“Okay! So what! We had a swim, and that was it!”
“No, it wasn’t. I’ll tell you what I think happened. I think Becky took off because she was pregnant and you wouldn’t support her. You were a big football star. Or you wanted to be, anyway. It would have ruined all your big dreams if it came out that you’d made your girlfriend pregnant. Isn’t that right, Chipper?”
“No!” His black eyes blazed. “That’s not what happened! I don’t know where Becky went! I don’t know what happened to her! Why won’t you fucking believe me?”
“Daddy!” The little girl was at the front door again. “We want our SpaghettiOs now!”
“Just a minute, Jamie Lynn!”
“Just tell me, Chipper. Is it possible that Becky was pregnant that day?”
“I don’t know if she was!”
I narrowed my eyes at him, angry that I wasn’t getting the confession I’d expected. “She didn’t come to you that day at the pond and tell you she was pregnant?”
“No! She did not!”
“But is it possible? Might she have been pregnant, and by you?”
Chipper moved in very close to me. Once, such close proximity would have thrilled me. But Chipper was no longer the young football player, with the strong, taut muscles. Instead, he was over-weight and had bad breath. Beer and Doritos. “Look,” he said forcefully. “I have a family. I have three daughters inside that house.”
“All right.” My voice was barely a whisper. “Just tell me if it’s possible that Becky may have been pregnant, by you, on the day she disappeared. Tell me if that’s possible, and then I’ll go away.”
He hesitated just a moment. “Yes,” he admitted. “It’s possible.”
“Daddy!”
Chipper looked at me. Our eyes held for several seconds.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
He hurried inside the house. I got in my car and drove away.
My brain was shutting down. I couldn’t think clearly. I wasn’t sure what it meant. But I’d done what I’d come here to do.
I headed out of the subdivision and drove back through the old part of town. I passed the church in which I’d been baptized, where Mom had spent so much time praying for Becky’s safe return. I turned into the cemetery.
I knew where the grave was located, because I’d been there many times when I was a boy. On every Memorial Day before I turned fourteen, Dad would bring Nana, Becky, and me there, and we’d lay flowers on my grandfather’s grave. Grandpa was buried at the back of the cemetery, where the water table was high, and marble headstones routinely toppled over onto the grass. Many times I had struggled to help Dad right Grandpa’s stone. I wondered if by now it would be permanently embedded facedown into the ground.
It was not. New concrete had been laid around the stone to secure its foundation. I wondered when that had been done. Probably when Nana had died and been buried next to her husband. I got out of the car and walked across the grass to the stone. Nana’s name was etched into the marble, right below Grandpa’s and right above Aunt Patsy’s. ADELE HORGAN FORTUNATO. Dead these past twenty-one years. She had passed away just months after I’d left home.
But it was the stone beside Nana’s, a flat marble slab nearly covered by long grass, that I had really come to see. I bent down to read the name closely. MARGARET CRONIN FORTUNATO. A woman better known to the world as Peggy, lionized by the local media as Becky Fortunato’s indefatigable mother.
She was my mother, too.
Was she looking down at me now? That’s what the nuns at St. John’s used to teach, that the dead looked down from heaven upon the living. I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore. So little of my Catholic school education had stayed with me, except for sentence construction. Still, enough of the catechism had lingered that I had come here to the cemetery, wondering if I might feel some kind of connection, if I might sense my mother’s presence at her grave.
I did not. The air was still. A couple of birds called from the trees. The sun was low in the sky, and the shadows of the gravestones were long against the grass. My mother was not here. But I spoke to her, anyway.
“I believe him,” I said. “I believe Chipper. If Becky was pregnant, she didn’t leave because he wouldn’t support her. She left for other reasons. Reasons I guess we’ll never know. That maybe we aren’t meant to know.”
I bent down and cleared away the grass that obscured my mother’s name.
