Mystic River

  Sean nodded. “Kids, actually. Thirteen years old. Ray Harris’s son, Ray junior, and a kid named Johnny O’Shea. They confessed half an hour ago.”

  Jimmy felt a knife enter his brain through the ear and push toward the other side. A hot knife, slicing away through his skull.

  “No question?” he said.

  “None,” Sean said.

  “Why?”

  “Why’d they do it? They don’t even know. They were playing with a gun. They saw a car coming, and one of them lay down in the middle of the street. The car swerves, clutch kicks out, and O’Shea runs up to the car with the gun, says he just meant to scare her. Instead the gun went off. Katie hit him with the door, and the kids say they snapped. They chased her so she wouldn’t tell anyone they had a gun.”

  “And the beating they gave her?” Jimmy said, and took another drink.

  “Ray junior had a hockey stick. He wouldn’t answer any questions. He’s mute, you know? Just sat there. But O’Shea said that they beat her because she’d made them mad by running.” He shrugged as if the utter wastefulness of it surprised even him. “Little fucking kids,” he said. “Afraid they’d get grounded or something, so they killed her.”

  Jimmy stood. He opened his mouth to gulp some air and his legs gave way and he found himself right back on the step. Sean put a hand on his elbow.

  “Go easy, Jim. Take a few breaths.”

  Jimmy saw Dave sitting on the ground, fingering the slice Jimmy had drawn from one end of his abdomen to the other. He heard his voice: Look at me, Jimmy. Look at me.

  And Sean said, “I got a call from Celeste Boyle. She said Dave’s missing. She said she went a little crazy the last few days. She said you, Jim, might know where he is.”

  Jimmy tried to speak. He opened his mouth, but his windpipe filled right up with what felt like damp cotton swabs.

  Sean said, “No one else knows where Dave could be. And it’s important we talk to him, Jim, because he might know something about a guy who got killed outside the Last Drop the other night.”

  “A guy?” Jimmy managed before his windpipe closed up again.

  “Yeah,” Sean said, something hard finding his voice. “A pedophile with three priors. Real piece of shit. The theory at the barracks is that someone caught him in the act with a little kid and canceled his fucking ticket. So anyway,” Sean said, “we want to talk to Dave about it. You know where he is, Jim?”

  Jimmy shook his head, having trouble seeing anything out of his peripheral vision now, a tunnel seeming to have formed in front of his eyes.

  “No?” Sean said. “Celeste says she told you that Dave killed Katie. Seems to think you believed the same thing. She got the feeling you were going to do something about it.”

  Jimmy stared through the tunnel at a sewer grate.

  “You going to send five hundred a month to Celeste now, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy looked up and each of them saw it at the same time in the other’s face—Sean could see what Jimmy had done, and Jimmy could see that knowledge appear in Sean.

  “You fucking did it, didn’t you?” Sean said. “You killed him.”

  Jimmy stood up, holding on to the banister. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You killed both of them—Ray Harris and Dave Boyle. Jesus, Jimmy, I came down here thinking the whole idea was nuts, but I can see it in your face, man. You crazy, lunatic, fucking psycho piece of shit. You did it. You killed Dave. You killed Dave Boyle. Our friend, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy snorted. “Our friend. Yeah, okay, Point Boy, he was your good buddy. Hung with him all the time, right?”

  Sean stepped into his face. “He was our friend, Jimmy. Remember?”

  Jimmy looked into Sean’s eyes, wondered if he was going to take a swing at him.

  “Last time I saw Dave,” he said, “was at my house last night.” He pushed Sean aside and crossed the street onto Gannon. “That’s the last time I saw Dave.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  He turned, arms wide as he looked back at Sean. “Then arrest me, you’re so sure.”

  “I’ll get the evidence,” Sean said. “You know I will.”

  “You’ll get shit,” Jimmy said. “Thanks for busting my daughter’s killers, Sean. Really. Maybe if you’d been a little faster, though?” Jimmy shrugged and turned his back on him, started walking down Gannon Street.

