No Time to Wave Goodbye (7 page)

“The pretty girl. With the hair.”

“Yes,” Beth said. “That one. Who worked at the restaurant.”

Beth got up from the bench and snapped a few more blown heads off the roses that circled the pool. She liked her roses, the only flowers she bothered taking care of herself. They’d gone on blooming through the long, warm fall. Then she sat back down.

“So … about Markey…. What does this have to do with Ben acting weird?”

“He’s nineteen. He wouldn’t go to school. He wouldn’t hold any job. So finally Petey sent him to work for Charley, who sent him to me because, I’m quoting here, Ma, not swearing, the kid’s ass was merging into the sofa in the office.”

“I’ve been in that office,” Beth said. “The one with nothing in it but a desk, not even any file cabinets …”

“Yeah, and a Coke machine with only one kind of Coke?”

“Was Markey awful?”

“No!” Vincent said. “He was great! That was the thing. He never touched a piece of equipment before, but the light and the sound stuff … he was like some kind of savant! He followed us into that dark little room with the camera on creepers and he somehow made it look like humans could live there.”

Beth said, “Huh.”

Vincent went on to describe Markey’s bizarre combination of grace and cluelessness. The purpose statement specified a no-smoking-on-set shoot; and so there was Markey, smoking Marlboros one after the other, snapping the filters off and dropping them on the Caffertys’ lawn as fast as Vincent could pick them up. He had to wipe the equipment with baby wipes every five seconds … but besides that, he was totally invisible. Vincent said, “He didn’t talk. Didn’t have any facial expressions.”

Beth added, “And there’s nothing worse when you’re trying to get something done and it’s sensitive and somebody’s standing there like … talking on the phone and texting someone….”

“Yeah! Exactly! Do you even know how to text, Ma?”

“Actually, I do,” Beth said. “Where was Ben all this time?”

“That was it. He just sat on the porch. And if Rob and I were the hors d’oeuvres, then Ben’s the dessert, okay? And so finally I go out there and he gives me the finger. I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’” The telephone rang, repeatedly and insistently, inside the house, but Beth waved away the glance Vincent shot at it.

“What was it?” she asked.

“He said it was the trampoline. He saw the trampoline and junk. He said it was then that he realized it was real. Like a real little kid. He said, ‘It’s like me, asshole. Like a copy of our house. As if you didn’t know that when you brought me here.’

“And I told him, Sam, you weren’t even there. You don’t remember the things you had when you were little. And he’s like, … first of all, you don’t have a family, you are not expecting a baby. And second, you
don’t know what I remember.” Vincent paused. He was sweating in the soft air. “So we did atmospheric shots for a while,” he said. With the camera on creepers, they followed Eileen Cafferty into Alana’s room. “Ma, the clothes in her closet were so little that they barely took up any vertical space.”

Beth found herself breathing harder. She remembered savagely tearing down folded little corduroys with Sesame Street characters on them, little dinosaur T-shirts—putting away the few things her friend Laurie had left behind when she came in and boxed up most of Ben’s scattered belongings. While Pat and his family watched her in horror, Beth seemed determined to erase Ben after he was abducted.

Vincent told his mother about postcards from Alana’s grandma that were stuck around the mirror. Her doll was missing one shoe. She had written down the words to an old Disney song, but written them down wrong: I know you. You walked with me once upon a bridge …

“Do you remember how Ben used to sing some old song the wrong way?” Vincent asked.

Beth said, “If a bunny catch a bunny …”

“What is it really?” Vincent asked.

“I can’t sing but it’s really … um, if a body catch a body, coming through the rye. Everybody has somebody, nay they say, have I. But all the girls they smile at me when coming through the rye,” Beth sang softly. “Why?”

“They said their little girl used to sing some Disney song. Over and over. Like Ben did. That’s all. Anyhow, they took us out to the yard with the huge trampoline and told us Alana got it for her sixth birthday, the last birthday before they lost her.” Beth was quiet. “They said she always made Adam, that’s the little brother, jump too high … he was four then.”

“I yelled at you for doing that,” Beth said.

Vincent played the track in his head,
Ben, don’t be a baby! You big baby! I won’t let you fall if you jump …
and Ma saying,
Vincent! He’s too little for that slide! Stop it! You were scared to death of that slide when you were three….

