Mystic River (11 page)

“Daddy, Daddy!” Nadine broke away from a group of friends and ran toward Jimmy as he reached the bottom step, slammed into Jimmy’s legs full-force, still saying it: “Daddy, Daddy.”

Jimmy picked her up, got a sharp whiff of starch from her dress, and kissed her cheek. “Baby, baby.”

With the same motion her mother used to push hair out of her eyes, Nadine used the backs of two fingers to push her veil out of her face. “This dress itches.”

“It’s itching me,” Jimmy said, “and I’m not even wearing it.”

“You’d look funny in a dress, Daddy.”

“Not if it fit just so.”

Nadine rolled her eyes and then scraped the underside of his chin with the stiff crown of her veil. “Does that tickle?”

Jimmy looked over Nadine’s head at Annabeth and Sara, felt all three of them blow through his chest, fill him up, and turn him to dust at the same time.

A spray of bullets could hit his back right now, this second, and it would be okay. It would be all right. He was happy. Happy as you could get.

Well, almost. He scanned the crowd for Katie, hoping maybe she’d pulled up at the last moment. He saw a state police cruiser instead as it slammed around the corner of Buckingham Avenue, went wide into the left lane of Roseclair, rear tire slapping the median strip, the bleat-beep and sharp squawk of its siren slicing the morning air. Jimmy watched the driver floor it, heard the big engine rev as the cruiser shot down Roseclair toward the Pen Channel. A black unmarked followed a few seconds later, its sirens mute but no mistaking it for anything else, the driver cutting the hard ninety-degree turn onto Roseclair at forty miles an hour, engine humming.

And as Jimmy lowered Nadine back to the ground, he could feel it in his blood, a sudden, mean certainty, a sense of things falling miserably into place. He watched the two cop cars zip under the overpass and turn hard right onto the entrance road of Pen Park, and he felt Katie in his blood now along with that humming engine and slapping tires, the floating capillaries and cells.

Katie, he almost said aloud. Sweet Jesus. Katie.

C
ELESTE WOKE UP
Sunday morning thinking about pipes—the network of them that coursed through homes and restaurants, movie multiplexes and shopping malls, and dropped in great skeletal sections from the tops of forty-story office buildings, floor by giant floor, plunging toward an even grander network of sewers and aqueducts that ran beneath cities and towns, connecting people more viably than language, with the sole purpose of flushing the things we’d consumed and rejected from our bodies, our lives, our dishes and crisper trays.

Where did it all go?

She supposed she’d considered the question before, in a vague sense, the way you wondered how a plane really stayed aloft without flapping its wings, but now she really wanted to know. She sat up in the empty bed, anxious and curious, heard the sounds of Dave and Michael playing Wiffle ball in the backyard three stories below. Where? she wondered.

It had to go somewhere. All those flushes, all that hand soap and shampoo and detergent and toilet paper and barroom vomit, all the coffee stains, bloodstains, and sweat stains, dirt from the cuffs of your pants and grime from the inside of your collar, the cold vegetables you scraped off the plate into the garbage disposal, cigarettes and urine and hard
bristles of hair from legs, cheeks, groins, and chins—it all met up with hundreds of thousands of similar or identical entities every night and poured, she assumed, through dank corridors fleeced by vermin and out into vast catacombs where it commingled in rushing water that rushed off to…where?

They didn’t dump it in the oceans anymore. Did they? They couldn’t. She seemed to remember something about septic processing and the compacting of raw sewage, but she couldn’t be sure that wasn’t something she’d seen in a movie, and movies were so often full of shit. So if not the ocean, where? And if the ocean, why? There had to be some better way, right? But then she had an image of all those pipes again, all that waste, and she was left to wonder.

She heard the hollow plastic snap of the Wiffle-ball bat as it made contact with the ball. She heard Dave yell, “Whoa!” and Michael whoop and a dog bark once, the sound as crisp as the bat against the ball.

Celeste rolled over onto her back, realizing only at that moment that she was naked and had slept past ten. Neither circumstance had occurred much, if at all, since Michael could walk, and she felt a small wave of guilt roll through her chest, then die in the pit of her stomach as she remembered kissing the flesh around Dave’s fresh scar in the kitchen at 4
A.M
., on her knees, tasting the fear and adrenaline in his pores, any worries about AIDS or hepatitis conquered by this sudden need to taste him, to press herself as intimately as possible against him. She’d slid her bathrobe off her shoulders with her tongue still roaming along his skin, knelt there in a half-T-shirt and black underwear feeling the night slipping under the porch doorway and chilling her ankles and kneecaps. The fear had given Dave’s flesh a half bitter, half sugary taste, and she ran her tongue up from the scar tissue to the base of his throat and cupped her hand between his thighs and felt him harden and heard his breathing grow shorter. She wanted this to last as long as possible, the taste of him, the power she suddenly possessed in her
body, and she rose up and covered him. She slid her tongue over his and tightened her fingers in his hair and imagined she was sucking the pain of his parking lot encounter straight out of him and into her. She held his head and pressed her skin against his until he stripped off her shirt and sank his mouth over her breast, and she rocked herself against his groin and heard him moan. She wanted Dave to understand that this was what they were, this pressing of flesh, this enveloping of bodies and scent and need and love, yes, love, because she loved him as deeply as she ever had now that she knew she’d almost lost him.

