Vincent followed Grandpa Angelo out into the kitchen. “Grandpa,” he said. “You made a mistake. These are for Ben, and you know, Ben is kidnapped right now….”
Grandpa’s eyes got all red in the white part. “I know, ’Cenzo,” he said, squatting down. “But Grandma and me, we think if we keep on believing that our Benbo will come back to us, the Lord will answer our prayers. And so we buy him gifts, so we don’t forget our Ben, and so he will have them when he comes home.”
“I’m going to show my mom.”
“Okay,” said Grandpa Angelo. “In a little while.” He looked around. “Where’s the Christmas tree?”
Vincent felt bad. He knew that he could have told his dad that nobody had remembered to put up a Christmas tree; but he was afraid his dad would cry if he did. So Vincent ran upstairs without answering Grandpa and got his mom. She usually didn’t come down until around lunchtime, but she came right down today, and she had on normal clothes instead of her red Badger sweat pants with the holes in them, the ones she slept in and wore all day. She had on black pants and a white shirt tucked in. Vincent was proud of her. She kissed everybody.
“Mom,” Vincent said, tugging on her arm, “I want to show you something special.”
But he didn’t get to show her Ben’s presents right then, because Aunt Tree and Uncle Joey drove up. Aunt Tree told everybody she didn’t know whether she should come or not, because she was starting to have breaks and hicks. Vincent assumed this had something to do with Aunt Tree’s baby, still in her tummy, and he was right.
“Ahhhhh,” Grandma Rosie said. “Maybe a Christmas baby!”
“They have hospitals right here in Madison, Tree-o,” Dad said.
“Little early yet,” said Grandpa Angelo.
“Just a few days,” Grandma said. “Easier, anyhow, if it’s a little early. Her first one.” Aunt Monica wasn’t coming, because she was spending Christmas with a boyfriend. Even though she had long nails and could play the piano, Aunt Monica didn’t have a husband yet; she always told Vincent he was the only man she could count on.
Aunt Tree couldn’t run upstairs, and she hadn’t wrapped all her presents yet, so she made Vincent her “lieutenant,” telling him to get her the tape and the ribbon shredder. And then, just when he was about to show his mom the gifts for Ben, suddenly Dad’s buddy Rob came with a tree—an already decorated tree!
Vincent smelled it, and it wasn’t fake. Rob said Delilo’s Florists had given it to Dad for free. The tree made everything look better. Everybody took a long time putting the presents under it. Vincent went to get his Playskool tape recorder, to hide under the tree behind some of the packages. He planned to turn it on right before he went to bed, in case he couldn’t stay awake long enough, so that he could tape Santa. He figured that if he could be the first kid in America to actually prove there was a real Santa, he could get on TV. He’d told Jill about this idea, and she told him it was excellent. Tonight would be a test. If he could hear what the grownups said on his tape after he was in bed, at least until it clicked off, then he knew he’d catch Santa for sure.
Rob stayed for a glass of wine, and Aunt Sheilah had already taken the twins up to bed by the time Vincent finally got the chance to tell his mother about the gifts for Ben. She was sitting on the couch, holding a cup of coffee but not drinking it, and he walked up to her quietly and said, “Look, Mom. All those presents are for Ben. Grandpa and Grandma brought them. Wasn’t that nice?”
Grandma Rosie was sitting across from Mom, embroidering on a picture she was making for Aunt Tree’s baby, and Mom didn’t even look at Vincent. She just walked over to the tree and held up one of the packages and said, real flat, “Rosie.”
Even to Vincent, Grandma looked up as if she was guilty, like she’d been caught passing notes in school with the word “piss” written on them. “Bethie?” she asked softly. “What, dear?”
“What are these?”
“Presents for Ben.”
“You brought presents for Ben.”
“Yes.”
“Rosie, why did you bring presents for Ben?”
“Because,” Grandma Rosie said, in her talking-to-a-kid voice, “I believe that Ben will be found. And I want him to know that his family didn’t forget him, when he is found.”
“Do you have the impression that we have forgotten Ben?”
“No, my dear.”
“But we didn’t get Ben any presents.”
