SEAN'S PARENTS LIVED in Wingate Estates, a gated community of two-bedroom stucco town houses thirty miles south of the city. Every twenty units formed a section, and each section had its own pool and a recreational center where they held dances on Saturday nights. A small, par-three golf course stretched around the outer edge of the complex like a fallen slice of crescent moon, and from late spring until early autumn the air hummed with the buzz of cart engines.
Sean's father didn't play golf. He'd long ago decided it was a rich man's game and to take it up would represent some form of betrayal to his blue-collar roots. Sean's mother had tried it for a while, though, and then gave it up because she'd believed her companions secretly laughed at her form, her slight brogue, and her clothing.
So they lived here quietly and, for the most part, friendless, though Sean knew his father had struck up an acquaintanceship with a small Irish plug of a guy named Riley who'd also lived in one of the city's neighborhoods before coming to Wingate. Riley, who had no use for golf either, would occasionally join Sean's father for drinks at the Ground Round on the other side of Route 28. And Sean's mother, a natural, if reflexive, caretaker, often tended to older neighbors with infirmities. She'd drive them to the drugstore to fill prescriptions or to the doctor's so new prescriptions could take up residence in the medicine cabinet beside the older ones. His mother, pushing seventy, felt young and vibrant on these drives, and given that most of the people she helped were widowed, she felt, too, that her and her husband's continued health was a blessing donated from above.
"They're alone," she'd said to Sean once regarding her sickly friends, "and even if the doctors won't tell them, that's what they're dying from."
Often when he pulled past the guard kiosk and drove up the main road, striped every ten yards with yellow speed bumps that rattled his axles, Sean could almost see the ghost streets and ghost neighborhoods and ghost lives the Wingate residents had left behind, as if cold-water flats and dull white iceboxes, wrought-iron fire escapes and shrieking children floated through the present landscape of eggshell stucco and spiky lawns like a morning mist just beyond the limits of his peripheral vision. An irrational guilt would settle in him, the guilt of a son who'd packed his parents away in a retirement home. Irrational, because Wingate Estates wasn't technically a community for people over sixty (though Sean had frankly never seen a resident under that age), and his parents had moved here completely of their own volition, packing up their decades-long complaints about the city and its noise and crime and traffic jams to come here, where, as his father put it, "You can walk at night without looking over your shoulder."
Still, Sean felt as if he'd failed them, as if they'd expected he would have tried harder to keep them near. Sean saw this place and he saw death, or at least a depot en route, and it wasn't just that he hated to think of his parents here-biding their time until the day someone needed to drive them to the doctors-he hated to think of himself here or someplace like it. Yet he knew there was little chance he'd end up anyplace else. And, as it stood now, without kids or a wife to care. He was thirty-six, a little more than halfway toward a Wingate duplex already, with the second half likely to pass at a far more furious clip than the first had.
His mother blew out the candles on her cake at the small dinette table that perched in the alcove between the tiny kitchen and the more spacious living room, and they ate quietly, then sipped their tea to the click of the clock on the wall above them and the hum of the climate-control system vents.
When they were finished, his father stood. "I'll clear the plates."
"No, I'll get them."
"You sit down."
"No, let me."
"Sit, birthday girl."
His mother sat back with a small smile, and Sean's father stacked the plates and took them around the corner into the kitchen.
"Careful with the crumbs," his mother said.
"I'm careful."
"If you don't wash them all the way down the drain, we'll get ants again."
"We had one ant. One."
"We had more," she said to Sean.
"Six months ago," his father said over the running water.
"And mice."
"We've never had mice."
"Mrs. Feingold did. Two of them. She had to get traps."
"We don't have mice."
"That's because I make sure you don't leave crumbs in the sink."
"Jesus," Sean's father said.
Sean's mother sipped her tea and looked over the cup at Sean.
"I clipped an article for Lauren," she said when she'd placed the cup back on the saucer. "I've got it here someplace."
