The Abyss Read online

  Chapter 2

  Lindsey

  If you're going to understand anything about Lindsey Brigman, first you've got to know some things about her mother, Cathy Thomas. I guess that's true about practically everybody - I mean, either we spend our whole lives acting out all the things our parents said and did, or we spend our whole lives deliberately not acting like our folks. If there's one thing that matters about Lindsey Brigman, it's that she's not like her mother. Or so she thinks.

  The last time Catherine Mary di Angeli brought a friend to her parents' house was in second grade, in 1937. Pretty Debbie Benchley stood there in the kitchen door of the di Angeli home in Queens, gaping as Catherine Mary's five brothers and three sisters and parents and grandparents wandered in and out, quarreling and jabbering in Italian. Catherine Mary couldn't understand why her friend looked so frightened, her eyes wide open, pupils darting back and forth, jaw slack; then without a word Debbie Benchley turned and fled. Catherine Mary followed her halfway down the block, demanding to know what was wrong, but Debbie only walked faster, shaking her head.

  Catherine Mary walked home, sick with a sense of loss, of failure. How did I offend her? Why wasn't I worthy? Debbie Benchley was beautiful and blond and her father was a pharmacist, prosperous by the standard of those Depression years. She wore lovely clothes and smiled shyly and everyone admired her. Catherine Mary daydreamed of waking up one morning and looking in the mirror and seeing Debbie Benchley's face.

  When she got back to the house, she went straight to the kitchen door at the side of the house as usual. Only now she tried to imagine what Debbie must have thought of this. Debbie's family certainly entered their house through the front door, Debbie's family did not have five boys sleeping in the living room.

  Catherine Mary stood in the doorway, seeing the confusion through Debbie's eyes: so many people, all rushing here and there, hands chopping and waving in the air as they talked. The music of a dozen people speaking Italian, arguing, so forceful and passionate Catherine Mary let the sound come to her as it came to Debbie, without understanding, and now it was pushy, jabbering, demanding noise, not at all like the soft way Debbie spoke.

  And there was Catherine Mary's mother, tears streaming down her face from the onions she was cutting in the sink while she argued with Johnny - Giannino - about whether or not he could quit his job at the Jew grocery. Catherine Mary didn't know if Debbie Benchley had a brother, but if she did, he would certainly not be a stockboy at a grocery store, and he would never, never work for a Jew. Nor would Debbie's mother make flamboyant gestures with a knife in her hand, or roll her weeping eyes heavenward as she invoked the saints, or cross herself with an onion.

  Catherine Mary was ashamed. She had seen her family through horrified Protestant eyes, and because she identified so completely with Debbie Benchley, she could never again see them any other way.

  From that day on, Catherine Mary never spoke Italian, never brought another friend home, and never answered to any name but Cathy. As she grew older, she listened carefully to the radio and eliminated every trace of Italy and New York from her speech. She learned to walk with dignity. She moved her hands only rarely, and then in delicate, ladylike gestures. She studied the covers of fashion magazines and wore her hair as the prettiest models did. After high school she attended Columbia, taking only her music and drama classes seriously, devoting the rest of her time to selecting just the right husband. In 1950, at the age of eighteen, she shocked her family by marrying a twenty five-year-old Protestant.

  To Cathy he wasn't a Protestant. Frank Thomas was an American with a brand-new engineering degree, a job offer from Kodak with a five-figure salary, and a last name that didn't end with a vowel. He was also blond and bright-faced, without the heavy brooding eyebrows and dark-shadowed whiskers that Cathy's brothers and cousins had. In short, he was exactly the sort of husband that Debbie Benchley would have married, if she hadn't died of polio in sixth grade.

  Cathy proceeded to create precisely the home she imagined Debbie would have chosen. The living room was used only for company, and always looked like a picture in a magazine. Frank came home from work every day to find the table prettily set for dinner, his wife with a pert hairdo and a smile for him, and his daughters ready to greet him with a hug. Cathy was the perfect American wife.

  But Cathy was always pretending. She was an imposter, she had stolen Debbie Benchley's place. In her heart she was still Catherine Mary, and in her worst dreams she spoke only Italian. She knew that none of her friends would like her if they knew who she really was.

  It would be different for her five daughters. They would grow up knowing that they belonged among the best people, with never a doubt. They would have every opportunity, every grace.

  It began with their names. Frank wanted to name a daughter after one of his female relatives, but they all had horrid concocted names like LaDelle and DeEsta. Nor would Cathy dream of naming any of them for a saint. She made a bargain with Frank. She would name their daughters, and he could name their sons. They never had sons.

  Their daughters were Dana, Christa, Corey, Lindsey, and Gail.

  She had their hair done professionally from the age of three. They took ballet almost as soon as they could walk, and studied singing before they learned to read. When it came to musical instruments, they were not utterly without choices - they could opt for piano, flute, or violin. Brass and percussion instruments were too vulgar, clarinet and cello were obscene.

