Mystic River

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 right."

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.