The Deep End of the Ocean (31 page)

Beth came out of the growing shadows under the overhang of the county building. “What happened?” she asked. “What happened to him?”

“We were playing ball is all,” Reese muttered.

“It’s okay,” Sam said desperately. But Beth gave Reese the look she gave him once a year, like she was really seeing him or something, before she reached out to touch Sam’s arm. She ran her hands over him as if she was patting him down for weapons.

“Nothing broken?” she said in her little metal voice, her I’m-just-so-fine voice, her school voice.

They put Reese in the front seat with Beth. Dad sat in back with the kid. Nobody even mentioned going to get Kerry from Grandma’s place. At Benno’s the pizza they ordered sat there, grease hardening in ridges like a relief map. The kid ate two pieces, carefully picking off the pepperoni, which Reese’s father absently speared off the plate with a fork and ate himself. Reese watched his dad; Pat was sweating heavily, as if he’d been running. He hoovered the Coke in.

“Eat something, Vincent,” said Beth. She should get a T-shirt that said this, Reese thought. So he made a game of seeing how long he could chew a single bite, watching Beth watch him, her own mouth moving in synchrony. If Reese made a monkey face, would his mother do it, too? The thought made him grin.

The kid looked up then, and asked, “Can I have some milk?”

As his father waved for the waiter, Reese asked, “You drink milk with pizza?”

They all stared at him, as if he’d told the kid to go fuck a tree. Reese got up and went into the john, where he messed with his hair and washed his face. He was drying off when Pat stuck his head in and said, “Let’s go.”

Dvo
k, thought Reese, lying back on his bed—his lumpy good bed; they’d bought a new one for young Sam, didn’t even attempt to take this one back. The Largo from the “New World.” Excellent choice for a slight case of jits. He cranked it, wondering if he could levitate soundlessly simply from the vibrations out of the headphones. When he got up to get a glass of water and to change to his oldest Metallica CD, he heard Beth down the hall in the kid’s room.

“Do you want a light?” she asked.

“No, I don’t sleep with a light,” said the kid.

“This must feel very strange to you.” The kid didn’t answer. “You want a blanket?” Wow, Mom, thought Reese, it’s only frigging May. Right through the bathroom wall, when he went in, Reese could feel Beth touching the kid; she couldn’t keep her hands off him, though he noticed, every time they saw Sam in the last week, she always drew back before she touched, as if the kid was hot.

“Saturday tomorrow,” called his dad, coming up the hall. “You want to take in a game?”

“Okay,” said the kid.

Father city, thought Reese. Yep. Going to take a lot of games, though, Dad. Lot of catch-up to play this season. He ran into Pat when he opened the bathroom door. His dad looked as if he were ready to have a talk; Reese tensed. But Pat only leaned against the frame of the door.

“Vincenzo,” Dad said, and Reese felt his throat close. “Please, please…”

He heard their bedroom door shut. Mom would be in tranquo-land now; he could drive a front-loader up on the porch and she’d maybe turn over. His dad, he wasn’t sure; his dad might stalk around some. And sure enough, Reese heard his parents’ mattress sigh and the jingle of Pat’s change as he put his pants back on. The Metallica was making Reese even more jumpy. He got up and rummaged around until he found the African sax guy whose name he could never remember. There, he thought, laying one hand exactly parallel with the other along the sides of his hips. Nothing strenuous. Drift….

Didn’t work. Needed Puccini maybe. He rummaged again.

Reese woke up in the dark. His father must have turned out the light. Turning, he felt under his back the familiar lump. Over the years, Reese had occasionally tried to figure out what the constant body pressure was morphing Ben’s red bunny into looking exactly like. He thought sometimes it looked like a tadpole now, except for the one remaining ear. Easing up, careful not to press his groaning bladder, Reese pulled it out from under the bottom sheet. One eye. A humped, fat shape, in places its red plush worn nearly transparent pink. Embryo, though Reese now. That’s it. Igor the Embryo.

Still carrying the formless thing, Reese got up to pee, and put the red bunny down on the sink. His father was snoring, the strangled choke that drove Reese nuts. The one that made him breathe along with Pat until sleep drove him under. It was after he shut off the water that he heard the sound.

Kerry? But Kerry was at Grandma Rosie’s. Reese walked down the hall, keeping close to the wall, and toed open the door where the kid, Sam, slept.

