Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  Which one you want to go to tonight, honey?

  You pick.

  No, you pick.

  No, come on, you pick.

  Okay. How about that one?

  Looks good.

  That one it is, then.

  I love you, Brendan.

  I love you, too, Katie.

  And they would have walked up the carpeted stairs between the white columns and into the clamor of the smoky, clanging palace. They would have done this as man and wife, starting their lives together, still kids really, and East Buckingham would have been a million miles behind them and receding a million more with every step they took.

  That’s what it would have been like.

  Brendan sat down on the floor. He just needed to sit for a second. Just a second or two. He sat and pulled the soles of his high-tops together and gripped his ankles like a little boy. He rocked a bit, dropping his chin to his chest and closing his eyes, and he felt the pain soften for an instant. He felt a calm in the dark and in his rocking.

  And then it passed, and the horror of Katie’s removal from the earth—the total lack of her—swam back through his blood and he felt pulverized by it.

  There was a gun in the house. It had belonged to his father, and his mother had left it behind the removable ceiling slat above the butler’s pantry where his father had always kept it. You could sit on the counter of the butler’s pantry and reach under the lip of the curved wooden cornice, and touch the three slats there until you felt the weight of the gun. Then all you had to do was push up, reach in, and curl your fingers around it. It had been there since Brendan could remember, and one of his first memories was of stumbling out of the bathroom late one night and watching as his father withdrew his hand from underneath the cornice. Brendan had even taken the gun out and shown it to his friend Jerry Diventa when they were thirteen, Jerry looking at it with wide eyes and saying, “Put it back, put it back.” It was covered in dust and quite possibly had never been fired, but Brendan knew it was just a matter of cleaning it.

  He could take the gun out tonight. He could walk down to Café Society, where Roman Fallow hung out, or over to Atlantic Auto Glass, which Bobby O’Donnell owned and where, according to Katie, he conducted most of his business from the back office. He could go to either of those places—or better yet, both—and point his father’s gun in each of their faces and pull the fucking trigger, over and over and over, until it clicked on an empty chamber and Roman and Bobby never killed another woman again.

  He could do that. Couldn’t he? They did it in the movies. Bruce Willis, man, if someone killed the woman he loved, he wouldn’t be sitting on the floor, holding his ankles, rocking like a Sped case. He’d be loading up. Right?

  Brendan pictured Bobby’s fleshy face in his sights, the man begging. No, please, Brendan! No, please!

  And Brendan saying something cool like, “Please this, motherfucker. Please this all the way to hell.”

  He started crying then, still rocking, still holding his ankles, because he knew that he wasn’t Bruce Willis, and Bobby O’Donnell was a real person, not something out of a movie, and the gun would need cleaning, serious cleaning, and he didn’t even know if it had bullets because he wasn’t even sure how to open the thing, and when you got right down to it, wouldn’t his hand shake? Wouldn’t it shake and jump the way his fist used to when he was a kid and knew there was no way out, he was going to get into a fight? Life wasn’t a fucking movie, man, it was…fucking life. It didn’t play out like it did where the good guy had to win in two hours so you knew he would win. Brendan didn’t know much about himself in the hero sense; he was nineteen and he’d never been challenged in that way. But he wasn’t sure he could walk into a guy’s place of business—that is if the doors weren’t locked and there weren’t all these other guys hanging around—and shoot the guy in the face. He just wasn’t sure.

  But he missed her. He missed her so badly, and the pain of her not being around—and not ever going to be around again—made his teeth ache until he felt he had to do something, anything, if only so he’d stop feeling like this for one fucking second of this newly miserable life.

  Okay, he decided. Okay. I’ll clean the gun tomorrow. I’ll just clean it and make sure it has bullets. I’ll do that much. I’ll clean the gun.

  Ray came into the room then, still wearing his Rollerblades, using his new hockey stick as a walking staff as he seesawed on wobbly ankles over to his bed. Brendan stood up quick, wiped the tears from his cheeks.

  Ray took off his Rollerblades, watching his brother, and then he signed, “You okay?”

  Brendan said, “No.”

  Ray signed, “Anything I can do?”

  Brendan said, “It’s all right, Ray. No, you can’t. But don’t worry about it.”

  “Ma says you are better off.”

  Brendan said, “What?”

  Ray repeated it.

  “Yeah?” Brendan said. “How’s she figure?”

  Ray’s hands went flying. “If you left, Ma would have bummed.”

  “She’d have gotten over it.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Brendan looked at his brother sitting on the bed, staring up into his face.

  “Don’t piss me off now, Ray. Okay?” He leaned in close, thinking about that gun. “I loved her.”

  Ray gazed back, his face as empty as a rubber mask.

  “You know what that’s like, Ray?”

  Ray shook his head.

  “It’s like knowing all the answers on a test the minute you sit down at your desk. It’s like knowing everything’s going to be okay for the rest of your life. You’re going to ace. You’re going to be fine. You’ll walk around forever, feeling relieved, because you won.” He turned away from his brother. “That’s what it’s like.”

  Ray tapped the bedpost so he’d look at him, and then he signed, “You will feel it again.”