  Just before Christa's birth, Frank changed jobs, from Kodak to a company with an unpronounceable name that made photocopying machines. Cathy hardly noticed, except when his stock options and ever-rising salary allowed her to dress her daughters more exquisitely and take them three times a year to Manhattan, to attend operas, plays, and concerts and buy clothes that were a year ahead of any other girls in Rochester. She contributed heavily to the community theatre, and her daughters got the ingenue leads as each one came of age.

  Cathy's work on her daughters was almost completely successful. Dana married a Manhattan banker and traveled all over the world with him. Christa sang opera in Europe. Corey acted in regional theatre until she won a recurring role on TV, in a situation comedy that ran six years; each of her three husbands was exactly the sort of man who was in vogue the year she married him. And little Gail wrote obscene feminist poetry under her own name, which won her a great deal of literary prestige, and a dozen historical romances under the name Angelle de Brise, which earned her an astonishing amount of money.

  Four daughters out of five, living exactly the kind of life their mother dreamed of - surely any other woman would have been satisfied. But Cathy could not forgive herself for having failed with Lindsey.

  Where did Lindsey go wrong? Cathy never knew, but Lindsey did. Her transformation happened, coincidentally, when Lindsey was in second grade. It was a Saturday, and her father was up in the attic rummaging around for something. Lindsey stood at the bottom of the attic stair, listening to the noises from above. It occurred to her that she had no idea what her father did at work, or what he did for fun, or even, really, who he was. She could hear him humming, and she realized she had never heard her father sing. Every morning he left early for work, with a word or two if she was up; every night was a flurry of lessons and studies, all centered around Mother. She'd trot dutifully in to kiss him good night, but they never talked.

  She climbed the stairs into the attic. He must have heard her footsteps; the singing stopped. But when she got to the top, he didn't look at her. He had his back to her, he was gazing at something made of small pieces of wood, interlaced in a latticework so it seemed light and airy, even though it was about five feet long and a couple of feet high. It wasn't furniture, and it wasn't art - Lindsey had already been to enough homes and enough museums to know furniture and art when she saw them.

  It was a bridge. A model of a bridge.

  "My senior project," Father said. "In civil engineering."

  "Do you buil
d real bridges?"

  "I build optical assemblies and the structures that support them and the precision machines that move them."

  Lindsey didn't know what any of that meant. "Oh," she said.

  "Thanks for asking."

  If she had been older, she might have heard the pain in his voice, the loneliness, for he had long since realized that he was merely an unavoidable accessory in Cathy's home. There had to be a father, but no one knew what he was actually for, once the money was in the bank and the children were conceived. Lindsey could not know that he was in the attic this particular day brooding about his first infidelity the afternoon before; she could not know how emotionally raw he was, from guilt, from anger, from relief, from fear that it would happen again, from fear that it would not.

  Lindsey was seven years old, so she saw only what mattered to her. Despite the seeming frailty of the bridge, she understood intuitively that it was very strong. "How does it work?"

  He looked at her, saw that she was looking at the bridge, and began to explain about how the real bridge would be made of steel, and why steel was stronger than wood - but that wasn't what she wanted to know.

  "There's almost nothing there. It's so light. Like it's made of air."

  It shook him to have her say that. He had taken a great deal of pride in the fact that the bridge derived maximum strength from minimal materials. An untrained seven-year-old should not have noticed it. For a dizzying moment he felt as if there was a chance that one of his children might actually have inherited something from him. And yet, because it was an engineering question, by reflex he answered her as he answered the teams of engineers working under him. "Why do you think?"

  Lindsey pondered for a moment. "I guess if you made it too heavy, the bridge would use all its strength holding itself up."

  To her surprise, her father laughed out loud, with a delight that she had never heard from him in her entire life. He reached out and hugged her, which was very uncomfortable but also quite interesting, even good. This was a hug at an unscheduled moment, a nonperfunctory embrace. But she couldn't concentrate on her father, not for long. The bridge kept drawing her eye.

  "Can you teach me how to build stuff?"

  "Bridges?"

  "Build things." She hadn't built anything in her life, not since piling up alphabet blocks as a toddler, and she didn't remember that. But now, seeing this bridge and knowing that somebody built it, somebody she knew now she felt hungry to build something herself. She didn't even know what she wanted to make, but she knew she had to make something, now; she felt jittery and urgent and hurried.

  "How about if I bring home these new building blocks they're importing from Europe? Legos? I've wanted to play around with them myself, I could bring some home on Monday after work. Would you like that?"

  "Yes, thank you." But behind her excellent manners, she was thinking, That's two days from now, and what about today? It's today that I want.

  He studied her face. "But Monday's a long time from now, isn't it? How about we go to the toy-store right now?"

  "Yes, please." She immediately turned around and ran for the stairs.

  Frank Thomas got up and followed her, chuckling. Partly he laughed at himself because he knew that it wasn't him she was interested in, it was building. But partly he laughed in pleasure because he had just looked inside her and found a part of himself looking out. It was the part of himself that allowed him to live with a woman who didn't love him and children who didn't know him, because when he was working on a project none of that mattered, only the project, only solving the problems and making something that worked - economically, smoothly, beautifully. All else was bearable, as long as he had that. And somehow he had given that same gift to Lindsey.

