“No, not people like me. Gay women, yes. But not people like me. I mean, I could. But Beth, you don’t become a cop because you’re a rebel. I’m a deeply conventional person, Beth. I know that sounds crazy, given my…well, just leave it at that. I always thought I’d have a husband and kids. I just couldn’t ever see the husband.”
“But you could…”
“No. Sometimes I think…” Candy paused to stuff her mouth with a fistful of fries. “There’s this guy. We’re old buddies. He was my law professor—I went to a year of law school, during my Watergate period. He had a crush on me, a bad crush, and I had to tell him I didn’t do men, that is, not anymore. Which is to say, I have, in my life, though I can’t imagine why I’m telling you that. Jesus. Anyhow, Chris and I, we hang out. We get Chinese, maybe once a month. Watch Spencer Tracy movies. He’s probably, Chris is probably forty-seven or something now. And he’s this perennial bachelor. Dates young women. Coeds. I have sweaters older. And then, of course, me. We go to the ballet and stuff. To his big firm gala things. I tell him, Chris, I’m your beard—you know what that means, Beth?” Beth nodded; she didn’t. “I’m like his surrogate wife for places he can’t take the young chickies.”
Candy lay back on her elbows, Beth wincing over the contact of the grass with the fine beige linen. “A few Christmases ago, I had this party—I told you I’m a bad Jew—and he brought this girl. Beth, I don’t think she could drive yet. And I told him, ‘Chris, you’re going to be hanging around the middle school soon. This is getting fairly despicable.’ And he looked at me so sadly. I thought, I had this flash, he’s gay, or he’s something, and he’s not out to himself. Not at all. But what he said was, ‘I’m tired, Candy. I want a son. I would marry you, Candy. You name the day.’”
Candy went on, “And since that Christmas, I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought, why not? We have a lot of laughs. He’s still looking at the teenagers, but they aren’t looking back that much anymore. With what I make, if I had a kid, I’d have to chain it to the bed while I’m at work; and my work is crazy. But if I had enough money to cover it all…Chris is richer than God. I mean, why not? He’d have his kid…I’d have a kid.”
“But you’d be betraying…who you are.”
Candy smiled slowly. “Don’t we all do that, Beth? Shit, can you please point out why I am telling you all this?”
The teenagers were drifting back to their cars. The air smelled of cordite from the last wisps of firework smoke.
“I don’t mind,” Beth said, thinking, That was lame. “I’m glad you did.”
“I guess I am because this is horrible, what’s happening to you, Beth. It’s the worst, the absolute shits. But it doesn’t mean you should throw away everything else with both hands.”
She doesn’t see, thought Beth sadly. Not even Candy. She doesn’t see that if I can’t be Ben’s mother, I not only don’t want to be anyone’s mother, I don’t want to be anyone. Even being dead would be an effort. I want to be a lay sister, scrubbing the same patch of stone cement floor every day, scrubbing, scrubbing.
“And one more thing,” Candy said, wadding up the paper wrappings. “If you go home, it doesn’t mean I’ll forget you or stop working to find Ben. I’ll work every day, Bethie. As long as it takes. And if you want to call me every day and make sure I’m working, you can. And I’ll call you, too. All the time. I promise.”
So three weeks later, Pat came with the baby on Saturday night. And Beth told him she would be going home on Sunday. Pat’s face reflected comic-book disbelief, dropped jaw and all. There was a hushed sort of festivity in the house afterward; she could hear Joey and Tree hanging around to sit up late in the kitchen with Angelo—even the reporters seemed restless. As if it were part of the choreography, Beth let Pat make love to her for the first time since the reunion; he’d brought her diaphragm to her, unasked, several weeks before, in mute appeal. She had taken the box in her hand and laughed, right into his crumpling face. But then he had done the most touching thing, a thing Beth realized objectively she had not sufficient grace to do. He had turned back to her and asked, “Why don’t you want to? I mean, it isn’t really the actual sex I want. It’s you. It’s your love.”
“I love you, Pat,” she had said. “It’s just that making love would be something so…ordinary, so…”
“Normal?”
