No Time To Wave Goodbye

No time to wave goodbye: a novel.

Jacquelyn Mitchard.

For the two Annies-one who came back, one who never left.

And for Thomas H. Cook and Susan Terner, who changed my lonely life one lucky day ...

CHAPTER ONE.

Before dawn on the day she would finally see his first real film, Beth Cappadora slipped into the guest room and lay down on the edge of the bed where her son, Vincent, slept.

Had she touched his hair or his shoulder, he would not have stirred. When he slept at all, Vincent slept like a man who"d fallen from a relaxed standing position after being hit on the back of the head by a frying pan. Still, she didn"t take the risk. Her relationship with Vincent didn"t admit of nighttime confidences, funny cards, all the trappings of the sentimental, platonic courtship between a mother and her grown boy. Instead, Beth blessed the air around his head, where coiled wisps of dark hair still sprang up as they had when he was a child.

Show them, Vincent, she said softly. Knock "em dead.

Beth asked only a minor redemption-something that would stuff back the acid remarks that everyone had made about where Vincent"s career of minor crime and major slough-offs would end, because it had so far outlasted the most generous boundaries of juvenile delinquency. She wished one thing itself, simple and linear: Let Vincent"s movie succeed.

That night, as she watched the film, and recognized its might and its worth, Beth had to appreciate-by then, against her will-that her wish was coming true. What she didn"t realize was something that she"d learned long ago.

Only long months from that morning did Beth, a superst.i.tious woman all her life, realize she had forgotten that if a wish slipped like an arrow through a momentary slice in the firmament, it was free to come true any way it would. Only fools thought its trajectory could ever be controlled.

Sixteen hours after Beth tiptoed from Vincent"s bedside, a spotlight beam shined out over the seat where she sat fidgeting and craning her neck to peek at everyone else taking their seats in the Harrington Community Center Auditorium.

Suddenly, there was Vincent, onstage. He looked up from nervously adjusting the pink tie he wore against his white shirt and twilight gray suit and said, "I have to apologize. We have a little technical glitch we need to fix and then we"ll be ready. Thanks for your patience. In just a moment, the first voice you will hear is my sister, the opera singer Kerry Rose Cappadora, who also narrates this film. I"ll be right back. I mean, the film will. Thanks again."

Beth leaned forward as if from the prow of a ship. Her husband, Pat, reached out to ease her back.

"Don"t jump," he teased. "You can"t do this for him. It"s high time, Bethie. You have to agree. Vincent"s lived la vita facile too long."

"I know," Beth agreed. Though she didn"t speak Italian, she wanted to poke Pat in the ribs and not gently. Vincent earned his way, after a fashion. Vincent owned a home, after a fashion-two rooms in Venice Beach, California, that had once been a garage. Vincent had made a gourmet chocolate commercial nominated for an ADDY Award. He hadn"t asked them for a dime since ... well, since the last time he dropped out of college. But she said only, "You"re right, of course."

"Bethie?"

"Yeah?"

"Why aren"t you arguing with me?" Pat asked. "What"s the matter with you?" Beth shrugged, battling the urge to drag her fingers through her careful blowout: If you have to mess with your hair, Beth"s friend Candy said, shake, don"t rake. Pat cracked his knuckles. "d.a.m.n it," Pat said then. "Who am I trying to kid? I haven"t wanted a cigarette this bad since the grease fire at the restaurant. I want to jump up on the stage and yell at everybody, This is my son"s work! You better appreciate this! But we"ve got to give this over to him."

"Absolutely," Beth said, her heartbeat now a busy little mallet that must be visible through her pale silk chemise.

"You sound like a robot. Where"s my wife? You could object a little," Pat said.

"Too nervous," Beth replied.

It was more than that, of course. Nothing that she could confide, even in Pat. For Beth was in part responsible for her son"s brushes with the law and his seeming inability to finish ... anything. (In part? Was she flattering herself? Once upon a time, Vincent had done everything he could, including selling a few bushels of thankfully low-order drugs, to get his mother"s thousand-yard stare to focus on him.) If this film were to be worthy at all-Beth hugged herself, smiling-then this private screening for a hundred people in the rented theater of a community center would also be the long-overdue premiere of her son"s life as a man in full.

More than this, in just a moment, Beth would learn the answers to the questions she"d asked herself for months.

What was the doc.u.mentary about?