  Brendan dropped to his knees and shoved his face into Ray’s. “No, I won’t. Fucking get that? No.”

  Ray pulled his feet up onto the bed and backed up, and Brendan felt ashamed, but still angry, because that was the thing about those who were mute—they could make you feel stupid for talking. Everything Ray said came out succinctly, just as he’d intended. He didn’t know what it was like to fumble for words or trip over them because his speech was going faster than his brain.

  Brendan wanted to spill, he wanted the words to come out of his mouth in a gush of passionate, fucked-up, not entirely sensible, but completely honest testament to Katie and what she’d meant to him and how it had felt to press his nose against her neck in this bed and hook one of his fingers around one of hers and wipe ice cream off her chin and sit beside her in a car and watch her eyes dart as she came to intersections and hear her talk and sleep and snore and…

  He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn’t just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you’d fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had.

  Ray, though, no way he could grasp that. Words for Ray were flicks of the fingers, deft droppings and raisings and sweepings of the hand. Words were not wasted with Ray. Communication was not relative to him. You said exactly what you meant, and then you were done with it. To unload his grief and over-emote in front of his blank-faced brother would have merely shamed Brendan. It wouldn’t have helped.

  He looked down at his scared little brother, backed up on the bed and staring at him with bug eyes, and he held out his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and heard his voice crack. “I’m sorry, Ray. Okay? I didn’t mean to blast you.”

  Ray took the hand and stood.

  “So, it’s okay?” he signed, his eyes on Brendan as if he was ready to dive out the window at the next outburst.

  “It’s okay,” Brendan signed back. “I guess it’s all r
ight.”

  20

  WHEN SHE COMES HOME

  SEAN’S PARENTS LIVED in Wingate Estates, a gated community of two-bedroom stucco town houses thirty miles south of the city. Every twenty units formed a section, and each section had its own pool and a recreational center where they held dances on Saturday nights. A small, par-three golf course stretched around the outer edge of the complex like a fallen slice of crescent moon, and from late spring until early autumn the air hummed with the buzz of cart engines.

  Sean’s father didn’t play golf. He’d long ago decided it was a rich man’s game and to take it up would represent some form of betrayal to his blue-collar roots. Sean’s mother had tried it for a while, though, and then gave it up because she’d believed her companions secretly laughed at her form, her slight brogue, and her clothing.

  So they lived here quietly and, for the most part, friendless, though Sean knew his father had struck up an acquaintanceship with a small Irish plug of a guy named Riley who’d also lived in one of the city’s neighborhoods before coming to Wingate. Riley, who had no use for golf either, would occasionally join Sean’s father for drinks at the Ground Round on the other side of Route 28. And Sean’s mother, a natural, if reflexive, caretaker, often tended to older neighbors with infirmities. She’d drive them to the drugstore to fill prescriptions or to the doctor’s so new prescriptions could take up residence in the medicine cabinet beside the older ones. His mother, pushing seventy, felt young and vibrant on these drives, and given that most of the people she helped were widowed, she felt, too, that her and her husband’s continued health was a blessing donated from above.

  “They’re alone,” she’d said to Sean once regarding her sickly friends, “and even if the doctors won’t tell them, that’s what they’re dying from.”

  Often when he pulled past the guard kiosk and drove up the main road, striped every ten yards with yellow speed bumps that rattled his axles, Sean could almost see the ghost streets and ghost neighborhoods and ghost lives the Wingate residents had left behind, as if cold-water flats and dull white iceboxes, wrought-iron fire escapes and shrieking children floated through the present landscape of eggshell stucco and spiky lawns like a morning mist just beyond the limits of his peripheral vision. An irrational guilt would settle in him, the guilt of a son who’d packed his parents away in a retirement home. Irrational, because Wingate Estates wasn’t technically a community for people over sixty (though Sean had frankly never seen a resident under that age), and his parents had moved here completely of their own volition, packing up their decades-long complaints about the city and its noise and crime and traffic jams to come here, where, as his father put it, “You can walk at night without looking over your shoulder.”

  Still, Sean felt as if he’d failed them, as if they’d expected he would have tried harder to keep them near. Sean saw this place and he saw death, or at least a depot en route, and it wasn’t just that he hated to think of his parents here—biding their time until the day someone needed to drive them to the doctors—he hated to think of himself here or someplace like it. Yet he knew there was little chance he’d end up anyplace else. And, as it stood now, without kids or a wife to care. He was thirty-six, a little more than halfway toward a Wingate duplex already, with the second half likely to pass at a far more furious clip than the first had.

  His mother blew out the candles on her cake at the small dinette table that perched in the alcove between the tiny kitchen and the more spacious living room, and they ate quietly, then sipped their tea to the click of the clock on the wall above them and the hum of the climate-control system vents.

  When they were finished, his father stood. “I’ll clear the plates.”

  “No, I’ll get them.”

  “You sit down.”

  “No, let me.”

  “Sit, birthday girl.”

  His mother sat back with a small smile, and Sean’s father stacked the plates and took them around the corner into the kitchen.

