Mystic River (39 page)

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.”

Sunday

J
IMMY 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!”

Murderer.

Then there’d been the funeral, and the service at the grave site, Jimmy standing there as they lowered his baby into the hole and hit the coffin with piles of dirt and loose rock and Katie faded away from him under all that soil as if she’d never lived.

The weight of all that had found his bones last night and sunk in deep, Katie’s coffin rising and falling, rising and falling, so that by the time he’d put the gun back in the drawer and flopped into bed, he’d felt immobilized, as if his bone marrow had filled with his dead, and the blood was clotting.

Oh, God, he’d thought, I have never been so tired. So tired, so sad, so useless and alone. I’m exhausted from my mistakes and my rage and my bitter, bitter sadness. Wiped out from my sins. Oh, God, leave me alone and let me die so I won’t do wrong and I won’t be tired and I won’t carry the burdens of my nature and my loves anymore. Loose me of all that, because I’m too tired to do it on my own.

Annabeth had tried to understand this guilt, this horror at
himself, but she couldn’t. Because she hadn’t pulled the trigger.

And now, he’d slept until eleven. Twelve hours straight, and a dead sleep, too, because he’d never heard Annabeth wake.

He’d read somewhere that a hallmark of deep depression was a consistent weariness, a compulsive need to sleep, but as he sat up in bed and listened to the thump of drums, joined now by the blasts of those brass horns, almost in tune, too, he felt refreshed. He felt twenty. He felt wide, wide awake, as if he’d never need sleep again.

The parade, he realized. The drums and horns came from the band prepping to march down Buckingham Avenue at noon. He got up and went to the window and pulled up the shade. The reason that car hadn’t started out front was because they’d blocked off Buckingham Avenue from the Flats straight up to Rome Basin. Thirty-six blocks. He looked through the window and down onto the avenue. It was a clean stripe of blue-gray asphalt under the bright sun, as clean as Jimmy could remember seeing it. Blue sawhorses blocked access at every cross street and stretched end-to-end along the curbs as far as Jimmy could see in either direction.

Folks had just begun to come out of their homes and stake out their places on the sidewalk. Jimmy watched them set down their coolers and radios and picnic baskets, and he waved to Dan and Maureen Guden as they unfolded their lawn chairs in front of Hennessey’s Laundromat. When they waved back, he felt touched by the concern he saw in their faces. Maureen cupped her hands around her mouth and called to him. Jimmy opened the window and leaned into the screen, got a whiff of the morning sun, bright air, and what remained of the spring’s dust clinging to the screen.

“What’s that, Maureen?”

“I said, ‘How you doing, hon?’” Maureen called. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, and it surprised him to realize that, in fact, he did feel okay. He still carried Katie in him like a sec
ond stricken and angry heart that would never, he was certain, stop beating its mad beat. He had no illusions about that. The grief was a constant now, more a part of him than a limb. But somehow during his long sleep, he’d gained an elemental acceptance of it. There it was, part of him, and he could deal with it on those terms. And so, under the circumstances, he felt far better than he would have expected. “I’m…all right,” he called to Maureen and Dan. “Considering. You know?”

Maureen nodded, and Dan asked, “You need anything, Jim?”

“We mean
anything
,” Maureen said.

And Jimmy felt a proud and everlasting surge of love for them and this whole place as he said, “No, I’m good. But thanks. Very much. It means a lot.”

“You coming down?” Maureen called.

“I think so, yeah,” Jimmy said, not knowing for sure until the words left his mouth. “We’ll see you down there in a bit?”

“We’ll save you a place,” Dan said.

They waved and Jimmy waved back and then left the window, chest still filled with that overwhelming mixture of pride and love. These were his people. And this was his neighborhood. His home. They’d save a place for him. They would. Jimmy from the Flats.

That’s what the big boys had called him in the old days, before he’d shipped out to Deer Island. They’d take him to the social clubs on Prince Street in the North End and say, “Hey, Carlo, this is that friend of mine I was telling you about. Jimmy. Jimmy from the Flats.”

And Carlo or Gino or one of the O’s would widen his eyes and go, “No shit? Jimmy Flats. Nice to meet you, Jimmy. I admired your work a long time now.”

The jokes about his age would follow—“What, you crack your first safe with your diaper pin?”—but Jimmy could feel the respect, if not a kind of minor awe, these hard guys felt in his presence.

He was Jimmy Flats. Ran his first crew at seventeen.
Seventeen
—you believe that shit? A serious guy. Not to be fucked with. A man who kept his mouth shut and knew how the game was played and knew how to show respect. A man who made money for his friends.

He was Jimmy Flats back then, and he was Jimmy Flats right now, and those people beginning to gather along the parade route—they loved him. They worried about him and shouldered a modicum of his grief as best as they could. And for their love, what did he give them in return? He had to wonder. What, really, did he give them?

The closest thing this neighborhood had to a governing presence in the years since the Feds and RICO had busted up Louie Jello’s gang had been—what?—Bobby O’Donnell? Bobby O’Donnell and Roman Fallow. Pair of bantamweight drug dealers who’d moved into the protection and shylock rackets. Jimmy had heard the rumors—how they’d forged some kind of deal with the Vietnamese gangs up in Rome Basin to keep the gooks from muscling in, carved up the territory and then celebrated the alliance by burning Connie’s Flower Shop to the ground as a warning to anyone who refused to pay their insurance premiums.

That’s not how you did it. You kept your business out of your neighborhood; you didn’t make the neighborhood your business. You kept your people clean and safe and they, in gratitude, watched your back and became your ears to whispers of trouble. And if occasionally their gratitude came in the form of an envelope here, a cake or a car there, then that was their choice and your reward for keeping them safe.

