Absent Friends (17 page)

Laura looked down at the notepad, names and numbers in a tidy list. Names on the left, numbers on the right, ruled blue lines between them like the rungs of a ladder waiting to be climbed.

Stone!
she heard Harry howl.
Stop that simile! Mash that metaphor! Annihilate those allegories! Fight, team, fight!

P
HIL
'
S
S
TORY

Chapter 6

The Invisible Man
Steps Between You and the Mirror

October 31, 2001

Almost always, when Sally spoke about Markie, Phil got the sense that where Sally was, the sun had gone behind clouds. The exception: when she was talking to Kevin. Then her eyes sparkled, and the stories she told her son about his father were funny ones, or tender. And Kevin, a child never happy unless he was in motion, would listen and be still.

“He gave me a kitten once, when we were little,” she said to Kevin when he was eight. Kevin asked if it was Socks. “It was Snowflake. Socks's great-gran.” It had been late on one of their excursion afternoons, the three of them returning from Manhattan, from the circus. Phil didn't like circuses, or zoos, not even aquariums: places where animals were confined to amuse people left him restless and impatient. But Kevin wanted to go to the circus.

“The first time we went, we were ten,” Sally told Phil. He'd just arrived on a late-night boat. The cat had been out late, too, and had followed Phil up the walk, meowing. “Before that there was a show that used to come. Spivey's Traveling Circus. It wasn't much, but when we were little, we didn't know the difference.”

“It doesn't come anymore?”

“They built a Buick dealership on the lot they used to use. Besides, the elephant was old. I think she retired.”

Because Sally knew how Phil felt about circuses, she didn't ask if he'd come. Because Phil knew how Sally felt about traveling solo off Staten Island, he'd pulled three tickets from his shirt pocket a few nights later and asked if anyone had plans for Saturday.

Kevin was wild for the circus, unable to sit still. Each time the acts changed, he tried to watch everything all at once. Finally choosing, he'd lean forward, more and more, then leap up with excitement. His seat would snap up, and every time, he'd turn, stare, and laugh and laugh, delighted that even the chairs were part of the show.

Phil loved watching Kevin, and watching Sally watch Kevin. The circus itself he'd hated, though he was unexpectedly gripped by the high-wire act. Briefly he forgot the sad elephants standing on hind legs and the great cats jumping unnaturally into fire. Jolted by adrenaline as though he were the one somersaulting into space, he waited without breathing for the flyer's arms to make contact with the catcher's. And if they hadn't? Who would have been more frightened, he wondered, who more thrilled, as the flyer fell?

At the start of the ferry trip back—because Kevin was along, it was just a boat ride, and their Brigadoon did not emerge—Kevin, wedged between Phil and Sally on a smooth wooden bench, listened to the story of Sally, Markie, the boys, and Snowflake. The second the tale was over, he pushed off the bench. He swung the circus flashlight Phil had bought him, then gave it to Sally to hold while he played a growling tiger pawing at the trainer's whip. He tried standing on his head like the clowns and asked why the ringmaster didn't do any tricks of his own.

“He's directing everybody,” Sally said.

“Can I be him?”

“You could try. I'm not sure how much fun he has, though.”

Kevin tried directing other passengers to get up and do tricks, but it didn't work, not even once. “It's not fun,” he declared. Then, as though struck by a thought, he pushed back into his place between them on the bench and asked about Snowflake again, and Sally smiled and told the story a second time.

Phil bought them all ice cream when they got off the ferry. The flower shop in the terminal had one bunch of roses left. He bought them when Sally was busy with Kevin and swept them out from behind his back with a big “Ta da!” that made both Sally and Kevin laugh. He stayed at Sally's for another hour. When he left, Kevin jumped up from his toy fire engine, wrapped Phil in a bear hug, and said, “Thanks, Uncle Phil.”

“Any time, pal.”

Kevin dropped to the floor again. He started pushing the engine around the room, but stopped and looked up at Phil. “Were you friends with my daddy, Uncle Phil?”

Oh, it was so much more complicated than that: but Kevin was eight. “Yes.”

“You remember Snowflake?”

“No.”

Kevin's face took on a worried look, as though this were unexpected. “But you remember Socks?”

“Socks? Sure. I think he's out back.”

Kevin nodded and switched his attention to the fire truck. He drove it right through the kitchen and into the yard.

Phil kissed Sally goodbye before he opened the front door. As he passed the driveway, he spotted Kevin squatting there. He would have spoken to him, said goodbye a second time, but Kevin was busy sneaking Socks an unauthorized can of sardines.

That circus afternoon, just before he left, Sally said, “Move in with us.”

Phil didn't answer, but as though he had, she smiled and said, “I know. I just thought I'd try again.”

It was also true that Sally had never given a moment's serious thought to the idea that she and Kevin might leave Pleasant Hills, might move across the water into Phil's world.

