The Deep End of the Ocean (19 page)

“Eat!” called Grandma Rosie from the back door.

“Momento!”
Grandpa yelled back. “Now, listen to this part, Vincent. This is also sad, though it’s supposed to be happy. This is why opera is so great. There’s a whole story. If you like, I will copy this tape for you, so you can play it at home. In this part—this is the most famous song in the whole thing, it’s called ‘Un bel di.’”

“What’s that?”

Grandpa spelled it out for him; it wasn’t spelled like it sounded. “‘One fine day,’ Vincent. She’s singing about how she thinks this jamoke is going to come back to her and her baby and make her happy….”

The voice was really pretty, and the melody was so pretty. You could tell it was Japanese because of the tune, but it was even prettier than regular Japanese music, which Vincent had heard in school, and which sounded to him like skim milk tasted, like they didn’t have enough instruments to go around. He lay back against Grandpa, and listened to the lady’s heavenly voice, and tried to let his sadness float on it.

But all he could think of was that his hunger was all gone, and of the way the mama’s voice sounded before, when she was talking to her little boy, who wasn’t even lost yet, but it was as if he was already a million miles away from her, so far she could never hug him again.

May 1990

Under the mangy grape arbor in the backyard, which Vincent’s dad never paid any attention to, though he always said he was going to and yelled if you goofed around with it, Vincent and Alex Shore were starting to set up this whole twig town for the little Playmobil guys to live in. They were big now, almost twelve, and they didn’t really play with that kind of stuff much anymore; mostly, they rode bikes to Radio Shack or goofed around with the hoops at the park. Last night on the phone, they’d cooked up this big plan to use the spool of utility wire Vincent had found. They were going to string it from Vincent’s window to Alex’s, three houses down and across the street, and try to rig up a phone that really worked. But when Vincent’s dad caught him taking out his bedroom screen and found the hammer and nails, he put a stop to the whole thing right away:

“Are you stupid?” he asked Vincent. “You want to clothesline some kid in a convertible?”

Which didn’t sound so bad to Vincent, actually.

But the wire idea going bust kind of meant needing something to do. And it was hot, real hot for the last week of school. The pool wasn’t even open yet. Alex’s mom wouldn’t let them in the house because his brother Max had chicken pox.

At first they were just going to make some dirt barricades and stuff so the guys could have a war; but Vincent found some twine his father had cut off the tomatoes and showed Alex how Indians used to build wickiup—by tying a whole bunch of same-size sticks together at the top and then bending them out. Then you had a frame. Alex had the idea of using tissue to cover it; but Vincent said, “No, let’s use that plastic wrap stuff, because then we can see what they’re doing in there.”

“They won’t be doing anything,” Alex said. “Unless we reach in there and move them around.”

“No, you don’t get what I mean. It’ll be like we can set up little scenes, like one can be the deer-skinning hut or something. It’ll be like a diorama at the Field Museum.” Alex had never been at the Field Museum. “Well, it’s where they have a lot of mummies and stuff, and they have all these dioramas of the hunter-gatherers and the Incas. Like models.”

“I don’t want to do it,” Alex grumbled. “I just want to have a war is all.”

“Well, that’s boring and stupid,” Vincent told him. “And anyhow, they’re my guys.” That didn’t sound too good, Vincent thought, and he’d better be careful. Alex was his best friend—pretty much his only friend. On the other hand, he didn’t want to do something really baby and boring like war. “Come on, Al. It’ll be cool,” he said. As Alex thought it over, Kerry came out into the yard, wearing her velvet American Girl dress (she wore it all the time, and it cost like a hundred bucks; it drove Vincent nuts to see her, like, wear it to gymnastics under her jersey; but nobody ever stopped her). Kerry was lugging a big bucket, filled to the top. Vincent caught the high, hottish smell of it right away.

“Wait a minute,” he told Alex. “Kerry, what’s in that?”

“The stuff under the sink,” she said, smiling. “I’m going to kill the bugs in the sandbox.” Vincent went over and took the bucket away from her; she started to kick him right away—she was only four, so this really shouldn’t have hurt too much. But she was a good kicker. Vincent had to stand on one of her feet to stop her.

“Kerry,” he told her, “this is ammonia. It’s poison. You can’t play with it. Where’s mom?”

“On the telephone.”

“Did she let you have this?”

“Yes,” Kerry said. Vincent thought, Well, maybe she did. Oh, well.

