Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  Still, he probably should have seen the affair coming. Maybe he did. And maybe it wasn’t the affair that truly bothered him, but the pregnancy that followed.

  Shit. He sat down on his kitchen floor, in the absence of his wife, and put the heels of his hands to his forehead, and tried for the umpteenth time in the last year to see the wreck of his marriage clearly. But all he saw were the shards and shattered pieces of it, strewn across the rooms of his mind.

  When the phone rang, he knew somehow—even before he lifted it off the kitchen counter and pressed “Talk”—that it was her.

  “This is Sean.”

  On the other end of the line, he could hear the subdued rumble of a tractor-trailer idling and the soft whoosh of cars speeding past on an expressway. He could instantly picture it—a highway rest stop, the gas station up top, a bank of phones between the Roy Rogers and the McDonald’s. Lauren standing there, listening.

  “Lauren,” he said. “I know it’s you.”

  Someone passed by the pay phone jingling his keys.

  “Lauren, just say something.”

  The tractor-trailer ground into first gear and the pitch of the engine changed as it rolled across the parking lot.

  “How is she?” Sean said. He almost said, “How is my daughter?” but, then, he didn’t know if she was his, only that she was Lauren’s. So, he said again, “How is she?”

  The truck shifted into second, the crush of its tires on gravel growing more distant as it headed for the mouth of the plaza and the road beyond.

  “This hurts too much,” Sean said. “Can’t you just talk to me?”

  He remembered what Whitey had said to Brendan Harris about love, how it doesn’t happen even once to most people, and he could see his wife standing there, watching the truck depart, the phone pressed to her ear but not her mouth. She was a slim woman and tall, with hair the color of cherry wood. When she laughed, she covered her mouth with her fingers. In college, they’d run across campus in a rainstorm, and she kissed him for the first time under the library archway where they’d found shelter, and something had loosened in Sean’s chest as her wet hand found the back of his neck, something that had been clenched and breathless since as long as he could remember. She told him that he had the most beautiful voice she’d ever heard, that it sounded like whiskey and wood smoke.

  Since she’d left, the usual ritual was that he’d talk until she decided to hang up. She had never spoken, not once in all of the phone calls he’d received since she’d left him, calls from road stops and motels and dusty phone booths along the shoulders of barren roadways from here to the Tex-Mex border and back somewhere in between again. Yet even though it was usually just the hiss of a silent line in his ear, he always knew when it was her. He could feel her through the phone. Sometimes he could smell her.

  The conversations—if you could call them that—could last as long as fifteen minutes depending on how much he said, but tonight Sean was exhausted in general and worn out from missing her, a woman who’d disappeared on him one morning when she was seven months pregnant, and fed up with his feelings for her being the only feelings he had left for anything.

  “I can’t do this tonight,” he said. “I’m fucking weary and I’m in pain and you don’t even care enough to let me hear your voice.”

  Standing in the kitchen, he gave her a hopeless thirty seconds to respond. He could hear the ding of a bell as someone pumped a tire with air.

  “Bye, baby,” he said, the words strangling on the phlegm in his throat, and then he hung up.

  He stood very still for a moment, hearing the echo of the dinging air pump mix with the ringing silence that descended on the kitchen and thumped through his heart.

  It would torture him, he was pretty sure. Maybe all night and into tomorrow. Maybe all week. He’d broken the ritual. He’d hung up on her. What if just as he’d been doing it, she had parted her lips to speak, to say his name?

  Jesus.

  The image of that got him walking toward the shower, if only so he could run away from it, from the thought of her standing by those pay phones, mouth opening, the words rising in her throat.

  Sean, she might have been about to say, I’m coming home.

  III

  ANGELS OF THE SILENCES

  15

  A PERFECT GUY

  MONDAY MORNING Celeste was in the kitchen with her cousin Annabeth as the house filled with mourners and Annabeth stood over the stovetop, cooking with a detached intensity, when Jimmy, fresh from the shower, stuck his head in to ask if he could help with anything.

