Mystic River

"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 doorway 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.