“Then, we went back to the living room….” The Caffertys had
held a picture of the little girl, grinning with big, white teeth that looked oversized in her face. Eileen must once have looked this way. In the photos, Alana’s big eyes were touched with eye shadow, her outfits carefully put together. Eileen had herself been a gymnast—first an Olympic hopeful, then a few seasons high on the ropes with Cirque du Soleil, then a coach at her own gym. She didn’t coach anymore.

Now, Eileen Cafferty stayed home, writing endless letters in support of early-alert technology for missing-child cases.

Her husband, Al, was as big as she was tiny, a thickly muscled, blond man whose face didn’t seem to match his Irish last name. Al’s guys did most of the work now at his construction firm. He went to the office twice a week. He worked out at the gym. He slept. Among the decks of photos picturing Eileen with Alana were a few of her brother, Adam. He wore hockey gear, or held a baseball or a big brown trout. But there were no more family Christmas pictures, fireplace or tree-farm snaps of two kids in matching sweaters they must have hated. Something had seeped out of the Caffertys, the Hutchesons, all of the families: It was as though they’d lost some kind of affective pigment. Their lives ground forward only because people had to breathe and eat so that their missing child wouldn’t come back to find them dead.

“They didn’t come to the screening,” Beth said. “Well, she didn’t.”

“She just had a baby,” Vincent said. “Al didn’t think she could. Sari Hutcheson just plain didn’t come. I was surprised that the Whittiers’ girl, Blaine, did. She was … it was funny … it was like she was worse off than the father when we were there.”

Even the Whittiers, though, as self-possessed as they were, still searched Vincent’s eyes for hope. At least the mother and sister did. So did Rosa and Ernest Rogelio, Luis’s parents. Vincent was once removed from Ben, the full-solar-eclipse being. They didn’t know the fine print and didn’t care. There was Ben, who came back. That was all they needed to know, forever and ever, amen.

Should he tell his mother more? About his own nightmares, which had come back full-strength—nightmares he hadn’t had since he was a teenager? Vincent decided to stick to the facts. His mother was still so fragile, bright and busy but so thin and all on-purpose. He had no
idea what Beth really thought. Like, should he tell her about what Al Cafferty said about the phone number, about how people used to call them all the time? He knew she would want to know. But would it turn the knife?

Al told them, “We got sick of the crazies that come out at the full moon. We got ourselves unlisted now. But we still advertise. We still offer a reward for information.”

Vincent had remembered his mother slamming down the phone, uttering words that, at age eight, he understood as “You funning buster!” Wearing pajama pants and his father’s old shirts, with unwashed hair and greasy skin, she’d occasionally had the
fegato
to tell the cranks off. Other times, she didn’t pick up. She sat on the sofa, her green eyes wide, her hands limp around Kerry’s little tummy, where Vincent had ritually placed them. He heard one time what they said:
I saw your little boy with a good family. Not like your godless family. He’s better off because you left the church, Elizabeth. You’re on God’s shit list, Beth. You and your Dago husband. You deserve this.

Who was it who talked about crank callers in the film? Penny? He wasn’t about to mention it now. He’d already given his mother worry for ten lifetimes with all he’d done—not just the Ben thing but after Ben came home, for years, up until … now. But he longed to ask, how had she hung on to even strings of her mind? How had she forgiven Vincent for being such a prick, for hating her? Vincent had hated her. Dad took a powder for the restaurant—first Uncle Augie’s in Madison, then their own. Mom had the phone calls, the psychics, the endless letters, cards decorated with the Holy Cross or puppies or rainbows, the Protestant zealots, and the tipsters. She had Vincent, terrified, jumping up and down like a Jack Russell terrier trying to get her to see him, then stealing lunch cards and pencils, then cash and candy, then booze and cars. And Kerry, a confused and messy little ragamuffin … and Candy.

Maybe Candy’s friendship, like a lighthouse, was how Vincent’s mother had managed not to lose her mind altogether.

“How did you finally get Ben to come in?” Beth asked, interrupting Vincent’s thoughts.

“He just did finally. I was about to give up. And I said, Al and
Eileen, this is my brother, Sam Cappadora,” Vincent said. “And you can imagine how they took that. The name-switch thing.”

“Yes,” Beth said. Her skin seemed to grow taut. A pause lengthened like a penny dropped into a deep well. “What did they say?”

