No Time to Wave Goodbye: A Novel (Random House Reader's Circle) / Jacquelyn Mitchard

Book Description
New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard captured the heart of a nation with The Deep End of the Ocean, her celebrated debut novel about mother Beth Cappadora, a child kidnapped, a family in crisis. Now, in No Time to Wave Goodbye, the unforgettable Cappadoras are in peril once again, forced to confront an unimaginable evil.

It has been twenty-two years since Beth Cappadora’s three-year-old son Ben was abducted. By some miracle, he returned nine years later, and the family began to pick up the pieces of their lives. But their peace has always been fragile: Ben returned from the deep end as another child and has never felt entirely at ease with the family he was born into. Now the Cappadora children are grown: Ben is married with a baby girl, Kerry is studying to be an opera singer, and Vincent has emerged from his troubled adolescence as a fledgling filmmaker.

The subject of Vincent’s new documentary, “No Time to Wave Goodbye,” shakes Vincent’s unsuspecting family to the core; it focuses on five families caught in the tortuous web of never knowing the fate of their abducted children. Though Beth tries to stave off the torrent of buried emotions, she is left wondering if she and her family are fated to relive the past forever.

The film earns tremendous acclaim, but just as the Cappadoras are about to celebrate the culmination of Vincent’s artistic success, what Beth fears the most occurs, and the Cappadoras are cast back into the past, revisiting the worst moment of their lives—with only hours to find the truth that can save a life. High in a rugged California mountain range, their rescue becomes a desperate struggle for survival.

No Time to Wave Goodbye is Jacquelyn Mitchard at her best, a spellbinding novel about family loyalty, and love pushed to the limits of endurance.

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An Essay by Jacquelyn Mitchard

Motherhood—The Sequel

How I grieved when my three older sons—“gen one” of my seven children—began to achieve young manhood. Every inch they grew made me shrink a little inside. The older they got, the less they would need me. I’d lost the sweet confidences, heartfelt hugs and even unruly tears of the little boys I’d known as a first-time mom. And I thought I had lost my sons.

How wrong I was.

Sure, I still miss those first little boys (although my youngest children today are little boys, too, just three and five). I still miss my effortless size six jeans, too. I haven’t seen them since.

But the way I feel about my older sons took me completely by surprise—as does the way they feel about me.

Like my character Beth Cappadora in No Time To Wave Goodbye, I thought motherhood was time-limited, a vocation that required gear, mittens with zippers, and car seats and bags of Cheerios. When I put away childish things, I felt, just as Beth did, that I’d outlived my usefulness to growing guys. I was just a sweet-and-sour relic of their past and. While I was anything but “finished” with them, they were more than finished with me. But that turned out to be only adolescence.

As they grew older, I learned that they needed their mother differently, but equally urgently, as they did when they needed me to hold their spoons.

It’s against me that they practice the beliefs I tried to instill (the ones they now praise as genuinely as they previously rejected them). It’s with me that they offer a more quaint and tender courtship than they give their girlfriends—only the flowers on the bedside table are roses instead of dandelions.

I never imagined the bond I would feel when I heard Marty, 19, sing on a stage in front of 500 people—and saw him search the crowd for my face. I never anticipated the thrill of accompanying my 22-year-old chef-in-training to dinner and listening with quiet pride as he ordered for both of us. I marvel as my Rob, 25, (a fiercely indifferent high school student) now worries every college grade to an A—then turns to me for approval.

And so the “sequel” to my biggest bestselling novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, is more than a tale of a family tested beyond the limits of endurance, twice in a lifetime. It’s a story that reflects so much of what I’ve learned in 13 intervening years since the book was published. Love that changes isn’t love lost; just as mist and ice are only water in another form, equally lovely.

Beth Cappadora learns more than how tough she really is in her sons’ time of agony in No Time To Wave Goodbye. She learns that she’s still a mother and she still matters.

And so did I. —Jacquelyn Mitchard

(Photo © Liane R. Harrison)
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