Free The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page B

distribution to the media. It was getting late now, and she didn’t want to miss morning paper deadlines.
    Did Beth have a picture? She had dozens—she’d brought a score of them for purposes of bragging, for the reunion.
    But she had no idea, she told Captain Bliss, where her purse was.
    Pat found it under the luggage trolley. It was wet, the contents half-scattered. He held out a picture of Ben in his baseball shirt, grinning with his Velcroed catch mitt held close to one cheek.
    Beth would wonder later, What had she been imagining? Had she believed, as very small children do, that because Ben was out of her vicinity, was invisible to her, he had in fact been suspended in a pocket of the universe? That he sat on a bubble, safe but estranged, waiting for his mother to notice him again, so he could resume being real? Had Beth believed that because she, his own mother, could not see him, Ben had stopped existing as a complete being who could feel terror and bewilderment?
    Ben was a real child in the urban night.
    “Ben!” Beth screamed. And again, as the fragile crust of her muddled restraint cracked and then broke entirely, “Ben! Ben! Ben! Ben!” It got easier. “Ben!” Beth screamed. “Ben!” When Pat put his hand over her arm to try to ease her down, she leaned over and seized it in her teeth, biting hard, drawing blood. The room took on the aspect of a hospital emergency room, a sudden bustle. Pat and Jimmy tried to strong-arm Beth; but she tossed them off as they scrabbled to grab different parts of her. She was an eel, a thing coated with resistant gel. The manager ran for the purple security guards, who watched in pity as Beth thrashed, blocking her path to the door every time she got to her feet. She was strong, famously strong. She noticed everything: Pat’s bleeding hand; the fearful, furtive glances; the looking away of the departing couples who had to pass through the lobby. She saw Nick with his shiny charcoal-brown head of curls in his hands; she thought he might be crying. His back was heaving up and down. Beth stopped stock-still for a deep breath, and then she screamed again, “Ben! Ben! Ben!”
    Candy Bliss told the manager tersely, “Call a doctor.”
    “I don’t know a doctor,” said the formal, chubby manager.
    “Well, don’t you have an emergency physician on call to the hotel?”
    “We’ve never had…What does she want?”
    “You simple—” said Candy Bliss, letting out stored breath in a huff. “Shit. Call 911.”
    Beth was wearying; her arm muscles burned. But she only had to look at the bright banquet of children’s photos—primary-colored, gleaming—on the coffee table and she would feel the scream percolate up again, as impossible to resist or contain as an orgasm. “Ben! Ben! Ben!”
    The manager brought Candy Bliss a portable phone. “The mother is having trouble…. Yes, exhausted…. Yes, you can hear her…. Well, no, not a transport…. Send someone out.”
    “Christ God, Beth, please stop!” her father told her firmly.
    “Ben!” she screamed at his heavy, veined face. He looked like a hound, sad-eyed and pouching. A bluff, once-handsome man, features blurred by years of gin gimlets. “Beeeeennnnn!” Tears formed in Bill’s eyes. Pat was repelled—shivering, he backed away from the couch where Beth struggled.
    Beth looked at the clock. It was blurred. Could it be eleven? She screamed, “Beeeennnn!”
    A paramedic, very cute, slipped a blood-pressure cuff around Beth’s arm. And the doctor who arrived, minutes later, in a jogging suit, squirted golden liquid out of a syringe; the drops flicked down. “We need to get you some rest, here,” he told her, swabbing parts of her arms and hands with alcohol, whatever patches of skin he could reach as she flailed. “Listen,” he said to the room at large, “we need—”
    Nick charged across the room then and half-lay on top of Beth; he smelled wonderful, spicy. His chest was harder than Pat’s, bigger. He