His teeth pinched her breast, hurting, sucking too hard, and she pushed herself further into his mouth and welcomed the pain. She wouldn’t have minded if he drew blood, because he was sucking at her, needing her, fingertips digging into her back, releasing the fear onto and into her. And she would take it all and spit it out for him, and they would both feel stronger than they’d ever felt before. She was sure of it.

When she’d first been dating Dave, their sex life had been characterized by a raw lack of boundaries; she’d come home to the apartment she shared with Rosemary covered in bruises and bite marks and scratches on her back, rubbed straight down to the bone with the kind of urgent exhaustion she imagined an addict felt between fixes. Since Michael’s birth—well, actually, since Rosemary had moved in with them after cancer number one—Celeste and Dave had slipped into the type of predictable married-couple routine joked about nonstop on sitcoms, usually too weary or without enough privacy to do much more than a few perfunctory minutes of foreplay, a few oral, before moving on to the main event, which, over the years, seemed less like a main event and more like something to pass the time between the weather report and Leno.

But last night—last night had definitely been main event/title card sort of passion, leaving her, even now as she lay in the bed, bruised to the marrow with it.

It was when she heard Dave’s voice from outside again,
telling Michael to concentrate, concentrate, damn it, that she remembered what had been bothering her—before the pipes, before the memory of their crazy kitchen sex, maybe even before she’d crawled into bed this morning: Dave had lied to her.

She’d known in the bathroom when he’d first come home, but she’d decided to ignore it. Then, as she’d lain on the linoleum and raised her back and ass off the floor so he could enter her, she’d known it again. She watched his eyes, slightly glazed, as he inserted himself and pulled her calves over his hips, and she met his initial thrusts with the dawning certainty that his story didn’t make sense.

For starters, who said things like, “Your wallet or your life, bitch. I’m leaving with one of them”? It was laughable. It was, as she had been sure in the bathroom, movie talk. And even if the mugger had prepared the line beforehand, no way he’d actually say it when the time came. No way. Celeste had been mugged once on the Common when she was in her late teens. The mugger, a high-yellow black man with flat, thin wrists and swimming brown eyes, had stepped up to her in the abandonment of a cold, late dusk, placed a switchblade to her hip, and let her see a glimpse of his winter eyes before he whispered, “Whatcha got?”

There had been nothing around them but trees stripped by December, the closest person a businessman hurrying home along Beacon on the other side of a wrought-iron fence, twenty yards away. The mugger had dug the knife a little harder into her jeans, not cutting, but applying pressure, and she smelled decay and chocolate on his breath. She’d handed over her wallet, trying to avoid his swimming brown eyes and the irrational feeling that he possessed more arms than he showed, and he’d slid her wallet into the pocket of his overcoat and said, “You lucky I’m short on time,” and strolled off toward Park Street, no rush, no fear.

She’d heard similar stories from a lot of women. Men, at least in this city, rarely got mugged unless they were looking for it, but women, all the time. Always there was the threat
of rape, either implied or intuited, and in all the stories she’d heard, she’d never come across a mugger with clever phrasing. They didn’t have the time. They needed to be as succinct as possible. Get in and get out before someone screamed.

And then there was the issue of the punch thrown while the mugger held a knife in the other hand. If you assumed the knife hand was the favored hand, well, come on, who threw a punch with anything but their writing hand?

Yes, she believed Dave had been thrust into an awful situation where he’d been forced to succumb to a kill-or-be-killed mentality. Yes, she was sure he wasn’t the type of guy to have gone looking for it. But…but, still, his story had flaws, gaps. It was like trying to explain lipstick on the inside of your shirt—you may very well have been faithful, but your explanation, no matter how ridiculous, had better add up.

She imagined the two detectives in their kitchen, asking them questions, and she felt sure Dave would crack. His story would fall apart under impersonal eyes and repeated questions. It would be like when she asked about his childhood. She’d heard the stories, of course; the Flats was nothing but a small town wrapped within a big city, and people whispered. So, she’d asked Dave once if something terrible had happened in his childhood, something he felt he couldn’t share with anyone, letting him know that he could share it with her, his wife, pregnant with his baby at the time.

He’d looked at her as if confused. “Oh, you mean that thing?”

