The Deep End of the Ocean (29 page)

“Mr. Karras,” Candy said, “may we please come inside?”

“Sure,” said the man, smoothing his flannel shirt. “I was just doing the bills. But I don’t think I can help you much. Because I don’t know the family. You got the wrong house is all.”

“They’re not arresting us,” Beth said.

“Huh?” Karras stared at her. “Are you a cop?”

“No,” Beth said.

“We’re his parents,” Pat said then, puffing, dragging himself up the steps behind Beth. “We’re Ben’s parents, you sonofabitch.”

“That’s enough,” Bender said.

“What?” Karras asked again. “Where is this kid? Is my boy hurt?”

Candy moved into the living room, where a large card table was set up next to a low corduroy-covered couch. There were stacks of invoices piled on one end next to an adding machine with a long tail of tape. “Mr. Karras,” she said, “please slowly raise your hands—”

“What?”

“Raise your hands so that the officer can make sure—”

“I don’t have a gun.” The small man smiled, then, at Beth. “I was doing the bills. I don’t have a computer.” One of the younger patrolmen quickly patted Karras’s sides, the inside and outside of his trouser legs. “Please, I don’t know what’s going on. This is my house. I didn’t do anything.”

Beth wanted to get down on her hands and knees and examine the fiber of the carpet, where a tiny pile of ground-in potato chips dotted a corner, to untie and explore the two huge pairs of boys’ tennis shoes she saw neatly standing side by side just inside the door, put her fingers in the pockets of the Bulls jacket tossed on a hook. A well-oiled mitt snuggled deep into the cushion of a fat maroon chair, near the fireplace; on the television, a photo of a boy, crouched grinning in a green silk baseball uniform, was framed in wood and gold. There were a pair of ceramic candlesticks at each end of the mantel. Only one had a candle. There was a vase with silk gladioli, white. And above that, a painting—no, Beth thought, in quick correction, a retouched photograph. The woman looked straight into the camera with an antelope’s shy grace and wide-eyed intensity; she wore a high-necked gray dress, a gown nearly, with a line of pearl buttons at the throat, and her pale hair haloed away from her forehead as if it were being lifted by invisible fingers. Blown, thought Beth; they had used a fan in the shoot. She reached for the edge of the couch, missed it, and sat down hard on the floor.

“Beth!” Candy turned, distracted, one eye still on Karras as he instinctively reached out a hand to help Beth.

“That’s Cecil,” Beth gasped. “That’s Cecil Lockhart.”

“Oh,” Karras said, “Cecil. Sure. She’s an actress. Did you see her on TV?”

Beth fought for a normal breath. She began to get up, settled for kneeling. “Why,” she asked then, “do you have a picture of Cecil Lockhart?”

George Karras drew himself up, nearly proudly, then nodded, his lips pursed with a wistfulness, a sorry rue Beth would never forget.

He said, “That’s my wife.”

They could not make Candy stop apologizing.

When she thought about that first week, years later, it was Candy’s utter despair that Beth remembered most, the coruscating blame she heaped on herself and Bender and even the devoted officers from her Parkside staff, blame in fistfuls, even after Beth begged her to stop, even after Rosie, for God’s sake, put her hands on Candy’s shoulders and said, “This is not right. You did everything. This family owes you its life.”

It started the moment the three of them stepped out onto George Karras’s porch and stood blinking in the late-afternoon sun—after Karras had told them, and Chief Bastokovitch had confirmed by phone, that his wife, Cecilia, had been a patient at Silvercrest in Elgin, a private hospital for the mentally ill, for the past four years. That he, George, was essentially a single parent of their only son—Sam, Cecil’s child from her previous marriage, whom George had legally adopted not long after his own marriage to her, seven years ago.

Beth had tried, and to an extent had been successful, to make a blur of the moment George Karras said that, to blot out the remembrance of her nausea when the vein in Pat’s forehead began to flutter, and sweat beaded at the neck of his shirt. “Legally adopted?” he’d said softly, dangerously, that I’ll-break-anything-here Vincent-look in his eyes. “Legally adopted?”