Why had Vincent enlisted his sister and his brother to help him make it? Last year, during the filming, had been the busiest time of their lives: Ben had a wife, a full share in the family business, and a baby on the way. Kerry still lived at her parents" house, but her college major was so demanding that some nights she came home from school or the voice studio with dark smudges under her eyes and fell asleep before she could eat the food she"d microwaved.

Was it because the subject was too intimate or incendiary or simply too off the wall to entrust to a stranger, even a fellow professional? Why had Vincent used film instead of video, which probably quadrupled the cost?

Was the obsessive privacy all pride? Did he have to do this all on his own?

With his first doc.u.mentary, Alpha Female, a snapshot of the life of a young farmer"s wife and mother of four putting herself through college as a part-time dominatrix, Vincent had turned to Beth, a photographer for nearly thirty years, on everything from how to light someone so blond that her features were nearly achromatic to how to coax an interview out of the woman"s stern, disapproving parents. Beth recalled the look on her mother-in-law"s face when that film had first screened, in the auditorium of the high school from which Vincent had been expelled. Freckle-faced Katie Hubner saddle-soaped her leather garter belt and said, "They don"t care anything about s.e.x, poor things! They just want me to treat them like their mean old mamas did!"

Of this film, Beth knew nothing but its t.i.tle, No Time to Wave Goodbye. In her good moments, it seemed almost a private message from her older son. Her own first photo book-a series of black-and-white shots of her own children walking away from her, dragging fishing poles, hurrying toward the blooming paG.o.da of a fireworks display, each underlined with a tender quotation-was called Wave Goodbye.

What other connection could there possibly be?

Beth began to twist her wedding ring round and round. Did no one else notice the minutes that had collapsed since Vincent"s introduction? Two, three ... seven?

No one close to the family would mind. There they all were, chatting, her family, her in-laws, Ben and his wife, Eliza. People were admiring Ben and Eliza"s baby, two-month-old Stella, Beth"s first grandchild, on her very first outing. Along with Eliza"s mother-Beth"s beloved friend Candy-the crowd included dozens of business a.s.sociates and old and new neighborhood friends. They were the cheering section.

But what about the others?

What of the one reviewer invited to this private event? Where was he? The fourth-row seat on the aisle reserved for him was still empty.

And all the guests Beth didn"t recognize?

Would they hate the film if they had to wait much longer?

Beth glanced around her. In the same row, across the aisle, sat a perfect Yankee couple, ramrod-straight, their spines an inch from the seat backs-mother, father, impeccably coutured blond daughter. Several rows back, directly behind Beth, a soft, pretty young black woman held hands with her son, a slender young teenager. To the right and near the back door, there was a round-shouldered guy, not heavy but big, who might have been a day laborer with his snap-closure shirt rolled up to the elbows. No one sat beside him; in presence rather than size, he seemed to fill a row of his own. A young Latino couple-a sharply dressed young man and his hugely pregnant wife-patiently tolerated the two silently rambunctious preschoolers crawling all over them. An older man, who could have been an advertis.e.m.e.nt for mountain-climbing and Earth Shoes, sat just beyond the young couple. Who were these people? Who were they to Vincent?

The screen went dark.

Then from the darkness, a canvas appeared and, to the sound of Kerry"s pure, sweet soprano singing "Liverpool Lullaby," a beautiful sequence of transparent photos of children was tacked to the cinematic canvas by an invisible hand. As soon as each eager face appeared, a name, height, and date of birth printed below it, like a Wanted poster, a visual force like a strong wind tore the picture off the screen. Beside the photos, words configured to look like a child"s block printing unfurled. They read: A Pieces by Reese Production ... written and produced by Vincent Cappadora and Rob Brent ... in conjunction with John Marco Ruffalo Projects ... edited by Emily Sydney ...

Then came the last photo.

The last photo was Ben"s preschool photo.

Beth gripped the arms of her seat. What?