“You can kill box elder bugs better with just plain old dish soap and water in a squirter. And it’s funner.” He dumped the ammonia under Mr. Aberg’s poplars, which Vincent’s dad said were really about half trees of heaven and the other half eyesore. “Do you want me to get you some of that?”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh!” cried Kerry delightedly.

“I’m going to go get her something and get some of that clear wrap, okay, Al?” Vincent went back to the grape arbor. “You want a Coke, too?”

“You’re so damn bossy,” Alex said.

“Cut it out,” Vincent warned. His hands were balling up; they always did, he couldn’t help it—even teachers knew it.

“My mom says you’re so bossy because your mom never pays no attention to you.”

“
Any
attention to me, Al. She never pays
any
attention to me.”

“Well, that’s what she says. And I think she’s right. Your dad is at work all the time and your mom never pays no attention to you.”

“You know, your mom is dumb, Al.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “So?”

“Adults aren’t supposed to say that stuff where kids can hear them. Your mom would kill you if she knew you told me that.”

“So?”

“So, let’s just get this game going, okay? We can have a war and a village of hunters, okay? We can do both.” Alex shrugged. That was okay. He wouldn’t leave if Vincent hurried up.

He went into the kitchen to snag two Cokes, and right away, even though he couldn’t see her, he noticed how his mother was talking on the phone. Because she was really
talking,
saying, “Get out of here! How long have you known this?…But when did you really decide?” And then, “But will you even enjoy it?…You have? How many times?” She was laughing. His mother was laughing. He followed the telephone cord around the edge of the breakfast-room wall, and there she was, all coiled up in a chair, twiddling her hair with one finger. When she saw him, she waved at him.

His mother waved and…grinned.

Vincent brought the Cokes back outside. Damn it. He had forgotten Kerry’s bug spray. His mother was off the phone, but she was dialing it again. She called to Vincent, “Guess who’s getting married?”

Vincent was so stunned he dropped the nearly full spritz bottle into the sink; it started to spill down the drain. His mother never spoke to him or anyone else first. He’d done, like, experiments, measuring how long it would take her to say anything if the phone didn’t ring or Kerry didn’t ask her for a cookie or something. And she could go hours, whole days probably. He had personally seen her go a whole day, once when his dad was out of town. She made beds and junk, like a regular person, except she never said one word, didn’t even hum. It wasn’t like she wasn’t paying attention to him; she just didn’t even see him.

Vincent didn’t believe she was really thinking nothing; you couldn’t. He and his cousin Moira had tried a whole bunch of times, once, to run around the house just one time without thinking of a pig. You couldn’t do it. A person always thought; you couldn’t drain your brain. In his humble opinion, it was really too much thinking—like static on the radio—getting in his mother’s way. Aunt Tree had once said, when she thought Vincent was asleep, “The light’s on but nobody’s home,” about his mother’s head. But Vincent disagreed. Vincent pictured his mother’s head more like a beehive, sometimes.

But now she was looking right at him.

“Candy,” his mom said, and he thought, Does she want some? But then he realized she meant her friend the police lady, the one who sometimes came up for the weekend and let Vincent touch her unloaded gun for just a second, and let him play with her gold shield. “Candy’s going to get married. Can you believe that?”

Vincent knew something was expected of him. “Well,” he said. “She is pretty old.”

“Oh, she’s not so old, Vincent,” said his mother. “She’s what…forty, I guess maybe. She wants…she wants a baby before it’s too late.”

“Too late?” Vincent asked, feigning more interest than he felt, desperate to keep her looking at him this way.

“Well, women can only have babies for a while. Then they get too old and their bodies don’t work that way anymore.” You mean menopause, Vincent thought—they told them about it in school. He always thought, why was it a pause? Didn’t it really just stop altogether?

“But that’s when you’re real old, right?” he asked, urgently, feeling his mother start to slip away.

“Well, but sometimes if you have a baby when you’re old, the baby isn’t right. It has birth defects.” He saw then that she was gone. He could pop out one of his eyeballs right now and she’d say, “Vincent, take that outside.” She turned back to the phone. “I want Laurie to take Kerry for me. Do you want to stay with Daddy? Are you big enough to stay alone till he gets home from work?” She frowned. “I wish Jilly was still around.” Mom was always wishing Jill didn’t get out of school and get married. But Vincent knew this wasn’t one of those questions parents asked that they’d already worked out the answers to. His mother didn’t do that. When she asked whether they had long division in fifth grade, she really had no idea whether he knew what long division was. She had no idea that he’d placed second out of the whole school in the spelling bee, and that the word he missed was “withdrawal.”

