Mike found a private investigator, and together we went and I told him my story. He seemed like a nice man, a former Texas sheriff with a big stuffed sailfish over his desk and a hunk of Red Man tobacco puffing out his upper lip. He pushed the check back across the desk. “You seem like good people,” he said, “so I’m not gonna bullshit you. Your boy is gone, and he’s gonna be hard to find. Your ex is a cop, which means he knows things about making himself scarce. Look how easy it was for you. But let’s say you go looking for him and maybe you find him. What then? You got no case, is what. You took this guy’s kid and absconded with him. He took him back. It’s maybe you who could get in trouble for this. Assault charges, you might try against him, but it won’t necessarily help you get the child. He goes to court and says you disappeared with his boy for a year, you are gonna get your head handed to you.”
“We won’t give up on this boy,” Mike said.
“I appreciate your sentiments, mister. I got two boys of my own. But what I’m saying to you is, you may not have a choice. You could grab him back, if you could find him. And then maybe your husband could grab him again. And so on, and so forth. You get the idea. Ping-Pong, only the kid’s the ball.” He turned to me, shaking his head. “If you were divorced and you had custody, I might be able to find him and you could get him back. You don’t even have a custodial snatch here. I don’t even know what to call the situation you got.”
I knew what to call it. It was like death, except I had to go on living with it. I couldn’t look at Mike Riordan when he stopped by with cardboard bakery boxes of cookies and stacks of magazines because I knew he had spent his day with kids at the local day camp, breathing in the sweet fragrance of their skin and hair, listening to the staccato sound of their light feet, hearing their high voices calling to one another across the ball field, teaching them how to kick a soccer ball into the goal the way my own boy had once done and, maybe, a thousand miles away, was doing again. I slept in my clothes and canceled out on Cindy whenever she asked me to dinner. And then one July day, three weeks after Bobby found me, almost a year to the day from the day Robert and I had disappeared, the bell rang in the still apartment, the air so thick with dust motes that it looked like a blizzard when I moved, and I lunged for the door like a crazy woman.
“Frannie,” she said, in a voice so thick with sorrow I almost didn’t hear the word. And Grace was in my arms and I in hers. She cleaned and cooked as though I was an invalid. She cried with me and read to me. Once I heard her on the phone. “She’s not ready to talk yet,” she said. Once she handed me an envelope. It was full of documents: my birth certificate. My nursing license. Robert’s baptismal certificate. I ran my fingers over the notary’s seals.
I hadn’t even thought about that, right away, that I was free now, that I didn’t have to hide because what I’d had worth hiding was already gone. But Mike had thought of it, and he’d found Grace through the college, and told her everything, and picked her up at the airport. And when Mrs. Levitt called and told me that she needed me to come, she was having fainting spells and heart palpitations, it was Mike who had put her up to it, though she didn’t admit it until months later, when she was demanding I be nicer to him.
“You must make a life for your son to come back to, Mrs. Nurse,” she said to me one day, eating a Happy Meal, handing me the toy, Donald Duck on a motorcycle. “Don’t waste your time crying. Crying is nothing. It does nothing.”
Cindy came by one night in August with a bottle of wine, and I drank most of it and finally cried, slurring my words, mucus dripping onto her shoulder as I told her all of it, all the blood and all the beatings, everything, both of Bobby’s babies, the one he’d taken from me and the one I’d taken from myself. She put me in the bathtub with some sort of sweet-smelling oil, trimmed my hair and gave me a manicure, big as she was with child, with children. The day that Grace flew in and the day that Cindy pushed her way past me into the stale air of the apartment: those were the days when I started to come back to life.
I bought an answering machine so that if Robert called when I was out I would get his message; I bought one of those caller ID machines Bobby had boasted about so that if Robert called when I was home I would know where the call was coming from. I kept Robert’s enrollment current at school. “Tell them he’ll be back soon,” I told Mike on the phone, though I told him not to stop by, no, there was nothing he could bring over, nothing I needed. Except the one thing I did not have.