Candy urging, “Pat, wait….”

And George continuing, fervently, anxiously, “No, no, it’s fine, it’s okay. You can check. I got the legal document right in my safe. With his birth certificate. Go ahead. Let’s clear this up, okay?”

Jimmy showing up in the living room then, and he and Candy leading a rigid Pat outside, while Bastokovitch flipped open a steno pad and sat down heavily on George’s couch, asking, in low tones, if Mr. Karras would like an attorney present before he answered some questions. Sighing, as he began, while even outside, Pat, Beth, and Candy could still hear George’s voice piping up, “You just got to look at the papers. That’s all. He’s my son. He’s my wife’s child. It’s a mixup. Just let me get them.”

Outside the door, Candy had turned to Beth and Pat abruptly. “Please, please,” she said, for the first time of what would turn out to be dozens, as it began to break over all of them, the thing that had somehow actually happened, and gone on happening, for long years, two blocks from the Cappadoras’ front porch. “Please forgive me.”

“What?” Beth cried. “Forgive you? What?”

“Please, please…No, don’t forgive me. This is the worst fucking abortion in history. He was here all the time. I don’t deserve you to forgive me.”

And even Pat, ashen, raised his head and told her, “Candy, no. You couldn’t have known….”

But Candy would not be stopped. For the first time since Beth had known her, the ever-composed Candy indulged, those early days, in a virtual orgy of emotionalism—berating herself with curses even more fluent than her usual fare as fact after fact emerged.

It was Jimmy who told Beth how Candy slammed down her office phone and pulled a window shade off its cord when she heard that Cecil had cooperated fully with officers in an interview at her parents’ house, just months after the kidnapping, even cracking a bedroom door so they could peek at her sleeping son, whom she described as four years old, not much older than Ben. “That,” she had told Jimmy, “will make me wake up screaming the rest of my life.” And after Candy learned that a clear set of Cecil’s fingerprints, taken during a mass arrest at a nuclear-weapons demonstration in Champaign-Urbana years before, existed in FBI files, she’d run up three flights to shout into the phone at Bender that she didn’t care if the fucking bungling dirtbag lived in Budapest now, that Bender had better find him, because the Cappadoras were going to sue the government for millions; it was going to cost the government millions of bucks because some asshole FBI tech had been given prints on rubber, for Christ’s sake, on the bottom of Ben’s second tennis shoe, prints probably as clear as the dummy sets they gave you to study in the academy, and still managed to screw up lifting them. “And you guys had a matched set!” Candy screamed. “Cecil Lockhart did everything but call you on a bullhorn on the night of the second reunion—‘I’m still here! I did it!’ This could have been five fucking years ago!…Yeah, the kid is okay. Well,
maybe
he’s okay. We don’t know everything yet…. Does that justify it, Bob? All’s well that ends well? And if I find out that this kid was touched, that a hair on his head was harmed, I’ll personally get you then, Bob. Take it to the bank.”

Beth had listened, terrified, then ventured helplessly, “You’re taking too much on yourself, you’re too close.”

“Oh, really, Beth?” Candy snapped. “How about the fact that even I fucking spaced the Minneapolis connection? She only moved back and forth about fifty times.” She stopped, then, and apologized for her sarcasm.

But even long afterward, when the whole sorry unraveling of nine years of near misses and sheer mishaps was pieced together as best it could be without the keystone information that only Cecil herself could have provided, Beth could not accept the intensity of Candy’s guilt, the determination with which she turned away all of their comfort, their thanks. “
You
found him,” she told Beth a dozen times. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t earn it.” That the media, and almost every other official source connected with the case, seemed determined to laud her anyway (she was, if anything, even more elegant and glamorous than she’d been nine years before, even more irresistible as copy)—this only deepened Candy’s frustrations. She told Beth, one night the following fall, that the only forgiving moment of the whole spring had been on the night of the “arrest,” which had, of course, quickly turned out to be nothing of the sort—the moment when she and Jimmy had the chance to see Pat see Ben.

