No Time to Wave Goodbye (3 page)

That woman was probably as old as Sari.

She must be family to Vincent and Sam, for she sat in the section cordoned off from the rest by gold rope. Vincent had told him that his family’s last name, Cappadora, meant “gold hat.” They looked like their name. All the people in that section were shiny with health and wealth. Why should the woman cover her face and then slam her hands down on the arms of her seat? Their lost boy was right there, just feet away from them. Their suffering was all over.

Walter’s suffering would not end until his eyes closed for the last time. He tried to believe that Laurel was happy, somewhere, in this world or another.

But what had come before? What agonies?

Had the Cappadoras once been the way Walter was now, all bones and overlarge clothes? Walter sometimes thought he would look into the mirror above the sink and see a man whose frame was crumbling like the piecrust earth of an eroded bluff, but the bluff was made from his dreams.

As the camera panned mountain majesty over the crescent of a hazy ocean bay, in a voice growling like a rock tumbler with the echo of ten thousand cigarettes, the man identified as Walter Hutcheson of Spinnaker, Washington, said, “Laurel’s a free spirit, like her mom and me. We tried to be upbeat at first and we still try to do that. Of course we miss her all the time and we worry. But she’s self-reliant.”

Beth realized that this was the Earth Shoes man she’d spotted earlier in the audience. He was alone here in the theater, but on the screen, he introduced his wife, Sari, who nodded along with Walter—but perpetually, nodding and smiling even when there was nothing to nod or smile about. “I’m half sure she’s just found a new way of trying out the independence we all want. I mean, what were we like when we were fifteen?” Walter smiled broadly and his wife began to nod again, her smile collapsed like a Halloween pumpkin too soon carved and frozen. “We still think Laurel will come back when she’s ready. Maybe …”

But Laurel Hutcheson’s backpack was found in the trunk when a feral, fox-faced drifter called Jurgen Smote was arrested in Washington State for a traffic violation. He was only eleven miles from what the police called the PSL—the point last seen. The Hutchesons had taken their daughter Laurel to an Equinox Festival near their home, a festival they had attended a dozen times, where they felt comforted and welcomed.

Smote, interviewed by Vincent for a brief segment in a visiting room at the prison where he was doing what Smote described as “a nickel” for statutory rape, said, “I might’ve met a girl named Laurel. I’ve met a lot of girls. Some of them … don’t stay in touch. They disappear.
From my life, that is.” His slow smile forced Beth to shrink back in her seat.

Another shot was taken in a moment of sepia light, with Walter’s face illuminated from below by a coal fire. “There are people who say we let her go on her own too long. Let her go camping with groups of boys and girls, let her hitchhike. Well, I say to that … that they’re right. Oh, they are right. We never thought it would be anything but safe for her here …”

Laurel’s friends, doe-eyed, faces plain of makeup, as much like unicorns as Laurel seemed in the photos, had identified Jurgen Smote as having danced with Laurel at the festival. Smote had taken Laurel’s hand, a girl named Echo said in her interview. Laurel had pulled her hand away.

As Echo’s voice in the film continued, Sari, filmed listening to Laurel’s friend, hid her face in her husband’s shirt. Hutcheson put his arm around her shoulders but, abruptly, she pulled away. Beth remembered exactly that, wanting Pat’s touch desperately—wanting only one thing more, for no one to touch her at all.

How bad would it get? Beth thought.

Would there be footage of her—a crazed, dirty, and sleep-famished Beth from long ago? Would this whole crowd see her telling the glossy, wide-eyed young anchorwoman who’d asked her to film a “plea” to the kidnapper,
I don’t expect you to bring Ben back, because you are a sick, heartless bastard…. If you could do this thing, you either don’t understand the nature of the hell we are going through, or you don’t care….
No.

No. Vincent would spare her that at least. Those were nightmare moments that she had shoveled for years to bury deep.

Tonight, coming in, Beth had seen press people outside, including a few she knew to nod to from her newspaper days. Vincent’s partner, Rob, a former radio guy who could have sold parkas to people living in Death Valley, must have dropped choice hints to the press—if not leaflets from a helicopter.

How elated she had been, when she saw those reporters! Now, the possibility of scrutiny made her sick.

Sit still, she thought. Just sit still.