No one came for the rent, and the home-care agency got me a new patient, whose wife had Alzheimer’s. I relieved Mr. Dean while he went out bowling or to the movies with friends; I sat with his wife while she picked at her skirt and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.” We were two crazy ladies, sitting in the living room of a little brick ranch house watching tabloid shows on television. We sat with tray tables in front of us; Mrs. Dean played some sort of solitaire that seemed to have no real rules, and I sent out flyers to schools and police departments. “Have you seen this boy?” the flyer said. Grace printed them on her computer. The photograph of Robert came out grainy, flat, anyboy in black and white.
Two schools called, and one police department, but the boys were too young, too old, too small, too light, too not mine. One night, after Mrs. Dean and I watched a miniseries about a beautiful woman who owned the best boutique in Beverly Hills, I came home to see a red light glowing in the darkness of the kitchen. For just a moment I thought it was the glowing tip of a cigarette, and thought that Bobby had come back to finish me off. But my heart leapt, too, because if Bobby was there, Robert would be with him. I was happy at the thought of Bobby’s hands on my throat, as long as I could put my arms around Robert one last time.
It was only the light on the answering machine. There was no voice on the message for a few moments, only noise: traffic, big trucks, horns, a faint shouted conversation between two men in the background. Then a deep breath. “Mom,” he said, and I bent over the machine and hugged it to my chest so that the sound was muffled for a moment.
“I’m all right. Daddy is all right, too. He’s being really nice. He really missed me when I was gone.” There’s a silence there, on the tape, a long one. A car honks. The background noise sounds like highway traffic, a gas station, maybe, or a pay phone on a shopping strip. “Are you all right? Mom?” More silence. “We had lunch at McDonald’s. Tell Bennie I said ‘hi.’ Tell him I saw Batman on TV.” Another silence, another breath. “I miss you a lot. I have to go. I love you. Don’t worry, I’m good. We move around a lot.” Tears then. “I hope you’re not hurt. I hope you’re all right. I’m sorry. I have to go.”
I listened to that tape all night, that first night. I felt as if I was there, could see the trucks whizz by, feel the breeze around the booth, see the boy feeding the phone with spare change, culled from the top of strange bureaus and the slots of vending machines. By morning I knew every word, every nuance, every shift in timbre and tone. He was afraid, my little boy. Maybe afraid Bobby was going to find him talking on the phone, the way I had that night in the kitchen. Maybe afraid of something more. I wasn’t imagining it, the way his voice broke when he said he hoped I was all right. Mike heard it, too. “That son of a bitch told him you were dead,” he said. “I just know it. I feel it.”
A week later on the machine there was the recording of an operator. “You have a collect call. Caller, at the tone state your name.” The operator cut it off there, while I sat and cried and played over and over again the snippet of dead air where the name should be. I changed the message on my machine, changed it to begin: This machine accepts collect calls. There were none, not after that one attempt.
In October, after school began again, I took $300 and flew to New York City. Grace thought I was coming in on Tuesday evening, but my flight landed just after dawn, and instead of taking a cab to her apartment I went to Brooklyn, to the narrow house Bobby and I had bought thirteen years before, where our words and our actions lived on in the walls, which
we haunted. I rang the bell and a pretty girl, twenty-five, maybe thirty, opened it with a dishtowel in her hands. Her hair and eyes were dark; if she was not Italian, she could pass. She was the sort of woman Bobby Benedetto should have married, who would never have complained, soft and yielding as a feather pillow.
“He’s not here,” she said. “My husband and me, we rent the house from his mother. She lives over on Ocean Avenue. Maybe she can tell you where he’s living now. I think maybe Florida someplace.” My mirror still hung in the foyer, the one that Ann Benedetto had given us, and in it I could see my reflection, my hair brushing my shoulders now, brushing the collar of a dress I’d gotten on sale with Cindy, too flimsy, really, for an autumn day in the Northeast. I’d have to borrow a sweater from Grace. No, I said, I didn’t need directions. I knew the way to Mrs. Benedetto’s house. The other Mrs. Benedetto. The only Mrs. Benedetto.