When he'd first suggested that, Sally's answer was that she wanted Kevin to live somewhere he belonged, not a place—Phil's downtown loft, she meant—where things had been pushed aside and room made for him.

So Phil offered neutral addresses, worlds they could create together: a co-op on the Upper West Side, and Kevin could go to private school; or a house on Long Island with a pool in the backyard. Sally smiled at these ideas, the same smile Phil had seen her give Kevin when, at six, he brought home a Valentine's Day heart, painted red and stuck with sequins and plastic pearls. And Phil came to understand that “somewhere he belonged” meant only one thing to Sally: it meant Pleasant Hills.

And so the years reeled slowly out, so many years. Sometimes Phil found himself looking around, surprised to be where he was, wondering where those years had gone, wondering sometimes if Sally wondered, too. So many years, when their lives had been locked together while their worlds, to each other, were mist-shrouded, hidden.

That was before.

And since?

Phil had seen little of Sally since September 11. Not even spoken to her as often as he'd wanted. Not since those first frantic hours when they were desperate to find Kevin, Phil calling Sally over and over as the connection broke and came back, Phil jogging thirty blocks uptown to the office of a friend whose power had not gone out so he could scan the names of missing firefighters on website lists as they were updated and grew ever longer.

Jimmy McCaffery's name was one of the first posted. Phil read it with disbelief but no other emotion; that all came later.

Kevin's name never appeared. Phil had called everyone he could think of, everyone he could reach, all of them equally despairing, no one able to help. He had been useless, come up with nothing, but another firefighter, someone Sally didn't know, called Sally in the late afternoon. He told her Kevin was at NYU Hospital, hurt but all right. Sally had called Phil, weeping a mother's tears of relief.

That day Sally couldn't cross the harbor from Staten Island to be with Kevin at the hospital: all ferries were moored, all bridges closed, all trips canceled. So she had gone to church. She wanted, she told Phil on the crackling cell phone, to give thanks for the life of her son, and to pray for the lost.

Phil, sitting at that point on a curb in a milling crowd of strangers, smoke stinging his eyes, said, Good, said, Being with people, the comfort of the church, that's a good idea. I'll go up to the hospital, he promised, I'll go see Kevin. Weeping, she said to tell Kevin she'd come as soon as she could. She asked Phil to call from the hospital. She asked him if he'd be all right. Automatically, he said he would. Maybe she believed him; maybe she just knew there was nothing she could do for him. She told him she loved him and said goodbye. He thumbed off his phone, hearing the echo of Sally's voice, the joyful catch in it. He wondered what was in the voices of the hundreds, thousands, of other mothers, wives, children, clutching for that same golden ghost, hope. What would be in their voices after the phantom flashed and vanished, leaving empty hands, empty air? Or lingered, laughing, just beyond reach, disturbing sleep, distracting days, for a long, long time? And faded, finally disappearing, after that.

Now, on this bright corner six weeks later, it was again Sally's voice that riveted Phil. This time, no joy, no warmth: just cold, windswept distance.

He said again, “I'll meet you on the ferry.”

She said, “No.”

“There's another reporter,” he said. He felt like he was warning her. Against what? He didn't know.

“I don't want you calling me.”

But she didn't hang up.

And this was his chance. To explain, persuade, to show her, tell her: it had all been for her, everything had been for her. A wizard, his opponents called him, one of the Dark Side's best, words his weapon, wielded with a wild, sweeping daring and a jeweler's precision. He could use that weapon now, surely, he could win this battle.

But she was the one to find words first, and those words were only “Goodbye, Phil,” and he was left alone.

M
ARIAN
'
S
S
TORY

Chapter 5

The Bodies of the Birds

October 31, 2001

One blowy, dark autumn day some years ago, Marian had lingered on the steps of Holy Innocents after mass to speak to Father Domingo about secrets.

What had been an early morning cloudburst had retrenched to a hostile dampness; a sky the color and weight of lead sagged over wet sidewalks stuck with fallen leaves. Father Domingo, the keen-eyed junior priest at Holy Innocents, lately come to this church and to his profession (and this was why Marian had selected him: she hoped for the counsel of someone to whom her questions, like most questions, was new and thus worthy of serious thought), had shown no surprise at the gravity of her inquiry or the time and place she had chosen to pursue it.

On the church steps, a cold, determined wind pushed the hem of the priest's cassock around his ankles and tangled Marian's hair. Father Domingo tilted his head to hear her question, then frowned thoughtfully, clasping his hands behind him.

The conundrum she posed was hypothetical. A man carelessly throws a match away, realizes he has started a fire, and runs inside the burning building, rescuing the inhabitants. All are grateful: the man has saved them. Their home is destroyed, their possessions lost, but the man, their rescuer, helps them rebuild. Their losses are great, but they take heart from the selfless spirit of their benefactor. They are not sure they could have gone on, they say, but for his help and his example. He never tells them, and they never learn, that it was he who started the fire.

