Beth said, “I don’t care. I want my muscles to atrophy.”
Laurie ran four miles four times a week, even in snow. Once, she had fallen on wet ice in front of a neighbor’s house and walked up onto the woman’s porch, holding the skin of her elbow together over shards of exposed bone. She’d told the woman to call 911 and sat down on the porch to wait for the ambulance. “Beth, it isn’t just the inactivity. It’s foolish. You don’t even know what happened to him yet. If you won’t talk to the TV people and you won’t make phone calls, at least you can mail off some of these things to people who have called from all over the country offering to post them. It’s the least you can do for Ben. I’m sorry, honey, but you’re just about worthless the way you are right now.”
“I don’t care.”
Laurie clicked her tongue once. “Beth,” she said. “I’ve never said anything like this to you. But get the hell up, now, or I’m going to stop being your friend and then you’ll be in far worse shape than you already are.”
Beth swung her feet over the edge of the bed and put them on the floor.
And then, Beth did get up most mornings. The signal often was a phone call, from Candy or Laurie or Rosie. There was another body to identify; Bick had done the duty. The boy, in Gary, Indiana, was at least seven. Another call: Did she know that there was now a billboard of Ben’s face on I-90, right near the huge shopping center? Yes, Beth would reply, yes to everything, sure. And then she’d get up and brush her teeth. She might spend the whole day curled in a corner of the couch, furtively watching the street, but she did get up. Twice she went out to get the mail. The only truly ferocious moment was the early Sunday when she got up in the murky dawn light, peeked into the boys’ room, and saw Ben curled up in his bed.
Pat came running when she screamed; Beth had peed her own legs.
“It’s Vincent,” he had explained, holding her up as she trembled. “It’s just Vincent. He sleeps in Ben’s bed now. He has since the night I brought him home. At first, I used to move him, but now I don’t. I think…I think it makes him feel better, Beth. He sleeps with Ben’s…with Ben’s rabbit, Igor, too.” Pat had carried her back to the bed, brought a warm wet towel and washed her, and then, somehow stimulated by the sight of her uncovered legs and hips, made love to her. Beth thought, as he gravely strained and plunged, he would get more response from screwing a basket of laundry. The children slept on. Pat’s breathing was the only sound in the continuous universe.
In the middle of September, Laurie brought them to Compassionate Circle, a group she’d discovered in her PR-chick days, when Laurie had done trifolds and newsletters for almost every socially worthy organization in Madison, which was a hotbed of support programs. But the lost children of Compassionate Circle parents hadn’t died of cystic fibrosis. Some of them weren’t dead at all. Laurie said the catalogue of bizarre stories was truly stunning. Of them all, the group’s president, Penny Odin, had the most macabre story. Her ex had picked their four-year-old son up on his birthday, phoned her an hour later, put the child on the phone, and, as he talked to his mother, shot him in the back of the head.
“Why would anybody with that kind of pain want to hear about me?” asked Beth.
“I thought maybe you might want to hear about them,” Laurie suggested softly. “They say it helps to know you aren’t the only one.”
But, Beth thought, I am. A line from a poem snaked back to her: “there was no other.” Mine was the only one. What did the myths and miseries and coping strategies of other busted sufferers have to do with her? She agreed to go to one meeting, only if Pat would come, too. Compassionate Circle met, as everything seemed to, in a church basement. Beth had come to think of church basements as a kind of underground railway to emotional succor—trailing all over America, where people in transformation, grieving, marrying, giving birth and dying, were gathering around scarred tables in rooms with walls covered by children’s crayoned pictures of the Annunciation.
“The part of the name of our organization, Compassionate Circle, that has always meant the most to me is the word ‘compass,’” Penny was saying now. “A compass is a circle, and it contains the four directions, north, south, east, and west, all in one circle. For many of us, there are also are four emotions—joy and sorrow, knowing and mystery. For some of us, that mystery is literal. We don’t know where our children are, living or dead. Even for those of us, like me, who know what happened to the child we lost, there is mystery. I believe Casey is one of the brightest singers in God’s choir. But I don’t know it for sure, because I haven’t passed over to that plane yet. Still, every gray hair I get is a joy to me; it brings me closer to my little boy, and to our reunion.” She smiled that saucy smile again—a hundred pounds ago, Beth thought, Penny must have been a looker. “Join hands now,” Penny urged.