  When they were kids, Celeste and Annabeth had been more like sisters than first cousins. Annabeth had been the only girl in a family of boys, and Celeste had been the only child of parents who couldn’t stand each other, so they’d spent a lot of time together, and in junior high had talked on the phone almost every night. That had changed, in almost imperceptible increments, over the years, as the estrangement between Celeste’s mother and Annabeth’s father had widened, moving from cordial to frosty to hostile. And somehow, without any single event to point to, that estrangement had wormed its way down from a brother and sister to their daughters, until Celeste and Annabeth saw each other on only the more formal occasions—weddings, after giving birth and at the subsequent christenings, occasionally on Christmas and Easter. It was the lack of a clear reason that got to Celeste most, and it stabbed her that a relationship that had once seemed unbreakable could slip apart so easily due to nothing more than time, family turmoil, and growth spurts.

  Things had been better since her mother had died, though. Just last summer, she and Dave had gotten together with Annabeth and Jimmy for a casual cookout, and over the winter they’d gone out for dinner and drinks twice. Each time the conversation had come a little easier, and Celeste had felt ten years of bewildered isolation fall away and find a name: Rosemary.

  Annabeth had been there for her when Rosemary died. She’d come to the house every morning and stayed until dark for three days. She’d baked and helped with the funeral arrangements and sat with Celeste while she’d wept for a mother who’d never shown much in the way of love, but had been her mother, nonetheless.

  And now Celeste was going to be here for Annabeth, though the thought of someone as fearsomely self-contained as Annabeth needing support was alien for most, Celeste included.

  But she stood by her cousin and let her cook and got her food from the fridge when she asked for it and fielded most of the phone calls.

  And now here was Jimmy, less than twenty-four hours after he’d discovered his daughter was dead, asking his wife if she needed anything. His hair was still wet and barely combed, and his shirt was damp against his chest. He was barefoot, and pockets of grief and lack of sleep hung below his eyes, and all Celeste could think was, Jesus, Jimmy, what about you? Do you ever think about you?

  All the other people who packed the house right now—filling the living room and the dining room, milling near the front of the hall, piling their coats on the beds in Nadine and Sara’s room—were looking to Jimmy, as if it wouldn’t occur to them to look out for him. As if he alone could explain this brutal joke to them, soothe the anguish in their brains, hold them up when the shock wore off and their bodies sagged under fresh waves of pain. The aura of command Jimmy possessed was of an effortless sort, and Celeste often wondered if he was aware of it, if he recognized it for the burden it must be, especially at a time like this.

  “What’s that?” Annabeth said, her eyes on the bacon crackling below her in a black pan.

  “You need anything?” Jimmy asked. “I can work the stove a bit, you want.”

  Annabeth gave the stovetop a quick, weak smile and shook her head. “No, I’m fine.”

  Jimmy looked at Celeste as if to say: Is she?

  Celeste nodded. “We’ve got things covered in here, Jim.”

  Jimmy looked back over at his wife, and Celeste could feel the tenderest of aches in the look. She could feel another teardr
op piece of Jimmy’s heart detach and free-fall down the inside of his chest. He leaned in and reached across the stove and wiped a bead of sweat from Annabeth’s cheekbone with his index finger, and Annabeth said, “Don’t.”

  “Look at me,” Jimmy whispered.

  Celeste felt like she should leave the kitchen, but she feared her moving would snap something between her cousin and Jimmy, something too fragile.

  “I can’t,” Annabeth said. “Jimmy? If I look at you, I’ll lose it, and I can’t lose it with all these people here. Please?”

  Jimmy leaned back from the stove. “Okay, honey. Okay.”

  Annabeth whispered, her head down, “I just don’t want to lose it again.”

  “I understand.”

  For a moment, Celeste felt as if they stood naked before her, as if she were witness to something between a man and his wife that was as intimate as if she were watching them make love.