“I guess.”
“Do we have to never do anything normal again, Bethie? Is that what we have to do for Ben?”
“I don’t know if I ever can. Do anything the way I would have done it…before.”
“I don’t know if I ever can either, Beth. I know that I’m lonely, though. I feel like I didn’t just lose my kid but my wife, too. Like I’m a widower, and I don’t want to be.”
I do, Beth thought, but she said, “Let me take a little time.”
And when it finally happened, it wasn’t so bad. Beth had not even been able to imagine that her body would open for Pat; but it turned out to be an accommodating body, after all; and though she felt as though her insides were covered with skin, as though Pat’s shudderings and urgings were calisthenic rather than romantic, the tenderness she experienced for him, though at a distance at least equal to the width of the room, when he finally rolled over beside her, cupping one of her breasts gratefully in his hand as he fell asleep, made it a good thing to have done. Pat whistled in the morning as they packed the car.
Just before they left, when Angelo and Rosie and the girls were lined up on the curb, Ellen’s Saab screeched to a halt behind them. She had David in his Sunday-school clothes on the seat beside her. Beth jumped out of the front seat to hug her.
“I thought you were going to leave without saying goodbye,” Ellen told her, instantly beginning to cry.
“I called you.”
“I was on the way.”
“It’s the right thing.”
“I’ll be back next weekend.”
“And I’m going to keep everything going….”
“I know, Ellenie. You’re the top, you’re the best.”
They hugged, but Beth felt the slackening, the dip. The principals were leaving; who could expect the supporting actors to go on with the show alone?
“It’s all my fault,” Ellen said suddenly.
“What?”
“I put your room on my card, so you had to go up to the desk and take so long getting it straightened out….”
“Ellenie,” Beth said, trying to be gentle. “I would have had to go up to the desk anyway….”
And yet, how many times had she thought exactly the same thing?
“I even talked you into coming, remember? You said you were still too fat from Kerry. I made you come.”
“You didn’t.”
“I made you come. I signed you up without even asking you, Beth, remember?”
“It doesn’t matter, Ellen. It just happened. It just happened.”
Pat got out of the car and put his arm around Ellen’s shoulders. “We all feel like it’s our fault, El. If I didn’t let Beth take the kids…”
Let, Beth thought—let? You made me take the kids.
“I’m a bad friend,” said Ellen, sobbing now. “I went out with Nick when you were in Michigan the summer of junior year….”
“Did you sleep with him?” Beth asked.
“No.” Ellen was genuinely shocked, shocked so that her tears stopped midstream.
“Well, that’s okay then,” Beth said. Why were they talking about this? “You could have told me that seventy-five years ago, Ellenie.”
“Why would it matter if I slept with him?”
“Because I never did.”
“None of it matters,” Pat put in. “We could trace this all the way back to the Korean War.” He turned to Beth. “We have to go, honey. Vincent’s with the Shores. We have to go by and get him….”
Both of the women turned to Pat, and, as if drilled by their combined glance, he quietly folded himself back into the car.
Ellen
asked, “Where does he get off?”
“He’s worn out, too, Ellenie. He just wants to get home.”
“Do you?”
“Sure,” she said.
Pat talked about as far as Rockford, mostly the fact that two of the new waitresses seemed to consider the cash register at Cappadora’s their personal savings account. After a while, he stopped talking and sang with the radio. The baby fell asleep. Beth fell asleep, only to waken, sweating, at some minuscule shift in pressure, as if the landing gear had slid out of the bowels of the plane.
They were turning the corner onto their street. They were pulling into the driveway. The garage.
Beth had no idea how long she sat in the cave of the garage, alone.
What roused her again was her surprise at the cold, the snaky lick of cold under the summer canopy. Get up, thought Beth, and then, No, sit here a bit more. Postpone the beginning of the post-Ben period just a little more. She heard a rustle in the dark from the corner of the garage, where the snowblower was stored, and her heart did thump then. A rat. A fat, bold raccoon, waiting to bite. She threw open the car door and nearly knocked Vincent over.