He was asleep, or at least his eyes were shut. Reese stepped closer. Sam was lying on his back with his arms thrown out, sleeping that kid-sleep where you go down so hard you drool. Reese looked for eye movements. The kid was zonked. Then, Reese opened his hand and let the chafed red shape of the bunny Igor fall next to the bed. But as he turned to walk out, he heard the kid groan. Sam’s arm came up over his face and he said, “No. I just don’t…no…”

Did he mean “I don’t know”? Or was he trying to stop something? The kid moaned again.

Reese sprinted for the door—what if the kid woke up? But Sam rolled over and again, this time softly, he said, “Oh, no.”

There was a space between the door and the opening to the closet. Reese leaned against the wall and slid down soundlessly. He folded his arms over his raised knees and adjusted his eyes to the dark. If he strained, he could see the hands on the clock face above Sam’s dresser.

It was three a.m. So. Maybe three hours. Reese had gone without blinking longer. Anyone with training could watch that long. It was just…Reese leaned forward, his chin on his arms. You couldn’t tell…. But then the kid tossed once again, the upper part of his body shifting into a shaft of light from the street lamp on the corner. There.

Reese relaxed. He could see his face.

June 1994

For a dime, Reese would have bagged the last couple of weeks of school. But he figured that all he needed to do was get his dad on edge, and his brand-new driver’s license would be folded six ways and stuck where the sun didn’t shine in about five minutes flat. Dad was still Dad—in fact, he was extra-jovial Dad now that the sainted Sam was actually living under his roof—but he wasn’t going to tolerate anything that would kick back on “the family.” Reese could picture the headlines: “Miracle on Menard Street: Regaining a Son and Losing Another?”

Fuck that. He had two lousy weeks to keep his nose clean, and he was determined to do it. Though the strain was getting to him. He had two term papers due, and he’d been using the books he needed to write them to prop up the broken leg on the old bed that had been Ben’s. Jordie had accused him of thinking he could absorb all the facts about multiple personalities (his chosen topic for psychology) by sleeping on them.

Reese figured he knew everything about multiple personalities by osmosis, from living with his mother. But he had to settle down, and with his house the Grand Central of the universe, that was pretty hard to do.

He couldn’t get away from it. Everywhere he went in school, some teacher had a copy of the
People
magazine, the one with Sam dribbling in the driveway on the cover—the one with the headline that said, “Back…But Not Ben,” and underneath, “The Incredible Odyssey of a Lost Boy.” Some dildo in fourth-hour study hall even asked Reese to fucking autograph it. He did. Taking pity on the kid, he wrote, “Best Wishes, Daffy Dick,” when he by rights should have written something much more blistering. His mom had had a veritable shit hemorrhage when she’d seen Sam’s picture on the cover—even more than she’d had over the first
People
cover, which Reese still remembered vividly.

He’d heard her yelling downstairs, “What do these people think? That we have no life?”

And his father answering, “Beth, that’s what you used to do for a living….”

Tom, being Mr. Detective Psychiatrist, had of course asked him, a couple of times, “Are you
sure
you didn’t know it was Ben?” And Reese couldn’t believe it—like, why wouldn’t he have said something? If he had been really sure? Knowing the only thing his parents wanted on the entire earth was to find Ben?

And Tom had said, “Because maybe it wasn’t the only thing you wanted on the entire earth.”

Which was what was frustrating about Tom; he always thought he could trick you into revealing some deep subconscious longing by bringing up something so far out of the ballpark it was on top of a bus heading up Waveland Avenue. Reese, in fact, had thought about it himself, and the only real reason he hadn’t mentioned the red-haired kid to his mother was because it was just too damned ridiculous to think that his long-lost brother lived around the corner. The kid didn’t even really look like he remembered Ben; in fact, he didn’t even remember Ben, not that much.

“I was seven years old, for Christ’s sake,” he’d told Tom in disgust. “What do you remember from when you were seven?”

“I remember that I had a little brother who was three months old, who died of SIDS, and I was the one who found him, and it took me ten years to figure out why I was afraid of going to sleep,” Tom told him.

Trust old Tom to have a big, dramatic answer. Well, that’s why they said shrinks had to be crazy themselves.

And then Tom had started asking him a whole bunch of stuff about how he felt about Cecilia Lockhart, which Reese totally had nothing to say about—I mean, how could you be mad at a crazy lady for something she didn’t even know was wrong?