  The door at the other end of the hall opened, and Annabeth’s father, Theo Savage, entered the house, came down the hall with a case of beer on each shoulder. He was a huge man, a florid, jowly Kodiak of a human being with an odd dancer’s grace as he squeezed down the narrow hall with the cases of beer on his boat-mast shoulders. Celeste was always a bit amazed to think that this mountain had sired so many stunted male offspring—Kevin and Chuck being the only sons who’d gotten some of his height and bulk, Annabeth the only child to inherit his physical grace.

  “Behind you, Jim,” Theo said, and Jimmy stepped out of the way as Theo spun delicately around him and moved into the kitchen. He brushed Celeste’s cheek with his lips and a soft “How ya doing, honey?” then placed both cases on the kitchen table and wrapped his arms around his daughter’s belly, pressed his chin to her shoulder.

  “You holding up, sweetie?”

  Annabeth said, “Trying, Dad.”

  He kissed the side of her neck—“My girl”—and then he turned to Jimmy. “You got some coolers, we can fill ’em up.”

  They filled the coolers on the floor by the pantry and Celeste went back to unwrapping all the food that had been brought over once friends and family had begun returning to the house early this morning. There was so much of it—Irish soda bread, pies, croissants, muffins, pastries, and three different plates of potato salad. Bags of rolls, platters of deli meat, Swedish meatballs in an oversize Crock-Pot, two cooked hams, and one massive turkey under crinkled tinfoil. There was no real reason for Annabeth to cook—they all knew that—but they all understood: she needed to. So she cooked bacon and sausage links and two heaping panfuls of scrambled eggs, and Celeste moved the food out to a table that had been pressed against the dining room wall. She wondered if all this food was an attempt to comfort the loved ones of the dead or if they somehow hoped to eat the grief, to gorge on it and wash it down with Cokes and alcohol, coffee and tea, until it filled and bloated everyone to the point of sleep. That’s what you did at sadness gatherings—at wakes, at funerals, at memorial services and occasions like this: you ate and you drank and you talked until you couldn’t eat or drink or talk anymore.

  She saw Dave through the crowd in the living room. He sat beside Kevin Savage on a couch, the two of them talking, but neither of them looking particularly animated or comfortable, both of them leaning so far forward on the couch it was almost like a race to see who’d fall off first. Celeste felt a twinge of pity for her husband—for the minor, but everlasting, air of the foreign that seemed to hover around him sometimes, particularly in this crowd. They all knew him, after all. They all knew what had happened to him when he was a boy, and even if they could live with it and not judge him (and they probably could), Dave couldn’t entirely, couldn’t ease completely into a comfort zone around people who’d known him his whole life. Whenever he and Celeste went out with small groups of co-workers or friends from outside the neighborhood, Dave would be as laid-back and confident as they come, quick with the droll aside or quirky observation, as easygoing a person as you’d ever meet. (Her friends and their husbands from Ozma’s Hair Design loved Dave.) But here, where he’d grown up and planted roots, he always looked like he was a half-sentence behind every conversation, a half-step out of beat with everyone else’s stride, the last one to get a joke.

  She tried to catch his eye and give him a smile, let him know that as long as she was in the apartment, he wasn’t entirely isolated. But a knot of people found their way to the open archway that separated the dining room from the living room, and Celeste lost sight of him.

  It was usually in a crowd when you most noticed how little you saw or spent quality time with the person you loved and lived with. She hadn’t seen much of Dave period this week, outside of their Saturday night on the kitchen floor after he’d almost been mugged. And she’d seen barely any of him since yesterday when Theo Savage had called at six o’clock to say, “Hey, honey, we got some bad news. Katie’s dead.”

  Celeste’s initial reaction: “She is not, Uncle Theo.”

  “Sweetie, I’m dying here just telling you. But she is. Little girl was found murdered.”

  “Murdered.”

  “In Pen Park.”

  Celeste had looked over at the TV on the counter, at the lead story on the six o’clock news where they were still covering it live, a helicopter shot of police personnel forming a crowd by one end of the drive-in screen, the reporters still in the dark as to the name of the victim, but confirming that a young woman’s body had been found.

  Not Katie. No, no, no.

