Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  “Right…” He turned on the shower, looking at her, waiting, that gash along his side darkening, making her worry about AIDS again, or possibly hepatitis, the many ways another’s blood can kill or poison.

  “I know when they come. Seven-fifteen, on the dot, every week, except the first week in June when all the college kids take off, leave all that extra trash and then they’re usually late, but…”

  “Celeste. Honey. The point?”

  “Oh, so when I hear the truck, I’ll just run downstairs after them, like I forgot a bag, and toss it right in the back of the compactor thing. Right?” She smiled, though she didn’t feel like it.

  He put one hand under the shower spray, the rest of him still turned back toward her. “Okay. Look…”

  “What?”

  “You all right with this?”

  “Yeah.”

  Hepatitis A, B, and C, she thought. Ebola. Hot zones.

  His eyes went wide again. “I might have killed someone, honey. Jesus.”

  She wanted to go to him and touch him. She wanted to get out of the room. She wanted to caress his neck, tell him it would be okay. She wanted to run away until she could think this through.

  She stayed where she was. “I’ll wash the clothes.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Yeah.”

  She found some plastic gloves under the sink, ones she used when cleaning the toilet, and she put them on and checked for any tears in the rubber. When she was satisfied there were none, she took his shirt from the sink and his jeans off the floor. The jeans were dark with blood, too, and left a smear on the white tile.

  “How’d you get it on your jeans?”

  “What?”

  “The blood.”

  He looked at them hanging from her hand. He looked at the floor. “I was kneeling over him.” He shrugged. “I dunno. I guess it splashed up, like on the shirt.”

  “Oh.”

  He met her eyes. “Yeah. Oh.”

  “So,” she said.

  “So.”

  “So, I’ll wash these in the kitchen sink.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” she said, and backed out of the bathroom, left him standing there, one hand fluttering under the water, waiting for it to get hot.

  In the kitchen, she dumped the clothes in the sink and ran the water, watched the blood and filmy chips of flesh and, oh Christ, pieces of brain, she was pretty sure, wash down the drain. It amazed her how much the human body could bleed. They said you had six pints in you, but to Celeste it always seemed like so much more. When she was in the fourth grade, she’d been running through a park with friends and she’d tripped. As she was trying to break her fall, she drove the center of her palm through a broken bottle that was pointing straight up out of the grass. She’d severed every major artery and vein in her hand, and it was only because she was so young that over the next decade they gradually repaired. But, still, she was twenty before sensation returned to all four fingertips. What she remembered most, however, was the blood. When she’d raised her hand from the grass, her elbow tingling as if she’d hit her funny bone, the blood had jetted straight up and out from her torn palm, and two of her friends had screamed. At home, she’d filled a sink with it while her mother called an ambulance. In the ambulance, they’d wrapped the hand in an Ace bandage as thick as her thigh, and the layers of fabric turned dark red in less than two minutes. At the hospital, she’d lain on a white gurney and watched as the wrinkles in the sheet formed small canyons that filled with red. And when the gurney had filled, her blood dripped onto the floor and eventually formed puddles until her mother screamed long enough and loud enough that one of the City ER residents decided Celeste should be bumped to the head of the line. All that blood from one hand.

  And now, all this blood from one head. From Dave punching another human being’s face, banging the skull off pavement. Hysterical, she was sure, from fear. She held her gloved hands under the water and checked them again for holes. None. She poured dishwashing liquid all over the T-shirt and scoured it with steel wool, then squeezed it out and went through the whole process again until the water that dripped from the shirt when she squeezed was no longer pink but clear. She did the same with the jeans, and by that time Dave was out of the shower and sitting at the kitchen table with a towel wrapped around his waist, smoking one of the long white cigarettes her mother had left behind in the cupboard and drinking a beer, watching her.

  “Fucked up,” he said softly.

  She nodded.

  “I mean, you know?” he whispered. “You go out, expecting one thing, a Saturday night, nice weather, and then…” He stood and came over by her, leaned against the oven, and watched her wring out the left leg of his jeans. “Why aren’t you using the washing machine in the pantry?”

  She looked over at him and noticed the cut along his side already going a puckered white after the shower. She felt a nervous need to giggle. She swallowed against it and said, “Evidence, sweetie.”

