The Deep End of the Ocean (44 page)

“Well, look. I’ll ask Candy if I can call Tom.”

“Forget it.”

“No, I will…. And a lawyer, maybe, though I don’t know if—”

“’Cause I don’t even know if he knows.”

She looked blank, so Reese reminded her: “I mean Tom.”

Beth sighed. “Oh, Vincent, he knows. I think everyone in four states knows.” Reese thought, I’d like to paste her, just once.

Reese stood up and tapped on the door that led back to the detention. The guard was standing right there, but he did this elaborate yawning thing, like, Oh, is that a fly I hear? Reese closed his fist and banged harder.

“Problems?” asked the guard.

“I just want a drink of water, okay?”

“No water.”

“No water?”

“We got no water. You want coffee?”

“I didn’t mean like bottled water….”

“I can’t get water from here. Want coffee?”

“I’m sixteen, man. I don’t even drink coffee,” Reese pleaded, and then added, “Much.”

“I’ll see if I can find you some pop.”

When the guard let the door shut, Reese felt the room suck at him. It was so very small, so small. And the patterns of dirt on the walls and floor were the only variation in all the blond-and-cream-wood-and-plaster, the only decoration. He was not claustrophobic; he remembered the box on the landing of the stairs, where all of them would hide, and snow forts…

Reese didn’t even notice the kid. But Sam was already holding his telephone. Reese picked up. “How long have you been here?” he asked.

“A minute.” The kid looked scared to death, and he looked…little. Shrunken. He had on a Cubs shirt.

“Are you okay?” the kid asked.

Reese suddenly had this picture of one of the old Pat O’Brien movies his dad made him watch with him in the middle of the night, where Jimmy Cagney was this arch-criminal who was going to the chair, and Pat O’Brien was his old friend from when they were kids, a priest, and he came to the jail to beg Jimmy Cagney to act like a coward when he was going to the chair so all the little kids in the neighborhood wouldn’t think this wrong guy was a hero or something. Reese started to laugh. He couldn’t stop laughing.

“What’s the matter?” Sam said. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing…I’m…nothing. Well, Sam man, fancy meeting you here.”

“Are you okay?”

Reese automatically reached up to touch the bandage on the back of his head, where they’d stitched…it stung. He still couldn’t figure out how the hell he’d banged the back of his head running into a light pole with the front of Teeter’s car.

“I’m okay. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Are you going to be in here for a long time?”

“Well, five to ten years,” said Vincent, and then he looked at the kid and thought, That was a shitty thing to do. “No, I don’t know, Sam. I guess…I know guys who did stuff, and they had to go to one of these schools….”

“Reform school. Beth said it’s not for sure.”

“Yeah, well, it’s like a farm, I guess. For JDs. I don’t know.”

“What did you do?”

“I took Teeter’s car. I wasn’t going to keep it. I just was going to ride around….”

“Teeter the coach at the high school?”

“Yeah, that asshole.”

“And so why didn’t you just bring it back?”

“I was going to, but this goon I know, Schaffer, and I, we were goofing around, and then when I saw the cops, I just went faster….”

“Were you drunk? That’s what Beth said.”

“I was overserved…yeah, Sam, I was drunk. But I never did anything this bad before….”

“That you got caught for.”

“That…right. So, Sam, what do you want?”

“Nothing.”

Reese could see his parents sort of scuffling to see in the skinny window, his dad waving a little. Reese waved back. He couldn’t see whether his dad looked sick or not. At least Pat was wearing matching clothes; this was a sign he couldn’t be too bad. Bad. Speaking of bad, he felt bad. Why am I baby-sitting this kid? Why wasn’t one of them in here with Sam? Wasn’t this against some law or something, letting a little kid go in to visit a felon?

“Well, then, why are you here? Is this, like, the alternative amusement for Saturday morning?”

“I wanted to see if you were okay.”

“Well, I’m okay.”

“Okay.”

The kid looked around the booth.

“So? Sam?” Reese, all at once thinking he could maybe sleep, prodded the kid. The sooner this day could end, the better.

“This is pretty ugly, this place.”

“It’s ugly.”

“How fast were you going?”

“I don’t know…like ninety….”

Sam’s eyes blinked and fastened on Reese. He grinned. “Ninety?”

And it occurred to Reese that maybe he should go easier here. That Sam was probably not just ordinarily fucked up, but a little more than ordinarily, just barely back with George and all. A couple of weeks at his own house after the foray into Cappadoraland. And now this shit. He was such a kid…. Oh, Ben.

“Look, Sam. I don’t know if you know…” Reese dropped his voice. Soundproof, my ass. “I don’t know if you know how incredibly stupid what I did was.”

“Well…” said the kid. “Yeah. I do.”

“I mean really, monumentally stupid.”

“Yeah?”

“Like, I’m a jerk, Sam.”

“No,” said Sam.

“I’m a fuck-up, and it’s not funny, it’s not cool.” Reese was almost whispering now, leaning toward the partition.

“I just thought…”

“What did you think, Sam?”

“I thought we could be…friends.”

“Friends?” Reese was glad he couldn’t get his hands on the kid. “Look, you idiot. First of all, how would we be
friends,
Sam? I don’t hang with twelve-year-olds. And second, you come back, you leave, and go in and out the window…I don’t even know you, Sam. You’re a concept, you follow me? And you don’t know me!”

“That’s not my fault!” The kid looked on the verge of tears. Reese could see Pat motioning for Candy to punch in the code and let him in. He quickly waved Dad off, to try to soothe him—I’m not instructing him in the finer points of car theft here, Dad. You don’t have to save him.

“I know it’s not your fault,” he told the kid with what he thought was awesome patience, considering. “But I have a life of my own, you know? And it’s unfun right at the moment. What do you want from me?”