A banner fluttered across the screen:
Searching.

On the screen, around a young, pretty black woman, sat three children, an older boy reading and two small girls coloring elaborate, large paper dolls. Identified by a caption as Janice Dicksen of Chicago, Illinois, the woman said, “This new playground guy organized dodgeball games, and DuPre loved that game. One day I was in the park by the school, talking to my sister Tanya, about the gifted class DuPre was going to be in, and there was this short white guy in a black hoodie and jeans. And DuPre was calling, ‘Hey, hey Coach.’” The lively young woman’s face bled into a video clip of a chubby little mustang of a boy high-footing it out of the goal on a city soccer field. “So I told him, you run over and say hi and then we got to go pick up your little sister.” Her brown eyes shined with unspilled tears. “It wasn’t more than one minute that I talked to Tanya. Not five like they said.” The camera waited in silence as Janice Dicksen’s face broke open. “I sent my boy to that man.”

A Channel Five reporter in flight-attendant blue said, “Police tonight are seeking a man who allegedly abducted a six-year-old boy, DuPre Dicksen, from Hamlin Community Park near Our Savior Baptist Church on Seventy-fifth Street. The boy’s mother, Janice Dicksen, says the man who allegedly took her son was a playground supervisor at John F. Kennedy School. But officials there say that this was no official playground helper. The only man seen that day in the park was an unemployed carpenter who volunteered to help with after-school activities. That carpenter was identified as Joseph Jackson, but the man’s ex-wife knew him by the name Joseph Jackson Plimoth. The whereabouts of the little boy and Plimoth are unknown. This photo of DuPre was taken at the beginning of the school year. When he was last seen, he was wearing a red baseball cap, navy blue shorts, and red Converse high-tops.”

Like Ben, Beth thought. Ben had been wearing a baseball cap, too.

Ben had worn new red tennis shoes.

“They blamed me,” Janice Dicksen said. “One of the officers asked if I was having a relationship with the man who took DuPre. I never even met him!”

Beth thought it might be possible for her heart to fall out of her chest. Putting her hands on her sternum, she pressed hard. Ben was just two seats down. A muscle in his cheek quivered, but he studied the screen as though he’d never seen a movie before. To avoid his mother’s hot gaze? Or did all this feel as removed from reality for Ben as it did for Beth? That had been
Ben’s own three-year-old face
up there, a face he didn’t remember having been his.

She turned slightly in her seat. There was the real-life Janice Dicksen beside an older version of the boy who’d been reading while Janice was interviewed. He must be nearly a foot taller, wearing a suit that almost fit him, except for the gap at the end of the jacket cuffs that exposed two inches of shirtsleeves. Would they come later to the reception? Could Beth touch her, hug her—and not seem patronizing?

With a physical tug, Beth forced herself to turn back to the mammoth moving mouths and foreheads above her.

She peered at her watch.

Eighty-one minutes had passed. Vincent had snagged her, pulled her into the heft and tenderness of his images and vistas, his hard-won moments of naked emotion. In silence, a man’s big face fell like a crumbling cliff as he stroked a good-luck teddy bear, decked out in a silver gymnastics leotard, that his daughter had dropped when she was taken. DuPre Dicksen’s older brother, small and alone against a background of battered tenements, irregular as ruined teeth, was captured sinking shot after shot through a hoop with a single string of metal mesh, the setting sun a fragile orange gauze.

Beth began to forget time, except to wish that the film would not end.

The interview with the Caffertys hit her with maximum force. The Caffertys were … they were like Beth and Pat had been, so much like
them—not rich, not connected, ordinary working people. She recognized from the audience the big man who took up his own row; his elfin wife had apparently not come. Two wives had chosen to absent themselves from this screening. Their little daughter Alana was only six when she was snatched from a crowded hallway at a gymnastics meet nearly seven years before.

When Beth looked up, Candy had taken the seat beside her. Pat had disappeared. Beth glanced down the row and saw him with his arm around Rosie, his mother. Hey, thanks, Beth thought.

“It’s hard for me, too,” Candy said. “You holding up?”

“You know, I’m good,” Beth said. “He earned it.”

They hugged briefly and sat back.