Beth wouldn’t, until Laurie jerked her closed fist up from her lap.
“We meet in a circle, in the hope that healing goes around and around, as we used to sing in church when we were children,” said Penny. “That’s what we’re here to find out, if we can have wholeness in our lives, in spite of our wounds. I think we can.” She picked up a stack of pamphlets and began passing them out. “These are some of the most common problems that occur in families that lose a child. Sexual dysfunction. Acting out on the part of siblings who feel ignored or betrayed or scared. Different goals—one parent who wants to get back to business as usual and one who gets stuck…. We’ve all told each other our names and the reasons we’re here. Now, who would like to talk about some of the matters this pamphlet suggests?”
Jean was the mother of a pregnant teenager pushed off a cliff by her older married lover. Jean almost levitated from her seat with eagerness. “When Sherry died, the turning point for me was her funeral. I went and looked at Sherry in her open coffin, and though the undertaker had done his very best, you could see from the way her muscles were all tensed up in her neck that she had been in unbelievable pain when she passed….”
Beth looked spears at Laurie. Was she supposed to sit here and listen to this? Laurie replied with her own shushing look, and Beth slumped in her chair, trying to lose herself in the whorls of the pattern on the pamphlet cover, a compass surrounded with rays, like the sun. “And my husband’s whole goal in life,” Jean went on, “was to get the man who killed her convicted. He was furious that there was no death penalty in Wisconsin, because, actually, this man killed two people, my baby and her baby. He was on the phone with the police and the lawyers all day, and I just didn’t want any part of it. I mean, it wasn’t going to bring Sherry back, was it? He wanted to file for compensation for us—money we would have gotten if Sherry had grown up, money for our suffering. The guy who killed her had a lot of money; he had a really good job on the line at the auto plant. I didn’t even care that much about that. So, I would try to go along with him, but he could tell I wasn’t really interested in it, and he started saying it was because I never cared about Sherry as much as he did.”
Jean and her husband were separated now, two years after her daughter’s death. Jean was learning to line-dance and, for the first time in her life, was going to college, studying to be a nurse. Her husband lived in a small apartment by the lake, his only furniture a foldout bed and filing cabinets crammed with all the documents and newspaper reports on Sherry’s death. It was, said Jean, a virtual shrine to Sherry—with candles that burned night and day under pictures of her all over the house. “He’s going to burn himself up one day.”
“Maybe he knows that,” another man, Henry, put in. “I was pretty self-destructive after my wife snatched my son. In bars all the time. Picking up one woman after another. Just trying to find some softness or love. Waking up in the morning with a head the size of New Jersey….” Appreciative laughter rippled around the table.
A very young woman, who had not let go of her husband’s hand for the entire duration of the meeting—which Beth noticed, with dismay, was now almost ninety minutes—spoke up then. “Y
ou know,” she said, “I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with us, because we really haven’t experienced any of those problems. Jenny’s death just brought us closer, closer to each other and closer to God.” Jenny, the couple’s two-year-old, had been crushed under the wheels of her caregiver’s car as the woman (who was, unbeknownst to her employers, drunk) backed out of the driveway one night after work. “We’ve found that whenever one of us needs a shoulder to cry on, the other one is always there. We look at Jenny’s pictures, and though of course we’re sad, and we’ll always be sad, we try to remember the joy she brought us, and we find that very healing. We were lucky to have had her.”
Laurie wrote on the corner of her pamphlet, shoving it noiselessly across to Beth: “They probably didn’t want kids to begin with.” Beth covered her face with one hand.
