“Work on it,” Ben said, but she glared at him and he added quickly, “please.”
On their way to her car, Ben asked her, “Are you divorced?”
“No,” she answered, clearly surprised.
“My mom was divorced before she met
“A lot of people get divorced these days,” she explained. “It doesn’t make your mother any less a person.”
“I thought she went away,” he said, his voice catching in his throat. Daphne started the car but glanced over at him before shifting gears. “She did, sort of. Go away. You know?” He felt tears coming and turned to look back at the building from which they had come. “He told me she left me. That she left us both. And I believed him.” He felt a tear run down his cheek then, and he kept his face toward the glass of the window so she couldn’t see. The car backed up.
“Ben, you’re old enough to understand that people like Jack Santori do bad things. They hurt other people. Those of us who end up victims face some tough choices.” She had started to drive, but she pulled the car over and put it in park and turned to face him. Her eyes moved as if she was thinking hard or remembering something. “If we dwell on being victims, we often never escape. The better choice is to move on. Talking about things can help.” Too many memories for her. She felt herself break.
She had tears running down her cheeks; so did he. For an instant she reminded him of his mom, because his mom seemed always to be crying, especially in the months before she left. He thought of the lie-she had never left-and cried all the harder. She had been lying down there in the cold and the damp, down there with mice and spiders and ants and God knows what else. Nothing left but some bones and that gold ring.
He relived the experience of finding that ring for the first time since promising himself not to think about it. As Daphne reached over and hugged him he felt her warmth, and he smelled her sweetness, and he buried his face in her chest and fell apart, images surfacing, feelings surfacing that he had no idea were buried inside him. He saw himself as a child. He saw his mother naked in the bathtub, running her toes under the hot water and laughing. He saw her bruised face, her swollen eye, and her fat lip, and he remembered her warning in a frightened voice, “Don’t you say a thing about this in front of him. When you look at me, you don’t see it. When he looks at you, you act no different, Benjamin. You’re my best boy, right? You gotta do this for me.” She’d been protecting him; he realized that, though too late.
A tape played inside his head and he heard them arguing and he heard her being hit, and he heard her say, “I’ll do it! I’ll do anything. Just not my boy.” After that the bed had pounded against the downstairs wall for a long time, and later he’d smelled smoke and, worried the guy had passed out while smoking, he went to look and found his mother sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette. He went down the stairs quietly and walked right up to her-she didn’t smoke cigarettes, not as far as he knew, and it upset him to see her smoking and he told her so. She was staring at the drawn curtain; she didn’t seem to hear him. The room was dark, and as his eyes adjusted, each time she drew on the cigarette a red light spilled over her body, and he realized she was sitting stark naked in that chair. Then, as the cigarette drew down, he saw that her body was covered in red, angry scratches, some of them deep enough to still be bleeding, black ugly bruises as big as potatoes. She exhaled and, without looking at him, said, “Go to bed.” Tears ran down her cheeks. He hurried up the stairs, but he didn’t go to bed; he sat in the shadows and watched her instead. She smoked four cigarettes in a row, found a coat in the coat closet, and put it on. She sat on the couch for a while, and when Ben awakened from an unplanned nap, she was in a different chair, looking out the window again, as if she wanted to be out there. She smoked two more cigarettes. Ben caught himself hugging his knees, crying into his pajamas. Jack called from the bedroom, “Get in here. We’re gonna play a little more.” Ben’s mom glanced up toward where Ben was hiding, as if contemplating something. She snubbed out the cigarette-he would never forget that because she used her bare foot to grind it into the rug; he had looked at the burned spot often and thought of her. She unzipped the coat, shedding it and leaving it on the couch, and walked slowly toward the bedroom, almost like a zombie. He heard the guy say something, heard his mother’s voice though not her words, and then caught the distinctive sounds of a hard slap and his mother’s groan, and he had covered his ears with his palms and run to his room and buried his head under his pillow, as he had so many nights before.
“He killed her,” Ben said to Daphne, between his sobs. She squeezed him all the tighter. “He killed my mom and put her down there.” Daphne didn’t tell him to be quiet; she didn’t tell him everything would be all right. That had been what he had feared the most, being told to shut up or that things would work out. Because they weren’t going to work out, and Ben knew it.
Daphne said, “You can tell me anything that comes to mind. It doesn’t have to make sense. I want to hear it, if you want to share it.” These words seemed to come from the voice of an angel to him. He cried all the harder. She said, “You’re safe here, Ben. Emily, me, Susan-we’re not going anywhere. We’re here for you. We’re your friends. You can talk to us. You can share with us. It’s safe.” She squeezed him again.
“I’m afraid,” he said, admitting aloud for the first time something he had lived with for what felt like forever.
“Me too,” said Daphne. “And you know what? It’s okay to be afraid.”
He looked up at her then, and for a moment he forgot everything. There was only this woman and the feeling that whatever was wrong was suddenly okay. That he was safe.
He shut his eyes and tried to hold it there forever.
The big man was Boldt, he knew that much. He wasn’t so much tall as big, and yet his hands belonged to a different person, with their long fingers. They looked like he kept them in his pockets all day or something. Hiding them. Protecting them. Ben had never seen hands quite like that.
The other guy to visit the houseboat was some sort of artist. He had a gentle face and kinky hair and went by the name of Andrew or Andrews; Ben couldn’t tell if it was a last name or a first name. He set up his pad of white drawing paper under a lamp on the small countertop bar that separated Daphne’s galley from the tiny sitting room that housed Ben’s fold-out couch. There were three tall stools at the counter where Ben usually sat while Daphne cooked.
The one called Boldt brought a videocassette with him that Daphne put into the machine and set up for Ben to view. Boldt explained, “You’ll see five men, all standing alongside one another-”
“I know what a lineup is,” Ben interrupted. He wanted these guys gone. He wanted Daphne to himself. He wanted that meeting with Emily she had promised. For the first time in a very long time he felt as if things weren’t as bad, as scary, as they had seemed, and he didn’t want to lose that feeling.
Boldt glanced over at Daphne, who asked Ben politely not to interrupt, saying that Boldt and this other guy had a job to do and it had to be done in a certain way, and even if all of them knew exactly what was supposed to happen, the sergeant still had to explain everything to Ben-which he then did, without interruption. Boldt thanked him at the end of the explanation, and it made Ben feel better about the whole thing. He wasn’t used to a guy thanking him for anything, only ordering him around.
They played the video for him then, and it looked just as it did on TV, with a line of five guys shoulder to shoulder standing in front of a white board that had lines for different heights drawn onto it. They kept their arms and hands behind their backs. There was a short guy with a beard, and next to him a taller blond guy with a tattoo showing at his chest, and then Nick, and then another tall guy with a messed-up ear, withered and small, and then a guy who looked pretty much like Nick but not really. They all turned right, then left. They spoke the same line, one right after another, so Ben could hear their voices. But he didn’t need to hear the guy’s voice.
“The guy in the middle,” Ben said. “The duffel bag had drugs in it.”
“You’re absolutely sure?” Boldt asked. “If this is the man at the airport, the one in the truck, that’s important to us. We need to confirm that. We don’t want to mix things up. But if not-”
“His name is Nick. He was a customer of Emily’s. He has his name on the back of his belt. He drives a light blue pickup with a white camper shell. There’s a Good Sam’s Club sticker on the back bumper, and there was a gun inside the camper shell: a pistol like the cops use on TV.”
“You saw the gun in the camper?” Boldt asked.
“I was
“Drugs?”