  “Evidence?”

  “Well, I dunno for sure, but I figure blood and…other stuff have a better chance of sticking to the insides of a washing machine than to a sink drain.”

  He let out a low whistle. “Evidence.”

  “Evidence,” she said, giving in to a grin now, feeling conspiratorial, dangerous, part of something big and worthwhile.

  “Damn, babe,” he said. “You’re a genius.”

  She finished wringing out the jeans and shut off the water, took a small bow.

  Four in the morning, and she was more awake than she’d been in years. She was Christmas-morning-when-you’re-eight kind of awake. Her blood was caffeine.

  Your whole life, you wished for something like this. You told yourself you didn’t, but you did. To be involved in a drama. And not the drama of unpaid bills and minor, shrieking marital squabbles. No. This was real life, but bigger than real life. This was hyper-real. Her husband may have killed a bad man. And if that bad man really was dead, the police would want to find out who did it. And if the trail actually led here, to Dave, they’d need evidence.

  She could see them sitting at the kitchen table, notebooks open, smelling of coffee and the previous night’s taverns, asking her and Dave questions. They’d be polite, but scary. And she and Dave would be polite back and unruffled.

  Because it all came down to evidence. And she’d just washed the evidence down the kitchen sink drain and out into the dark sewers. In the morning, she’d remove the drainpipe from under the sink and wash that, too, douse the insides with bleach and put it back in place. She’d put the shirt and jeans into a plastic trash bag and hide it until Tuesday morning and then toss it into the back of the garbage truck where it would be mashed and chewed and compacted with rotten eggs and spoiled chickens and stale bread. She’d do this and feel large, better, than herself.

  “It makes you feel alone,” Dave said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Hurting someone,” he said softly.

  “But you had to.”

  He nodded. His flesh was gray in the semidark of the kitchen. He looked younger still, as if fresh from his mother’s belly and gasping. “I know. I do. But still, it makes you feel alone. It makes you feel…”

  She touched his face and his Adam’s apple bulged as he swallowed.

  “Alien,” he said.

  5

  ORANGE CURTAINS

  SUNDAY MORNING AT SIX, four and a half hours before his daughter Nadine’s First Communion, Jimmy Marcus got a call from Pete Gilibiowski down at the store telling him he was already in the weeds.

  “The weeds?” Jimmy sat up in bed, looked over at the clock. “Friggin’ Pete, it’s six in the morning. You and Katie can’t handle six, how you going to handle eight when the first church crowd comes in?”

  “That’s the thing, though, Jim. Katie ain’t here.”

  “She ain’t what?” Jimmy threw back the covers and got out of bed.

  “She ain’t here. Supposed to be at five-thi
rty, right? I got the doughnut guy honking his horn out back, and I got no coffee ready on account of—”

  Jimmy said, “Uh-huh,” and walked down the hallway toward Katie’s room, feeling the cold drafts in the house on his feet, the early May mornings still carrying the raw bite of March afternoons.

  “—a group of bar-hopping, drinking-in-the-park, methamphetamine-in-their-squashes construction workers come in here at five-forty and cleaned us out of Colombian and French roast. And the deli looks like shit. How much you paying those kids to work Saturday nights, Jim?”

  Jimmy said, “Uh-huh,” again and pushed open Katie’s door after a quick knock. Her bed was empty and, worse, made, which meant she hadn’t slept here last night.

  “’Cause you either got to give ’em raises or shitcan their worthless asses,” Pete said. “I got an extra hour of prep work before I can even—How ya doing, Mrs. Carmody? Coffee’s brewing now, hon, won’t be a sec.”

  “I’m coming in,” Jimmy said.

  “Plus, I got all the Sunday papers still bundled up, circulars on top, look like crap—”

  “I said I’m coming in.”

  “Oh. No shit, Jim? Thanks.”

  “Pete? Call Sal, see if he can make it in by eight-thirty, ’stead of ten.”

  “Yeah?”

  Jimmy heard the sound of a hand standing on a car horn from Pete’s end. “And Pete, Christ’s sake, open the door for Yser’s kid, will you? He ain’t going to wait all day with those doughnuts.”

