Mystic River

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."

Epilogue

JIMMY FLATS

Sunday

28

WE'LL SAVE YOU A PLACE

JIMMY 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.