“So, we’re finding that this experience,” the young mother went on, “difficult as it is, has actually been a time of growing…so that when we have another child, and we’re sure we will—”
“Why are you here, then?” Henry asked bitterly. “If you’re doing so great, how come you want to come and be with people who aren’t doing so great?”
“Henry,” Penny reminded him gently. “You know the covenants of the Circle. We don’t begrudge and we don’t grudge. Everyone has a right to work through a loss in their own way….”
“But they don’t seem like they need any help,” Henry said.
“But we do,” said the woman. “We need to know that we’re not alone.”
“Of course you do,” said Penny, turning suddenly to Beth. “Now, our newest guests, Pat and Beth, are just starting along the road some of us have been on for a long time. All of you have read about Ben Cappadora, Beth’s little boy. We have every reason to believe that your son will be found, Beth, but your family must be experiencing some of these reactions of mourning. Do you feel like talking about it?”
“No,” said Beth, and then, surprising herself, she asked, “How did you get how you are?”
Penny looked puzzled. “How did I…?”
“How you are. So accepting. So kind. Were you always like that? I mean, before?”
Penny nearly laughed. “I sure wasn’t. The first few months after Casey was shot by my ex-husband, the only thing I allowed myself to feel was rage. Rage at my own stupidity for trusting my ex-husband with my son, because I knew he was strung out about half the time. Rage at the man himself, for doing what he did. I quit going to church, and I devoted myself to eating everything in the house that wasn’t nailed down….” She gestured to her bright red tunic. “You can see the results of that. If you would have told me that I’d ever feel any different, I’d have said you were a fool, you just never understood what I’d been through….”
“So how?” Beth asked again, feeling a rush of admiration, a wish to graft some piece of Penny’s peace under the skin of her own heart.
“Well, what I did, Beth, was…I finally forced myself to…do things like look at the pictures of Casey after he died,” Penny said, with the first trace of hesitancy Beth had heard in her voice all night. “Casey was shot at point-blank range in the back of the head. And I forced myself to think, What did he feel? What did he know? And the answer was, he knew nothing. He was talking to me, and then he was gone, just gone. When I looked at it from Casey’s point of view, I had to think that he died, but he died happy and painlessly and quickly, and that the person it hurt most wasn’t him. It was me. And my…and my ex-husband. Because Wisconsin isn’t a death-penalty state, he has to live with this forever, even now that he’s sober.”
“And you feel sorry for him? Does he get some kind of pass because he’s crazy?” Beth asked.
“I guess, no, I don’t feel sorry for him,” Penny said. “I do feel, though, that his regret and grief are a kind of justice.”
Beth looked up. Pat was on his feet. He hadn’t said a word beyond his name all night, but he now said, “I’m so sorry. I can’t stand anymore.”
“I understand. Do come back,” said Penny. “Anytime. Any time you want. Or call me.”
“I will,” Beth said.
Outside, the last of the light was draining from a perfectly transparent fall sky. Beth breathed in, heavily, the smells of the church’s patch of wild roses, the bus exhaust from the metro on its way up Park Street.
Laurie asked Pat, “Are you okay?”
He said, “I just felt as though I couldn’t…I never imagined there was so much suffering in the world.”
Oh, Pat, Beth thought, there just never was in yours.
But that night, she couldn’t forget Penny Odin’s foolish, saintly face. Did Penny sleep? Beth got up and walked into the boys’ room and stood over Vincent as he lay curled on Ben’s bed. Each of the boys had a shelf over the head of his bed for books and toys; each one had a designated side to the closet, neatly labeled with stick-up letters spelling out their names.
Laurie had done her work sensitively and well. Only a few discreet things hung well back in Ben’s side of the closet. His toys were mostly gone (also boxed and stored in the crawl space, Beth knew, out of sight but not forgotten). There had been an easing of Ben’s imprint, a consolidation, but not a clean sweep. Thank you, my dear Laurie, Beth thought, kneeling down at Vincent’s side. Thank you for letting me be able to come in here.
