“No, I didn’t touch him one single time!”
“Was he frightened? Did he want me?”
“No—Ellen. He wanted me to get Aunt Ellen. He said he was peeing his pants.”
Beth loosed her arms from around Vincent; he flopped forward. She clawed her face again—Ben helpless, Ben embarrassed and looking for a trusted grownup, any of his “safe grownups,” to help him use the bathroom. Had he seen her? Had he called? Had he tried to find a washroom on his own? Beth stood up, reeled, sat down heavily on the luggage trolley.
“I can think of better places to fall than that thing,” Bliss said. “Why don’t we get you on a couch?”
Lie down, Beth thought. It was the suggestion you made all the time in disasters, to people waiting to hear about the survivors of downed aircraft, to the stranded, to those in hospital emergency rooms awaiting the results of doomed surgeries. Have coffee. Lie down. Try to eat something. She had said it herself, to Pat’s cousin (Jill’s mother, Rachelle) last year, when Jill, then a freshman, had been hit by a car on her bike and had a leg broken in three places. Rachelle had listened; she lay down and slept.
Beth supposed she should lie down; her throat kept filling with nastiness and her stomach roiled. But if she lay down, she wanted to explain to Candy Bliss, who was holding out her hand, it would be deserting Ben. Did Detective Bliss think Ben was lying down? If Beth ate, would he eat? She should not do anything Ben couldn’t do or was being prevented from doing. Was he crying? Or wedged in a dangerous and airless place? If she lay down, if she rested, wouldn’t Ben feel her relaxing, think she had decided to suspend her scramble toward him, the concentrated thrust of everything in her that she held out to him like a life preserver? Would he relax then, turn in sorrow toward a bad fate, because his mama had let him down?
Surely this woman would understand how urgently Beth needed to remain upright.
She smiled brightly at Candy Bliss and said, “He’s not dead.”
“No, of course not, Beth.”
“If he were dead, I could tell. A mother can tell.”
“That’s what they say.”
“It’s true, though. They talk to you with their minds, your kids. You wake up before they wake up—not because you hear them cry; you hear them getting ready to cry.” Beth had never thought about the sinister extension of that link before—that if Ben were now being tortured or suffocating, she would feel a searing pain in her, perhaps in her belly, her throat. She was, instantly, entirely sure of this; there would be a physical alert, a signal at the cellular level. She strained up on the end of her spine, to raise her aerial, her sensors. She felt nothing, smelled and heard nothing, not even a whisper of breathed air past her ear.
And then Pat came up out of the basement of the hotel, yelling, “Where’s your phone? I have to call my father and mother, and my cousin, my sisters!”
No, Beth thought, not them all. And yet, perhaps, if they came—and then went—she could follow her feelers, delicate feelers deranged by all this light and sound, into the night, clear. She could rise up from this pond bottom, from where she watched Pat, and let Ben pull her to him. Pull his mother to him with the gravitational force of their bond.
It was seven p.m.
She watched as Vincent soundlessly, furiously threw himself on Pat—and Pat had sufficient presence of will to show love for Vincent even now, to bury his face in Vincent’s neck. “Don’t worry, Vincenzo,” he said. “Papa will find Ben.”
Mama, Beth thought. Mama will find Ben. Maybe.
She leaned forward, delicately and slowly, over the edge of the luggage trolley, and vomited on the tile floor in front of the elevator.
CHAPTER 3
Italians were good at this sort of thing. In a jam, Irish would tremble and supplicate theatrically; but Italians knew what mattered in this world: that everyone needed food and shelter, that an army ran on its stomach, that children had to be bathed and put to bed. Except at funerals, when they indulged hysteria at a time when it availed them least, Italians did what needed doing.
Beth’s mother-in-law, Rosie, came in the revolving door carrying the car keys. She’d driven. Angelo would have wanted to, but he was older than she by ten years, a little loose behind the wheel at the best of times. Rosie, who was boss, didn’t trust him in a crisis.