Sean's mother was always clipping articles from the paper and giving them to him when he'd visit. Or else, she'd mail them in stacks of nine or ten, Sean opening the envelope to see them folded neatly together like a reminder of how long it had been since his last visit. The articles varied in topic, but they were all of the household-tip or self-help variety-methods to prevent lint fires in your dryer; how to successfully avoid freezer burn every time; the pros and cons of a living will; how to avoid pickpockets while on vacation; health tips for men in high-stress jobs ("Walk Your Heart to the Century Mark!"). They were his mother's way of sending him love, Sean knew, the equivalent of buttoning his coat and fixing his scarf before he left for school on a January morning, and Sean still smiled when he thought of the clipping that had arrived two days before Lauren left-"Leap into in Vitro!"-his parents never grasping that Sean and Lauren's childlessness was a choice, if anything, one steeped in their shared (though never discussed) fear that they'd be terrible parents.
When she finally had gotten pregnant, they'd kept it from his parents while they tried to figure out if she'd have the baby, their marriage crumbling around them, Sean discovering the affair she'd had with an actor, of all things, starting to ask her, "Whose kid is it, Lauren?" and Lauren coming back with, "Take a paternity test, you're so worried."
They'd backed out of dinners with his parents, made excuses for not being home when they made the drive into the city, and Sean felt his mind breaking apart under the fear that the child wasn't his and the other fear, too-that he wouldn't want it, even if it was.
Since Lauren had left, Sean's mother would only refer to her absence as "taking some sorting-out time," and all the clippings were now for her, not him, as if one day they'd overflow in a drawer to the point that he and Lauren would have to get back together if only so they could close the drawer again.
"You talk to her recently?" Sean's father asked from the kitchen, his face hidden behind the mint-green wall between them.
"Lauren?"
"Uh-huh."
"Well, who else?" his mother said brightly as she rummaged through a drawer in the sideboard.
"She calls. She doesn't say anything."
"Maybe she's just making small talk because she-"
"No. I mean, Dad, she doesn't speak. At all."
"Nothing?"
"Zip."
"Then how do you know it's her?"
"I just know."
"But how?"
"Jesus," Sean said. "I can hear her breathing. Okay?"
"How odd," his mother said. "Do you talk though, Sean?"
"Sometimes. Less and less."
"Well, at least you're communicating somehow," his mother said, and placed the latest clipping down in front of him. "You tell her I thought she'd find this interesting." She sat down and smoothed a wrinkle in the tablecloth with the outer edges of both palms. "When she comes home again," she said, peering at the wrinkle as it dissolved under her hands.
"When she comes home," she repeated, her voice a light wisp, like the voice of a nun, certain of the essential order in all things.
"DAVE BOYLE," Sean said to his father an hour later as they sat at one of the tall bar tables in the Ground Round. "That time he disappeared from in front of our house."
His father frowned and then concentrated on pouring the rest of a Killian's into his frosted mug. As the foam neared the top of the mug and the beer slowed to a trickle of fat drops, his father said, "What-you couldn't look it up in old newspapers?"
"Well-"
"Why ask me? Shit. It was on TV."
"Not when his kidnapper was found," Sean said, hoping that would suffice, that his father wouldn't press him on why Sean had come to him because Sean didn't have a complete answer yet.
It had something to do with needing his father to place him in the context of the event, maybe help him see himself back there in a way newspapers or old case files couldn't. And maybe it was about hoping to talk to his father about something more than just the daily news, the Red Sox's need for a lefty in the bullpen.
It seemed to Sean-sometimes-that he and his father may have once talked about more than just incidental things (just as it seemed that he and Lauren had), but for the life of him, Sean couldn't remember what those things may have been. In the fog that was his remembrance of being young, he feared he'd invented intimacies and moments of clear communication between his father and him that, while they'd achieved a mythic stature over the years, had never happened.
His father was a man of silences and half-sentences that trailed off into nothing, and Sean had spent most of his life interpreting those silences, filling in the blanks left in the wake of those ellipses, creating a concept of what his father meant to say. And lately Sean wondered if he, himself, ever finished sentences as he thought he did, or if he, too, was a creature of silences, silences he'd seen in Lauren, too, and had never done enough about until her silence was the only piece of her he had left. That, and the air hiss on the phone when she called.
"Why you want to go back there?" his father said eventually.
"You know that Jimmy Marcus's daughter was murdered?"
His father looked at him. "That girl in Pen Park?"
Sean nodded.
"I saw the name," his father said, "figured it might be a relative, but his daughter?"
"Yeah."