Vincent answered slowly. “Eileen asked, wasn’t your brother Benjamin? And Ben told them he … he didn’t remember the time he had that name. He was more comfortable with Sam.” Vincent watched his mother. “He said …”

“Yes,” she said. “I know what he said. Ben said his dad called him that.”

“And … well, you can imagine.”

“I bet Mrs. Cafferty said something like, that must break your mother’s heart,” Beth said evenly. Vincent bit his lip. Eileen had said that, word for word.

“So then we moved on….”

“You don’t have to protect me, Vincent,” Beth said. “If you wanted to protect me, you shouldn’t have made the film at all. I don’t mean that as a put-down. I know he told them about George. He must have. And that he calls us Pat and …”

“Well, right. Anyhow, Ben ignored the list of questions. Ben asked, was Alana a gymnast? And, wouldn’t she be at the perfect age to compete nationally now? And I thought, great! When we leave, these people are going to get out some clothesline and hang themselves in the garage! But Al said that was just what he thought …”

“I remember,” Beth said, snapping her fingers. “Someone wanted their own little champion. Or maybe they had a child who died … like Cecil.”

“Ah, yeah,” Vincent said, who now wanted not just to leave, but to sprint across the yard like Carl Lewis. He got up and brushed off his pants. “I’m cold. Are you cold?”

“I’m fine,” Beth said. “The pictures of that little girl. You nailed that, Vincent. His face and then that great bit of the little girl performing.” She meant the footage of Alana’s floor exercise to the old song “Happy Talk,” from
South Pacific.

“Ma, these gymnastics meets and beauty pageants and stuff for
kids, they’re like a farmer’s market for pedophiles. You know? Buy a wristband and pretend you’re somebody’s uncle, and take your pick. That’s what I think happened to Alana. Somebody remembered seeing a white van with some kind of painting on the side.” Vincent paused. “White vans. The vehicle of choice for serial killers. And they told us about one time they might have gotten an authentic call. Someone called and they heard the background noise, like a meet, an announcer and all that, and someone said something that sounded like ‘Mama,’ and they thought it was Alana.”

“That must have been hellish. At least that never happened to us.”

That you know of, Vincent thought, thinking of the years he’d sat astride his bike, watching Ben whack the puck in his driveway. And he had left out the part about how he couldn’t swallow when Eileen told them that Adam, the little brother, used to sneak in and sleep in Alana’s bed. He’d left that part out of the film, too. When he heard the Caffertys say that, Vincent nearly lost it. He was eleven years old again, asleep in Ben’s bed with Ben’s misshapen toy rabbit, Igor, stuffed carefully under his stomach so that Dad wouldn’t see it and think he was a sissy or something.

“She said she wouldn’t want to be alive, except that they were having the baby, and Ben said, I told my mom once that there were things worse than dying.”

“Ben did say that. And he’s right. Dying is an answer. That was a question.”

Vincent thought of the last moments, of all saying,
One minute we had all the time in the world. Next minute, no time to wave to her.

That was when Vincent thought of the title … no time to wave goodbye. Or had he always known it? He turned to his mother, but she had silently gotten up and motioned for him to follow her inside.

He wondered if he had gone too far.

He caught up with Beth halfway across the backyard. They began to laugh as they remembered his bagel, which Beth said must have the consistency now of a hockey puck. And casually, as though she did this all the time, Beth took Vincent’s hand.

“I’
ve spent my life finding creative ways to get
out
of hosting parties,” Beth said. “And this will make, what, five in a year? The wedding shower, the baby shower, the movie party. You do it.”

“My house is too small,” Candy said.

That much was true. Candy had added on to her little Baltis brownstone after she adopted Eliza, but the whole place was still the size of a very austere, timelessly fashionable camper. “I don’t see why there has to
be
a reception for everything anyhow.”

“Eliza would absolutely kill me if there was no reception after Stella’s christening. She’s the queen of receptions.”

They both stopped and Beth pictured Eliza at her wedding, in size zero Vera Wang, dancing in her bare feet with Ben to the tarantella, with the flower girls, Candy’s twin grandnieces, in copies of the bride’s gown, holding the twenty-foot train and spinning in and out like crazy
little spools. On a dime, the couple suddenly stopped and the orchestra struck up “Bella Notte,” from
Lady and the Tramp,
and Ben and Liza, who had secretly taken ballroom dancing lessons for the occasion, spun around the room like a prince and princess.