“Baby!” Beth cried. “I didn’t see you! Did Dad call you to come home?”
Vincent buried his face against her belly, nearly knocking Beth back into the seat. And suddenly, easily, she was holding him, too, pulling him up onto her lap.
“Mama,” said Vincent, wriggling in sensuous joy. Beth froze.
She held Vincent back from her and looked at him. She had not seen him since the Fourth of July, more than a month ago, and if she were honest, not really seen him all summer. He was a leggity thing now, his last summer’s shorts crowding his crotch like a bad bikini. “Mom?” Vincent asked her, wonderingly, switching back to his own word. She kissed him on both cheeks, asked him how T-ball was going, did he hit a home run? And then she set him down and picked up her purse and went into the house, Vincent skipping around and around her like a puppy.
She started to think about Bob Unger, a reporter she knew years ago at The Capital Times. She’d gone to Three Mile Island with him, during the meltdown crisis at the nuclear power plant. At night, after everyone filed, it was party city, war stories and card games on top of fourteen-hour work days. One night, Beth and Bob started necking in his car. She had been a tiny bit pregnant with Vincent. No one knew; they wouldn’t have sent her to a place where even smart people thought it was possible to end up glowing in the dark for life. But because she was pregnant, her hormones had started to race, arousal catching her unawares. She and Pat had been having sex twice a day; and at that moment, with hunky, prematurely gray science-guy Bob, she wanted to get down to it right there on the seat. But then Unger had slipped his hand under her sweater, and Beth suddenly sat up, smiled, punched him on the shoulder, and said, “I think we’re both worn out, buddy.”
She’d all but run for her room, a tumult of physical pulses at war with the big feeling—relief. Adrenaline prickles ran down both arms.
She felt that way now. Why? What had she avoided?
Vincent jumped into the house ahead of her, and Beth stopped on the threshold, steeling herself. Laurie had been here, boxing up the most obvious toys, storing some of Ben’s clothes. And yet, Beth knew the house would try to take her under to the deep cold places. She would have to kick aside the bathroom stool he still used to pee. A sock would turn up, or his cowboy hat—there, right there, right now, she saw his duck umbrella against the magazine rack in the living room. Had no one else seen it? Moved it? All summer? Vincent stood in the hall, looking back at her, his thick brows drawn down, and she almost grabbed for him again, actually began to extend her arms, and he began to come forward.
But then she folded her arms back against her own body. She forced herself to smile.
What? What was it? Why couldn’t she reach for her wild child and pour into him all the baby-clear affection she had felt for Ben? It wasn’t Vincent’s fault that Ben had never gotten old enough to sully the purity of that baby love. It would be easy, one of the right motions.
But if she did that, what would Ben have been? A sort of delayed miscarriage? No, thought Beth. No. There was no one to punish, no possibility of atonement. Only survival, through a silent celibacy of the heart. Any solace at all would be a signal to the universe that a mother could get along with one child more or less.
Oh, Ben, thought Beth, letting the door of her own house close behind her with a thud. I almost cheated on you.
CHAPTER 9
“Eighty percent of us divorce,” said Penny, shifting her considerable bulk to perch more comfortably on the edge of the folding chair. To be fair about it, it was a sort of pygmy chair: Beth noticed that even slight Laurie filled her seat to capacity. And Pat looked like a giant slouched on his.
Fingering the laminated button she wore that pictured her murdered four-year-old, Casey, Penny went on, “That’s thirty percent more than the general population. If half of American couples divorce over the ordinary stresses of life, people who lose children the way we have lost children endure just that much more stress. And it gets you down below the surface of the water in the marriage, where the undertow is.”
That’s why this meeting of Compassionate Circle, Penny re-emphasized (“for the benefit of those of you joining us for the first time”), would focus on the effects of the loss on family relationships. The meeting last year on this subject, she added, flashing an astounding from-nowhere chorus girl’s smile—as if the leaden door of a safe had opened in her sad, fat face—had been among the best the group had ever held.