And when that didn’t get anywhere, Tom had gakked on about how was he feeling about Sam, was he mad at Sam? Reese couldn’t figure why Tom would even ask. Mad? Mad for what?

“For getting all the attention,” Tom said.

“I’m not a kid, Tom,” Reese told him. “I mean, if you lost a kid and hadn’t seen him for nine years, wouldn’t you sort of want to spend all your time with him, and be sort of obsessed with him? It’s pretty natural. Especially if you had this other kid that was—”

Tom had really zeroed in on that. “Another kid who was what, Reese? What?” Reese had shrugged. “What, Reese? Another kid who wasn’t worth being obsessed with?”

“Dr. Kilgore, this psycho crap can get really tedious.”

Tom had laughed then, and asked Reese how he thought it would be if he had to listen to it forty hours a week, coming from his own mouth. And Reese had sort of loosened up then. He’d told Tom he was thinking of becoming a psychologist himself—you didn’t have to get dirty, you didn’t just bury your mistakes like other doctors. Plus, Reese figured that Tom could have paid for a strip mall just with what he’d made off the Cappadoras alone over the years.

They talked about sports, about this idea Reese had that maybe he’d try out for basketball in the fall, finally, junior year being his last chance and all. Tom thought it was a pretty good idea, but Reese wasn’t sure. He wasn’t much of a joiner, and though he did love the game, and had some pretty heavy fantasies about suiting up and actually showing he could do it, he just didn’t know if he could take the boredom of drills and shit.

Nonetheless, he’d been doing a lot of stuff in the driveway, putting up folding chairs from Wedding and dribbling around them until he was sweating like a warthog. Sam would come out there and do it, too. Reese had to admit, the kid was fast in spite of how big he was, and he already knew things it had taken Reese years to learn, like never really letting your palm touch the ball: Sam could dribble so low a snake couldn’t ease under, with those hard, long fingers, just the tips tapping, all control.

Dad would come out, in this suit, and try to play a few points with them—it was just like Grandma Rosie used to say about Grandpa: he looked like an immigrant, mowing the lawn in a sport coat. Dad always tried to get in on it when Sam and Reese were doing something; it never failed to stiffen Sam up, Reese noticed.

But Sam played baseball, too, and practice was starting, so most of the nights Reese dribbled and lobbed and dribbled on his own.

The last few days before school ended, Reese began taking a pumpkin into the deserted gym and trying some things in there. Mostly seeing if his fadeaway jump shot was really as good as it felt in the driveway and on the playground. He’d been lifting weights a little bit, to build up his arms. People didn’t know it, but it took a lot more strength than a regular shot from midcourt, because you were rearing back from the guard, basically weakening your stance, instead of putting all your weight forward. But it could get a much bigger guy off you, and Reese knew that with his size, he was going to have to be able to be dead solid perfect with that and the free throws or he’d have no chance at all. Until he’d started trying to perfect the fadeaway, he’d never understood just how incredible Jordan’s shot really was. And Jordan didn’t have that much height, either. I mean, he had ten inches on Reese, but by NBA standards six feet six was no giant. Some nights, by the time Reese got home, his arms ached. He’d watch Sam and think, That kid’s going to go right up and stuff ’em if he keeps growing like he is now. Was he jealous of Sam’s size? He didn’t think so. It just would have been a whole lot easier if he’d gotten a few more of Mom’s big-Irish genes than Dad’s scrawny wop ones. Look at Uncle Paul. You could float a cat in one of his shoes.

Jealousy. Nervousness. Half the time, Reese realized, he was hanging around after school trying to figure out what he was really feeling about Sam. If nothing else, his years with Tom had taught him that no matter how smart you were, when it came to how you felt about things, you were pretty much always the last to know. The first time he saw Sam, and knew it was Ben, in the counselor’s office while Sam was still in foster care, Reese had almost started to cry, he was so glad. It was like Ben had this light all around him, and he couldn’t believe that if he walked right up to the kid, Ben wouldn’t just grab his arm and start talking about the time the squirrel got stuck in the car engine or the time Ben fell off the end of the long pier at Lake Delavan, or about the tree house in Madison. Even if he remembered the day in the lobby, fuck, he was just so glad Ben wasn’t dead….

But Ben—that is, Sam—had looked Reese right in the face. And he couldn’t have been faking it. He looked like he’d never seen Reese before in his life. “This is your brother,” said the social worker. “This is Vincent.”