I could hear the bell ringing inside, the gold chimes in the white hallway; I could tell by the faint sound of her footsteps from inside that she’d come from the kitchen to the front door. I remembered the day, maybe seven or eight years before, when we had stood there together looking out the window that gave onto the yard, both of us staring at Bobby out back with a beer, watching Robert weave in and out of the rows of tomato plants. I felt that day like loneliness was more than a feeling, that it was a state of being, like zero gravity or the bends, and we were in the place where you learned to feel it in your marrow, the bathysphere in which you felt it all around you, pressing in on you, on the dishwasher, the pot holders, the spice rack, the forks and spoons, the emptiness inside.
“I want to ask you something,” I had said that day to Ann Benedetto. “What was your husband like?”
“What kind of question is that?”
I didn’t know what kind of question it was. It was maybe the first direct one I’d asked Bobby’s mother, but I was emboldened by the tenderness in my elbow where I’d hit one of the dining-room chairs after he shoved me, after I said I wanted to stay home Sundays, not go to Ocean Avenue.
“Was he good to you?”
“He was my husband.”
“Did he ever hit you?”
She’d narrowed her eyes to look at me, and her dislike was an atmosphere, too, as thick as the isolation of the two of us in that clean, clean room, our distance from each other and from the man outside, calling to his son.
“My son is a good man,” she said. “Nobody can tell me different.”
Her face was hard then, and it was hard when she opened the door to find me standing on her concrete steps, clean the way steps are when someone sweeps them every day. Her hair had just been done, the sculptured waves of iridescent black, the sheen of hair dye and hair spray. She gave me a long look, and I her, and then she began to close the door again. I held it open with the flat of my hand. “I want my son back home,” I said.
“So do I,” she said. “And we’re both out of luck.”
Grace told Mike about that, the two of them doing their dance around me, and he traveled to New York on his own, and hired a detective there. Mike made friends with some people who ran a group for missing children, and he mailed more flyers to more schools with Robert’s picture, the one he had taken in Lake Plata during fifth grade, his smile big, his face thin, his eyes bright, a false tableau of trees and clouds and endless fields behind him. He’s never given up, Mike, and neither have I. Four years it’s been, and still I have the tape in my drawer, that I listen to from time to time when Grace Ann is napping. And that photograph, on my bedside table. “That’s your brother,” I tell my little girl. “You’ll see him soon. When he comes home.”
“Bruvver,” Grace Ann says.
I imagine him, my Robert, his voice just beginning to break when he gets excited, the down on the curve of his jaw thickening until he can’t help but see it when he looks in the mirror, turns his head on an angle, and feel it with the flat of his hand as though he’s caressing and measuring himself. Maybe his father is with another woman now, just as I am with another man, and maybe when he’s had too much to drink he smacks her, hard, knocks her down, even, and Robert tries to shut his eyes and his ears and maybe sometimes he has a few drinks himself, sneaks a can from the refrigerator, so that the hard sounds are softer, the cotton padding of beer wrapped around the sharp edges.
I see Robert in my mind’s eye, and he’s tall now, and he’s handsome, and he feels things as deeply as he always did, but doesn’t speak of them much. And maybe he has found a girl of his own and she tests him, taunts him, innocently, because sometimes it’s fun to test and taunt, at least for most of us, and he grabs her, hard, and scares her a little bit. But it feels like love to her, the grip on her forearms, and she thinks it’s because he loves her so much, and maybe in the beginning that is it. And by the time it turns to something else—well, it’s too late.
I think of my Robert and I think of that maybe girl, and you know what? I don’t give a damn about her, about her bruises and even her broken bones. I should. But I don’t. I love my boy. I always have. I always will. Somewhere between my head, where I know so much, and my gut, where I can almost feel her pain, is my Robert. My heart.
In six months Robert will be sixteen, old enough to get on a plane, to pick up the phone, to make his own way. It’s been four years since I lost him, but he knows where to find me. My phone number has never changed. When I left the apartment to move in with Mike, and later, when we bought this house, with its three bedrooms and its trellis of clematis by the garage, I gave our new address to the woman who had taken my place there. And maybe he’ll knock at the apartment door and the woman will say, oh, your mother wanted you to know exactly where to find her. And he’ll drive to the house and I’ll open the door and he’ll say, Mommy, it’s all right. I’ve taken the best of both of you and left the rest behind. The part of the river that runs with blood stops with you. It does not flow on through me. I pray every day that that is true. I wonder sometimes why Captain McMichael said that day in the precinct house that Robert was no Benedetto. Was he teasing him? Or wishing him a happy life?