“You’re my brother. I haven’t come around, because I didn’t know if you guys would all be so mad at me you wouldn’t want to see me. But…I missed you. There were even times when I thought I shouldn’t have…whatever. You’re my brother.”

“I’m not your brother!” Reese gave up; the tears were running down his filthy face; he was just tired out, is all, and this fucking kid…“Look, if I were your brother, what would you want from me? I mean, I’m fucking going to some kind of penitentiary or something! Even Dad thinks I should be in a padded cell! I probably have, like, no future. I probably won’t even graduate….” Reese rubbed his eyes, trying to get himself to stop. His head was filled with that pool-water smell—that drained limpness he remembered from being a little kid, when you cried and cried until your chest was hollow.

“I just thought…It’s okay,” said Sam. “I’ll leave.”

“Yeah, leave,” said Reese. Then he winced. “Sam, I’m sorry. I know you probably feel crummy. It was nice of you to come over here. But here’s the thing…I have to get out of this somehow….”

“I know, and I—”

“You don’t know. Don’t say you know because you don’t. You never did anything wrong in your whole life! You’re just a kid. And you’re a real good kid. Look, when I come home, I’ll come and get you and we’ll go get something to eat, okay? Or shoot pool or something, okay?”

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where could we go?”

Reese sighed. “I don’t know, buddy. Anywhere in walking distance. I may not be driving until, like, two thousand and ten.”

“Can we go to Wedding?”

“Nah. Not there. I meant like a burger.”

Then the kid sighed, too. “Okay. I just didn’t want you to think I believe it when they say you’re crazy.”

“Well, I
am
crazy. Who says I’m crazy?”

“My dad.”

“George.”

“Yeah.”

“He said so. In so many words?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of’?”

“Well, he said so.”

“Okay. Come on. How?”

“He said…he said…”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, when I was at your house, he would say, ‘Watch out for that kid, Sam. Watch out for that kid. He ain’t right.’”

“‘Ain’t right.’”

“Yeah, and I don’t think…I mean, I love my dad, but he doesn’t understand…. He thought you would hurt me or something.”

And so I would, thought Reese, and raised his arm in motion for the guard, but the kid said, “Wait a minute. Reese?”

Reese sighed again. The room would inflate.

“I got to tell you something.”

Reese made a weary circular motion with one hand. So? So?

“I remembered something.”

“Yeah?”

“I remembered something from when I was a kid.”

Reese stiffened. He thought, Christ, no. Not today. I don’t want him to remember today. And anyhow, he couldn’t, he was just a baby, he couldn’t remember the words….

“When I was at your house, Beth showed me this trunk. The trunk at the foot of your bed.” The cedar chest, thought Reese. The big hope chest with the hoop top. “She took out all these baby clothes she said were mine. And she showed me some blankets and stuff. Some pictures.”

“And? And?”

“And I didn’t remember any of them.”

“Oh.” Reese’s weariness was deafening. So long as the kid didn’t remember the lobby, what the fuck did he care? How much, Reese thought, how much more? Isn’t this enough, Mom?

“But I remembered the smell.”

“The smell.”

“I remembered the smell of the cedar chest. From being inside it.”

Reese let the phone drop, almost. It was as if Mom, gesturing, shrugging her shoulders, outside the window, asking if Sam wanted to come out, was on film instead of real. He could feel his shorter self running up those stairs in Madison, into the little room half-made-over for baby Kerry, where they dumped everything, pulling over the boxes of diapers and clothes and whispering, “Ben, Ben, where are you, Ben?” Running back down. Thinking of the dryer. Thinking, Mommy will kill me if he’s in the dryer again and turning blue. He wasn’t in the dryer. A pulse thudding in his neck. He couldn’t let his mother hear. She would screech. She would grab his hair.

“…hide-and-seek,” the kid said.

“I know,” Reese said, adjusting the telephone, which had gone slimy in his wet hand.

“And there was this one time I got into the big chest? Did that really happen?”

“It really happened. You let the lid shut, and it caught.”

“I knew it! I knew it!” said the kid. “I can really remember lying in there in the dark—there were these cracks of light, so it wasn’t totally dark. I was just lying there on some clothes or something, and the top was so high, I couldn’t even touch it unless I sat up. And at first I tapped on the top, but nobody came, and I thought I couldn’t breathe, but I could. So I just stayed there.”

“And I was running all over the house, looking for you, telling you to quit fooling around, it wasn’t funny anymore—”

“But I didn’t hear you—”

“Because I couldn’t talk loud…Mom would have heard me—”

“And finally you came and opened the top of the chest—”

“And you were there. You were just there. Not scared or anything. Just got up and got out.”

“See, that’s the thing. That’s what I remember.”

“What?”

“That I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t scared, because I knew…”

“Yeah?”

“I knew you would come and find me.”

And Reese could see it, Ben’s white freckled face, unexpected, staring up at him from the trunk, like a baby in a basket. And his relief, his huge relief, when Ben moved, sat up. He’d jerked Ben’s arm, but not too hard, and called him a dork, and asked him why he didn’t yell, told him to never go in the trunk again. But Ben just started jumping down the stairs, one at a time, saying he was a bunny. Reese could hear him: “Bunny. Bunny. Bunny. Hop. Hop. Hop. Can you do this, Vincent?”

He tried to erase the image, cover it with anything, any picture, even last night’s gaudy wash of ambulance lights. Reese wondered if this was what Pat had done when he had the coronary, willed himself to die, squeezed himself so pitilessly that his heart burst. Tried to take himself out on purpose because he couldn’t stand thinking of stuff anymore. I would do it now, Reese thought, shading his eyes with one hand. If I could just die now by wanting to, I would, I’d just disappear…. Shame was not a thought. Shame had mass and volume. Right now, thought Reese, I’d blow.