The kid had offered to shake hands. “Hi, Vincent,” he’d said, and goddamn if his voice didn’t sound like Ben, that funny, deep, hoarse voice that used to sound so weird out of a little kid. That was when Reese had wanted to run, to just get away from all of them, this fucked-up unlucky bunch of people who didn’t even recognize each other, any of them. He could be like Horace Greeley or Thoreau or somebody and just head out, and work on the railroad or something. Did people still work on the railroad?

But he’d known, even then, he would never do it. He was too lazy and scared, and that was when he’d started getting irritated with the kid, with his “Yes, ma’ams,” and his table manners and his phobia about germs. It hadn’t taken Reese—or Kerry, for that matter—long to realize that Sam had this psycho-thing that if you breathed on his food, he wouldn’t eat it. And so Vincent got so he could just exhale a little at the dinner table, just as Mom passed Sam his plate, and then Sam would sit there, looking all sick, swallowing like the food was old socks that stuck in his throat. But then Kerry had started doing it, too, and Dad lowered the boom.

The kid was never anything but nice and polite to Reese. Nice and polite and just…in himself. It drove Reese nuts. He had no idea what to do to get to Sam. Sam just didn’t talk.

One time, the kid had come down while Reese was watching
Hell Is for Heroes
about one o’clock in the morning. Sam sat down, and after about half an hour he had said, suddenly, “So, is that where you got it?”

“What?” Reese had asked.

“Your name.” There was a guy in the movie called Reese. But that didn’t have anything to do with
his
name, Reese told Sam, and explained the “resale” thing, and the kid was like, well, Vincent’s a good name, too—like Vincent van Gogh. Reese had been pretty shocked, a little kid knowing about Vincent van Gogh.

But what he had said, and he sort of regretted it, was, “Yeah, and he was nuts, too.”

Sam, though, hadn’t seemed to mind. All he’d said was, “But you didn’t cut your ear off. At least not yet.”

A pretty decent kid, in some ways. He never got in your way. It made Reese wonder what it would have been like, having a kid brother; Kerry had always been so little, he couldn’t remember a time he didn’t have to take care of her. Though Tom said that when they grew up, that would “bond” them closer. Like they were covered with some kind of rubber cement.

Go out, reverse, imagine the big blocker, fade back, shoot. Reese did it over and over. Sometimes for an hour or more. He got so he was making it about ninety percent of the time; of course, there was no real defense there, so he was probably giving himself breaks. Between concentrating on the shot and thinking about Sam, he didn’t notice Teeter the day the coach came up behind him, reached over his head, and slapped the ball away.

Reese’s heart felt like he’d been filled with helium. “What…?” he yelled, whirling around. Teeter was built like a mastodon; they said he’d guarded Pistol Pete Maravich back in college, but that was twenty years ago, and now he looked like he’d eaten Pistol Pete and his brother for breakfast. Coach Teeter had to go three hundred pounds dry.

“If it ain’t Cappadora, the terror on the playground,” Teeter said, in that weasly sort of southern voice Reese always associated with drill sergeants in movies. “I been watching you in here, Vince. Going to drop out junior year and try to make the draft?”

“No,” Reese told him, recovering his ball. “I’m just goofing around.”

“Pretty famous guy now,” Teeter said. “Huh?”

“You got me confused with my brother,” Reese told him. What the hell, why piss the guy off? He still hadn’t formally decided not to try out next year.

“All you Cappadoras are famous, right? Maybe that’s why you don’t think you have to show up for school except on alternating Tuesdays during the full moon, eh, Vince?”

Reese said nothing.

“Oh, I forgot,” Teeter went on. “It ain’t Vince. It’s Reeeese. That’s right. Reeeese. Pardon me. So, Reese, you like basketball?”

“I like the game,” Reese said evenly.

“They say you take ’em pretty well out there in the street.”

“I do okay.”

“Wanta try with me?”

“I don’t care,” Reese said. They played a little Make It—Take It. Teeter was still fast, in spite of the poundage, and Reese had to hustle him; the coach also had natural size, so the lay-up was easy for him. But he couldn’t get around Reese’s fadeaway.

Finally, puffing, Teeter said, “You got a pretty fake there.”

Reese was caught off guard. He smiled. “I work hard at it,” he said.

“You thinking of coming out for the team next year?”

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“You think you could make it?”

“I might try,” Reese said evenly.

“Do you think that the other guys would be willing to put up with all your shit, just because you got one shot?”