"He's your age. He has a nineteen-year-old daughter?"
"Jimmy had her when he was, I dunno, seventeen or so, a couple years before he got sent up to Deer Island."
"Aww Jesus," his father said. "That poor son of a bitch. His old man still in prison?"
Sean said, "He died, Dad."
Sean could see that the answer hurt his father, rocked him back to the kitchen on Gannon Street, he and Jimmy's father working on those soft Saturday afternoon beer buzzes as their sons played in the backyard, the thunder of their laughter exploding into the air.
"Shit," his father said. "He die on the outside at least?"
Sean considered lying, but he was already shaking his head. "Inside. Walpole. Cirrhosis."
"When?"
"Not long after you moved. Six years ago, maybe seven."
His father's mouth widened around a silent "seven." He sipped his beer and the liver spots on the back of his hands seemed more pronounced in the yellow light hanging above them. "It's so easy to lose track. To lose time."
"I'm sorry, Dad."
His father grimaced. It was his only response to sympathy or compliments. "Why? You didn't do it. Hell, Tim did himself in when he killed Sonny Todd."
"Over a pool game. Right?"
His father shrugged. "They were both drunk. Who knows anymore? They were drunk and they both had big mouths and bad tempers. Tim's temper was just a lot worse than Sonny Todd's." His father sipped some more beer. "So, what's Dave Boyle's disappearance have to do with-what was her name, was it Katherine? Katherine Marcus?"
"Yeah."
"So what does the one have to do with the other?"
"I'm not saying they do."
"You're not saying they don't."
Sean smiled in spite of himself. Give him a hardened gangbanger in the box any day, some guy trying to lawyer up who knew the system better than most judges, because Sean would crack him. But take one of these old-timers, these hard-as-nails, mistrustful bastards from his father's generation-working stiffs with a lot of pride and no respect for any state or municipal office-and you could bang at them all night, and if they didn't want to tell you anything, you'd still be there in the morning with nothing but the same unanswered questions.
"Hey, Dad, let's not worry about any connections just yet."
"Why not?"
Sean held up a hand. "Okay? Just humor me."
"Oh, sure, it's what's keeping me alive, the chance I might get to humor my own son."
Sean felt his hand tighten around the handle of his glass mug. "I looked up the case file on Dave's abduction. The investigating officer is dead. No one else remembers the case, and it's still listed as unsolved."
"So?"
"So, I remember you coming into my room maybe a year after Dave came home and saying, 'It's over. They got the guys.'"
His father shrugged. "They got one of them."
"So, why didn't-?"
"In Albany," his father said. "I saw the picture in the paper. The guy had confessed to a couple molestations in New York and claimed he'd done a few more in Massachusetts and Vermont. The guy hung himself in his cell before he could get to the particulars. But I recognized the guy's face from the sketch the cop drew in our kitchen."
"You're sure?"
He nodded. "Hundred percent. The investigating detective-his name was, ah-"
"Flynn," Sean said.
His father nodded. "Mike Flynn. Right. I'd kept in contact with him, you know, a bit. So I called him after I saw the picture in the paper, and he said, yeah, it was the same guy. Dave had confirmed it."
"Which one?"
"Huh?"
"Which guy?"
"Oh. The, ah, how'd you describe him? 'The greasy one who looked sleepy.'"
Sean's child's words seemed strange coming out of his father's mouth and across the table at him. "The passenger."
"Yeah."
"And his partner?" Sean said.
His father shook his head. "Died in a car crash. Or so the other one said. That's as far as I know, but I wouldn't put too much stock in what I know. Hell, you had to tell me Tim Marcus was dead."
Sean drained what remained in his mug, pointed at his father's empty glass. "Another?"
His father considered the glass for a bit. "What the hell. Sure."
When Sean came back from the bar with fresh beers, his father was watching Jeopardy! run silently on one of the TV screens above the bar. As Sean sat down, his father said, "Who is Robert Oppenheimer?" to the TV.
"Without the volume," Sean said, "how do you know if you got it right?"
"Because I do," his father said, and poured his beer into his mug, frowning at the stupidity of Sean's question. "You guys do that a lot. I'll never understand it."
"Do what? What guys?"