“I understand that.”
“In fact,” said Mom, “to tell you the truth, I didn’t even want to have this whole…go through this whole big holiday act. I didn’t want to do anything except sleep through it. And when you do this, when you act like he’s just out of town on a business trip and he’ll be back anytime, Rosie, do you know what that does to me?” Her voice was getting loud, and Vincent heard the chairs scrape as his dad and Rob got up in the kitchen and came out to see what was the matter.
“Beth,” Grandma Rosie was saying, “no one meant to upset you.”
“But you knew it would upset me.”
“Bethie,” said Vincent’s dad, “please. You know what they said in the Circle. Everyone needs a ritual.”
“But I don’t, Pat!” Vincent’s mother was crying now. “And I’m his mother! I don’t want to do a bunch of stupid things to pretend that my baby is alive and on his way home, when that’s the cruelest lie in the world! I don’t want to rub my face in all this shit!”
“Beth honey!” Aunt Tree said then. “Take it easy. Ma didn’t mean anything.”
“Take it easy? Take it easy?” his mother cried. “How can I take it easy when nobody except me seems to want to accept that this is over—it’s over? And we’re just all going to go on acting the way we always have, eating and sleeping and baptizing babies….”
“What’s my baby got to do with this?” Aunt Tree asked, grabbing her tummy; she was mad. “Listen, Beth. You’ve got to snap out of it at some point. No one can talk to you. I can’t. Pat can’t. If you don’t have any hope at all that Ben will come back—”
“Come back? He’s not even four yet! What’s he going to do? Get an Amtrak schedule?”
“What I mean, Beth, is that if the rest of Ben’s family wants to keep up hope, that’s our business. It’s not an insult to you. And furthermore, Beth, what do you care? How does it affect you? You’re an…island, Beth. You don’t care even care about my baby….”
“No. I don’t.”
“Well, you should. Life goes on.”
“If I never hear anyone say ‘Life goes on’ again, it’ll be too soon, Teresa.” That was a first. Vincent had forgotten Aunt Tree’s real name.
“And you don’t care about my mother or my father, and the fact that they’re as knocked out by this as you are. And that they don’t know what to make of how you’re behaving. Now, I have to admit, I would be curled up on the floor. I couldn’t go on like you do. But you have withdrawn from the whole family. And that’s okay, but if you do that, you can’t control—”
“Tree,” Vincent’s dad warned, very tired. “Tree, wait—”
“No, Pat. You’re all too scared to say this, but I’m not! We try to call, she won’t talk to us. We write, she won’t answer us. We can’t talk about anything in our lives that doesn’t have to do with Beth’s grief. She’s like Deirdre, Mother of Sorrows—nothing in the world can ever be as bad as what she’s going through, so she’s just opted out of life completely.”
“That’s right. That’s my choice.”
“But it isn’t ours, Beth. You don’t own every choice about Ben. He was ours, too. And we haven’t decided to give up. We still go over at night and mail bunches of leaflets to people in New York and Kansas and Oklahoma. We still talk to the police. We still want to believe that there’s hope, and you can’t stop us, and I don’t know why you want to, because you aren’t going to find him by sitting on your duff all day and—”
That was when Vincent decided he had to tell his mom that there
was a very good chance things were going to be fine by Christmas morning, that Ben would be back.
“Mom,” he said, “I have to tell you what I did.” He wondered if, actually, this was going to be sort of a lie, because he hadn’t actually written a Santa letter. He had simply tried praying to Santa, because Grandma Rosie insisted he was a saint and you could pray to saints any time you wanted; they were up there waiting for it. So he took a deep breath and said, “Wait a minute, Mom. I asked Santa to bring Ben home. I think he’ll do it.”
It was like freeze tag.
Nobody in the room moved. Nobody spoke.
Then his mom got up and carefully put down her cup and dug her hands up under the roots of her hair and stumbled out of the room toward the stairs. Vincent looked at his dad. Once, on Mother’s Day a couple of months after Kerry was born, he and his dad had brought his mother a whole basket full of wild roses, and she had put her face right down into them and cried and cried, and when Vincent asked why, his father told him, “She’s happy, Vincent. I know it sounds funny, but sometimes adults get so happy that they cry.”