  Sean watched him until he lost him to the darkness under a broken streetlight right in front of Sean’s old house.

  You did it, Sean thought. You actually did it, you cold, cold-blooded animal. And the worst part of it is that I know how smart you are. You won’t have left us anything to go on. That’s not in your nature, because you’re a detail guy, Jimmy. You damn prick.

  “You took his life,” Sean said aloud. “Didn’t you, my man?”

  He tossed his beer can into the curb and walked to his car, called Lauren from his cell phone.

  When she answered, he said, “It’s Sean.”

  Silence.

  He knew now what he hadn’t said that she’d needed to hear, the thing he’d refused to say in over a year. Anything, he’d told himself, I’ll say anything but that.

  He said it now, though. He said it seeing that kid pointing the gun at his chest, the kid reeking of nothing, and seeing, too, poor Dave that day Sean had offered to buy him a beer, the spark of desperate hope he’d seen in Dave’s face, the guy probably never believing, truly, that anyone would want to have a beer with him. And he said it because he felt it deep in his marrow, a need to say it, as much for Lauren as for himself.

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  And Lauren spoke. “For what?”

  “For putting it all on you.”

  “Okay…”

  “Hey—”

  “Hey—”

  “You go ahead,” he said.

  “I…”

  “What?”

  “I…hell, Sean, I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Really.” He took a deep breath, sucking in the soiled, stale-sweat stench of his cruiser. “I want to see you. I want to see my daughter.”

  And Lauren answered, “How do you know she’s yours?”

  “She’s mine.”

  “But the blood test—”

  “She’s mine,” he said. “I don’t need a blood test. Will you come home, Lauren? Will you?”

  Somewhere on the silent street, he could hear the hum of a generator.

  “Nora,” she said.

  “What?”

  “That’s your daughter’s name, Sean.”

  “Nora,” he said, the word wet in his throat.

  WHEN JIMMY GOT HOME, Annabeth was waiting up for him in the kitchen. He sat in the chair at the table across from her and she gave him that small, secret smile he loved, the one that seemed to know him so well he’d never have to open his mouth for the rest of his life and she’d still know what he meant to say. Jimmy took her hand and ran his thumb along hers and tried to find strength in the image of himself that he could see in her face.

  The baby monitor sat on the table between them. They’d used it last month when Nadine had come down with a bad case of strep, listening to her gurgle as she’d slept, Jimmy picturing his baby drowning, waiting for the sound of a cough so ground in glass he’d have to leap from bed and scoop her up, rush her to the emergency room wearing only boxers and a T-shirt. She’d healed quickly, though, but Annabeth didn’t return the monitor to its box in the dining room closet. She’d turn it on at night, listen to Nadine and Sara sleep.

  They weren’t sleeping now. Jimmy could hear them through the small speaker, whispering, giggling, and it horrified him to picture them and think of his sins at the same time.

  I killed a man. The wrong man.

  It burned in him, that knowledge, that shame.

  I killed Dave Boyle.

  It dripped, still burning, down into his belly. It drizzled through him.

  I murder
ed. I murdered an innocent man.

  “Oh, honey,” Annabeth said, searching his face. “Oh, baby, what’s wrong? Is it Katie? Baby, you look like you’re dying.”

  She came around the table, a fearsome mix of worry and love in her eyes. She straddled Jimmy and took his face in her hands and made him look in her eyes.

  “Tell me. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  Jimmy wanted to hide from her. Her love hurt too much right now. He wanted to dissolve from her warm hands and find someplace dark and cavelike where no love or light could reach and he could curl into a ball and moan his grief and self-hatred into the black.

  “Jimmy,” she whispered. She kissed his eyelids. “Jimmy, talk to me. Please.”

  She pressed the heels of her hands against his temples, and her fingers dug through his hair and against his skull and she kissed him. Her tongue slid into his mouth and probed him, searching deep for the source of his pain, sucking at it, capable of turning into a scalpel if necessary and cutting away his cancers, sucking them back out of him.

  “Tell me. Please, Jimmy. Tell me.”