In her own chair, the seat of honor to Penny’s right, inhaling Penny’s hypnotic almondy scent, Beth fantasized, and not for the first time, about the possibilities of insanity. Were she crazy, truly crazy, Penny’s earnest voice would be no more than background buzz. Laurie would not have been able to drag her and Pat here. The genuinely crazy had a certain aloofness, a dignity, a madnesse-oblige. People left them alone. Did catatonics in hospitals, she wondered, really see the people they pretended to ignore, or notice the drool soaking their clothes? And did they simply refuse, from perversity, to indulge in a sentient reaction? Was true madness simply a will so ultra-strong it overcame ordinary human response? Or were such people really wandering so deep inside, on a broken landscape, so intent on minding their own footing, that the world outside receded?
That’s what I want, Beth thought. To be really checked out. Few ants short of a picnic. Few bricks shy of a load. Few pickles short of a jar. One oar out of the water.
But even as she longed for it, she knew she couldn’t manage it. Insanity simply managed to elude her. In a short half-hour at Compassionate Circle, two of the thirteen participants had already used the word “breakdown” to describe their immediate circumstances following the loss of their child.
Beth didn’t doubt them; she simply wanted to know, How did you do it? The best she could summon was a sort of perpetual sluggishness, in which she noticed almost everything she didn’t do but almost nothing she actually did.
At first, it was just bed. Beth behaved as if she had one of the long, sheet-sweating diseases of childhood. She had her huge, delightfully full bottle of little blue footballs left over from the doctor in Chicago, and two of them sent her into a dreamless torpor for six hours at a time. When Pat came home from the restaurant before the night rush, she made sure to get up and hold the baby on her lap and look at Vincent. Then she handed the baby back to Jill and went back to bed. The children had seen her. They knew she was alive.
Soon she began to notice that she smelled. Her underwear was crusty; her oily head felt as though it were crawling with lice. So she showered, put on clean underwear and a T-shirt, and got back into bed, virtuous. If she went on like this indefinitely, would the children be able to say they had never had a mother? Of course not. They would be able to say they had a mother and she was home all the time. A stay-at-home mom, which Beth had never been. Surely Pat would never expec
t her to work again.
Still, she was only thirty-three. She didn’t drink very often. She didn’t smoke anymore, or hardly ever. Her blood pressure hovered at about a hundred and ten over seventy. Her weight was within ordinary limits. She wouldn’t be running or taking aerobics classes anymore; but she had done those things for years, and thus was in relatively toned-up shape except through the hips. Her mother had died young, but that was more in the nature of an accident than the outcome of hereditary prophecy. Her grandparents had lived to great ages.
All that Kerry longevity meant that—barring unforeseen event or medical calamity, or suicide, and Beth knew she could never do it, even “accidentally” with the blue pills—she would live her threescore and ten. She was damned if she could see what she would do with it. People would reasonably expect her to get out of bed. The thought of getting up and playing with Vincent and Kerry, or going to a supermarket or planting a bulb or frying an egg—these were outside the realm of the performable. In Chicago, she had done human things—she had driven, she had spoken—so as not to let down Candy, Ellen, Barbara Kelliher, and the band of volunteers. She could go back—consult private detectives, work harder on the solution. But she could not imagine seeing those west-side streets, ever again. Just picturing the tulip-covered yellow “I” at the corner of the high-school driveway made her reach for her pillow and bury her head.
But a few weeks after she’d come home, Laurie brought dinner and several boxes of Ben’s Missing poster to Beth’s house. Beth could hear Laurie calling in the downstairs hall. She squeezed her eyes shut tight.
“I know you’re awake, Beth,” Laurie said, upstairs now. “I can see your eyeballs moving.” Laurie sat down on the bed. “Why aren’t you up?”
“I was up,” Beth answered. “I just had to lie down for a minute.”
“Jill says you haven’t gotten out of bed in a week,” Laurie replied. To this, Beth said nothing. “I know you don’t feel like getting up, but you have to. Your muscles will atrophy. You’ll get sores.”