That’s how you ran a neighborhood. Benevolently. With one eye on their interests and one on your own. You didn’t let the Bobby O’Donnells and the slant-eyed tong wannabes think they could just stroll the fuck in here and take whatever they desired. Not if they wanted to stroll back out on their God-given limbs.

Jimmy left the bedroom and found the apartment empty. The door at the end of the hall was open, and he could hear
Annabeth’s voice from the apartment upstairs, could hear his daughters’ small feet scampering across the floorboards as they chased Val’s cat. He let himself into the bathroom and turned on the shower, stepped in when it got warm, and raised his face to the spray.

The only reason O’Donnell and Farrow had never bothered Jimmy’s store was because they knew he was tight with the Savages. And like anyone with a brain, O’Donnell was afraid of them. And if he and Roman feared the Savages, then that meant that, by association, they feared Jimmy.

They feared him. Jimmy from the Flats. Because, on his own, Lord knows, he certainly had the brains. And with the Savages watching his back, he could have all the muscle and balls-to-the-wall, batshit fearlessness he’d ever need. Put Jimmy Marcus and the Savage brothers together for
real
, and they could…

What?

Make the neighborhood as safe as it deserved to be.

Run the whole damn city.

Own it.

“Please don’t, Jimmy. Jesus. I want to see my wife. I want to live my life. Jimmy? Please, don’t take that away from me. Look at me!”

Jimmy closed his eyes and let the hard, hot water drill his skull.

“Look at
me
!”

I’m looking at you, Dave. I’m looking at you.

Jimmy saw Dave’s pleading face, the spittle on his lips not much different than the spittle on Just Ray Harris’s lower lip and chin had been thirteen years ago.

“Look at me!”

I’m looking, Dave. I’m looking. You never should have gotten back out of that car. You know that? You should have stayed gone. You came back here, to our home, and there were crucial pieces of you missing. You never fit back in, Dave, because they’d poisoned you and that poison was just waiting to spill back out.

“I didn’t kill your daughter, Jimmy. I didn’t kill Katie. I didn’t, I didn’t.”

Maybe you didn’t, Dave. I know that now. It’s starting to look like you actually had nothing to do with it. Still a small chance the cops got the wrong kids, but I’ll admit, all in all, it looks like you may have been guilt-free on the Katie account.

“So?”

So you killed
someone
, Dave. You killed someone. Celeste was right about that. Besides, you know how it is with kids who get molested.

“No, Jim. Why don’t you tell me?”

They turn into molesters themselves. Sooner or later. The poison’s in you and it has to come out. I was just protecting some poor future victim from your poison, Dave. Maybe your son.

“Leave my son out of this.”

Fine. Maybe one of his friends then. But, Dave, sooner or later, you would have shown your true colors.

“That’s how you live with it?”

Once you got in that car, Dave, you should never have come back. That’s how I live with it. You didn’t belong. Don’t you get it? That’s all a neighborhood is—a place where people who
belong together
live. All others need not fucking apply.

Dave’s voice fell through the water and drummed into Jimmy’s skull: “I live in you now, Jimmy. You can’t shut me off.”

Yes, Dave, I can.

And Jimmy turned the shower off and stepped out of the tub. He dried off and sucked the soft steam up his nostrils. If anything, it left him feeling even more clearheaded. He wiped steam off the small window in the corner and looked down into the alley that ran behind his house. The day was so clear and bright that even the alley looked clean. Christ, what a beautiful day. What a perfect Sunday. What a perfect day for a parade. He would take his daughters and his wife down to the street and they would hold hands and watch the
marchers and the bands and the floats and politicians stream by in the bright sunlight. And they’d eat hot dogs and cotton candy and he’d buy the girls Buckingham Pride flags and T-shirts. And a healing process would begin amid the cymbals and drumbeats and horns and cheers. It would take hold of them, he was sure, as they stood on the sidewalk and celebrated the founding of their neighborhood. And when Katie’s death pressed in on them again during the evening hours, and their bodies sagged a bit with the weight of her, they would at least have the afternoon’s entertainment to balance their grief a little bit. It would be the start of healing. They would all realize that, at least for a few hours this afternoon, they’d known pleasure, if not joy.

He left the window and splashed warm water on his face, then covered his cheeks and throat with shaving cream, and it occurred to him as he began to shave that he was evil. No big thing, really, no earth-shattering clang of bells erupting in his heart. Just that—an occurrence, a momentary realization that fell like gently grasping fingers through his chest.

So I am then.

He looked in the mirror and felt very little of anything at all. He loved his daughters and he loved his wife. And they loved him. He found certainty in them, complete certainty. Few men—few people—had that.

He’d killed a man for a crime the man had probably not committed. If that weren’t bad enough, he felt very little regret. And in the long-ago, he’d killed another man. And he’d weighted both bodies down so that they’d descended to the depths of the Mystic. And he’d genuinely liked both men—Ray a bit more than Dave, but he’d liked them both. Still, he’d killed them. On principle. Stood on a stone ledge above the river and watched Ray’s face turn white and sagging as it sank beneath the waterline, eyes open and lifeless. And in all these years, he hadn’t felt much guilt over that, although he’d told himself he did. But what he called guilt was actually a fear of bad karma, of what he’d done being done to him or someone he loved. And Katie’s death, he supposed,
may have been the fulfillment of that bad karma. The ultimate fulfillment if you really looked at it—Ray coming back through his wife’s womb and killing Katie for no good reason
except
karma.