  And he knew, looking into her love, that he had to tell her everything or he’d be lost. He wasn’t sure she’d be able to save him, but he was positive that if he didn’t open himself to her now, he would definitely die.

  So he told her.

  He told her everything. He told her about Just Ray Harris and he told her about the sadness he’d felt anchored inside of him since he was eleven and he told her that loving Katie had been the sole admirable accomplishment of his otherwise useless existence, that Katie at five—that daughter-stranger who’d needed and mistrusted him at the same time—was the scariest thing he’d ever faced and the only chore he’d never run from. He told his wife that loving Katie and protecting Katie were the core of him, and when she had been taken, so had he.

  “And so,” he told her with the kitchen gone small and tight around them, “I killed Dave.

  “I killed him and buried him in the Mystic and now I’ve discovered, as if that crime weren’t bad enough, that he was innocent.

  “These are the things I’ve done, Anna. And I can’t undo them. I think I should go to jail. I should confess to Dave’s murder and go back into jail, because I think I belong there. No, honey, I do. I’m not fit for out here. I can’t be trusted.”

  His voice sounded like someone else’s. It sounded so far from the one he usually heard leaving his lips that he wondered if Annabeth saw a stranger before her, a carbon Jimmy, a Jimmy vanishing into the ether.

  Her face was dry and composed, though, so still she could have been posing for a painting. Chin tilted up, eyes clear and unreadable.

  Jimmy could hear the girls on the monitor again, whispering, the sound like a soft rustle of wind.

  Annabeth reached down and began unbuttoning his shirt, and Jimmy watched her deft fingers, his body numb. She opened the shirt and pushed it halfway off his shoulders and then she placed her cheek to it, her ear over the center of his chest.

  He said, “I just—”

  “Ssshh,” she whispered. “I want to hear your heart.”

  Her hands slid along his rib cage and then up his back, and she pressed the side of her head tighter against his chest. She closed her eyes, and a tiny smile curled up her lips.

  They sat that way for a while. The whispering on the monitor had changed to the hushed rumble of his daughters’ sleeping.

  When she pulled away, Jimmy could still feel her cheek on his chest like a permanent mark. She climbed off him and sat on the floor in front of him and looked into his face. She tilted her head toward the baby monitor and, for a moment, they listened to their daughters sleep.

  “You know what I told them when I put them to bed tonight?”

  Jimmy shook his head.

  Annabeth said, “I told them they had to be extra-special nice to you for a while because as much as we loved Katie? You loved her even more. You loved her so much because you’d created her and held her when she was tiny and sometimes your love for her was so big that your heart filled like a balloon and felt like it was going to pop from loving her.”

  “Jesus,” Jimmy said.

  “I told them that their Daddy loved them that much, too. That he had four hearts and they were all balloons and they were all filled up and aching. And your love meant we’d never have to worry. And Nadine said, ‘Never?’”

  “Please.” Jimmy felt like he was crushed under blocks of granite. “Stop.”

  She shook her head once, holding him in her calm eyes. “I told Nadine, ‘That’s right. Never. Because Daddy is a king, not a prince. And kings know what must be done—even if it’s hard—to make things right. Daddy is a king, and he will do—”

  “Anna—”

  “—he will do whatever he has to do for those he loves. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. Great men try to make things right. And that’s all that matters. That’s what great love is. That’s why Daddy is a great man.”

  Jimmy felt blinded. He said, “No.”

  “Celeste called,” Annabeth said, her words like darts now.

  “Don’t—”

  “She wanted to know where you were. She told me how she’d mentioned her own suspicions about Dave to you.”

  Jimmy wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, watched his wife as if he’d never seen her before.

  “She told me that, Jimmy, and I thought what kind of wife says those things about her husband? How fucking gutless do you have to be to tell those kinds of tales out of school? And why would she tell you? Huh, Jim? Why would she run to you?”

  Jimmy had an idea—he’d always had an idea about Celeste and the way she looked at him sometimes—but he didn’t say anything.