“I came back because I thought I’d finally learned the truth about what happened to Becky,” I told her. “I thought I’d finally figured it out.” I laughed at myself. “Frank and Randall warned me I was grasping at straws, but I didn’t want to believe them. I wanted so much to know what happened. I wanted to know why everything changed for us. For you and me and Dad.”
I stood up, letting out a long breath.
“But I don’t know. Sorry to report, Mom, but I was still unable to find Becky for you. I believe Chipper when he says Becky didn’t tell him she was pregnant.” I stared down at her name. “Now, it’s still possible she may have been. Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. Every scenario is possible, Mom, as I’m sure you realized many times since I’m sure you thought of them all.”
I looked over at the setting sun, the swirl of pinks and golds.
“Maybe you were right, Mom. Maybe sometime after her swim in the pond, Becky met up with a kidnapper who took her away. Or maybe, in fact, it was Guthrie who was right, and the truth is that Becky decided to leave on her own. Maybe it had something to do with her being pregnant, and maybe she wasn’t pregnant at all. Maybe it was a spontaneous decision. Maybe it was premeditated. The missing clothes and money make me think it was premeditated, but who knows? Maybe she gave the clothes away. Maybe she took the money to buy me a birthday gift. Any scenario is possible.”
I felt tears well up behind my eyes. “I wish I could remember Becky’s face that day at the pond,” I said, staring down again at my mother’s stone. “I can’t picture her. Only her back, and her long, wet hair. Was she anxious? Sad? I don’t know.” The first tears squeezed themselves out of my eyes. “Sorry not to be bringing you better news, Mom. But the truth is, we won’t ever know.”
I looked around, conscious suddenly of talking out loud in a cemetery. I was relieved to see that I was still completely alone, with only the dead and the birds in the trees as company. Still, I dropped my voice to a whisper.
“That was the worst part of it, wasn’t it, Mom?” I asked. “The not knowing? The constant feeling in your gut that you had somehow caused Becky to leave? It was easier, wasn’t it, to believe that she’d been taken by bikers, that she was living under some pier in New York or stripping in a club in Boston? That was easier to bear, wasn’t it, Mom? That she had been taken from you, rather than the idea that she had left you?”
I stared down at her name. Margaret Cronin Fortunato. The tears began dropping to the ground, one by one.
“Did you feel anything when I left you, Mom? I know you were angry. But did you feel anything more?”
It was one more thing I would never know.
I gazed down at the date of her death. It was eight years ago. I remembered the morning I woke up and just knew it was time to call home. There had been no mulling over the idea. It was just there, present and certain when I opened my eyes. I picked up the phone and called my parents’ number. After thirteen years, it was still in service. Thirteen years since I’d had any contact with them. My father answered the phone.
“How did you know?” he asked as soon as he heard my voice.
“Know what?”
“Your mother died this morning.”
It had been breast cancer, like Aunt Patsy, and Mom had gone almost as fast. He’d tried to find me, Dad said, but he’d been unsuccessful. I wasn’t sure I believed him. I wondered if Mom had forbidden him to do so, insistent to the very end that she had no children, that she’d lost both her daughter and her son. But maybe it hadn’t been that way. Maybe Dad had
tried to find me. The Internet wasn’t that big yet, and Dad surely had had little knowledge of how to search it. Maybe, in fact, Mom really had hoped I’d come at the end. But I hadn’t. I’d called exactly five hours after she died.
I chose not to return home for the funeral. There would be too many questions, too much awkwardness. Instead, I lay in Frank’s arms. I cried once, a big, heavy, gut-wrenching sound, as Frank stroked my hair and whispered, “It’s okay, baby,” over and over in my ear. But mostly I was silent, kept from shattering into a million fragments by Frank’s strong arms.
I longed for those arms now.
What had I come here expecting to find? What was it that I was really looking for, not just here, but in everything that I’d been through these last several months? They seemed a foolish, childish blur. What had I been hoping to find?