Twenty-two years ago, that very photo had occupied the whole cover of People magazine. For almost a decade, it claimed real estate in the center of the corkboard in the office of Detective Supervisor Candy Bliss, as she had searched tirelessly for Beth"s kidnapped son, to no avail. Posters made from this photo melted to tatters under the pummeling of rain and snow and sun and more rain and snow on thousands of light poles all over the Midwest and beyond. And they had produced nothing but phone calls from every crazy who wasn"t behind bars and some who were, and a single, valid rumor of the sighting of that little boy in Minneapolis with a "white-haired" woman. That white-haired woman turned out to be a dyed platinum blonde-Beth"s old schoolmate Cecilia Lockhart. Everyone remembered Cecil as nuts but not nuts. Yet, it was she, at Beth"s fifteenth high-school reunion, who had taken Ben"s hand and strolled with him out of the hotel lobby and out of Beth"s life, for nine unrelenting years.

Though she tried, Beth could not stop her jaw from shuddering. She wanted to cling to Pat but dared not move. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention from the screen to herself.

And yet, she already had.

Bryant Whittier, who sat in a cultivated posture of ease, flanked by his wife, Claire, elegant in a St. John knit suit, and his daughter, Blaine, demure for once in a designer wrap dress, saw Beth"s minute gesture of distress. He recognized it from a dozen holding cells and living rooms. A defense lawyer, Bryant had observed closely the parents of the accused, particularly the moment when incredulity gave way to rage and then despair. Poor woman, he thought. She hadn"t known.

When he interviewed them, Vincent said that no one but the crew understood the substance of this doc.u.mentary, but Bryant hadn"t believed that "no one" included the Cappadora brothers" close family. The slender, expensive-looking woman had to be Vincent"s mother. In profile, she was the exact image of Vincent. He had never shown them a picture of his parents, but Bryant had found old news photos of the case on the Internet. This clearly was Beth, more attractive than Bryant would have imagined she would be by now. Bryant did not like heavyset women. He sometimes reminded his surviving daughter, who rowed in a c.o.xed quad, to watch her prodigious appet.i.te at the training table. He made a covert inventory of Beth, a cultivated professional knack that also had its personal uses. It was unfortunate. Her husband, or the man he a.s.sumed was Vincent"s father, slouched with his arms hanging at his sides, as though they"d been dislocated.

Who would want to remember, if they didn"t have to?

And yet, it was their son, who, for reasons of his own, had made this film that Bryant partic.i.p.ated in only against his will. He had talked to Sam-the name Ben used for himself-and Vincent"s camera only because Claire and Blaine, who still had hope that Bryant"s missing daughter, Jacqueline, was alive, pleaded with him to do so. There was an awful fairness here. Why shouldn"t the filmmaker"s family share in the suffering ripped open anew for all the families Vincent had found and featured?

Bryant put his hand on Claire"s arm. She glanced at him, biting her lips. Bryant turned his attention back to the people in the three rows roped off by gold cord: The tiny girl whose long black hair swept over the baby swaddled in her arms? She wasn"t Italian. Spanish of some kind?

Ah, yes. Bryant was grown forgetful.

This was Ben"s wife.

Ben had married the adopted daughter of the detective, Candy, the sainted policewoman-Candy, whom all the family loved so well. To Bryant"s mind, being unable to find a child whose kidnapper had moved him to a house blocks from the place where the Cappadoras had grown up meant no genius at sleuthing! From what the Whittiers understood, twelve-year-old Ben had actually found his birth family on his own, rather than the other way around, quite by accident, when he was pa.s.sing out flyers offering to mow lawns. Bryant gingerly stroked his well-clipped beard. Hadn"t Ben admitted that he"d been raised by the innocent man the kidnapper married, whom he thought of as his father? "Adopted" by this man, Ted-or was it George?-who had no inkling that "Sam" wasn"t Cecilia"s own child? Hadn"t Ben said that his "mother" (the only mother he knew) spent most of his childhood in and out of inst.i.tutions? Was it from Ben, or from a newspaper account, that Bryant had learned that Cecilia, an actor Claire said she"d seen on an old soap opera, finally committed suicide?

Of course. Bryant would have read that. Ben ... well, Sam, who still, oddly, answered only to the name given to him by the kidnapper, would not have volunteered it. For all his glad-handing humor, Ben was hard to know. Unlike his sister, he kept very definite doors closed.

Where was the sister, Kerry, the pretty little singer? Oh, there she was, just visible behind a fold of curtain on the stage, standing beside Vincent, watching the audience. Kerry didn"t just wear her heart on her sleeve; she had no sleeve. The ideal juror, Bryant thought. Emotional. Impressionable. Visible. He smiled blandly, the expression cheerful enough to convince anyone who didn"t look into his eyes. The woodland path on the screen was familiar. Bryant had told police that his daughter, Jacqueline, had taken that route as she walked to her death.