  Annabeth smiled, as if she could see the answer in his face. “I could have called you on your cell. I could have. Once she told me what you knew, and I remembered seeing you leave with Val, I could guess what you were doing, Jimmy. I’m not stupid.”

  She was never that.

  “But I didn’t call you. I didn’t stop it.”

  Jimmy’s voice cracked around the words: “Why not?”

  Annabeth cocked her head at him as if the answer should have been obvious. She stood, looking down at him with that curious glare, and she kicked off her shoes. She unzipped her jeans and pulled them down her thighs, bent at the waist and pushed them to her ankles. She stepped out of them as she removed her shirt and bra. She pulled Jimmy out of his chair. She pressed him to her body, and she kissed his damp cheekbones.

  “They,” she said, “are weak.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Everyone,” she said. “Everyone but us.”

  She pushed Jimmy’s shirt off his shoulders and Jimmy could see her face down at the Pen Channel the first night they’d ever gone out. She’d asked him if crime was in his blood, and Jimmy had convinced her that it wasn’t, because he’d thought that was the answer she was looking for. Only now, twelve and a half years later, did he understand that all she’d wanted from him was the truth. Whatever his answer had been, she would have adapted to it. She would have supported it. She would have built their lives accordingly.

  “We are not weak,” she said, and Jimmy felt the desire take hold in him as if it had been building since birth. If he could’ve eaten her alive without causing her pain, he would have devoured her organs, sunk his teeth into her throat.

  “We will never be weak.” She sat on the kitchen table, her legs dangling off the side.

  Jimmy looked at his wife as he stepped out of his pants, aware that this was temporary, that he was merely blocking the pain of Dave’s murder, ducking from it into his wife’s strength and flesh. But that would do for tonight. Maybe not tomorrow or in the days to come. But definitely for tonight, it would provide. And wasn’t that how all recoveries started? With small steps?

  Annabeth placed her hands on his hips, her nails digging into the flesh near his spine.

  “When we’re done, Jim?”

>   “Yeah?” Jimmy felt drunk with her.

  “Make sure you kiss the girls good night.”

  Epilogue

  JIMMY FLATS

  Sunday

  28

  WE’LL SAVE YOU A PLACE

  JIMMY WOKE UP Sunday morning to the distant sound of drums.

  Not the rat-a-tat and cymbal clash of some nose-ring band in a sweaty club, but the deep, steady, tom-tom thump of a war party encamped just on the outskirts of the neighborhood. Then he heard the bleat of brass horns, sudden and off-key. Once again, it was a distant sound, riding the morning air from a distance of ten or twelve blocks away, and it died almost as soon as it had started. In the silence that followed, he lay there listening to the crisp quiet of a late Sunday morning—a bright one, too, judging by the hard yellow glow on the other side of the closed shades. He heard the cluck and coo of pigeons on his ledge and the dry bark of a dog down the street. A car door snapped open and shut, and he waited for the gun of its engine, but it never came, and then he heard that deep tom-tom thumping again, steadier, more confident.

  He looked over at the clock on the nightstand: 11 A.M. The last time he’d slept this late, he’d been…He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept this late, actually. Years. A decade, maybe. He remembered the last few days’ exhaustion, the sensation he’d had that Katie’s coffin rose and fell like an elevator car through his body. And then Just Ray Harris and Dave Boyle had come to visit as he’d sat drunk on the living room couch last night, a gun in his hand, watching them wave to him from the backseat of the car that had smelled of apples. And the back of Katie’s head stretched up between them as they drove off down Gannon Street, Katie never looking back, and Just Ray and Dave waving like mad, grinning like fools, as Jimmy felt the gun itch against his palm. He’d smelled the oil and thought of putting the barrel in his mouth.

  The wake had been a nightmare, Celeste showing up when it was packed at eight in the evening and attacking Jimmy, hitting him with her fists, calling him a murderer. “You have her body!” she’d screamed. “What do I have? Where is he, Jimmy? Where?” Bruce Reed and his sons pulled her off him and carted her out of there, but Celeste still screamed full throttle: “Murderer! He’s a murderer! He killed my husband! Murderer!”