  Jimmy hung up and walked back to the bedroom. Annabeth was sitting up in bed, sheets off her body, yawning.

  “The store?” she said, drawing the words out with another long yawn.

  He nodded. “Katie no-showed.”

  “Today,” Annabeth said. “Day of Nadine’s First Communion, she no-shows for work. What if she no-shows at the church?”

  “I’m sure she’ll make it.”

  “I don’t know, Jimmy. If she got so drunk last night, she blew off the store, you never know…”

  Jimmy shrugged. There was no talking to Annabeth when it came to Katie. Annabeth had only two modes in terms of her stepdaughter—either irritated and frosty or elated that they were best friends. There was no in-between, and Jimmy knew—with some small amount of guilt—that most of the confusion stemmed from Annabeth coming into the picture when Katie was seven, just getting to know her father, and barely over the loss of her mother. Katie had been openly and honestly grateful for a female presence in the lonely apartment she’d shared with her father. But she’d also been wounded by her mother’s death—if not irreparably, then at least profoundly, Jimmy knew—and anytime that loss would sneak up and slice through the walls of her heart over the years, she’d vent it mostly on Annabeth, who, as a real mother, never quite lived up to all the things Marita’s ghost could have or would have been.

  “Christ, Jimmy,” Annabeth said as Jimmy pulled a sweatshirt over the T-shirt he’d slept in and went looking for his jeans, “you’re not going in, are you?”

  “Just for an hour.” Jimmy found his jeans curled around the bedpost. “Two, tops. Sal was supposed to relieve Katie at ten anyway. Pete’s putting a call in to him now, trying to get him in early.”

  “Sal’s seventy-something years old.”

  “My point. He’s going to be sleeping? Bladder probably woke him up at four, he’s been watching AMC ever since.”

  “Shit.” Annabeth pushed the sheets completely away from her and got out of bed. “Fucking Katie. She’s going to screw this day up, too?”

  Jimmy felt his neck get hot. “What other day has she screwed up lately?”

  Annabeth showed him the back of her hand as she reached the bathroom. “You even know where she could be?”

  “Diane or Eve’s,” Jimmy said, still back at that dismissive hand she’d raised over her shoulder. Annabeth—the love of his life, no question—man, she had no idea how cold she could be sometimes, no clue (and this was typical of the whole Savage family) just how corrosive an effect her negative moments or moods could have on other people. “Maybe a boyfriend’s.”

  “Yeah? Who’s she seeing these days?” Annabeth turned on the shower, stepped back to the sink to give it time to warm up.

  “I figured you knew better than me.”

  Annabeth riffled the medicine cabinet for the toothpaste and shook her head. “She stopped seeing Little Caesar in November. That was good enough for me.”

  Jimmy, putting his shoes on, smiled. Annabeth always called Bobby O’Donnell “Little Caesar” unless she was calling him something far worse, and not just because he was a gangster-wannabe with a cold stare, but because he was short and fleshy like Edward G. Robinson. Those had been a tense several months, when Katie had begun seeing him last summer and the Savage brothers told Jimmy they’d clip the prick if it became necessary, Jimmy not sure if they were morally repulsed because such a scumbag was seeing their beloved stepniece, or because Bobby O’Donnell had become too much competition.

  Katie had broken it off herself, though, and outside of a lot of 3 A.M. phone calls and one near-bloodfest around Christmas when Bobby and Roman Fallow showed up on the front porch, the breakup aftermath had passed pretty painlessly.

  Annabeth’s abhorrence of Bobby O’Donnell could amuse Jimmy because he half wondered sometimes if Annabeth hated Bobby not only because he looked like Edward G. and had slept with her stepdaughter, but also because he was a half-assed criminal as opposed to the pros she assumed her brothers were and knew, beyond a doubt, that her husband had been in the years before Marita died.