Vincent had always slept hard. She had never seen him wake easily; he was like a cold-cocked prizefighter—he woke disoriented, bleary, looking plucked as a newly hatched chick. But now he rolled in his sleep, twitching, sweating like a racer. Maybe he’s sick, she thought. He’d asked her a lot of odd questions since she came home.
“How many bad guys are there in Madison?” he had asked. Vincent wasn’t the kind of child to be fobbed off with something easy.
She’d said, to get it over with, “There are thirty.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Who said?”
“Detective Bliss. She counted.”
“How many are there in Los Angeles?” he’d asked then.
Beth had sighed. “There are two hundred,” she’d told him.
What he was really asking was, Am I next? Beth knew that. What could she tell him? What could she feel, in front of his asking eyes, except accused and resentful? Hadn’t she let the bough break?
A memory, a safe one, flitted past her face like moth wings. Just before Ben was born, Vincent had stared at her belly and said, “You’ll like the baby. But it won’t be the same. You won’t like the baby as much as you like me.” And Beth had feared the same thing.
Indeed, Ben had managed to perfect for himself the role of second child, undemanding and delighted, the one she knew she would never need to worry about, never need to worry about…and she hadn’t.
She hadn’t worried at all.
Now she should be worrying. About Vincent. But it was all gone, that mother radar, along with her belief in it. She could do nothing for Vincent. Leaning low, she whispered, “I love you.” Studies had shown that even in deep sleep, people could hear, could even learn languages that came to them on paths of the subconscious. Perhaps it would work, and he would wake up feeling loved, even if he wasn’t sure who loved him. Or whether she was still around.
Vincent
CHAPTER 10
December 1985
Vincent had thought it over and he decided he would ask Santa for Ben. What he really wanted was a Lionel train or a radio-controlled boat, but the way he figured it was, if he asked Santa for Ben, he might get the boat and the train, too, because asking for Ben was an unselfish wish. Santa would be impressed, and everyone would be happy. His mother. Grandpa Angelo. Everybody.
Vincent would probably be happy, too, because, to tell the truth, after six months, he was getting sick of not having Ben around. Kerry was cute, but you couldn’t really play with her yet. Plus she was a little smelly and boring. And his mother was still acting like she was sick, sitting around all the time, except once in a w
hile yelling at him if he got too loud. It wasn’t like she never yelled at him before Ben got lost; but in between yelling, she used to do stuff with him and be funny. Now when he tried to make her laugh by singing Elvis or something, she didn’t even notice. He had the feeling that getting Ben back for Christmas would be about the only thing that would make her goof around. The way things were now was annoying.
Back in Chicago, he hadn’t minded because he could do anything he wanted. He never had to go back to school for the last week before summer break, and he still got passed into second, and got almost all Es, even though he was pretty sure he was only going to get an S in math because he goofed with Andrew P. the whole time. His teacher even wrote him a note and sent him some Geoffrey dollars. There was a lot more hugging and petting him than Vincent strictly liked, some of it from old people whose breath smelled like the wooden sticks the doctor used to hold your tongue down. But the police gave him all kinds of stuff—baseball cards, a play badge that was real metal and wouldn’t break if you left it on your shirt when it went into the washing machine, and so much gum he had to make a special place in a drawer to store it all. The lady with the blond hair who was a police officer even though she was really pretty gave him a piece of the stuff bulletproof vests were made out of. Grandma Rosie sewed it inside his Batman shirt for him. (He later put on that shirt and his dad’s fishing hat for Halloween, until Alex’s mother picked him up to go trick-or-treating. She took him back to her house to put some face paint on him, all the while saying to Alex’s dad, “Enough’s enough—really, enough’s enough”—like face paint was that expensive.)
But at first, he liked that everybody who came over gave him something. Grandpa Bill’s friends gave him dollars, paper and silver ones. He saved up eleven dollars the first week. And when he whined and wouldn’t eat, they just took the plate away and gave him anything—cookies, or even the kind of cereal his mother wouldn’t let him have, the kind with little marshmallow people in it. Uncle Bick even went out at night to get it at the store, just because Vincent wanted it…which actually almost gave Vincent the creeps.