The Deep End of the Ocean (22 page)

Beth had taken leave of her senses. She’d agreed.

But when she and Ellen pulled up in front of the cafe’s discreet sign, Beth felt the thump and shift of the avalanche, heard its creak. “It’s in a hotel,” she’d whispered to Ellen. Ellen looked genuinely panicked.

“I didn’t think…” she began. “Oh, Bethie, I didn’t even think of it! Haven’t you been in a hotel, ever? Ever since?”

“No,” Beth breathed.

“Not even when you go to New York?”

“Bed-and-breakfast places,” Beth said, measuring out her syllables. “Always.”

“We’ll just leave then,” Ellen said reassuringly, starting the car. “I thought if it wasn’t anywhere near where the reunion is…”

“The reunion,” Beth said.

“You know, the twentieth reunion. It’s this weekend. Didn’t they mail you…oh shit, I guess they wouldn’t.”

“It’s this weekend?”

“Yes, but Beth, that doesn’t make any difference at all. I wouldn’t go. Wayne, nobody would go. It just happened to be this weekend.”

“Where?”

“In Elmbrook.”

Beth put her hand over her mouth. “Oh God, Bethie,” said Ellen. “Just forget it. I’ll run in and see if Nick’s there and we’ll grab some deli and eat in a park. Okay? Will that be okay?”

But then, Nick appeared around the corner of the old hotel, his tightly curled black hair dusted with gray now, his suit as crisp as a silhouette cut from gray paper, and something in Beth’s abdomen uncurled like a lazy cat.

“My God,” she said to Ellen. “Look at him.”

“He never gets old,” Ellen agreed.

“What…what the hell.” Beth suddenly got out of the car and ran into Nick’s welcoming arms, kissing his mouth, which smelled of cloves, for just a millisecond too long.

Had she known, at that moment? Looked back upon, it all seemed choreographed, an elaborate series of steps and movements that all led into a single cul-de-sac, a loop with no exit.

Beth leaned her head against the pebbled ledge of stonework and prepared to let herself remember that day. She had to be alone, and she had to do it exactly the same way each time. She loathed herself when she did; but a hundred times over the months since that day, she had replayed that afternoon and evening, right up to the knock at the door, with filmic exactitude.

The three of them shared a bottle of wine at lunch—Ellen abstemiously denying herself more than one glass as designated chauffeur. They talked about…dumb stuff. The night they’d all piled into Nick’s father’s old Electra and crept up to the gates of the monastery once too often, and how the monks had let the Dobermans loose on them, costing Wayne the back of his leather jacket. The time some rogue from Cine Club had opened the wrong side of the treble curtains during the variety show, revealing Cecil Lockhart changing costumes between numbers, wearing nothing but a bra and tights, and how Cecil had simply struck a pose in the blue spot, while the audience sat frozen in horrified admiration. About smuggling Beth back from her job as a camp counselor in Lake Geneva one summer night so she could attend the wedding of Cherry and Tony; Cherry was seventeen and pregnant, and Bill and Evie had forbidden Beth to go.

She remembered, then, Ellen’s beeper going off. Ellen bitching that Dan wanted her to run over to some goddamned glazier’s office a few miles away and roust the guy out to the site; all the glass was cut short and the carpenter was giving birth. Could Nick run Beth over to the site when they finished eating? Sure he could. Then Nick and Ellen going out to switch Beth’s camera bags and duffel to Nick’s car in case Ellen got stuck in traffic, while Beth snuggled back into the deep red leather banquette and drank and drank from a second bottle of Pinot Noir, wondering how she would manage to close one eye to shoot Candy’s wedding photos.

Nick returning, a halo of sunlight around his dark head as he opened the door into the dark bar. Sitting down, not across but beside her. The talk shifting then to something smoky and late-night, in spite of the daylight burning outside the awnings. Talk about the covered bridge in Lake County, where they had lain, exposed to the summer night in Beth’s convertible, Nick with nothing left on but one of those angelic-colored peach or pink Ban-Lon shirts that would’ve made any other guy look effeminate, but that only emphasized Nick’s construction-crew tan, his Tuscan perfection. Beth, shorts and halter top rolled to a tangle around her thighs and neck, urging Nick to go ahead and do it, Nick holding back, holding his bronzed hips just away from her, then swaying forward to let her grip him, crushing his mouth against her breast, then stopping, saying, No, we can’t, we’re going to be married, it’s wrong. That no, all those rumors, even about Lisa Rizzo, were just that—rumors; he’d never done it before. He loved only Beth. He wanted only Beth.

