MONDAY MORNING Celeste was in the kitchen with her cousin Annabeth as the house filled with mourners and Annabeth stood over the stovetop, cooking with a detached intensity, when Jimmy, fresh from the shower, stuck his head in to ask if he could help with anything.
When they were kids, Celeste and Annabeth had been more like sisters than first cousins. Annabeth had been the only girl in a family of boys, and Celeste had been the only child of parents who couldn’t stand each other, so they’d spent a lot of time together, and in junior high had talked on the phone almost every night. That had changed, in almost imperceptible increments, over the years, as the estrangement between Celeste’s mother and Annabeth’s father had widened, moving from cordial to frosty to hostile. And somehow, without any single event to point to, that estrangement had wormed its way down from a brother and sister to their daughters, until Celeste and Annabeth saw each other on only the more formal occasions—weddings, after giving birth and at the subsequent christenings, occasionally on Christmas and Easter. It was the lack of a clear reason that got to Celeste most, and it stabbed her that a relationship that had once seemed unbreakable could slip apart so easily due to nothing more than time, family turmoil, and growth spurts.
Things had been better since her mother had died, though. Just last summer, she and Dave had gotten together with Annabeth and Jimmy for a casual cookout, and over the winter they’d gone out for dinner and drinks twice. Each time the conversation had come a little easier, and Celeste had felt ten years of bewildered isolation fall away and find a name: Rosemary.
Annabeth had been there for her when Rosemary died. She’d come to the house every morning and stayed until dark for three days. She’d baked and helped with the funeral arrangements and sat with Celeste while she’d wept for a mother who’d never shown much in the way of love, but had been her mother, nonetheless.
And now Celeste was going to be here for Annabeth, though the thought of someone as fearsomely self-contained as Annabeth needing support was alien for most, Celeste included.
But she stood by her cousin and let her cook and got her food from the fridge when she asked for it and fielded most of the phone calls.
And now here was Jimmy, less than twenty-four hours after he’d discovered his daughter was dead, asking his wife if she needed anything. His hair was still wet and barely combed, and his shirt was damp against his chest. He was barefoot, and pockets of grief and lack of sleep hung below his eyes, and all Celeste could think was, Jesus, Jimmy, what about you? Do you ever think about you?
All the other people who packed the house right now—filling the living room and the dining room, milling near the front of the hall, piling their coats on the beds in Nadine and Sara’s room—were looking to Jimmy, as if it wouldn’t occur to them to look out for him. As if he alone could explain this brutal joke to them, soothe the anguish in their brains, hold them up when the shock wore off and their bodies sagged under fresh waves of pain. The aura of command Jimmy possessed was of an effortless sort, and Celeste often wondered if he was aware of it, if he recognized it for the burden it must be, especially at a time like this.
“What’s that?” Annabeth said, her eyes on the bacon crackling below her in a black pan.
“You need anything?” Jimmy asked. “I can work the stove a bit, you want.”
Annabeth gave the stovetop a quick, weak smile and shook her head. “No, I’m fine.”
Jimmy looked at Celeste as if to say: Is she?
Celeste nodded. “We’ve got things covered in here, Jim.”
Jimmy looked back over at his wife, and Celeste could feel the tenderest of aches in the look. She could feel another teardrop piece of Jimmy’s heart detach and free-fall down the inside of his chest. He leaned in and reached across the stove and wiped a bead of sweat from Annabeth’s cheekbone with his index finger, and Annabeth said, “Don’t.”
“Look at me,” Jimmy whispered.
Celeste felt like she should leave the kitchen, but she feared her moving would snap something between her cousin and Jimmy, something too fragile.
“I can’t,” Annabeth said. “Jimmy? If I look at you, I’ll lose it, and I can’t lose it with all these people here. Please?”
Jimmy leaned back from the stove. “Okay, honey. Okay.”
Annabeth whispered, her head down, “I just don’t want to lose it again.”
“I understand.”
For a moment, Celeste felt as if they stood naked before her, as if she were witness to something between a man and his wife that was as intimate as if she were watching them make love.
The door at the other end of the hall opened, and Annabeth’s father, Theo Savage, entered the house, came down the hall with a case of beer on each shoulder. He was a huge man, a florid, jowly Kodiak of a human being with an odd dancer’s grace as he squeezed down the narrow hall with the cases of beer on his boat-mast shoulders. Celeste was always a bit amazed to think that this mountain had sired so many stunted male offspring—Kevin and Chuck being the only sons who’d gotten some of his height and bulk, Annabeth the only child to inherit his physical grace.