Was that it?
Grandma Rosie was leaning her head on Aunt Tree’s shoulder. Grandpa Angelo got up, jingling his car keys, and said he was going to take a ride over to the restaurant and see Augie. Vincent’s dad picked him up and said, “I think it’s time for bed, slugger. Just a few days until Christmas. Gotta get your rest.” Vincent struggled to get down. Why was everyone mad at him? Did they think it was mean to ask Santa for your own brother? But even though for once he was glad to go to bed, he wanted to switch on his tape first. “I just want to look at that one big present, Dad,” he lied.
When they were up in his room, and his father had bounced him on Ben’s bed and laid him down and sung a couple of verses of “Davy Crockett,” Vincent asked, “Remember that one time when all I did was bop Ben on the head very softly and he bit me?”
“Yeah. I put Ben in our room to separate you.”
“When it was actually Ben’s fault.”
“Well, you did bop him.”
“Very softly. And he bit me very, very hard.”
“He liked to bite. But he stopped that after he got bigger.”
“Yeah,” said Vincent. “I just wanted you to know, Dad, I forgive him for that.”
“Good,” said his dad. “I’m glad. Now, go to sleep. The twins are already out. They’re good little girls, not sneaky little monkeys who run around all night. Don’t you dare wake them up.” He kissed Vincent and said, “I love you.”
“Where’s Mom?” Vincent asked then.
“She’s in her room.”
“Is she sick?”
“A little, yeah. A little bit. Even grownups have fights sometimes, Vincent. You know that. It’ll all be better in the morning.”
But in the morning, it only got worse, because instead of talking loud at each other, everyone was so polite. At least the tape had worked pretty well. He heard his dad say to his aunt, “…the amount of stress. And she doesn’t answer it because she thinks half the time it’s going to be the police saying they’ve found another kid or some nut trying to tell her we killed him.”
“But even given all that, Paddy, she needs professional help. She really needs professional help.”
“Maybe,” said his dad. “Yeah.”
Then they started to talk about Monica being stuck up and all kinds of stuff Vincent didn’t even care about.
But professional help. That, thought Vincent, was a great idea. He hoped his dad really meant it. If his mom had a professional helper, someone who did helping for a job, right in the house all the time, she would have to wash and change her clothes every day, because the helper would make her. She would have to change Kerry more often, so that Kerry didn’t soak through the front of her little sleepers every day before Jill got home. Vincent couldn’t change diapers, because Kerry was too wiggly; he’d tried, and she just rolled over and over until she was away from him. His mom had to do it. If the helper could get his mom moving, so she did more things without taking forever, she would have more time, because as far as Vincent could tell, she wasn’t doing her picture work anymore at all. They could maybe take walks. Maybe make a mobile; she used to like to make mobiles out of wire hangers and cut-out stars. He might be too big for that now, but he didn’t care. He’d do it if his mom wanted to. And after a while of doing normal things again, she would start to realize that even if Ben was gone right now, she still had even more kids than she’d lost. She had double the number of kids she’d lost.
And he was pretty sure he and Kerry together made up for one Ben. Maybe even one and a half.
Beth
CHAPTER 11
Not long after the People magazine landed on the stands, seven months to the day after Ben was taken, Candy passed through Madison, unannounced, on the way to a forensics conference in Michigan. Beth later believed she had made a special detour; it was like Candy to anticipate how Beth would feel when she saw the cover, which was a full-page bleed of the second Missing poster, with no headline other than “1-800-FIND BEN” and a little kicker that said, “Before Their Very Eyes: The Strange Disappearance of Ben Cappadora.” No teases on movie stars’ pregnancies or stories about diet doctors. Just Ben.
Laurie had brought it to the house the day it came out.