She remembered Nick putting his arm along the back of the booth at Isabella, not quite touching her, and reminding Beth how he’d told her at his own wedding that he adored Trisha, he would be grateful for the rest of his life to her and Pat for introducing them, he couldn’t be happier that she and Pat were getting married too, but the only regret he’d ever have was that he’d never made love to Beth.

And then—this was the part Beth hated herself for loving to remember the most—Nick bending forward and murmuring, “I still regret it, Bethie.”

She hadn’t said a word to him, only gone into the washroom to brush her hair, looking at her face in the gilded old mirror and seeing herself as Nick must have seen her, not as the gaunt scarecrow Beth who glared back at her from under fluorescent bulbs in Madison every morning, but as a slender, delicate woman worth desiring, the hollows under her eyes and cheekbones not pitiful but dramatic, her hair a tousled dark cloud, her lips puffed with arousal, knowing that when she came back, he would already have a key and would know the way to the elevator, to a room down a badly lit hall that hid the worn spots in the once-expensive wool carpeting—a room called the Violet Room, all done in antiques, with a marble washstand where Beth carefully hung her clothes, turning to Nick utterly without shame or even caution, knowing there was nothing to discuss or pledge or doubt. Nick telling her only, “Andante, Bethie. Andante. We waited a long time for this.” Her nodding.

They had lain on top of the lavender coverlet for ninety minutes by the clock Beth glimpsed over Nick’s head, touching and tasting each other slowly, until her every limb was shuddering, beyond her control, until the insides of her thighs were so slippery her leg slid off Nick’s when she tried to roll onto him, until the moan at the back of her throat was constant, like a motor idling. Then Nick pulling back the sheets and—she thought of Pat once, when Nick entered her, not as long as Pat but thicker, more thoroughly filling her side to side, as she had always imagined him, beginning to move, slowly, slowly, shushing her when she began, frantically, to grab him and pull him closer, her mind emptied of everything but the feel of his golden, nearly hairless chest against her cheek, her treacherous body feeling pleasure for what seemed the first time since she had known such things were possible to feel, and then, when she could no more have stopped herself from coming than she could have stopped herself from exhaling, hearing the knock.

Hearing the knock and thinking, The hotel is on fire. Thinking, Well, so the hotel is on fire, we’ll still have five minutes. Five minutes is all I need, this five minutes, for the rest of my life. The knock again, sharper. Her name. Loud. A voice, a woman’s, not Ellen’s, a voice she knew.

Stumbling up, realizing she was still half-drunk, staggering as she dragged her jeans on over the bucking nerves between her legs. Buttoning her shirt. Her name again. Another, louder knock.

The rest Beth knew as if she’d read about it in a newspaper. The flower wreath in Candy’s hair as Candy stood outside the door in her champagne-colored sheath.

The absurd exchange.

“I thought you were getting married,” Beth had said.

Candy’s reply: “I did get married.” Candy glancing at her watch. “I’ve been married for an hour.”

Candy had never asked Beth who was in the room with her. She had not apologized, except to explain that Ellen’s housekeeper had told her where Ellen and Beth were having lunch. Nick had disappeared into the bathroom; Beth had gone back into the room only for her purse, leaving behind her underwear, getting into the squad car parked in front, next to its driver, the blond bride with the French braid, as the cafe manager stared in astonishment from under the portico. Some time later, at the Parkside station, Ellen had shown up with Beth’s bags, and, in the first-floor bathroom, Beth had changed into the top of her evening outfit; her tie-dyed shirt had been drenched in layers of sweat, sex sweat and then panic sweat. For the first couple of hours, as Candy and Calvin Taylor popped in and out to brief her on the events at the Hyatt in Elm-brook, where state cops and Elmbrook cops and Parkside cops were questioning guests at the twentieth reunion of the 1970 class of Immaculata High School, Beth had not even thought to call Pat.