“Take Kerry when?” he asked now.

“Next weekend, next weekend,” said his mother. “Oh.” She looked at him again then. “Candy wants me to take pictures. Of her wedding reception. In Chicago. And I said I would.”

Vincent had to sit down. Alex was probably disgusted by now; he’d probably gone home. To tell the truth, Vincent should be outside, making sure Kerry didn’t run into the street or something.

But he had to take this in. He could not believe this.

In the last few years, she’d gone on planes to New York for work, on planes to Florida. But she never, ever went to Chicago—not when Aunt Tree’s babies were born, not when Grandpa Angelo had a heart rhythm, not even for Christmas or to look at bodies the cops thought were Ben.

“Are you going to go with Dad?” he asked.

“Well, maybe,” said his mom. “No. I don’t think so. I mean, Dad has to work. I guess…” She stared at Vincent as if they were both discovering secret buried doubloons. “I guess I’ll just go by myself and stay at Aunt Ellen’s. It’s only one night. Right?”

“I guess. Will you be okay?”

“I think so. Will you be okay?”

“Sure.” What would be different, thought Vincent; it wasn’t like she told him when to go to bed or something. He scanned his mother’s face as she stared off into the yard—he could see Kerry out there, gravely squirting the hose into the sandbox. It was almost as if his mother were trying to think about what she was doing; he could
see
her thoughts walk back and forth like puppets. Her hand fluttered toward the phone again. Dropped to her lap. “Do you think Dad will let you go?” he asked, worried.

She didn’t answer for so long that Vincent thought she was purely gone. But then she said, “Uh,
let
me? Your father’s not my boss, Vincent. I can go somewhere if I want.”

But he was still astonished when, a week later, she actually did go, putting her duffel bag in the trunk with three of her cameras and her lights, even bringing up the black hood thing that made her look like one of those guys who took pictures in a big puff of smoke in silent movies. They stood around on the porch, waiting for Dad to get back from the hardware store.

“Do you want me to call you tonight, when Dad’s at work?”

“I’m going with him,” Vincent said.

“Oh. Good.”

Dad backed the Toyota into the driveway and started lifting out the bags of turf builder he always bought, even though, as far as Vincent could tell, they never had anything but the worst, knottiest lawn on the block. His dad dropped the last bag, splitting it open slightly, and leaned his head against the open trunk.

“You okay?” Vincent asked him. His mom just stood there.

“Just getting ancient,” said his dad, wiping off his face on the sleeve of the ratty flannel shirt he wore.

His mom leaned down to hug the air around him, and she squeezed his dad’s arm. Vincent wondered, as he always did, whether his mom would kiss his dad; she didn’t. Probably it was something you didn’t like to do in front of a kid before puberty.

“Are you sure you don’t need me to drive you?” his dad asked.

“I’m fine, Pat,” said his mother. “I owe her. She never stopped.”

“I think she’s crazy. It’s a crazy thing to do. This guy, he’s crazy, too.”

“Like she says, people have been fools for lesser things.”

“I suppose.” His dad smiled. “Kiss the bride for me. But not too hard.” Dad always made these kinds of jokes about Candy, which Vincent had privately decided meant his dad thought Candy was a lesbian, a girl who married girls. But she wasn’t. He knew that for sure. She smelled too good. He personally thought Candy would be a great mother—just for all the equipment she had in her car alone. He would love to be Candy’s kid.

That night during the rush, Uncle Augie was in a take-no-prisoners mood, yelling at everybody, right up to the chef, Enzo, who even Augie was normally scared of. “People are starving out there, Enzo!” he yelled. “People want to starve, they can go to Ethiopia, they don’t have to sit in my dining room!”

Finally, Enzo pointed the end of his biggest knife at Uncle Augie and said, “You say one more thing and I’m going to stick this up your fat nose, Augusto. You crazy old sonofabitch. You ever hire anybody else who got the IQ of my mailbox and maybe somebody would get to eat after all!” Vincent’s dad had to break them up. Vincent loved it when this happened, even though his dad didn’t. He hated fights. Linda, the big red-haired waitress, took Vincent to one side of the kitchen, near the open backdoor where the Mexican kids were cowering in their white shirts with “Cappadora’s” embroidered on the pockets, and held his head right between her boobs.