Beth was able to summon that part herself, entire, play it back almost like a time-lapse film of a rose opening: All of them standing outside the emergency foster-care home in Wheaton, aware of two kids hanging out a second-story window to try to see them under the roof of the porch; George, his eyes and nose reddened, but his handkerchief neatly folded in his sport-coat pocket, arriving with Bastokovitch in the chief’s car, passing the Cappadoras with a silent gesture, elbows in, palms up, something midway between a shrug and a plea, as he went inside. Then more waiting, Vincent plowing the soft dirt of a flowerbed with his toe, Kerry sitting on the ground, holding the whining, squirming Beowulf on his lead, Beth wondering why she’d given in when Kerry insisted on bringing the dog. Waiting for impossible minutes as the curtains on the inner door were drawn back, then dropped again; George finally emerging, blowing his nose, then the foster mother, gray and formidable even in a fuchsia sweat suit, already protective of her charge, flicking on the outside light in the gathering dusk. She’d come out onto the step and stood to one side, holding the screen door open behind her.

And then Ben.

It was Pat’s gathered energy Beth could still feel when she thought of that instant—his coil; she thought he would leap up onto the step, leaving her behind, numbed, her arms hanging thick and useless. He had, instead, raked his hair, once, and then walked up to the step slowly, cautiously, the way a field biologist would approach a newborn antelope, and extended his palm, made as if to shake hands. And when the child only stared at him, as Beth held her breath, Pat had lifted his hand, run one thumb down the side of Ben’s face, from his hairline to his chin, and asked, “How are you?”

“I’m good,” the boy had answered automatically, and then, “Dad…?” And when both George and Pat answered him, Beth began first to cry, then to breathe. Behind her, she could hear an enormous chorus of coughing and shuffling, as assembled masses of Parkside and state officers, who’d materialized from nowhere, let go. It was she who leapt onto the steps then, she and Kerry and Beowulf, Beth inhaling his smell as eagerly as the dog did, engulfing the child, nearly knocking him down as he stiffened and finally backed away, reaching for George.

“I know,” the foster mother said then, freighting the two words with supreme kindness. “But he’s just stunned.”

Pat had told Ben, then, to get some sleep. George, calling Ben “Spiro,” which Beth learned later was George’s Greek name for Sam, hugged him and propelled him back inside.

And that was when Candy said again, “I’m so sorry.”

But Pat had turned to her, his face smoothed, flushed, the shortstop’s face Beth had yearned for a hundred summers ago, and said, “Sorry? Candy, this is the best day of my life.”

And to underline it, Pat, for whom working at Wedding was respiration, had barely gone in to work over the next few weeks. Between supervised hour-long visits, every other day, with the child they soon learned to call “Sam,” Pat and Beth consumed dozens of quarts of coffee and absorbed the information in reports Candy brought them, almost daily, of police interviews with Cecil at Silvercrest, interviews that hardly merited the name. Michele Perrault, the little lawyer George had hired, had almost gotten in trouble at the arraignment, Candy told them, when Judge Sakura asked whether the defendant had chosen to stand mute, and Perrault shot back, “Your Honor, that’s the only way she can stand.”

But it was dead accurate. The diagnosis, in lay terms, was catatonic depression. When she entered Silvercrest, years before, Cecil had, Candy said, showed some animation—spoken occasionally in the trained, spheric actor’s voice that took the staff by surprise, especially when what she said was senseless. Now she was still as a well, making no noise even when she yawned or scraped her leg on a piece of furniture. At Silvercrest, in Cecil’s room, in the dayroom, in her supervising physician’s office, Candy and, after her, Robert Bender, Calvin Taylor, others, had spent hours with Cecil.