“Behind you, Jim,” Theo said, and Jimmy stepped out of the way as Theo spun delicately around him and moved into the kitchen. He brushed Celeste’s cheek with his lips and a soft “How ya doing, honey?” then placed both cases on the kitchen table and wrapped his arms around his daughter’s belly, pressed his chin to her shoulder.
“You holding up, sweetie?”
Annabeth said, “Trying, Dad.”
He kissed the side of her neck—“My girl”—and then he turned to Jimmy. “You got some coolers, we can fill ’em up.”
They filled the coolers on the floor by the pantry and Celeste went back to unwrapping all the food that had been brought over once friends and family had begun returning to the house early this morning. There was so much of it—Irish soda bread, pies, croissants, muffins, pastries, and three different plates of potato salad. Bags of rolls, platters of deli meat, Swedish meatballs in an oversize Crock-Pot, two cooked hams, and one massive turkey under crinkled tinfoil. There was no real reason for Annabeth to cook—they all knew that—but they all understood: she needed to. So she cooked bacon and sausage links and two heaping panfuls of scrambled eggs, and Celeste moved the food out to a table that had been pressed against the dining room wall. She wondered if all this food was an attempt to comfort the loved ones of the dead or if they somehow hoped to eat the grief, to gorge on it and wash it down with Cokes and alcohol, coffee and tea, until it filled and bloated everyone to the point of sleep. That’s what you did at sadness gatherings—at wakes, at funerals, at memorial services and occasions like this: you ate and you drank and you talked until you couldn’t eat or drink or talk anymore.
She saw Dave through the crowd in the living room. He sat beside Kevin Savage on a couch, the two of them talking, but neither of them looking particularly animated or comfortable, both of them leaning so far forward on the couch it was almost like a race to see who’d fall off first. Celeste felt a twinge of pity for her husband—for the minor, but everlasting, air of the foreign that seemed to hover around him sometimes, particularly in this crowd. They all knew him, after all. They all knew what had happened to him when he was a boy, and even if they could live with it and not judge him (and they probably could), Dave couldn’t entirely, couldn’t ease completely into a comfort zone around people who’d known him his whole life. Whenever he and Celeste went out with small groups of co-workers or friends from outside the neighborhood, Dave would be as laid-back and confident as they come, quick with the droll aside or quirky observation, as easygoing a person as you’d ever meet. (Her friends and their husbands from Ozma’s Hair Design loved Dave.) But here, where he’d grown up and planted roots, he always looked like he was a half-sentence behind every conversation, a half-step out of beat with everyone else’s stride, the last one to get a joke.
She tried to catch his eye and give him a smile, let him know that as long as she was in the apartment, he wasn’t entirely isolated. But a knot of people found their way to the open archway that separated the dining room from the living room, and Celeste lost sight of him.
It was usually in a crowd when you most noticed how little you saw or spent quality time with the person you loved and lived with. She hadn’t seen much of Dave period this week, outside of their Saturday night on the kitchen floor after he’d almost been mugged. And she’d seen barely any of him since yesterday when Theo Savage had called at six o’clock to say, “Hey, honey, we got some bad news. Katie’s dead.”
Celeste’s initial reaction: “She is not, Uncle Theo.”
“Sweetie, I’m dying here just telling you. But she is. Little girl was found murdered.”
“Murdered.”
“In Pen Park.”
Celeste had looked over at the TV on the counter, at the lead story on the six o’clock news where they were still covering it live, a helicopter shot of police personnel forming a crowd by one end of the drive-in screen, the reporters still in the dark as to the name of the victim, but confirming that a young woman’s body had been found.
Not Katie. No, no, no.
Celeste had told Theo she’d get over to Annabeth’s right away, and that’s where she’d been, except for a catnap back at her own place between three and six this morning, since the phone call.
And yet she still couldn’t quite believe it. Even after all the crying she’d done with Annabeth and Nadine and Sara. Even after she’d held Annabeth on the living room floor as her cousin shook for five violent minutes of heaving spasms. Even after she’d found Jimmy standing in the dark of Katie’s bedroom, his daughter’s pillow held up to his face. He hadn’t been weeping or talking to himself or making any noise whatsoever. He merely stood with that pillow pressed to his face and breathed in the smell of his daughter’s hair and cheeks, over and over. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale…
Even after all that, it still hadn’t sunk in entirely. Katie, she felt, would walk through that door any minute now, bounce into the kitchen and steal a piece of bacon from the plate on the stove. Katie couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t.