Beth wouldn’t talk to her, even after Pat pleaded through the locked bedroom door. Finally, Laurie told Pat to go away. “Bethie, listen,” she said. “You’re going to hate me for this, and I know it. But it’s been a long time now, Beth. The police are getting nowhere.” Beth could hear Laurie lightly rubbing the door, as if she were patting Beth on the back. Laurie went on, “You see that magazine at every doctor’s office in America, Bethie. And when that reporter called me, well, I decided that I was going to talk to her even though I knew what you’d think. It was the right thing to do, Bethie. I love you. I love Ben. And I’ve just always thought this paranoia about the media was…unreasonable. So, even if you never speak to me again, I’m glad I did it. And you should know, Barbara talked to them, too. And so did Wayne. And so did your sister-in-law Teresa. And if you hate them, too, I’m sorry for you. Beth, when you’re ready, I’ll be waiting to talk to you.” Beth could hear Laurie’s silent presence outside the door, like a drawn breath. “Okay, Beth. ’Bye now.”
The magazine was on the floor outside Beth’s bedroom door when she opened it an hour later. She sat down, right there, in the opening between the lintels, and flipped to page sixty, thinking, absurdly, They always make you wait for the cover story, no matter what it is, they make you wade through sixteen things about the ninth-grade genius who figured out how to make a computer out of a clock radio, or the model who had two babies in eighteen months and starved herself back to perfect flatitude in six weeks.
She thought she could read the first paragraph. That, she would allow herself, though she could feel the cold and crush shimmering above her even as she folded back the facing page, the one covered with photographs she barely glanced at but couldn’t help recognize. She’d taken most of them herself, after all—a Christmas photo of her three kids that had been the centerpiece of a card: newborn Kerry, Vincent, and Ben in Santa hats, all of them with their tongues sticking out. A picture on Laurie’s picnic table of Ben and Laurie’s son in clown makeup. Laurie had that one framed in her living room.
On the first page, it was just the first Wanted poster. Beth could look at that—she’d seen it so often that it had finally become meaningless. She no longer wanted to claw her wrists when she looked at the cockeyed tilt of Ben’s baseball cap, the crease in his nose when he smiled. And down below, a glamorous shot of Candy talking to reporters outside the Parkside station, looking up, clearly irritated by the photographer, but still every-hair-perfect despite the grim set of her jaw.
Okay, thought Beth. You can read one line. Two. “When Beth Cappadora took her children to the fifteenth reunion of her high-school class in Chicago, she expected a time
of togetherness with old friends, not the beginning of a nightmare that would tear apart a family, old friendships, and the very fiber of a community….” Beth slapped the covers together.
She knew what the rest would entail—a couple thousand words of breezy, bathetic prose wrapped around pictures that would make even women waiting for mammograms count their blessings as they read. Enough. It was done. It was there and existed and she knew it and that was it. Since she need never leave the house again, she thought gratefully, she was not going to have to see supermarket eyes averted in recognition and shame. She was not going to have to see the tight, pained half-smiles of teachers. Pat would, though. He would probably revel in the sympathy; he seemed, she reflected, to like sympathy in direct inverse proportion to the loathing Beth felt for the same glances, notes, and little hand-hugs. He’d even said, one night, how heartwarming it was, how startling a confirmation of the basic good in human beings, the letters and the offers of support that caused the mail carrier literally to heft armfuls of stuff up onto their porch; it would never have fit in any mailbox. Laurie, Beth believed, took the letters home. She could see Laurie eye the growing piles nervously every time she came over, and then, a few days later, Beth would notice the piles were slim again. She could not imagine, nor did she try, what manner of pity and grotesquerie those letters contained.
On her bad days, after Kerry fell asleep on her bottle, Beth took baths. She sat in the water until it was scummy and cold, looking at her spindly arms and legs, white as carp, floating under the surface. By the time she came out, it was four or after, Jill was often home if it wasn’t a late class day, and she’d gone to get Vincent at the Shores’. Beth could start waiting for dark. Deep dark came early now, and as soon as it was deep dark, a person could go to bed. Bed, for Beth, was a nearly erotic sensation. The falling away of the day was her most precious moment of existence. The nights when Jill had class were nearly intolerable. She had to sit on the couch while Vincent read his chapter books or went over his spelling lists, knowing she should get up and tell him that children did not do homework effectively in front of television, but unable to do it. After a while, he would get up, gingerly kiss her, and go to bed.