  Celeste had told Theo she’d get over to Annabeth’s right away, and that’s where she’d been, except for a catnap back at her own place between three and six this morning, since the phone call.

  And yet she still couldn’t quite believe it. Even after all the crying she’d done with Annabeth and Nadine and Sara. Even after she’d held Annabeth on the living room floor as her cousin shook for five violent minutes of heaving spasms. Even after she’d found Jimmy standing in the dark of Katie’s bedroom, his daughter’s pillow held up to his face. He hadn’t been weeping or talking to himself or making any noise whatsoever. He merely stood with that pillow pressed to his face and breathed in the smell of his daughter’s hair and cheeks, over and over. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale…

  Even after all that, it still hadn’t sunk in entirely. Katie, she felt, would walk through that door any minute now, bounce into the kitchen and steal a piece of bacon from the plate on the stove. Katie couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t.

  Maybe if only because there was that thing, that illogical thing clenched in the farthest crevice of Celeste’s brain, that thing she’d felt upon seeing Katie’s car on the news and thinking—again, illogically—blood = Dave.

  And she felt Dave now on the other side of the crowd in the living room. She felt his isolation, and she knew that her husband was a good man. Flawed, but good. She loved him, and if she loved him he was good, and if he was good, then the blood on Katie’s car had nothing to do with the blood she’d cleaned off Dave’s clothes on Saturday night. And so Katie must still, somehow, be alive. Because all other alternatives were horrifying.

  And illogical. Completely illogical, Celeste felt certain as she headed back toward the kitchen for more food.

  She almost bumped into Jimmy and her uncle Theo as they lugged a cooler across the kitchen floor toward the dining room, Theo pivoting out of the way the last second and saying, “You gotta watch this one, Jimmy. She’s hell on wheels.”

  Celeste smiled demurely, the way Uncle Theo expected women to smile, and swallowed against the sensation she got whenever Uncle Theo looked at her—a sensation she’d been experiencing since she was twelve years old—that his glances lingered just a little too long.

  They manhandled the oversize cooler past her, and they looked like such an odd pair—Theo, ruddy and oversize in body and voice; Jimmy, quiet and fair and so stripped of body fat or any hint of excess, he always looked like he’d just come back from boot camp. They parted the crowd milling near the door
way as they pulled the cooler over by the table against the dining room wall, and Celeste noticed that the entire room turned to watch them place it under the table, as if the burden between them suddenly wasn’t an oversize cooler of hard red plastic but the daughter Jimmy would bury this week, the daughter who had brought them all here to mingle and eat and see if they had the courage to say her name.

  To watch them stock the coolers side by side and then work their way together through the crowds in the living room and dining room—Jimmy understandably subdued but pausing to thank each guest he met with an almost genteel warmth and double-palm handshake and Theo his usual blustery, force-of-nature self—several folks commented on how close they seemed to have become over the years, the way they moved through that room almost like a true father-and-son tandem.

  You never would have thought it possible when Jimmy had first married Annabeth. Theo wasn’t known for his friends back then. He was a boozer and a brawler, a man who’d supplemented his income as a taxi dispatcher by working nights as a bouncer at various buckets of blood and really liking the work. He was gregarious and quick to laugh, but there was always challenge in his jolly handshakes, threat in his chuckles.

  Jimmy, on the other hand, had been quiet and serious since coming back from Deer Island. He was friendly, but in a reserved way, and at gatherings he tended to hang back in the shadows. He was the kind of guy, when he said something, you listened. It was just that he spoke so rarely, you were almost on edge wondering when, or if, anything would come out of his mouth.

  Theo was enjoyable, if not particularly likable. Jimmy was likable, though not particularly enjoyable. The last thing anyone would have expected would be for these two to become friends. But here they were, Theo watching Jimmy’s back like he might have to reach out at any moment and put his hand against it, keep Jimmy from hitting the back of his head against the floor, Jimmy occasionally pausing to say something into Theo’s oversize prime rib of an ear before they moved on through the crowd. Best of pals, people said. That’s what they look like, best of pals.