Rosie was little, light-boned, not at all the stereotypic black-shawled Sicilian mama—she had a pageboy, and wore a silver-moon pin on her plum-colored jacket. She looked chic, thought Beth, and collected, as she patted Beth’s cheek and murmured “Carissima” and exchanged a look with Pat (no words necessary). Then, without asking for a progress report—Rosie assumed she would get that if there were progress—she took the elevator upstairs to fetch Jill and Kerry. Jill’s mother, Rachelle, Rosie’s niece, was at the house. Jill would be happier with her mother. Ellen offered to ask her husband, Dan, to come for Vincent, so he could play with her son, David; but Rosie silenced her with a smile. “Vincenzo will go to the house, Ellenie dear,” she said. “It’s better.”
Ellen, who had known Rosie all her life, would not have thought of arguing.
For Beth, there was an almost festive interval when Rosie arrived. She knew she smelled of puke and booze; but Rosie, who normally frosted her eyes to behavior she called “stupida,” had not noticed, or had chosen to overlook. Angelo barreled in with a tray of cream horns for the police and set them down on the table where the phone bank burred steadily. The officers smiled faintly, exchanging looks. Beth thought, They don’t understand: you give something, you get something. They’ll remember the cream horns and make one more call.
Angelo grabbed Beth and searched her face, kissed Pat on the mouth. “My God in heaven,” he said. He ripped the paper covering from the cream horns. One was out of place; Angelo, by long habit, turned it and set it in line with the others.
Rosie and Angelo were first-generation, but far more pragmatic than earthy. They were caterers; it was not possible for a Mob wedding to take place on the west side without Rosie and Angelo’s braciole and cream horns, their ice swans (tinted) and Champagne fountain. And not just Mob—Rosie and Angelo did weddings for ordinary Catholics who weren’t even Italian, and for Protestants and Jews. They marinated chicken breasts in mustard and red vinegar; they sprinkled nasturtiums in the salad bowls before anyone else did it; they made a miniature of the towering wedding cake for the bride and groom to freeze and to thaw at the birth of the first child. They knew how to do things.
They had never had a child mortally ill or a grandchild lost. They had been married forty years, and for all Beth knew, their life’s severest tragedy had been the death of her own mother, their dearest friend. Even so, Beth could see they would do the right thing. They would help find Ben and they would forgive her.
By contrast, Beth’s father, Bill, was red-faced and dazed when he arrived. Not because of the crisis; he’d been golfing, with the firefighters—he’d been a chief, through most of Beth’s childhood, though he was retired now ten years. Beth had not even told Bill she’d be in town—she had the job to shoot, after all, and the reunion dinner and brunch would consume all the time up to that. “What are you doing, sweetheart?” he asked Beth, straightening his sweater and leaning down to take Beth’s hands. “What is this about Ben? Is he in the hospital?”
Rosie had left a message at the nineteenth hole, and a kid had run out in a cart to bring Bill in.
“Bill, Ben’s missing….” Pat told him.
“Missing? But Ben’s only two. Where?”
“He’s three, Bill. Here. They think he’s somewhere in the hotel….”
“Is he three? That’s right. Did somebody call the police?”
Pat sighed.
“Well, sure,” Bill went on. “I see all the blues. Did somebody call Stanley?” Stanley was the chief of police in Chester, the west-side suburb where Bill had served as fire chief for twenty-three years.
“It’s Parkside, Bill,” Pat told him. “They got this jurisd
iction. But there’s Chester police here, and Barkley, too. Even Rosewell.”
“Well, but Stanley could help out.” Bill could never be anything less than pugnaciously certain that a guy he knew could put matters straight. These cops, they looked young, he told Pat.
“Where were you, Patrick, when the baby walked away? Where was Beth?”
Ellen explained the whole thing to him then, while Beth got up and wandered into the bar. She could see the bartender scan her denim shirt, which was still damp and stained where Ellen had sponged away the vomit. But the bartender, a Hispanic guy with an elaborate mustache, gave her the vodka and tonic she asked for.
“Rosie!” Bill bawled when Rosie came back down into the hall, carrying the sleeping Kerry, leading Jill, who was holding Vincent’s hand and carrying his football and overnight bag. “What’s going on, sweetie? What’s all this?”
“Give Grandpa a kiss, Vincenzo,” Rosie told Vincent, and Vincent, who was ordinarily shy at first around Bill, turned up his face to be kissed. Bill picked Vincent up and embraced Angelo.
“Ange, what’s this? Where’s the baby?”
