Mystic River

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 murdered. 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."