I would have a happy life now, if only he were here. Mike was telling the truth, when he said he was a patient man. He wasn’t a fool; twice I told him to go away, and he went. For a while he dated a student teacher at the middle school, a little girl with a squeaky voice and long, long brown hair. I saw them once, going into a diner hand in hand, when I was on my way to the Deans’ house. She made him look so big, in the way I made Bobby look so dark, so many years ago. Mike told me she broke up with him because she said he wasn’t ready to make a commitment. But he was. Just not to her.
He took care of me, sometimes near, sometimes at a distance, for a long time before I bothered to take any care of him. I suppose I love him now, although it’s not what I once thought of as love. I know that I love what he is, and what he has given me, a life that feels ordinary, uneventful, and full. It’s hard to make ends meet, what with the retainers for the detectives and the trips Mike makes from time to time, when we get a lead that seems promising. He was promoted to principal; I work part-time and Cindy takes care of Grace Ann along with the twins. Chad bosses all three of them around. We run together every morning, Mike and I, with the baby in a special running stroller Cindy gave us for a gift when she threw me a shower. There’s a bedroom in our house done in green and yellow where Mike’s mother and my sister Grace sleep when they come to visit. But there’s a bulletin board over the desk with a picture of the soccer team and a Yankees game schedule pinned to it. In the drawer of the desk there’s a letter from Bennie, that I promised him I’d send to Robert if I ever had an address to send it to. It’s Robert’s room, that room. It’s waiting for him, just as I am.
I think of myself as Beth Crenshaw most of the time now, because if I think of myself as Fran Benedetto there is a piece of me missing so big that the pain doubles me over, clawing at my gut, and Bobby gets me again, and I can’t let that happen. Because I am Grace Ann Riordan
’s mother, too, a little girl who has nothing to fear except that she will be denied a second helping of crackers at snack time. She hears nothing through the walls except, perhaps, the occasional sound of her father saying her mother’s name in a kind of groan: Beth, Beth. Her father loves her pure, and loves her mother the same. And her mother loves her father a little more each day. I trust him, deep down, which is more important than I once understood. “The luckiest day of my life was the day I met you,” Mike said the day we were married at the municipal building. I don’t know if it’s legal, don’t know if I’m divorced, don’t even care. I don’t give a damn for the law. What did the law ever do for me? Mike wanted to be my husband; that was good enough. The rest is all Frannie’s life. That’s not me. This is the me I made. The past? Like Mrs. Levitt said, “It’s only a story.”
Three or four times a year I let myself go back. The men take the children somewhere, bowling or to the movies, and Cindy and I have the night alone, just the two of us, and I drink a couple of glasses of wine, and I sob and I scream and she holds me and cries into my hair. “He loves you, honey,” she says. “I know he does. He’ll be back. He’ll be back.” The last time she said to me, “I want you to know that if I ever meet that man, I’m going to slip a serrated knife between his ribs.” Then she put cucumber slices over my eyes to bring the swelling down. I don’t know what made me say it, lying there, seeing a wash of green light through my lids. But I reached out my hand for her, and said, so low she had to lean toward me to hear, “When are you going to tell me about your sister?”
I don’t know what her face looked like while she talked. I kept those cucumber slices where they were, so that she didn’t have to face me if she didn’t want to. She didn’t cry; it was almost like she was talking about somebody else, talking about a little girl curled up in a chair in a dark corner of the living room, reading a book, reading Mother West Wind’s Children. Listening to her mother call for her: Cindy. Cindy, come here. Cynthia Lee, I need you. Smiling to herself when her mother gave up, opened the screen door, went around to the side of the house, paused right beneath the living-room window, at the edge of the flower beds. “Cathy,” she said, “go call your father for supper.”