No Time to Wave Goodbye (2 page)

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 documentary, 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 coxed quad, to watch her prodigious appetite 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 assumed 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 participated 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 passing 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 institutions? 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 godmother, 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 God. 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 lustrous 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 advertisement 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 asserted 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 café in San Francisco as his return address? How many guys are named Jordan? If that’s even his name? How many Internet cafés?” 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 class, 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.

B
eth 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.