Beth slammed the drink. She didn’t feel a flicker of tipsiness, or even nausea—the liquor descended tenderly, like hot chocolate. She began to grow small again. Her father was not rising to the moment; it was his habit to act as if the world perplexed him. Beth was sure it did not; it was only Bill’s way of getting someone else to manage. When her mother was dying, Bill stood in the hospital hall, his face collapsed in a frown, while doctors explained that Mrs. Kerry needed dialysis, and even that, perhaps, would not clear the—
“Wait,” Bill had told them. “This cyst, if you remove this cyst, why then…?”
There was an almost comic quality to the combination of unlucky breaks and Bill’s bewilderment at each of them. Did we say two weeks? she imagined the doctors telling her father. We meant two days. Every palliative surgery, every new regimen of antibiotics intended to drive off the deepening infection revealed another complication, another mass of necrotic tissue, another absence of function. The doctors continued to probe and prop and confer. Bill continued to ask them when Evie would be cured, not how much time was left. Beth and her brothers, Paul and Bick, floundered, pitying Bill for his vacuity, hating him for it, wanting him to take charge of them as he did a squad at an industrial fire, wanting to take charge themselves and shake him, tell him, “Dad, she’s dying.”
But the train of Evelyn’s illness kept careening downhill; and still, Bill was perplexed when Evelyn died. “She doesn’t look like she could be filled with poison,” he told Beth at the funeral parlor. “Does she? Does this figure?”
He looked at Beth this same way now. As if she would clear matters up for him.
“We got an unidentified. Elmwood Hospital,” one of the stocky younger officers called. Everyone stopped. Candy Bliss was across the lobby like a sprinter, taking the phone. “Yes, a boy…. No, I don’t think so.” Shes canned the room for Beth. “Can Ben speak Spanish?” Beth shook her head and the detective asked her, an instant later, as if inspired by a random thought, “How about Italian?”
“Just swear words,” said Pat. No one laughed. Pat said then, “He speaks English. Sesame Street English.”
“We’ll call you back,” Candy Bliss said.
The child was older, she told Beth. He’d been hit by a car riding a bike; he was in stable condition. Had to be four or five at least. And Elmwood was ten miles away, easy. But he did have auburn hair. Beth looked up at her. Candy Bliss pressed a forefinger between her eyes. “Jimmy!” she called. “You saw Ben, right? Take a run over there and look at this little boy, okay? What’s the harm?”
Jimmy was already grabbing for his coat.
“Who are all those people calling?” Beth asked.
“Mostly other departments, calling back to tell us what they’ve been hearing, that’s all,” said Candy Bliss. “Later, when…well, if we have to inform the press, we’ll get a whole ton of calls from everyone, including Elvis, saying he’s seen Ben.”
“Cranks.”
“Aliens. The Easter bunny. And genuinely lonely people who watch reality TV shows.”
“And what if one of them has?”
“That’s why we listen to the Easter bunny.”
Past them proceeded an almost mournful parade of half-familiar faces, refugees from the reunion. A few people were staying, Ellen had told her, mostly those who were going to stay over a few days anyhow. And they wanted to help. But the majority of the people were going home, or out in large groups for dinner.
“Can we still stay here?” Beth asked. She wanted to be good, the model complainant, the kind of patient the dentist liked best because she kept her mouth open so wide.
“Of course, absolutely.” She smiled at Pat. Now he had to hear the recounting, find out about the odds. “Anyhow, it’s a beautiful night out there; he wouldn’t even really be uncomfortable.”
Beth gaped at the clock.
It was 9:15. Ben had been missing for eight hours. A work day. A day of school. An amount of time that would not be accidental. She jumped up, sweating. “It’s so late!”
“That’s what I mean, Mrs. Cappadora. In a sense, that’s an advantage. Now it’s quiet out there, and we can really start getting a sense of what’s going on in the town. The canine unit is on the way, and we’re getting helicopter support from Chicago. We have a neighborhood patrol, too—”
“Helicopters?” Beth asked.
“Equipped with infrared sensors, Beth. When things quiet down, they can scan open areas. They pick up objects that are giving off heat. A person, lying down maybe.”
“Or a person dead.”