It was getting dark when Candy, extricating the elaborate little wreath of vines and gardenias from her hair, had asked Beth if Pat was on his way. Ellen had gotten up to call him; but Beth had run after her, a surge of guilt giving her legs power, and so it had been she who told her husband that when the doors to the ballroom were opened before the dinner, a tiny Red Parrot tennis shoe had been found on a speakers’ podium. Told him that it had been, of all people, Barbara Kelliher who saw it, Barbara who nearly passed out and went running, screaming for Jimmy. That at first Jimmy and Karl Kelliher had thought it was somebody’s sick idea of a joke, but that Jimmy had the presence of mind to make sure nobody touched it, and that he had overcome all his misgivings and called Candy, knowing she was probably clinking glasses with her groom at that very moment, knowing she would never forgive him if it turned out not to be a joke. It was Beth who told her husband that she had known from the minute she saw the shoe, in a sealed bag in Candy’s hand, known from the tiny green plastic “B” shoved on the laces to keep little fingers from untying them, that it was real—that it was Ben’s.

It was Beth who had told Pat, heard him reply, then gasp, then heard the phone drop and finally disconnect. Beth who finally reached Augie and found out about Pat, and then rode with Calvin Taylor through the night, going over ninety, as he radioed the state squads they passed on the interstate. Who crouched at his bedside for three days, only vaguely aware of Rob’s periodic relays of messages from Chicago. The shoe was authentically made in 1985. The shoe had prints. But the prints were somehow ruined. The interviewed alumni, fewer by many than five years before, were whistle-clean. The staff had seen no one even slightly odd or out of place.

The press were baying at the moon, Rob said. The way he’d heard it, some rookie cop or other started talking about the shoe as if it were common public knowledge that the first Red Parrot was the link to the kidnapping. Candy, who’d successfully suppressed that detail, was fulminating; overnight, Ben’s face was again on the front of every Sunday edition in America. Since the media learned that Pat had been rushed to intensive care in Wisconsin, the hospital parking lot, Rob said, looked like the scene outside the prison when Gary Gilmore was executed.

All Beth wanted to do was watch Pat’s face, watch its color slowly deepen from gray to a hint of rose. All she wanted to do was lean against his bed and pray for her husband, whom she thought of as her children’s only surviving parent, to live. She sat, helplessly hearing Pat’s goofy laughter when she’d told him that somehow, in spite of their best efforts, she was pregnant again, with Kerry—heard him singing the sleepy song to Kerry on the morning of her birth. Saw him drawing a heart with marker on her stomach when she was pregnant with Ben. Watched him playing shortstop in Colt League when they were kids, she licking Fudgsicles with a crowd of twelve-year-olds, Pat just enough older and more glamorous that the way he hiked his belt up over his palm-flat hips made the hair on her arms stand up. Beth sat there, stinking of infidelity, and she had promised Pat—God, fate—anything in those first few days.

And Pat, God, and fate had collected.

Beth had not spoken to Nick again. After he left repeated messages on her answering machine at home, about how was Pat doing and then about Ben, which Beth didn’t return, she’d gotten a one-line note. “I’m sorry,” it read, “but I’m not sorry.”

Unsigned.

She’d wanted badly to call him then. She had fantasized about the sheer romantic rectitude of it—twenty-year journeys ending in lovers meeting. But not for her. Pat had lived. That was the end of it.

She and Candy had never discussed Candy’s wedding day. But since she and Pat had arrived in Chicago, Candy had been over to the new house twice. She’d brought bread and salt, knowing Pat would appreciate it, and news on the “new” investigation. The trail was colder than a witch’s heart. The Feebies were fucking around with the shoe prints; the reopened phone lines had sparked only a trickle of tips, most of frankly lunar quality. Barbara Kelliher had talked a handful of Immaculata volunteers into a small revival of the Find Ben center out of her house, but the turnout was feeble. Most of the old schoolmates were frankly aghast at the double curse on the reunions and shied away. Even Wayne only sent a check, for a thousand dollars.

There was, however, a new, computer-generated age-progression sketch of Ben being prepared. Something would pop, Candy said. Something. With the same certainty she knew that Rosie, riding in a car, would never forget to reach up to hold a button on her coat if they passed a funeral procession, Beth knew that nothing would pop, now or ever. But she thanked Candy anyway.