Marian's questions were two: Do this man's bravery and good deeds outweigh his guilty action? And: Is it cowardly of him to fail to reveal the truth, or courageous of him to bear the burden of this knowledge alone so that people who need something to believe in can continue to believe in him?

“We need never bear our burdens alone,” Father Domingo said, in the suede-soft accent that made him the darling of the Dominicans and Mexicans who worshiped at Holy Innocents. “God stands always ready to share the weight of our burdens.”

Marian's heart sank. Still, she persevered. “Sometimes people can only come to God through good works.”

“This man, then, he is coming to God?”

“I don't know. But the people who believe in him, what if they believe he was sent to them by God, to give them faith?”

“Believing in a mortal man, this is a sad delusion.”

“But if he tells the truth, people might lose their faith.”

“In God? Or in him?” Father Domingo's eyes fixed on Marian's. He seemed to want to bore deep within her, below the protective stones and the nurturing soil, to the roots of her heart. She wanted to look away, but she could not.

The rising wind snatched at her scarf, trying to draw her attention as though to warn her of danger, but Marian had another question, in some ways the only question. “If someone else had seen him throw the match?”

“Would you like to come into the confessional?” Father Domingo suggested.

Marian flushed and shook her head. She had been to confession earlier, had taken communion at mass. Like most people, she was not lacking in sins to confess. But how to be sure what was a sin, what required confession; it was really this that Marian was asking.

The priest met her eyes again and she shuddered: had he found her core and seen the darkness there? “Then you must ask God,” he said.

Marian mumbled her thanks to Father Domingo. She walked slowly down the steps. She would ask God: tonight in her prayers, and tomorrow, and next Sunday at mass. But she had been asking God this question for many years already.

Years later, following mass at St. Ann's on the Sunday after September 11, Marian stood with Sally in the sunshine outside the great carved doors. They hugged each other, holding on, then wiped their eyes and smiled at each other.

“I went to the hospital to see Kevin yesterday,” Marian said.

“He told me.”

“He looks good.” Marian, who would have said this to Sally in any case, was grateful that it was true.

“He's doing well, the doctor said.” Sally cast her eyes down. In these times and in this place, she was ashamed, Marian thought, of the joy she felt because her son was going to live.

Marian felt a hand rest on her shoulder. “Hey, you two,” said Tom. He hugged Sally, and then Marian; his strong arms were surprisingly comforting in this time when comfort was rare.

“You okay?” Tom asked Sally. “I called NYU this morning, finally got to talk to Kevin. He sounds good.”

“You got through on the phone?” Marian asked.

“Took me an hour.”

“He's doing well. I'm going over there this afternoon,” Sally said.

“To the hospital? Want me to take you?” Tom offered. “The bridge's open.”

That was sweet, Marian thought. Sally didn't like to travel into Manhattan alone; her friends all knew. And Tom was one of her friends. He always had been. He had never turned his back on her, though her husband had gone to prison for killing his brother.

Sally was hesitating. It was a lot of trouble for Tom to go to. Marian stepped in.

“I'm just having coffee with Dad, then I'm going back,” she said. “Tell me what ferry you want to make, and I'll go with you.”

Sally smiled. “Thanks.”

“Okay,” Tom said, “but the offer's still open. Marian, can we talk a minute?”

Sally gave them each a quick kiss. “I'll call you at your dad's,” she said to Marian, and left them.

Marian and Tom stood in the sun, and Tom told Marian about the fund that had just been created, the McCaffery Memorial Fund. Listening, Marian felt a lurch of fear. She told herself impatiently that was foolish. Jimmy was a hero. He was famous for unselfish courage. This fund would celebrate that. This was just the kind of thing New York needed right now. What was there to be afraid of?

“They made me chairman of the board,” Tom was saying. “But none of us knows anything about this. I'd like—the board would like—to ask you to be the director.”

“What? Oh, no.” Marian moved a small step back, as though fighting a magnetic field. “Tom, I can't.”

Tom gave a shake of his head. “Please.” He was handsome, as he had always been, with his dark hair and blue eyes that, when fixed on you, saw nothing else. Marian, seeking respite from Tom's eyes, glanced over the crowd. She saw Vicky on the sidewalk with her son Michael, named after Tom's father, Big Mike Molloy. When Vicky and Tom separated, Tom had been the one to move out; he'd bought a house two blocks away. Marian had asked him then if he'd considered a bigger move, a cleaner break. No, he said, sounding surprised: Pleasant Hills was where he belonged.

Marian watched Michael kiss his mother and stride away. The boy was twenty-two and looked so like Tom had looked that for a brief, disorienting moment, like a tremor or a spell, she found herself searching the crowd for Jimmy, for Markie, for herself, all of them exuberant and invincible as they had been, back then.

