“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.”
“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.