The camera followed the trail through the greenwood and Kerry"s voice began, "When I was six months old, my brother Benjamin Cappadora was abducted in the middle of the day in a hotel lobby crowded with people, nearly in arm"s reach of my brother Vincent, my G.o.dmother, and my mother. And though Ben came back to us, it wasn"t before my parents and my older brother walked through a valley that no one can understand who hasn"t walked it."

Beth turned to Pat and threw out her hands, demanding. But he slowly, woodenly, shook his head. "Bethie," he said, "I swear to G.o.d. I didn"t know a thing about this."

Beth tried to settle the lineaments of her face, to appear as the Cappadora family history obliged her to appear-sweet, gamine, ineffably cheerful. As ever, as part of a family people recognized and watched, she was on guard. There were obligations that redounded to such a family, to people who had been blessed, had been handed-by a preposterous coincidence-the gift of living happily ever after, when their missing child showed up on their doorstep. In the history of abductions, such luck was not unknown but rare to the point of statistical impossibility. Ben lost-and-found was more complicated, by orders of magnitude, than anyone except Candy understood. But it would have seemed a failure of grace to behave in any other way: Even the grown children knew they were expected to offer a firm handshake, a l.u.s.trous smile, even keep a normal weight.

It was no use. The best Beth could do for her face was to cover it with her long, pale fingers, the wedding-band ruby on her fourth finger gleaming like a coal in the moody light.

Kerry"s voice continued, "So-called stereotypical kidnappings, or stranger abductions, are fortunately far less common than the news media would have us believe." Beth couldn"t quite hear Kerry. There was a rushing in her ears, as though she were trying to listen to her daughter from inside a shower stall. "... Fewer than four percent of all child disappearances are stranger abductions.... most of them involve noncustodial parents or runaways.... Although thirteen years ago, my brother was restored to us, through diligent police work and impossible good luck, few families are so lucky. The five families who told us their stories still wait for the children who had no time to wave goodbye."

A banner fluttered across the screen and was again ripped away: The First Days.

There they were on-screen. Claire and Bryant Whittier. The Puritan couple who looked to be an advertis.e.m.e.nt for New England vitality were, in fact, Californians. They divided their time between a tiny suburb of San Francisco, called Durand, and their second home, a vast, rustic lodge they owned, some miles away in the San Juan Diego Mountains.

Filmed in the living room of their primary residence, the Whittiers sat like matching china figurines on matching Queen Anne chairs, their German shorthaired pointer, Macduff, between them, his head on crossed paws.

"At first, I slept in her bed every night. And Macduff slept under it, every night," said Claire Whittier. "He was her birthday puppy when she was twelve. When he gets to the end of the drive up at our summerhouse, he will still start to howl." Claire Whittier compressed her lips. "That"s where we found Jackie"s shoes, side by side. She just stepped out of them. It was because they were new, very nice ballet flats. She only wore them once, for graduation the day before. She didn"t want to ruin them. Bryant says that Jackie left them because she knew she wasn"t coming back. Bryant was far better able to cope than our other daughter, Blaine, and I. We were in shock. We didn"t know how much at the time. We were no help at all to the police. The worst moment was waking up. I would forget, until I woke up, and then it would be real. I slept and slept and tried to sleep some more. I needed pills to make me sleep, sleep, sleep. I craved them. I don"t believe I got out of bed for a month. And when I did, I wore those shoes everywhere. I still do. They make me feel close to Jackie."

The riddle of Jacqueline Whittier"s shoes so perplexed the police and the FBI that, at first, they harbored doubts about the Whittiers. Why wouldn"t Macduff have followed the girl he loved so extravagantly down the road that led to a patchwork of woods and river ponds surrounding the Whittiers" vacation lodge? To Bryant Whittier, it was obvious: Jacqueline was practical and logical. Macduff was as well bred and obedient as his mistress. She had told him down-stay; Macduff had no choice except to do that until he was released by Jacqueline or another family member. Jacqueline would have known that. She took after her father, Bryant said. He was the only defense lawyer in tiny Cisco County, sought out by families from around the state. Jacqueline, an honor student, the yearbook editor, and a star swimmer who also ran cross-country, hoped one day, Bryant said, to practice law with her dad.