Maybe if only because there was that thing, that illogical thing clenched in the farthest crevice of Celeste’s brain, that thing she’d felt upon seeing Katie’s car on the news and thinking—again, illogically—blood = Dave.
And she felt Dave now on the other side of the crowd in the living room. She felt his isolation, and she knew that her husband was a good man. Flawed, but good. She loved him, and if she loved him he was good, and if he was good, then the blood on Katie’s car had nothing to do with the blood she’d cleaned off Dave’s clothes on Saturday night. And so Katie must still, somehow, be alive. Because all other alternatives were horrifying.
And illogical. Completely illogical, Celeste felt certain as she headed back toward the kitchen for more food.
She almost bumped into Jimmy and her uncle Theo as they lugged a cooler across the kitchen floor toward the dining room, Theo pivoting out of the way the last second and saying, “You gotta watch this one, Jimmy. She’s hell on wheels.”
Celeste smiled demurely, the way Uncle Theo expected women to smile, and swallowed against the sensation she got whenever Uncle Theo looked at her—a sensation she’d been experiencing since she was twelve years old—that his glances lingered just a little too long.
They manhandled the oversize cooler past her, and they looked like such an odd pair—Theo, ruddy and oversize in body and voice; Jimmy, quiet and fair and so stripped of body fat or any hint of excess, he always looked like he’d just come back from boot camp. They parted the crowd milling near the doorway as they pulled the cooler over by the table against the dining room wall, and Celeste noticed that the entire room turned to watch them place it under the table, as if the burden between them suddenly wasn’t an oversize cooler of hard red plastic but the daughter Jimmy would bury this week, the daughter who had brought them all here to mingle and eat and see if they had the courage to say her name.
To watch them stock the coolers side by side and then work their way together through the crowds in the living room and dining room—Jimmy understandably subdued but pausing to thank each guest he met with an almost genteel warmth and double-palm handshake and Theo his usual blustery, force-of-nature self—several folks commented on how close they seemed to have become over the years, the way they moved through that room almost like a true father-and-son tandem.
You never would have thought it possible when Jimmy had first married Annabeth. Theo wasn’t known for his friends back then. He was a boozer and a brawler, a man who’d supplemented his income as a taxi dispatcher by working nights as a bouncer at various buckets of blood and really liking the work. He was gregarious and quick to laugh, but there was always challenge in his jolly handshakes, threat in his chuckles.
Jimmy, on the other hand, had been quiet and serious since coming back from Deer Island. He was friendly, but in a reserved way, and at gatherings he tended to hang back in the shadows. He was the kind of guy, when he said something, you listened. It was just that he spoke so rarely, you were almost on edge wondering when, or if, anything would come out of his mouth.
Theo was enjoyable, if not particularly likable. Jimmy was likable, though not particularly enjoyable. The last thing anyone would have expected would be for these two to become friends. But here they were, Theo watching Jimmy’s back like he might have to reach out at any moment and put his hand against it, keep Jimmy from hitting the back of his head against the floor, Jimmy occasionally pausing to say something into Theo’s oversize prime rib of an ear before they moved on through the crowd. Best of pals, people said. That’s what they look like, best of pals.
SINCE IT was closing in on noon—well, eleven, actually, but that was noon somewhere—most of the people dropping by the house now brought booze instead of coffee and meats instead of pastries. When the fridge filled, Jimmy and Theo Savage went searching for more coolers and ice upstairs in the third-floor Savage apartment—the one Val shared with Chuck, Kevin, and Nick’s wife, Elaine, who dressed in black, either because she considered herself a widow until Nick came back from prison or, as some people said, because she just liked black.
Theo and Jimmy found two coolers in the pantry beside the dryer and several bags of ice in the freezer. They filled the coolers, tossed the plastic bags in the trash, and were cutting back through the kitchen when Theo said, “Hey, hold up a sec, eh, Jim.”
Jimmy looked at his father-in-law.
Theo nodded at a chair. “Take a load off.”
Jimmy did. He placed the cooler beside the chair and sat down, waited for Theo to get to the point. Theo Savage had raised seven kids in this very apartment, a small three-bedroom with sloping floors and noisy pipes. Theo once told Jimmy that he figured this meant he didn’t have to apologize to anyone for anything for the rest of his life. “Seven kids,” he’d said to Jimmy, “no more’n two years apart between any of ’em, all screaming their lungs out in that shitty apartment. People’d talk about the joys of childhood, right? I’d come home from work into all that noise and go, ‘Fucking show me.’ I didn’t get no joy. Got a lot of headaches, though. Ton of those.”