“What thing?”

“I’m playing with Jimmy and this kid, Sean Devine. Yeah, you know him. You cut his hair once or twice, right?”

Celeste remembered. He worked somewhere in law enforcement, but not with the city. He was tall, with curly hair and an amber voice that slid through you. He had that same effortless confidence Jimmy had—the kind that came to
men who were either very good-looking or were rarely afflicted by doubt.

She couldn’t picture Dave with these two men, even as boys.

“Okay,” she’d said.

“So this car pulls up, I get in, and not long after, I escaped.”

“Escaped.”

He nodded. “Wasn’t much to it, honey.”

“But, Dave—”

He placed a finger to her lips. “That’s sorta the end of it, okay?”

He was smiling, but Celeste could see a—what was it?—a kind of mild hysteria in his eyes.

“I mean—what?—I remember playing ball and kick-the-can,” Dave said, “and going to the Looey-Dooey, trying to stay awake in class. I remember some birthday parties and shit. But, come on, it’s a pretty boring time. Now, high school…”

She’d let it go, as she would when he lied about why he lost his job at American Messenger Service (Dave saying it was another budgetary cutback, but other guys from the neighborhood were walking in off the street in the weeks that followed and scooping up jobs left and right), or when he told her his mother died of a sudden heart attack when the whole neighborhood had heard the story of Dave coming home from senior year in high school to find her sitting by the oven, kitchen doors closed, towels pressed to the bottoms, gas filling the room. Dave, she’d come to believe, needed his lies, needed to rewrite his history and fashion it in such a way that it became something he could live with and tuck far away. And if it made him a better person—a loving, if occasionally distant, husband and attentive father—who was to judge?

But this lie, Celeste knew as she tossed on some jeans and one of Dave’s shirts, could bury him. Bury
them
, now that she had joined in the conspiracy to obstruct justice by washing the clothes. If Dave didn’t come clean with her, she
couldn’t help him. And when the police came (and they would; this wasn’t TV; the dumbest, drunkest detective was smarter than either of them when it came to crime), they’d break Dave’s story like an egg on the side of a pan.

D
AVE’S RIGHT HAND
was killing him. The knuckles had ballooned to twice their normal size and the bones closest to the wrist felt like they were ready to punch up through the skin. He could have forgiven himself, then, for floating meatballs to Michael, but he refused to. If the kid couldn’t hit curves and knucklers from a Wiffle ball, he’d never be able to track a hardball coming twice as fast, hit it with a bat about ten times as heavy.

His son was small for seven, and far too trusting for this world. You could see it in the openness of his face, the glow of hope in the set of his blue eyes. Dave loved that in his son, but he hated it, too. He didn’t know if he had the strength to take it away, but he knew that soon he’d have to, or the world would do it for him. That tender, breakable thing in his son was a Boyle curse, the same thing that made Dave, at thirty-five, repeatedly get mistaken for a college student, find himself getting carded at liquor stores outside the neighborhood. His hairline hadn’t changed since he was Michael’s age; no lines had ever creased his face; and his own blue eyes were vivid and innocent.

Dave watched Michael dig in as he’d been taught, adjust his cap, and cock the bat high above his shoulder. He swayed his knees a bit, flexing them, a habit Dave had been gradually working out of him, but one that kept coming back like a tic, and Dave released the ball fast, hoping to exploit the weakness, hiding the knuckler by releasing the ball before his arm was fully extended, the center of his palm screaming with the pinch of the grip.

Michael stopped flexing, though, as soon as Dave began his motion, quick as it was, and as the ball fluttered, then dropped over the plate, Michael swung low and teed off on it
like he was holding a three-wood. Dave saw the flash of a hopeful smile on Michael’s face mixed with a bit of amazement at his own prowess, and Dave almost let the ball go, but instead he slapped it back to the earth, felt something crumble in his chest as the smile disintegrated on his son’s face.

“Hey, hey,” Dave said, deciding to let his son feel the goodness of a sweet swing, “that was a great swing, Yaz.”

Michael was still working on a scowl. “How come you could knock it down then?”

Dave picked the ball up off the grass. “I dunno. ’Cause I’m a lot taller than kids in Little League?”

Michael’s smile was tentative, waiting to break again. “Yeah?”

“Lemme ask you—you know any second-graders who go five-ten?”

“No.”

“And I had to jump for it.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. Keep a trip to a single, all five-ten of me.”

Michael laughed now. It was Celeste’s laugh, rippling. “Okay…”

“You were flexing, though.”

“I know, I know.”

“Once you dig in and set, buddy, you stop moving.”

“But Nomar—”

“I know all about Nomar. And Derek Jeter, too. Your heroes, okay. But when you’re pulling down ten million in the Show, you can fidget. Until then?”

Michael shrugged, kicked at the grass.