The Lovers

Her mother had not been so lucky. There had been a struggle, probably near the kitchen. She had managed to get away from her attacker, but only momentarily. He had caught up with her in the hall, and had stu

Was her daughter dead by then, or had the sight of her mother, dazed and bleeding, triggered the attack that led to Je

Mickey moved on, trying to visualize the scene as Parker had experienced it. Blood on the walls and on the floor; the kitchen door almost closed; the house cold. He took a deep breath, and turned to the final photograph: Susan Parker on a pine chair, her arms tied behind her back, her feet bound separately to the front legs, her head down, her face obscured by her hair, so that the damage to the face and eyes was not visible, not from this angle. Her daughter lay across her mother’s thighs. Not so much blood on her. Her throat had been cut, as was her mother’s, but by then Je

With the image clear in his head, Mickey opened the kitchen door, ready to impose this old vision of hell on the empty room.

Except now the room was not empty. The back door was half open, and there was a figure in the shadows behind it, watching him.

Mickey stumbled back in shock, his hand instinctively raised to his heart.

“Jesus,” he said. “What-”

The figure moved forward, and was caught by the moonlight.

“Wait a minute,” said Mickey as, unbeknownst to him, the final sands of his life began slipping through his fingers. “I know you…”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

JIMMY HAD MOVED ON to coffee, enlivened by a glass of brandy. I stuck with coffee alone, but I barely touched it. I tried to pinpoint how I was feeling, but at first there was only a numbness that gradually gave way to a kind of sadness and loneliness. I thought of all that my parents had endured, of my father’s lies and betrayal and my mother’s pain. For now, my only regret was that they were no longer there for me, that I could not go to them and tell them that I understood, that it was all okay. Had they lived, I wondered when, or if, they would together have told me of the circumstances of my birth, and I recognized that, coming from them, the details would have been more difficult to bear, and my reactions would have been more extreme. Sitting in Jimmy Gallagher’s candlelit kitchen, watching his wine-stained lips move, I felt that I was listening to the story of another man’s life, one with whom I shared certain qualities but who was, ultimately, distant from me.

With each word that he spoke, Jimmy seemed to relax a little more, but he also appeared to be growing older, although I knew it was only a trick of the light. He had lived to be a repository of secrets; now, as they seeped from him at last, so some of his life force went with them.

He sipped his brandy. “Like I said, there’s not mu Srsq„[1]‡ch more to tell.”

Not much more to tell. Only the story of my father’s final day, and the blood that he shed, and the reasons why.

Not much more to tell. Only everything.

Jimmy and Will kept their distance from each other after Will and Elaine returned from Maine with their new child, and they spoke to no one else of what they knew. Then, one December night, Jimmy and Will got drunk together at Chumley’s and the White Horse, and Will thanked Jimmy for all that he had done, for his loyalty and his friendship and for killing the woman who had taken Caroline’s life.

“You think of her?” asked Jimmy.

“Caroline?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes. More than sometimes.”

“Did you love her?”

“I don’t know. If I didn’t then, I do now. Does that make any sense?”

“As much as anything does. You ever visit the grave?”

“Just a couple of times since the funeral.”

Jimmy remembered the funeral, in a quiet corner of Bayside Cemetery. Caroline had told Will that she didn’t have much time for organized religion. Her folks had been Protestants of some stripe, so they found a minister who said the right things as she and the child were laid in the ground. Will, Jimmy, and the rabbi Epstein were the only other people in attendance. Epstein had told them that the male infant had come from one of the hospitals in the city. His mother had been a junkie, and the kid hadn’t lived for more than a couple of hours after he was born. The mother didn’t care that her child was dead or, if she did, she didn’t show it. She would later, Jimmy believed. He couldn’t countenance the possibility that a woman, no matter how sick or high she was, could remain untroubled by the death of her child. Elaine’s own labor had been discreetly induced while she was in Maine. There had been no formal burial. After she had made the decision to stay with Will, and to protect the child cut from Caroline Carr, Epstein had spoken with her over the phone, and had made her understand how important it was that everyone believed Caroline’s child was Elaine’s own. She had been given time to mourn her own baby, to cradle the small, dead thing in her arms, and then it was taken from her.

“I’d go more often, but it upsets Elaine,” said Will.

I’ll bet it does, thought Jimmy. He didn’t know how the marriage had survived and, from the hints Will had dropped, it wasn’t entirely certain that it would survive. Still, Jimmy’s respect for Elaine Parker had only grown in the aftermath of what had occurred. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what she felt as she looked at her husband, and at the child she was raising as her own. He wondered if she could yet even distinguish hatred from love.

“I always bring two bunches of flowers,” continued Will. “One fo Rfron dr Caroline, and one for the kid they buried with her. Epstein said it was important. It had to look like I was mourning both of them, just in case.”

“In case what?”

“In case someone is watching,” said Will.

“They’re gone,” said Jimmy. “You saw them both die.”

“Epstein thinks there might be others. Worse than that…”

He stopped talking.

“What could be worse?” asked Jimmy.

“That, somehow, they might come back.”

“What does that mean, ‘come back’?”

“Doesn’t matter. The rabbi’s fantasies.”