Jimmy knew from Annabeth that when her father came home to those headaches, he usually only stuck around long enough to eat his dinner and go back out again. And Theo had told Jimmy that he’d never lost much sleep when it came to child rearing. He’d had mostly boys, and boys were simple in Theo’s opinion—you fed them, taught them how to fight and play ball, and they were pretty much good to go. Any coddling they needed, they’d get from their mother, come to the old man when they needed money for a car or someone to post bail. It was the daughters you spoiled, he told Jimmy.
“Is that what he called it?” Annabeth said when Jimmy mentioned it.
Jimmy wouldn’t have cared what kind of parent Theo had been if Theo didn’t take every opportunity to weigh in on Jimmy and Annabeth’s deficiencies as parents, tell them with a smile that no offense, mind you, but he wouldn’t let a kid get away with that.
Jimmy usually just nodded and said thanks and ignored him.
Now Jimmy could see that wise-old-man gleam in Theo’s eyes as Theo sat down in the chair across from him and looked down at the floor. He gave a rueful smile to the clamor of feet and voices from the apartment below. “Seems like you only see your family and friends at weddings and wakes. Don’t it, Jim?”
“Sure,” Jimmy said, still trying to shake the feeling he’d had since four o’clock yesterday that his true self hovered above his body, treading air with slightly frantic strokes, trying to figure a way back in through his own skin before he got tired from all that flapping and sank like a stone to the black core of the earth.
Theo put his hands on his knees and looked at Jimmy until Jimmy raised his head and met his eyes. “How you handling this so far?”
Jimmy shrugged. “It hasn’t totally sunk in yet.”
“Gonna hurt like hell when it does, Jim.”
“I imagine.”
“Like hell. I can guarantee you that.”
Jimmy shrugged again and felt an inkling of some kind of emotion—was it anger?—bubble up from the pit of his stomach. This was what he needed right now: a pep talk on pain from Theo Savage. Shit.
Theo leaned forward. “When my Janey died? Bless her soul, Jim, I was no good for six months. One day she was here, my beautiful wife, and the next day? Gone.” He snapped his thick fingers. “God gained an angel that day, and I lost a saint. But my kids were all grown by then, thank Christ. I mean, I could afford to grieve for six months. I had that luxury. But you, though, you don’t.”
Theo leaned back in his chair and Jimmy felt that bubbling sensation again. Janey Savage had died ten years ago, and Theo had climbed into a bottle for a lot more than six months. More like two years. It was the same bottle he’d been renting for most of his life, he just took out a mortgage after Janey passed away. When she’d been alive, Theo had paid Janey about as much attention as week-old bread.
Jimmy tolerated Theo because he had to—he was his wife’s father, after all. From the outside looking in, they probably seemed like friends. Maybe Theo thought they were. And age had mellowed Theo to the point that he openly loved his daughter and spoiled his grandkids. But it was one thing not to judge a guy for past sins. It was another thing to take advice from him.
“So, you see what I’m saying?” Theo said. “You make sure you don’t let your grief become an indulgence, Jim, and, you know, pull you away from your domestic responsibilities.”
“My domestic responsibilities,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah. You know, you gotta take care of my daughter, those little girls. They got to be your priority now.”
“Uh-huh,” Jimmy said. “You figured that might slip my mind, Theo?”
“Ain’t saying it would, Jim. Saying it could. That’s all.”
Jimmy studied Theo’s left kneecap, pictured it exploding in a puff of red. “Theo.”
“Yeah, Jim.”
Jimmy saw the other kneecap blow up and shifted to the elbows. “You think we could have waited on this conversation?”
“No time like the present.” Theo let loose his boom of a laugh, but there was a warning to it.
“Tomorrow, say.” Jimmy’s gaze left Theo’s elbows and rose to his eyes. “I mean, tomorrow would have been all right. Wouldn’t it, Theo?”
“What I say about the present, Jimmy?” Theo was getting annoyed. He was a big man with a violent temper and Jimmy knew that scared some people, that Theo could see the fear in faces on the street, that he’d grown accustomed to it and confused it with respect. “Hey, the way I look at it, there’s no good time to have this conversation. Am I right? So I figured I’d just get it out of the way. ASAP, as it were.”
“Oh, sure,” Jimmy said. “Hey, like you said, no time like the present. Right?”
“Right. Good kid.” Theo patted Jimmy’s knee and stood up. “You’ll get through this, Jimmy. You’ll move on. You’ll carry the pain, but you’ll move on. ’Cause you’re a man. I said to Annabeth—your wedding night?—I said, ‘Honey, you got yourself a real old-school man there. The perfect guy, I said. A champ. A guy who—’”
“Like they put her in a bag,” Jimmy said.
