Black and Blue (32 page)

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.”

What could I say, as I held her close? That it wasn’t her fault? That she should let the guilt go? Words, words. They mean nothing, less than nothing. I know.

Cindy thinks it’s arbitrary, the nights I invite her over, something that happens now and then for no particular reason. That’s not true. What happens, every once in a while, is that the phone
rings. And on the other end I hear nothing but breathing. This happens to everyone, I tell myself, but I don’t believe it. I stay on and listen to the sound of what I think of as love, until whoever is at the other end hangs up. I don’t know whether I’m hearing Robert or Bobby, or some stranger. Maybe I’ll never know. But I believe it’s Robert, and I believe he knows I know, and I hang on. Six months ago the phone rang again, and I heard the breathing, and as I listened, Grace Ann looked up at me from her high chair and cried, in her demanding fashion, “Mama!” Whoever was on the phone hung up suddenly, a sound like a book banging shut. “Robert,” I cried, but there was only the echoing emptiness of the severed connection. “Ober!” Grace Ann replied happily.

Those are the nights, after the phone calls, when Cindy and I sit together, alone, and I grieve with the sound of sweet breathing still in my ears.

Cindy stood up for Mike and me at the municipal building, holding Charlie. So did Craig, holding Cathy. And Grace. Chelsea has decided that Aunt Grace is Wonder Woman, with her easy polysyllabic vocabulary and her knotty biceps. Afterward we had a party by the Roerbackers’ pool. “To our new daughter,” said Mike’s mother, and she gave me a cameo her husband had given her for her birthday years before, and hugged me tight. That was the only time I cried, that and afterward, when Mike said, “Can we have a baby right away?” I had a second glass of champagne, and when I went to the bathroom I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time, looked at myself in the silk suit, my hair curling around my face, Shhhhhell pink on my lips, I looked to make sure I knew who I was, that I was really real. I put my fingers to my mouth and shaped the word but did not say it, held it
inside in deference to the day. Robert. Robert. I got pregnant that very night, in the four-poster in the bedroom of a guest house in Key West.

Robert, Robert. Where is he now? What does he feel or think? Maybe he’s in Italy or Brazil, Canada or Mexico. I don’t think he believes I’m dead, and I know he knows I love him. I know how persuasive Bobby can be, how he can hold you in thrall, make you wonder about things you’re sure about, tolerate things you never thought you’d allow. I was only twenty-one when he started in on me. Maybe Bobby told Robert that I knew exactly where they’d gone, that I’d given him away to his father. Could Robert have believed that for even a moment? Did he wonder about it now, if he’d been the person at the other end of the phone when another child called my name, the name that once only he was entitled to? Perhaps none of the lies Bobby had to tell him, to woo him, to win him, had the simple power of that sound, the sound of someone else calling me
Mama
.