John Connolly - The Lovers

Epstein was silent. “What you’re suggesting isn’t-”

Will cut him off.

“Don’t tell me that! You make this happen. You go to your friend, Mr. Quiet in his nice suit, and you tell him what I want. Otherwise, I swear I’ll make so much noise that your ears will bleed.” Suddenly, the energy began to leach from his body. He wanted to crawl into bed and hold his wife, hold his wife and their dead child. “Look, you told me that the boy would have to be taken care of. I can take care of him. Hide him with me. Hide him in plain sight. Please.”

He heard Epstein sigh. “I will talk to our friends,” he said at last. “Give me the name of the doctor who is looking after your wife.”

Will did so. The number was in the address book beside the telephone.

“Where is your wife now?”

“She’s asleep upstairs. She took some pills.”

“I’ll call you in one hour,” said Epstein, and he hung up.

One hour and five minutes later, the phone rang. Will, who had been sitting on the floor beside it, picked it up before it had a chance to ring a second time.

“When your wife wakes up, Mr. Parker, you must tell her the truth,” said Epstein. “Ask her to forgive you, then tell her what you propose.”

Will did not sleep that night. Instead, he mourned for Caroline Carr, and when dawn broke he put his grief for her aside and prepared for what he felt certain would be the death of his marriage.

“He called me that morning,” said Jimmy. “He told me what he intended to do. He was prepared to gamble everything on the possibility of holding on to the boy: his career; his marriage; the happiness, even the sanity, of his wife.”

He was about to pour some more wine into his glass, then stopped.

“I can’t drink any more,” he said. “The wine looks like blood.” He pushed the bottle and the glass away. “We’re nearly done anyway, for now. I’ll finish this part, and then I have to sleep. We can talk again tomorrow. If you want, you can spend the night. There’s a guest room.”

I opened my mouth to object, but he raised his hand.

“Believe me, when I’ve finished tonight, you’ll have enough to think about. You’ll be grateful that I’ve stopped.”

He leaned forward, his hands cupped before him, and I saw that they were trembling.

“So your old man was waiting at your mother &rsquo R qmother &rs;s bedside when she woke…”

I think, sometimes, of what my father and mother endured that day. I wonder if there was a kind of madness to his actions, spurred on by his fear that he seemed destined to lose two children, one to death and the other to an anonymous existence surrounded by those who were not related by blood to him. He must have known, as he stood above my mother, debating whether to wake her or let her sleep on for a time, delaying the moment of confession, that it would sunder relations with her forever. He was about to inflict twin wounds upon her: the pain of his betrayal, and the perhaps greater agony of learning that he had succeeded in doing with another what she had failed to do for him. She was carrying a dead child in her womb, while her husband had, only hours before, looked upon his own son, born of a dead mother. He loved his wife, and she loved him, and he was now going to hurt her so badly that she would never fully recover.

He did not tell anyone of what transpired between them, not even Jimmy Gallagher. All I know is that my mother left him for a time and fled to Maine, a precursor to the more permanent flight that would occur after my father’s death, and a distant echo of my own actions after my wife and child were taken from me. She was not my birth mother, and I understand now the reasons for the distance there was between us, even unto her death, but we were more similar than either of us could have imagined. She took me north after the Pearl River killings, and her father, my beloved grandfather, became a guiding force in my life, but my mother also assumed a greater role as I came of age. I think, sometimes, that only after my father died did she truly find it in her heart to forgive him, and perhaps to forgive me the circumstances of my birth. Slowly, we drew closer to each other. She taught me the names of trees and plants and birds, for this was her place, this northern state, and although I did not fully appreciate then the knowledge that she was trying to impart, I think I understood the reasons for her wanting to communicate it to me. We were both grieving, but she would not allow me to be lost to it. And so each day we would walk together for a time, regardless of the weather, and sometimes we would talk, and sometimes we would not, but it was enough that we were together, and we were alive. During those years, I became hers, and now, every time I name to myself a tree, or a flower, or a tiny creeping thing, it is a small act of remembrance for her.

Elaine Parker called her husband after a week had passed, and they spoke for an hour. Will was granted unpaid leave, authorized, to the puzzlement of some at the precinct, by the deputy commissioner for legal affairs, Frank Mancuso. Will went north to join his wife, and when they returned to New York they did so with a child, and a tale of a difficult, premature birth. They named the boy Charlie, after his father’s uncle, Charles Edward Parker, who had died at Monte Cassino. The secret friends kept their distance, and it was many years before Will heard from any of them again. And when they did make contact, it was Epstein who was sent, Epstein who told him that the thing they had long feared was upon them once more.

The lovers had returned.

M ICKEY W="2">ALLACE FELT ASthough the mist had followed him from Maine. Tendrils of it drifted past his face, reacting to each movement of his body like a living thing, slowly assuming new shapes before slipping away altogether, as though the darkness were weaving itself into being around him, enfolding him in its embrace as he stood before the small house on Hobart Street in Bay Ridge.

Bay Ridge was almost a suburb of Brooklyn, a neighborhood unto itself. Originally it had consisted mostly of Norwegians, who lived there when it was known as Yellow Hook, in the nineteenth century, and Greeks, with some Irish thrown in, as there always were, but the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the 1970s had changed that makeup as people began to move out to Staten Island, and by the early 1990s Bay Ridge was becoming progressively more Middle Eastern. The bridge dominated the southern end of the area, although Mickey had always felt that it looked more real by night than by day. The lights seemed to give it substance; during the day, by contrast, it looked like a painted back-drop, a gray mass too big for the buildings and streets below, an unreal thing.

Hobart Street lay between Marine Avenue and Shore Road, where a series of benches overlooked Shore Road Park, a steep, tree-lined slope leading down to the Belt Parkway and the waters of the Narrows. At first glance, Hobart seemed to consist only of apartment buildings, but on one side was a small row of brownstone, one-family homes, each separated from its neighbor by a driveway. Only 1219 bore the marks of abandonment and neglect.

The presence of the mist reminded Mickey of what he had experienced out at Scarborough. Now, once again, he was standing before a house that he believed to be empty. This was not his neighborhood, not even his city, yet he did not feel out of place here. After all, it was a crucial element in the story that he had followed for so long, the story that he was now going to set down in print. He had stood here before over the years. The first time was after Charlie Parker’s wife and child had been found, their blood still fresh on the walls and floor. The second time was after Parker had found the Traveling Man, when the reporters had an ending to their story and sought to remind viewers and readers of the beginning. Lights shone upon the walls and windows, and neighbors came onto the street to watch, their proximity to the action a good indication of their willingness to talk, of their desire to be interviewed about what had happened there. Even those who were not residents at the time had opinions, for ignorance was never an obstacle to a good sound bite.