said, a young mother from Parkside drove off a bridge into a creek in the middle of a snowstorm. Her car went in head down and sank; the seat belt apparently malfunctioned. “She drowned in five feet of water, Beth. But the thing was, we didn’t know. We didn’t know what the hell had happened. This woman was going out for a bag of diapers. And she just never came back. The husband was a weasly little guy—we thought, you know, this woman’s in the backyard under the play structure. They hadn’t been having too good a time. But no, he was home the whole time with the baby—this lady was just gone. And so was her car. And none of her friends had seen her. She never got to the store. Just, you know, into the fourth dimension.”

And so, Candy said, somebody mentioned Loretta. “You have to know, Beth, I’m a very kind of this-world person. So I thought, Well…you hear departments have pet psychics, but you never think…Anyhow, old Loretta sniffed this young mother’s ski jacket just like those dogs Holmes and Watson, and said she was in her car under a mountain of snow, looking up. And Beth, that’s just where she was. We found her the following March when the creek thawed, still in her seat belt, looking up at the roof of her car. The mountain of snow was what the village plowed off the street into the creek.”

“So you think she might help find Ben.”

“I think I’m going to offer this as an option to you, which I want you to keep under your hat. Except you can tell Pat, of course.”

“I don’t want to tell Pat.”

“I think you should.”