  Or was it a curse? It was the gift of creation; it was the curse of monomania.

  They went out and bought a set of Legos. When they got home, Cathy was frantic. "How can we possibly get you to ballet if you go wandering off without telling me, Lindsey?" And to Frank: "Don't you know you can't just take the girls off any time you please?" And to Lindsey again: "Come out to the car at once, dear. I can get you there in time for the second half of your lesson, at least. Your leotard's in the back seat, you can change while we drive."

  "No thank you, Mother," said Lindsey. "Daddy and I are going to build with Legos."

  Cathy was furious. "That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard of, Lindsey! You'll never amount to anything if you shrug off your lessons like this! And your father knows better than to - "

  Frank put a finger on her lips, leaned in close, and whispered to her in a voice he thought Lindsey could not hear. "Shove it up your ass," he said. Then he smiled, took Lindsey's hand, and together they jogged down the stairs into the den. Several decisions were made in that moment. First, Cathy could have the other four girls, but Lindsey was his daughter, he would take charge of her education from now on. Second, Frank would continue his affair and not feel terribly guilty about it. Cathy had the use of eighty percent of his money and eighty percent of his children; still, there was plenty of room for happiness in the other twenty percent.

  Lindsey understood little of this. She only knew that from that day on, when her sisters had to go to lessons or plays or museums or deadly adult parties, all Lindsey had to do was start building something with Legos or her Erector set and she was exempt, even if Father wasn't home to intervene. Gradually she began to take charge of her whole life in a way that was simply unavailable to her sisters. In junior high she fell in love with swimming, and Father built her a pool. In high school she was so far ahead of the curriculum that Father got permission for her to attend half days at the University of Rochester, where she was taking upper-division math and engineering courses before she graduated from high school. She won the New York State Science Fair with a demand-regulated breathing apparatus for diving helmets. It was crude compared to things she later built, but she kept it and revered it the way her father had kept his model bridge. It was the foundation of all that came after.

  Lindsey was hardly aware that her mother hated her and her sisters laughed at her - usually behind her back. These people just weren't very important to her, with their music and plays and books and husbands and other irrelevancies. All that mattered was that she could build what had never been built before. Anything that could help her do that was important to her - like her father, whom she adored. Anything that couldn't help her was irrelevant. And anything that got in the way had to be sidestepped or knocked down or crushed.

  She ended up designing structures to withstand the pressures of the deep sea. She was the best at what she did. But like all engineers, she had come to believe that it wasn't worth designing something that would never be built. So she found a big-money application for her deep-sea designs - underwater oil drilling. Sure enough, she got the development money to start work on Deepcore. She also got something else.

  While she was working with the crew of a Gulf oil rig to learn the problems and processes of ocean drilling, she worked closely with a man named Bud Brigman. She found that when he was with her, everything went smoothly and everyone on her project got along with each other and with her. This had never happened to her before; she had usually worked with sullen, difficult people who hated her. She had always assumed this was a problem that every engineer had to deal with. Now she realized that Bud Brigman had a skill that she utterly lacked - the ability to handle people. She studied him, tried to learn what it was he did. What little she understood, she couldn't do. Yet she needed his ability to get Deepcore built and working. He was the first person since her father that she had actually needed. Lacking any other definition of the word, she thought that this was love. So she married him.

  Things went along all right at first. Sex was good, and that helped. They were both fascinated by the work on Deepcore, and that helped even more.

  They both laughed about the way that the oil-company people acted. It was Lindsey's project, she designed it, she was
going to build it, it was hers - but when the money guys came out to look at the prototype, they got as far from Lindsey as possible. She made them nervous. It wasn't that she was smarter than them - they usually worked with people who were smarter than them, and pretty much got along. It wasn't even the fact that she was speaking the language of undersea engineering. See, that sort of thing happens all the time - people who don't speak the same language, trying to understand each other. But there are ways around the problem. If both sides are men, they know how to talk the language of men, the vulgar, macho strutting and joking they all picked up when they were ten or twelve years old. If both sides are women, then they can talk the language of women, which they also learned along with all the other rituals of puberty. But when it's a woman on one side and a man on the other, then it gets tricky. Then they don't have any language in common.

  Even so, a lot of women manage to get around this, and so do a lot of men. Not Lindsey, though. Not because she didn't know how - hadn't she watched her mother manipulate men all her life? Hadn't she watched as her sisters learned the same skills? Hadn't she seen them work even on their father, who knew what they were doing? But Lindsey had rejected all that from the start. She had refused to do it with her father, and she refused to do it with any other man. When these men in suits came along, she spoke to them in the language of engineering - what Deepcore could do for undersea oil drilling, what deep-sea drilling could do for the oil companies. The more she talked, the more nervous the guys in suits became. An hour in a closed car with Lindsey made them more jittery than a gallon of coffee. She was beautiful, she was smart, she was terrifying.