  “Careful with the crumbs,” his mother said.

  “I’m careful.”

  “If you don’t wash them all the way down the drain, we’ll get ants again.”

  “We had one ant. One.”

  “We had more,” she said to Sean.

  “Six months ago,” his father said over the running water.

  “And mice.”

  “We’ve never had mice.”

  “Mrs. Feingold did. Two of them. She had to get traps.”

  “We don’t have mice.”

  “That’s because I make sure you don’t leave crumbs in the sink.”

  “Jesus,” Sean’s father said.

  Sean’s mother sipped her tea and looked over the cup at Sean.

  “I clipped an article for Lauren,” she said when she’d placed the cup back on the saucer. “I’ve got it here someplace.”

  Sean’s mother was always clipping articles from the paper and giving them to him when he’d visit. Or else, she’d mail them in stacks of nine or ten, Sean opening the envelope to see them folded neatly together like a reminder of how long it had been since his last visit. The articles varied in topic, but they were all of the household-tip or self-help variety—methods to prevent lint fires in your dryer; how to successfully avoid freezer burn every time; the pros and cons of a living will; how to avoid pickpockets while on vacation; health tips for men in high-stress jobs (“Walk Your Heart to the Century Mark!”). They were his mother’s way of sending him love, Sean knew, the equivalent of buttoning his coat and fixing his scarf before he left for school on a January morning, and Sean still smiled when he thought of the clipping that had arrived two days before Lauren left—“Leap into in Vitro!”—his parents never grasping that Sean and Lauren’s childlessness was a choice, if anything, one steeped in their shared (though never discussed) fear that they’d be terrible parents.

  When she finally had gotten pregnant, they’d kept it from his parents while they tried to figure out if she’d have the baby, their marriage crumbling around them, Sean discovering the affair she’d had with an actor, of all things, starting to ask her, “Whose kid is it, Lauren?” and Lauren coming back with, “Take a paternity test, you’re so worried.”

  They’d backed out of dinners with his parents, made excuses for not being home when they made the drive into the city, and Sean felt his mind breaking apart under the fear that the child wasn’t his and the other fear, too—that he wouldn’t want it, even if it was.

  Since Lauren had left, Sean’s mother would only refer to her absence as “taking some sorting-out time,” and all the clippings were now for her, not him, as if one day they’d overflow in a drawer to the point that he and Lauren would have to get back together if only so they could close the drawer again.

  “You talk to her recently?” Sean’s father asked from the kitchen, his face hidden behind the mint-green wall between them.

  “Lauren?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, who else?” his mother said brightly as she rummaged through a drawer in the sideboard.

  “She calls. She doesn’t say anything.”

  “Maybe she’s just making small talk because she—”

  “No. I mean, Dad, she doesn’t speak. At all.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Zip.”

  “Then how do you know it’s her?”

  “I just know.”

  “But how?”

  “Jesus,” Sean said. “I can hear her breathing. Okay?”

  “How odd,” his mother said. “Do you talk though, Sean?”

  “Sometimes. Less and less.”

  “Well, at least you’re communicating somehow,” his mother said, and placed the latest clipping down in front of him. “You tell her I thought she’d find this interesting.” She sat down and smoothed a wrinkle in the tablecloth with the outer edges of both palms. “When she comes home again,” she said, peering at the wrinkle as it dissolved under her hands.

  “When she comes home,” s
he repeated, her voice a light wisp, like the voice of a nun, certain of the essential order in all things.

  “DAVE BOYLE,” Sean said to his father an hour later as they sat at one of the tall bar tables in the Ground Round. “That time he disappeared from in front of our house.”

  His father frowned and then concentrated on pouring the rest of a Killian’s into his frosted mug. As the foam neared the top of the mug and the beer slowed to a trickle of fat drops, his father said, “What—you couldn’t look it up in old newspapers?”

  “Well—”

  “Why ask me? Shit. It was on TV.”

  “Not when his kidnapper was found,” Sean said, hoping that would suffice, that his father wouldn’t press him on why Sean had come to him because Sean didn’t have a complete answer yet.

  It had something to do with needing his father to place him in the context of the event, maybe help him see himself back there in a way newspapers or old case files couldn’t. And maybe it was about hoping to talk to his father about something more than just the daily news, the Red Sox’s need for a lefty in the bullpen.

  It seemed to Sean—sometimes—that he and his father may have once talked about more than just incidental things (just as it seemed that he and Lauren had), but for the life of him, Sean couldn’t remember what those things may have been. In the fog that was his remembrance of being young, he feared he’d invented intimacies and moments of clear communication between his father and him that, while they’d achieved a mythic stature over the years, had never happened.

  His father was a man of silences and half-sentences that trailed off into nothing, and Sean had spent most of his life interpreting those silences, filling in the blanks left in the wake of those ellipses, creating a concept of what his father meant to say. And lately Sean wondered if he, himself, ever finished sentences as he thought he did, or if he, too, was a creature of silences, silences he’d seen in Lauren, too, and had never done enough about until her silence was the only piece of her he had left. That, and the air hiss on the phone when she called.