I turned and walked out of the cemetery, not looking back, knowing I’d never return. My father was not going to be buried there. After Mom’s death, I’d stayed in touch with Dad, talking occasionally with him on the phone. I was pleased to learn that Father McKenna had gotten him into AA and that he’d stopped drinking, getting some of his life back. Toward my mother, he bore no ill will for all their years of conflict. He hoped it might be the same for me.
“Don’t hate her, Danny,” Dad had said over the phone.
“I don’t hate her,” I’d assured him.
“She loved you. I know it didn’t feel that way. But she did. Her grief destroyed her, and it nearly destroyed me.”
“Why didn’t you ever leave her?” I’d asked.
“I loved her,” Dad had said simply. “When you’re with someone that long, when you’ve been through so much together, you become part of each other. The love doesn’t go away.” He’d paused. “I’m not sure if you can understand what I mean.”
I hadn’t then. But now, walking out of the cemetery, longing for Frank’s arms, I understood very well.
A few years after Mom’s death, Dad had moved to Florida with a lady friend. Her name was Angela. I was happy for him. Vague plans were made about seeing each other again someday, but I doubted if it would happen. Perhaps our occasional phone calls would be enough.
I sat for a moment behind the wheel of my rental car. If I could have, I would have driven to the airport right then and there and gotten on a plane back to California. That was where I belonged. I missed Frank desperately. I wanted Frank to hold me, to whisper in my ear that everything was okay. My entire body ached for him.
Every morning, Danny, you wake up and look into the eyes of a man who loves you. Imagine for a moment what it’s like to go through life without ever being able to look someone in the eyes and know those eyes are looking back at you.
Popping open my cell phone, I speed-dialed Frank and got his voice mail. “I’m done here,” I told him simply. “I’m coming home.”
Heading back to my hotel, I drove along the same route the bus had taken when I left this place so long ago. I’d looked out of the bus window then as the buildings of my childhood rushed past, dropping out of my frame of vision one after another. I’d carried with me as many questions then as I did that day in the cemetery.
Two decades later, I’d discovered the answers were no answers at all.
EAST HARTFORD
Twenty-One Years Earlier
“I’ve come to say good-bye, Nana.”
“Can you help me?”
I set my suitcase down by the door and smiled down at her. They’d stopped putting the bows in her hair, but her face was still painted with too much lipstick and rouge. I took a tissue from the box on the side of her bed and began to gently wipe it off.
“I’m moving to California,” I told her. “I’m going to become an actor.”
“Can you help me?”
“I’ve got my bus ticket,” I said. “It’s going to be a long ride across the country. Almost a week. But I’m up for it.”
“Can you help me?”
I kissed her forehead. She smelled of disinfectant. I remembered her sweet, spicy perfume and missed it very much.
“Can you help me?”
I sat in the chair opposite her. “Okay, okay, Nana. I hear you. I’ll read to you for a little bit. I know how much you like it.”
I pulled a battered old paperback from the inside of my denim jacket.
“I’m reading a wonderful play right now. It’s called The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams wrote it. You know, the same guy who wrote The Night of the Iguana and Suddenly Last Summer.” I smiled broadly. “I like this one best of all. I’d love to play the part of Tom.”
I began to read, from Tom’s opening monologue: “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
As always, Nana became serene as I read to her.
I understood the power of great words. For the last three years, books and plays had been my escape. Forced out of St. Francis Xavier, I’d been sent to East Hartford High—which in some ways wasn’t so bad. I’d thought maybe I’d run into my old friend Desmond, but his family had moved away. Which was just as well. No one at East Hartford High knew who I was or what I had done in the men’s room. They’d even largely forgotten about the Becky Fortunato case by now, so I was able to just slip into a corner and stay there, pretty much out of sight, for my junior and senior year. For me, the myriad teenage dramas that were enacted around me held no interest. Nor did I risk involvement in another school play, though I was tempted. Instead, I lost myself in books, both those assigned in class and those I’d take out from the library. During the summer, literature was an especially boon companion, since, through my own choice, I had no friends with whom to hang out. Williams and Poe and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Jane Austen and Eugene O’Neill proved more than satisfactory comrades.