Standing hand in hand with his sister in the wings, Vincent took his first deep breath when he saw his mother hug Candy. The inhalation made him giddy, like his first pull on a cigarette at the age of thirteen. How long had he been holding his breath? He watched her face—the tears she held back by tipping her face upward, the times she pressed her palms to her cheeks or bit her lip. He’d waited for the volcanic leap out of the seat, the flight from the auditorium. Her stillness scared him even more. He had flanked her. He had gone behind her back. Studying her expression, he saw that she hated it but she couldn’t help but appreciate it as a film. How would she act, though, when it got to the parts about Candy and about her? Oh Christ. Kerry had let go of his hand. Vincent reached out again and gripped it tighter.

His mother had taught him that the lens was not human; it couldn’t lie. Computers could tweak things away. Even the eye could fool the mind about what it saw. But a film camera was the incorruptible witness. His mother had come all this way and not seen the worst of it yet. She had not seen the old footage of their own family.

Would Ma know that these images made him want to put his fist through a wall but that it would have been coy to leave his own family out at the expense of all the others? After all, Ben had been the
strangest case of all, the boy who came home but was no longer Ben. What about Ben? Now, after he had seen the same footage, which, to Vincent’s knowledge, he had never in his life watched. Vincent had looked into Beth’s eyes and seen a pane of green glass. He had seen mirth and longing and forgiveness, something seething, something pleading. Now the film was all of a piece, a force.

After this, what would he see in Beth’s eyes?

The last banner, for the final segment, was bright yellow: It read
Hope’s Long Road.

A psychiatrist from New York, known for his research on the ripple effect of losing a child, described a skip-tracer—someone who searched for missing people—and talked about what could work and what didn’t have a prayer.

A therapist spoke of a life lived around crisis, a unique mourning, an open pit with no healed place to lay flowers.

Twenty-two years ago, Beth had been the poster girl for that world of limbo: She dared not move, not one inch, to the left or the right. The world-after-Ben would have buried her. She told Pat that she would go mad, and leave him to raise the children alone, if he pressed her to be “normal.” She had believed that no one else knew what she knew.

But Vincent had somehow found these people, different from her only as a crystal is different from another crystal, at the microscopic level. Vincent’s dexterous hands had lifted this subject out of bathos into impassioned gravity.

The sweet, plump Mexican mother, Rosa Rogelio, nursed her newborn and sobbed. Her prayer chain extended around the world, through China and Greece and Wales and even Russia. Rosa sent out a new prayer each morning.

Her son Luis had been three years old on the evening three years ago when someone wheeled his stroller away from the lobby of a chain restaurant, during the instant that Rosa was in the washroom changing
one of his younger brothers and Ernest turned his back to give the cashier his credit card. Hiccoughing, Rosa said, “I feel like he wakes up every morning and wonders, why did Mama let this happen? When will Mama come? He’s only six now. He would cry for me and his papa. He would not forget us like Ben. We were so close in our family.”

Like Ben.
Beth breathed deeply, again.

Luis, Beth guessed, would have been the eldest of the family. Since then, they had apparently had another baby, too young to be in the audience with the preschoolers, and were expecting a fifth.

The beautiful Blaine Whittier appeared again, her ivory face literally sculpted downward by sadness, admitting she had been “shrunk” more times than her favorite sweatpants. She was supposed to get over feeling that she was complicit in Jackie’s loss. Blaine Putnam Whittier had briefly considered suicide. What if Jackie came back? What if she had been molested or otherwise hurt and Blaine were gone? One family could only bear so much.

One family, thought Beth, breathless with grief for this child, could only bear so much. One child could only bear so much.

Oh, Vincent….
Beth believed she had come to witness Vincent’s redemption.

Who was it that Beth had really hoped to absolve?

“And our family tried a hundred ways for a hundred days to cope too,” Kerry said evenly. “There were a hundred leads, a hundred errors, and one preposterous stroke of luck.”

There was Penny Odin, now the national director of Compassionate Circle, a support group for families of missing or murdered children, which had begun in Madison, Wisconsin, where Pat and Beth lived after college, until five years after Ben disappeared, when they moved back to Chicago so Pat and his father could start The Old Neighborhood, the restaurant designed around an Italian wedding theme that now had two locations and was a regular feature in gourmet and in-flight magazines.