They had shown Cecil pictures, pictures that George, in a fumbling open gesture that made Pat cry, had duplicated for the Cappadoras—pictures of Cecil on her mother’s porch with Ben on a brand-new red bike with training wheels, pictures of George with Ben sitting on his shoulders on a mountain path. A picture of Ben on Santa’s lap, with his hair still dyed Vincent-brown, no more than six months after…How had she dared? Beth thought, and then thought, Of course, what else would she have done—was Cecil, after all, stupid or just crazy? That picture, the one that attracted Beth most, had to have been taken the fall after the police interviewed Cecil, after she had moved back to Chicago from Minneapolis. Candy said Cecil’s mother had confirmed the move, that Cecil had showed up with a grandson Mrs. Lockhart had never even met before. Beth pressed Candy: Why had Mrs. Lockhart believed Cecil? Didn’t she connect the sudden grandson with Ben’s much-publicized loss?

“If she did, she’s not saying,” Candy replied.

In the meantime, after the Ben pictures failed, the police, with the help of Cecil’s psychiatrist, had tried evoking responses with other stimuli: hippie music from high-school times—Cream and Jimi Hendrix and Donovan. They had brought her mints, which her nurses said Cecil loved, and watched Cecil reach out and gobble them, the only movement she ever made voluntarily. They had brought in a videotape machine and showed Cecil long excerpts of herself in the
Hallmark Hall of Fame
production of
Major Barbara
. They had brought in a big poster of Cecil, her platinum hair upswept in a magnificent Gibson pouf, in her one-woman show
Jane Addams of Hull House,
the performance that had won her the Grace Dory Arts Achievement Award just the summer before the reunion. They brought out front pages, old headlines (“Mom Blasts Kidnapper: You Heartless Bastard!”).

And, as her doctor predicted up front, they had elicited…nothing. Less than nothing. Cecil was more than vacant, Candy told Beth; she was bottomless. She ate her mints; she got up when her angel-faced nurse, Mary, put pressure on her elbow. Whatever she knew, if she any longer knew anything at all, walked in her alone.

George was pitifully eager to help fill in blanks. He came to the Cappadoras’ house more than once, unbidden, and then chafed miserably at their kitchen table, his eyes drawn again and again to the baby pictures of Ben on the walls. He brought his son’s growth charts from the pediatrician, his dental records; the description of the broken wrist Sam had suffered in a soccer match at age nine. Beth brought him coffee, with cloth napkins she had to go upstairs into a dresser to find, brought cream in a pitcher, things she never did, to soothe him.

And finally, one night, when Ben was still in transitional care, George had blurted, “You guys probably think I should feel more guilty. And I do feel guilty. I do. But how can I blame myself? It’s probably impossible for you to believe how little I knew about any of this. All I know is my boy—God forgive me, he’s my boy, too. I mean, Beth, Pat, look at it from his point of view. He’s already a kid whose mother’s in the loony bin. God bless her. Poor Cecilia, she was the most gorgeous…You know, Beth, when I met her, I didn’t think she was a day over twenty-five, and she was really in her mid-thirties by then. She was so delicate and so sweet, like a flower.” George tapped his chest. “We were running this promotion deal; you got tickets to that theater out there by the airport. She had just moved back from Minneapolis, and she was in
My Fair Lady.
And here am I, this dummy who builds decks. That she would look at me…that woman, this girl, would look at me…I couldn’t believe it.”

He sipped his coffee, his pinkie delicately extended. “And then, you know all this, there was the boy. He was—well, Beth, he was just like…like he is still, even now. So happy and game. So smart and strong. I fell in love with him as much as Cecilia. It was Cecilia who wanted to get married, right away, almost like she could tell she was going to…oh, Jesus God. Before she was hospitalized the last time, she…she got his hair cut all short, in a buzz, not an eighth of an inch long. And it grew in all reddish. Brownish red. I noticed. God, I thought, kids change. I never knew the father. Irish, I thought. I build garages. Pat, I just build decks and garages. He’s my boy. I adopted him as my own boy. But even before that, he was my boy.”