“Or a body, yes. But that’s not what we’re looking for here. We want to be able to pick up a sign of Ben even if he is trying to hide from being seen, for example, in some bushes. See?” She excused herself for a moment and whispered to one of the cops on the phone, almost too low for Beth to hear, “Are they breeding the goddamn dogs or what?”
“Where’s Rosie?” Beth asked Pat, gripping his hand, which was icy and wet. “Where’s Rosie?”
Rosie was about to leave, to take the children home. But she came to Beth, humming so softly it sounded like a purr, and pushed Beth’s tangled hair behind her ears as if Beth were a little girl. In Jill’s arms, Kerry was absorbed in her bottle, but Rosie took Vincent firmly by the hand and told him, “Kiss Mama. You’ll see Mama soon. We’ll go to sleep at Nana’s.”
His eyes were wired with overtiredness, and something else, a confusion she had never seen before in her linear-minded eldest. Vincent leaned over. Beth hugged him perfunctorily; but for an instant, surprising her, he clung. Then Vincent took Rosie’s hand and walked a few steps without looking back. All at once he stopped.
“Mom?” he called.
Beth heard him, but had no energy for an answer.
“Mom?” Vincent called again, conversationally. “Did Ben get back yet?”
Rosie said firmly, “Not quite yet. Very soon.” But Vincent was looking straight at Beth’s eyes, his comically too-bushy brows drawn down in absorbed attention.
“Mom,” he said, “I asked you a thing. Did Ben get back yet?”
Beth said, “Sweetheart. No.”
Vincent said, “Oh.”
Beth covered her face, scoured it with her fingers. She looked down at her nails. The creamy-coral guaranteed-two-week manicure was smudged and split.
Angelo and Bill didn’t leave. They stayed in the lobby, sprawled in armchairs, though the manager officiously encouraged everyone, over and over, to “relocate” to an upper-floor lounge. People walked into the Tremont lobby, looked at the command center, and took a quick powder. Ellen and Nick Palladino were in the bar; Wayne had mustered a volunteer force of fifteen schoolmates to take their own cars and cruise the cemetery, the parking lot of the school, Hester Park. Beth had overheard a cop tell another that it was like bumper cars out there, but that no one had the heart to
stop them.
Supporting Beth under one arm, Pat brought her to a more comfortable chair by the piano. Candy Bliss followed. She wanted a picture of Ben for distribution to the media. It was getting late now, and she didn’t want to miss morning paper deadlines.
Did Beth have a picture? She had dozens—she’d brought a score of them for purposes of bragging, for the reunion.
But she had no idea, she told Captain Bliss, where her purse was.
Pat found it under the luggage trolley. It was wet, the contents half-scattered. He held out a picture of Ben in his baseball shirt, grinning with his Velcroed catch mitt held close to one cheek.
Beth would wonder later, What had she been imagining? Had she believed, as very small children do, that because Ben was out of her vicinity, was invisible to her, he had in fact been suspended in a pocket of the universe? That he sat on a bubble, safe but estranged, waiting for his mother to notice him again, so he could resume being real? Had Beth believed that because she, his own mother, could not see him, Ben had stopped existing as a complete being who could feel terror and bewilderment?
Ben was a real child in the urban night.
“Ben!” Beth screamed. And again, as the fragile crust of her muddled restraint cracked and then broke entirely, “Ben! Ben! Ben! Ben!” It got easier. “Ben!” Beth screamed. “Ben!” When Pat put his hand over her arm to try to ease her down, she leaned over and seized it in her teeth, biting hard, drawing blood. The room took on the aspect of a hospital emergency room, a sudden bustle. Pat and Jimmy tried to strong-arm Beth; but she tossed them off as they scrabbled to grab different parts of her. She was an eel, a thing coated with resistant gel. The manager ran for the purple security guards, who watched in pity as Beth thrashed, blocking her path to the door every time she got to her feet. She was strong, famously strong. She noticed everything: Pat’s bleeding hand; the fearful, furtive glances; the looking away of the departing couples who had to pass through the lobby. She saw Nick with his shiny charcoal-brown head of curls in his hands; she thought he might be crying. His back was heaving up and down. Beth stopped stock-still for a deep breath, and then she screamed again, “Ben! Ben! Ben!”