The Lovers

“Jesus. Fantasies is right.”

Jimmy raised his hand for another round of drinks.

“And the woman, the one I shot? What did they do with her?” he asked.

“They burned her body and scattered the ashes. You know, I’d like to have taken a minute with her, before she died.”

“So you could have asked her why,” said Jimmy.

“Yes.”

“She wouldn’t have told you anything. I could see it in her eyes. And-”

“Go on.”

“It’ll sound strange.”

Will laughed. “After all that we’ve been through, could anything sound strange?”

“I suppose not.”

“So?”

“She wasn’t afraid to die.”

“She was a fanatic. Fanatics are too crazy to be afraid.”

“No, it was more than that. I thought, just before I fired, that she smiled at me, as if it didn’t matter if I killed her or not. And that stuff about being ‘beyond your law.’ Jesus, she gave me the creeps.”

“She was sure that she’d done what she came to do. As far as she was concerned, Caroline was dead, and so was her baby.”

Jimmy frowned. “Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t sound like he believed it, and he wondered at what Epstein had told Will, about how they might come back, but he couldn’t figure out what that might mean, and Will wouldn’t tell him.

In the years that followed, they rarely d R &rsquoiscussed the subject. Epstein did not contact either Will or Jimmy, although Will thought that he had sometimes seen the rabbi when Will took his family into the city to shop or to see a movie or a show. Epstein never acknowledged his presence on those occasions, and Will did not approach him, but he had the sense that Epstein, both in person and through others, was keeping an eye on Will, his wife, and, most especially, his son.

Only very reluctantly would Will tell Jimmy of the state of his relationship with his wife. It had never recovered from his betrayal, and he knew that it never would, yet at least they were still together. But there were times when his wife would be distant from him, both emotionally and physically, for weeks on end. She struggled too with their son or, as she would throw at Will when her rage and hurt got the upper hand, “your son.” But, slowly, that began to change, for the boy knew no mother but her. Will thought that the turning point came when Charlie, then eight years old, was struck by a car while learning to ride his new bike around the neighborhood. Elaine was in the yard when it happened, saw the car strike the bike and the boy fly into the air and land hard upon the road. As she ran, she heard him calling for her: not for his father, to whom he seemed naturally to turn for so many things, but for her. His left arm was badly broken-she could see that as soon as she reached him-and there was blood pouring from a wound in his scalp. He was struggling to remain conscious, and something told her that it was important for him to stay with her, that he should not close his eyes. She called his name, over and over, as she took a coat from the driver of the car and, gently, placed it under the boy’s head. She was crying, and he saw that she was crying.

“Mommy,” he said softly. “Mommy, I’m sorry.”

“No,” she replied, “I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault.”

And she stayed with him, kneeling over him, whispering his name, the palm of her hand caressing his face; and she sat beside him in the ambulance; and she sat outside the theater as they operated on him to stitch his scalp and set his arm; and hers was the first face he saw when he came to.

After that, things were better between them.

“My father told you all this?”

“No,” said Jimmy. “She told me, after he died. She said you were all that she had left of him, but that wasn’t why she loved you. She loved you because you were her child. She was the only mother you knew, and you were the only son she had. She said that she’d sometimes forgotten that, or didn’t want to believe it, but as time went by she realized the truth of it.”

He got up to go to the bathroom. I remained seated, thinking of my mother in her final days, lying transformed in her hospital bed, so altered by the disease that I hadn’t recognized her when I’d first entered her room, believing instead that the nurse had made some mistake when she directed me down the corridor. But then she made some small gesture in her sleep, a raising of her right hand, and even in her illness the grace of it was familiar to me, and in that moment I knew it was her. In the days that followed, as I waited for her to die, she had only a few hours of lucidity. Her voice was almost gone, and it seemed to pain her to speak, so i Rmed monstead I read to her from my college texts: poetry, short stories, snippets from the newspaper that I knew would interest her. Her father would come over from Scarborough, and we would talk to each other as she dozed between us.

Did she consider, as she felt the darkness clouding her consciousness like ink through water, telling me all that she had withheld from me? I am sure that she did, but I understand now why she did not. I think that she may also have warned my grandfather to say nothing, because she believed that if I knew the truth then I might begin digging.

And if I began digging, I would draw them to me.

Jimmy went to the bathroom. When he returned, I saw that he had splashed water on his face, but he had not dried it properly, and the drops looked like tears.

“On that last night…,” he began.

They were in Cal’s together, Jimmy and Will, celebrating Jimmy’s birthday. Some things had changed in the Ninth, but they were still the same in many ways. There were galleries where once there had been dive bars and deserted buildings, and shaky underground movies were being shown in empty storefronts that were now functioning as avant-garde theaters. A lot of the old places were still there, although their time too would soon come to an end, some of them with shadows cast over the memories of them. At Second and Fifth, the Binibon was still serving greasy chicken salad, but now people looked at the Binibon and recalled how, in 1981, one of its customers had been Jack Henry Abbott, an ex-con who had been championed by Norman Mailer, who had worked for his release. One night, Abbott got into an argument with a waiter, asked him to step outside, and then stabbed him to death. Jimmy and Will had been among those cleaning up the aftermath, the two men, like the precinct that they worked, both changed yet still the same, altered in aspect but still in uniform. They had never made sergeant, and they never would. That was the price they had paid for what had happened on the night Caroline Carr died.

They were still good cops, though, one of the small cadre of city, transit, and housing officers who did more than the minimum, fighting the general strain of apathy that had infected the force, in part a consequence of a widespread belief that the suits and brass at the Puzzle Palace, as One Police Plaza was known to the rank and file, were out to get them. It wasn’t entirely untrue either. Make too many drug busts and you attracted the attention of your superiors for all the wrong reasons. Make too many arrests and, because of the overtime payments required to process them and see them through court, you were accused of taking money from the pockets of other cops. Best to keep your head down until you could cash out at twenty. The result was that there were now fewer and fewer older cops to act as mentors to the new recruits. By virtue of their years on the force, Jimmy and Will practically qualified as village elders. They had become part of the plainclothes Anticrime Unit, a dangerous assignment that involved patrolling high-crime areas waiting for signs that something was about to go off, usually a gun. For the first time, both were talking seriously about cashing out.