“What’s that?” Theo looked down at him.
“That’s what Katie looked like when I identified her in the morgue last night. Like someone had put her in a bag and beaten the bag with pipes.”
“Yeah, well, don’t let it—”
“Couldn’t even tell what race she was, Theo. Coulda been black, coulda been Puerto Rican like her mother. Coulda been Arab. She didn’t look white, though.” Jimmy looked at his hands, clasped together between his knees, and noticed stains on the kitchen floor, a brown one by his left foot, mustard by the table leg. “Janey died in her sleep, Theo. All due respect and shit, but there you go. She went to bed, never woke up. Peaceful.”
“You don’t need to talk about Janey. All right?”
“My daughter, though? She was murdered. There’s a bit of a difference.”
For a moment, the kitchen was silent—buzzing with silence, really, the way only an empty apartment can when the one below is filled with people—and Jimmy wondered if Theo would be dumb enough to keep talking. Come on, Theo, say something stupid. I’m in that kind of mood, like I need to take this bubbling inside of me and push it on somebody.
Theo said, “Look, I understand,” and Jimmy let loose a sigh through his nostrils. “I do. But, Jim, you don’t have to get all—”
“What?” Jimmy said. “I don’t have to get all what? Someone put a gun to my daughter’s flesh and blew the back of her head out, and you want to make sure I got my—my what?—my grief priorities straight? Please, tell me. Do I got that part right? You want to stand here and play fucking grand patriarch?”
Theo looked down at his shoes and breathed heavily through his nostrils, both fists clenched and flexing. “I don’t think I deserve that.”
Jimmy stood and placed his chair back against the kitchen table. He lifted a cooler off the floor. He looked at the door. He said, “Can we go back down now, Theo?”
“Sure,” Theo said. He left his chair where it was and lifted the other cooler off the floor. He said, “Okay, okay. Bad idea, me trying to talk to you this morning of all mornings. You’re not ready yet. But—”
“Theo? Just leave it. Just don’t talk. How about that? Okay?”
Jimmy hefted the cooler and started back downstairs. He wondered if maybe he’d hurt Theo’s feelings, then decided he really didn’t give a shit if he had. Fuck him. Right about now they’d be starting the autopsy on Katie. Jimmy could still smell her crib, but down in the medical examiner’s office, they were laying out the scalpels and chest spreaders, powering up their bone saws.
LATER, AFTER it had thinned out a bit, Jimmy went out onto the back porch and sat under the flapping clothes that had been hanging from the lines stretched across the porch since Saturday afternoon. He sat there with the sun warming him and a pair of Nadine’s denim overalls swaying back and forth through his hair. Annabeth and the girls had cried all last night, filled the apartment with their weeping, and Jimmy had figured he’d join them any second. But he hadn’t. He had screamed on that slope when he saw the look in Sean Devine’s eyes that told him his daughter was dead. Screamed himself hoarse. But outside of that, he hadn’t been able to feel anything. So he sat on the porch now and willed the tears to come.
He tortured himself with snapshots of Katie as a baby, Katie on the other side of that scarred table at Deer Island, Katie crying herself to sleep in his arms six months after he’d gotten out of jail, asking him when her mommy was coming back. He saw little Katie squealing in the tub and eight-year-old Katie riding her bike back from school. He saw Katie smiling and Katie pouting and Katie scrunching her face up in anger and scrunching it up again in confusion as he helped her with long division at the kitchen table. He saw an older Katie sitting on the swing set out back with Diane and Eve, lazing away a summer day, the three of them gawky with preadolescence and braces and legs growing longer and faster than the rest of them could catch up with. He saw Katie lying on her stomach on her bed with Sara and Nadine crawling all over her. He saw her in her junior prom dress. He saw her sitting beside him in his Grand Marquis, chin trembling, as she pulled away from the curb the first day he’d taught her to drive. He saw her screaming and petulant and in his face through her teen years, and yet those images he often found more endearing than the cute, sunshiny ones.
He saw her and saw her and saw her and yet he couldn’t cry.
It’ll come, a calm voice whispered inside of him. You’re just in shock.
But the shock’s wearing off, he answered the voice in his head. Has been since Theo started fucking with me downstairs.
And once it wears off, you’ll feel something.
I feel something already.
That’s grief, the voice said. That’s sorrow.
It’s not grief. It’s not sorrow. It’s rage.
You’ll feel some of that, too. But you’ll get past it.
I don’t want to get past it.