His father gestured at him with the beer mug. "Guys your age. You ask a lot of questions without thinking the answer might be obvious if you just gave it some friggin' thought."
"Oh," Sean said. "Okay."
"Like this Dave Boyle stuff," his father said. "What does it matter what happened twenty-five years ago to Dave? You know what happened. He disappeared for four days with two child molesters. What happened was exactly what you'd think would happen. But here you come dredging it back up again because..." His father took a drink. "Hell, I don't know why."
His father gave him a befuddled smile and Sean matched it with his own.
"Hey, Dad."
"Yeah."
"You telling me that nothing ever happened in your past that you don't think about, turn over in your head a lot?"
His father sighed. "That's not the point."
"Sure, it is."
"No, it isn't. Bad shit happens to everyone, Sean. Everyone. You ain't special. But your whole generation, you're scab pickers. You just can't leave well enough alone. You have evidence linking Dave to Katherine Marcus's death?"
Sean laughed. The old man had come around his flank, pushing Sean's buttons with the "your generation" slurs while all the time what he wanted to know was if Dave was involved in Katie's death.
"Let's say there are a couple of circumstantial things which make Dave look like someone we'd like to keep an eye on."
"You call that an answer?"
"You call that a question?"
His father's terrific smile broke across his face then and erased a good fifteen years from his face, Sean remembering how that smile could spread through the whole house when he was young, lighting everything up.
"So you were bugging me about Dave because you're wondering if what those guys did to him could turn him into a guy who'd kill a young girl."
Sean shrugged. "Something like that."
His father gave that some thought as he stirred the peanuts in the bowl between them and sipped some more beer. "I don't think so."
Sean chuckled. "You know him that well, do you?"
"No. I just remember him as a kid. He didn't have that kind of thing in him."
"Lot of nice kids grow up to be adults who do shit you wouldn't believe."
His father cocked an eyebrow at him. "You trying to tell me about human nature?"
Sean shook his head. "Just police work."
His father leaned back in his chair, considered Sean with the tug of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "Come on. Enlighten me."
Sean felt his face redden a bit. "Hey, no, I'm just-"
"Please."
Sean felt foolish. It was amazing how fast his father could do that, make him feel as if what would pass as a normal set of observations with most of the people Sean knew was, in his father's eyes, the boy Sean trying to act grown up and merely succeeding at sounding pompous instead.
"Give me a little credit. I think I know a bit about people and crime. It's, you know, my job."
"So you think Dave could have butchered a nineteen-year-old girl, Sean? Dave, who you used to play with in the backyard. That kid?"
"I think anyone's capable of anything."
"So, I could have done it." His father put a hand to his chest. "Or your mother."
"No."
"Better check our alibis."
"I didn't say that. Jesus."
"Sure you did. You said anyone was capable of anything."
"Within reason."
"Oh," his father said loudly. "Well, I didn't hear that part."
He was doing it again-wrapping Sean up in knots, playing him like Sean played suspects in the box. No wonder Sean was so good at interrogation. He'd learned from a master.
They sat in silence for a bit, and eventually his father said, "Hey, maybe you're right."
Sean looked at him, waited for the punch line.
"Maybe Dave could have done what you think. I dunno. I'm just remembering the kid. I don't know the man."
Sean tried to see himself through his father's eyes then. He wondered if that's what his father saw-the kid, not the man-when he looked at his son. Probably hard to do otherwise.
He remembered the way his uncles used to talk about his father, the youngest brother in a family of twelve who'd emigrated from Ireland when his father was five. The "old Bill," they'd say, referring to the Bill Devine who'd existed before Sean was born. The "scrapper." Only now could Sean hear their voices and feel the hint of patronization an older generation feels for a younger, most of Sean's uncles having a good twelve or fifteen years on their baby brother.
They were all dead now. All eleven of his father's brothers and sisters. And here was the baby of the family, closing in on seventy-five, and holed up here in the suburbs by a golf course he'd never use. The last one left, and yet still the youngest, always the youngest, squaring off at all times against even the whiff of condescension from anyone, particularly his son. Blocking out the whole world, if he had to, before he'd endure that, or even the perception of it. Because all those who'd had the right to behave that way toward him had long since passed from the earth.
His father glanced at Sean's beer and tossed some singles onto the table for a tip.
"You about done?" he said.