I became, once again, the good student I had been at St. John’s, though my grades weren’t so extraordinary that I drew any special attention—except in my American theater class during the first semester of my senior year, where my teacher had written on one paper: “You show such a passion for drama that you could become either a major actor or playwright.” That one line had convinced me to seriously pursue acting upon graduation—a decision not received well by my parents.
With Mom and Dad, I had settled into a routine of wary coexistence. My father remained an intermittent ghost in my life. My mother alternated between bouts of manic activity and long stretches of solitary depression. She never let go of the idea that Becky was still out there somewhere, just waiting to be found, and that everything Warren had told her had been the gospel truth.
And as she’d warned me, she expected that I would pay off my sins when I got my driver’s license. My penance was accepted without argument. I drove her wherever she wanted to go. Once I drove her to Somers State Prison so she could meet with Bruno himself face-to-face. I didn’t go in with her, passing the time instead in an airless, small outer room. I watched the clock in utter terror of a prison break. When Mom came out, nothing had changed. Bruno’s repeated denials of knowing anything about Becky had failed to convince her; she remained certain that he was lying, and that some day she’d get him to divulge what he knew. When he was murdered in a prison brawl a month later, she was convinced it had something to do with Becky, and rued that my sister’s whereabouts had gone with Bruno to the grave.
Other times, I drove her to New York, where we searched for Becky under piers and among the hard faces of the hookers in Times Square. Once there was a trip to Boston’s north shore, where a tipster had said Becky was working in a beachside dive that sold fried clams and onion rings. It wasn’t her. A psychic placed her on Cape Cod, advice my mother insisted must be true, since that was where Becky and Bruno had supposedly first been spotted years before. But a trek up the long arm of the Cape in the dead of winter had proven, yet again, fruitless. All we got was s
tuck in an ice storm.
On these trips, Mom and I spoke only the most necessary of words to each other. “Turn here.” “Slow down.” “Do you want to use the bathroom?” “Look at that girl over there.” By now, I’d given up all hope of finding my sister, but I chauffeured Mom everywhere without complaint, serving my sentence for longer than Bruno served his.
Even after high school graduation, I continued schlepping Mom around. But I was also now working two jobs, at Friendly’s Ice Cream and Bob’s Big Boy, so her trips had to be planned around my schedule. I was also saving my money for my escape. The first time I announced that I was going into New York to audition for a play, my mother hit the roof. “New York is filled with perverts!” she told me. But still I went. Though I didn’t get the part, I was glad I’d gone into the city to read for it, anyway, because it allowed me the chance to flout my mother’s opposition.
I managed to land some small roles in regional New England theater. The greasepaint and spotlights and applause convinced me that I had indeed found my calling. I became fixated on the idea of Los Angeles—Hollywood—which meant, of course, television or movies instead of the stage. That was fine by me. At night I’d lie in bed, imagining myself the star of a television series. What would Mom do then? The star of his own TV show didn’t haul his mother around to smelly biker bars. As a star, I’d be able to do whatever I wanted, without conditions from her. It would be heaven.
And finally the day came. I had just driven Mom all the way up to the border of Canada in Maine, where she’d met with one of the Rubberman’s old girlfriends, a hag who lived in a fishing shack and kept farting as we talked to her. She didn’t know a damn thing, but when Mom pushed some cash across the table, she conveniently remembered seeing a girl who fit Becky’s description at some biker rally or another. That did it for me. I vowed this would be the last excursion I’d ever make with Mom. The next day, I bought a bus ticket to Los Angeles, packed my bags, and headed over to the Swan Convalescent Home to say good-bye to Nana.
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