The Whittiers did not dispute that, in the strictest sense, the case of Jacqueline Bryant Whittier remained an unsolved stranger abduction.

But Bryant Whittier quietly a.s.serted that Jackie, who had suffered serious periods of depression since just before her fourteenth birthday, had taken her own life, although no body had ever been found.

Kerry"s voice explained, "According to her parents and sister, Jackie was indeed prey to periods of pain so intense, almost physical on rare occasions, that she would have committed suicide long before if she hadn"t loved them so much and hadn"t been so afraid of dying alone. But that doesn"t mean she was really ready to die. Recent months had been kind to Jacqueline. She seemed to have turned a corner. Her mother and sister don"t believe that she left her family voluntarily."

"There are these Internet sites," Jacqueline"s sister, Blaine, told the camera as it walked beside her, "where kids who are fascinated with suicide talk about it. We found conversations on Jackie"s laptop. Personally, to me they sounded just like overheated dramatic teenagers carried away by the romantic idea of dying young. But this one boy, Jordan? Who used a cafe in San Francisco as his return address? How many guys are named Jordan? If that"s even his name? How many Internet cafes?" Blaine wrapped her scarf around her neck and slipped her hands into leather gloves. "Maybe it wasn"t even his real name." After walking a few more paces, Blaine sat down on a stump in the woods and said, "Do you know what I really think? I think maybe he took Jackie"s ideas too seriously and came to get her and drove her up to our summer place in the mountains. And maybe he helped her kill herself. Maybe it was all him. But the police never found any evidence of ... that. They went over the whole area up there by our house. You know? No ... evidence. No Jordan. Nothing." She paused and continued slowly, "It"s not impossible Jackie ran away, with no intention of dying. She ... we ... she minded all the expectations from our dad more than I did." The camera pictured Bryant Whittier making a tent of his lean, patrician hands, shaking his head, presumably in reaction to his older daughter"s words.

Then Kerry"s voice read a poem Jacqueline had written: "I cherish the smallest spear of light / But inside me is a pool of night / For one whose soul longs just for rest / What may be hardest may be best. Despite her apparent upswing in mood, this was the poem that Jacqueline left behind in observance of her seventeenth birthday, the day before she disappeared, the day after she graduated first in her cla.s.s, and told her fellow students to embrace their dreams as the purest reality. Two years later, her case remains open. She is still missing."

Beth glanced at her watch. Twenty-four minutes into the film, Beth finally knew what it was about. She simply had no idea why Vincent had chosen to drag this dark river where his whole family had nearly drowned.

CHAPTER TWO.

Beth sat immobilized. She now knew the answer to one question but not to the fifty others it raised.

In public, in row three, in her hip-but-modest clothes, she felt her mouth filling with saliva, the way it had when she"d had morning sickness. She tried to breathe slowly through her nose. What a sight it would be for Beth to run from the theater with a handful of bile. Why choose this topic, and why involve her other children in raking her over the coals-along with his father and his elderly grandparents?

Was it some form of payback-"gotcha"-for the person she no longer was, the mother that Vincent had endured after the kidnapping, the skeletal scaffolding of a human being who lived years, woke and slept in the same clothes until Pat ran a bath and led her to it?

As Candy used to say, the answer was usually in the question.

Beth believed that she and Vincent had reached a kind of peace over the past years. If they were not jolly pals, they were not, at least, people with the same blood type who spoke on the telephone once every two months.

Beth lowered her hands and grounded herself to the seat with the grip of her palms. She stared unblinking at the screen. There. That was good. She looked calm and stoic, engaged and thoughtful.

But eyes saw through her pretense.

From a couple of rows back, Walter Hutcheson noticed that the woman he"d observed laughing and chatting earlier had gone still and grim. He"d first looked at her because something about Beth"s graceful hands reminded him of Sari just a few years ago, before Sari armored herself in fat and chopped off her waist-length brown hair, the skein of hair he once slipped over his fingers like the lengths of cashmere Sari carded from her goats and spun for weavers. It was wrong, given everything, for Walter to miss the physical love of his wife. But there were times he shook with longing for the jasmine scent of her freckled private skin. For him, she was still the leggy twenty-one-year-old he"d kissed at Big Sur the summer before senior year. Once, in the dark, he suggested to Sari that they were young enough to have a child still.

After that, she slept in the loft.

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 ..."