  Marita had died fourteen years ago, while Jimmy served a two-year bid at the Deer Island House of Corrections in Winthrop. One Saturday during visitation hours, as five-year-old Katie squirmed in her lap, Marita told Jimmy a mole on her arm had been darkening lately, and she was going to visit a doctor at the community clinic. Just to be safe, she said. Four Saturdays later she was undergoing chemo. Six months after she’d told him about the mole, she was dead, Jimmy having been forced to watch his wife’s body puree into chalk over a succession of Saturdays from the other side of a dark wood table scarred by cigarettes, sweat, come stains, and over a century’s worth of convict bullshit and convict laments. The last month of her life Marita had been too sick to come, too weak to write, and Jimmy had to make do with phone calls during which she’d be exhausted or doped up or both. Usually both.

  “You know what I dream about?” she slurred once. “All the time now?”

  “What’s that, baby?”

  “Orange curtains. Big, thick orange curtains just…” She smacked her lips and Jimmy heard the sound of her gulping water. “…just flapping in the wind, hanging from these tall clotheslines, Jimmy. Just flapping. They never do anything else. Flap, flap, flap. Hundreds of ’em in this big, big field. Flapping away…”

  He waited for more, but that was the extent of it, and he didn’t want Marita to nod off in the middle of the conversation like she’d done several times before, so he said, “How’s Katie?”

  “Huh?”

  “How’s Katie doing, honey?”

  “Your mom takes good care of us. She’s sad.”

  “Who? My mom or Katie?”

  “Both. Lookit, Jimmy? I gotta go. Nauseous. Tired.”

  “Okay, baby.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  “Jimmy? We never owned any orange curtains. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Weird,” she said, and then she hung up.

  Last thing she ever said to him: Weird.

  Yeah, it was weird. A mole that had been on your arm since you’d lain in a crib looking up at a cardboard mobile suddenly darkened, and twenty-four weeks later, almost two full years removed from the last time you’d lain in bed with your husband and curled your leg over his, you were dropped into a box and buried beneath the earth, your husband standing fifty yards away, flanked by armed guards, shackles clamped around his ankles and wrists.


  Jimmy got out of prison two months after the funeral, stood in his kitchen in the same clothes he’d left it in, and smiled at his alien child. He might have remembered her first four years, but she didn’t. She only remembered the last two, maybe some scattered fragments of the man he’d been in this house, before she was allowed to see him only on Saturdays from the other side of an old table in a dank, smelly place built on haunted Indian burial grounds, where winds whipped and walls dripped and the ceilings hung too low. Standing in his kitchen, watching her watch him, Jimmy had never felt more useless. He had never felt half as alone or frightened as when he squatted down by Katie and took her small hands in his and saw the two of them in his mind’s eye as if he floated just above the room. And the floating him thought: Man, I feel bad for these two. Strangers in a shitty kitchen, sizing each other up, trying not to hate each other because she’d died and left them stuck together and incapable of knowing what the hell they were going to do next.

  This daughter—this creature, living and breathing and partially formed in so many ways—was dependent on him now, whether either of them liked it or not.

  “She’s smiling down at us from heaven,” Jimmy told Katie. “She’s proud of us. Real proud.”

  Katie said, “Do you have to go back to that place again?”

  “Nope. Never again.”

  “You going to go someplace else?”

  Jimmy, at that moment, would gladly have done another six years in a shithole like Deer Island, or even someplace worse, rather than face twenty-four hours in his kitchen with this daughter-stranger, this scary unknown of a future, this cork—in no uncertain terms—on what remained of his life as a young man.

  “No way,” he said. “I’m sticking with you.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  And it hit Jimmy all the way—Oh, my God, I have to feed this girl whenever she’s hungry. For the rest of our lives. Jesus Christ.

  “Well, okay,” he said, feeling the smile shake on his face. “We’ll eat.”

  JIMMY GOT TO Cottage Market, the corner store he owned, by six-thirty and worked the cash register and the Lotto machine while Pete stocked the coffee counter with the doughnuts from Yser Gaswami’s Dunkin’ Donuts on Kilmer and the pastries, cannolis, and pigs-in-a-blanket delivered from Tony Buca’s bakery. During lulls, Jimmy ran coffee from the brewing machines in back out to the oversize thermoses on the coffee counter and cut the twine on the Sunday Globes, Heralds, and New York Timeses. He placed the circulars and comics in the middle, then stacked them all neatly in front of the candy shelves below the cash counter.