The moment passed, everything snapped back into focus. Marian was standing with Tom on the church steps, and Tom was speaking about the McCaffery Fund.

The idea was not Tom's, as the press later had it. Tom was inclined, as Marian was, to let Jimmy's legend rest, though his reasons were surely different. But other people—men who, as boys, had won trophies on teams Jimmy had captained; women who, when girls, had contrived innumerable accidental encounters with him in noisy school corridors, had whispered jealously to each other as Marian walked by—had elected this loss to stand for all the unbearable others. They had chosen to take action now to console themselves for their helplessness on that day, and they had come to Tom.

As he was coming to Marian.

“Please,” Tom said again. “He meant a lot to a lot of people. People want to give money—hell, it's all they can do. Think of all the good you can do with this, Marian.”

He'd smiled, and she'd had to smile, too. She was an Eskimo, and Tom knew, as he always had, just what to say so that she would be most likely to sign up for a delivery of ice.

She was nevertheless steeling herself and planning to refuse, when the church doors creaked open. She and Tom stepped aside to let a group of people pass. At their center walked Eddie Spano, talking on his right to someone Marian didn't know, while his left hand gripped the arm of his father, Aldo. Eddie was almost bald—had it been that long since she'd seen him? But it was the sight of Aldo Spano that stunned and scared her. When they all were young, Mr. Spano had been a legendary monster, lying in wait to eat you (or at least smack you, though you were not his) and teaching his two sons to be like him. Now he leaned on a cane, and on his son, his movements crabbed, imprisoned by that ferocious and insatiable jailer, age. The face she remembered as terrifyingly scarlet was dull, wrinkled, and soft, like something beginning to rot. While Marian watched, Aldo Spano looked to Eddie as though unsure what to do. Eddie spoke to his father calmly, then turned back to his conversation as though he had done this many times before. Marian drew a breath.

That Aldo Spano was no longer frightening was, to Marian, a fearful thing.

Tom watched her; Tom, because he was Tom, knew what she was thinking and how to turn it to his use.

“It's just us now, Marian,” he'd said, as they both watched the Spanos' slow progress down the stairs, Eddie half-lifting his hesitating father to each step. “There are no grown-ups anymore. It's just us. We have to do it.”

And so she'd told him she'd think about it. From the top of the steps she'd searched the crowd, found her own father in it, and hurried to him.

As Marian, still thinking of smoke and prayers, reached the door to her own office, she heard Elena call after her.

“Marian? That reporter, it was all right I gave her your cell phone? I wasn't sure, but you said, the press—”

“Yes, of course. Thank you,” Marian added with a quick smile.

Since September 11 Marian had been interviewed often in print, on radio, and on TV. To discuss the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan—and the role of the MANY Foundation and the Downtown Council in it—she made herself available to any journalist at any time. It was one of her responsibilities, one of the tasks she felt called upon to perform. Because MANY's phones still didn't work, she had given her staff permission to give her cell phone number out as liberally as she had jealously guarded it before.

And since she'd taken on the administration of the McCaffery Fund, she had been repeatedly asked about that, too, and she'd always replied with her gentlest smile and most assured tone.

“Our mission is outreach and support for Fire Department recruitment,” she'd told Larry King, and she'd taped that interview and later watched it carefully, to study her own face, her body language, as she said, “The New York City Fire Department was Captain McCaffery's life. His dream was to see a department that would continue to be the best in the world, because it would contain, it would welcome,
all
New York's Bravest.”

As a rule Marian did not worry about her public image, what she projected or how she was perceived. She tried to tell the truth and to be kind. She did not waste her time in inordinate concern about whether those intents were understood. Time spent speculating and fretting was time wasted on vanity, and Marian did not approve of vanity, least of all in herself.

But in this interview, she'd been talking about Jimmy.

This ground was too unsteady, this path too treacherous, for her to tread without looking back: she needed to assure herself of where she'd been. She needed to prepare herself for where she was to go.

She had run the tape three times, finally deciding she was satisfied with her look of comforting, of caring and firm resolve. “Through the McCaffery Fund,” she watched herself say, “we will be able to reach out to communities that have historically not had the opportunity to serve the people of New York through this extraordinary department. In this way we will help make Captain McCaffery's dream a reality.”

“A rainbow department,” Larry King had said. “Captain James McCaffery's dream. We'll be right back.”

It was beautiful, this dream, it was comforting to imagine heroes of all races, all colors, shapes, all beliefs and loves, being given the chance to help and save, to use their courage and their caring no matter who they were, no matter what. Beautiful, and a worthy goal for this Fund in Jimmy's name. It was a condition Marian had laid down for her service to the Fund, that this be its focus.

In truth Marian did not know what had been in Jimmy's dreams since the nights when they were young. She did not know what he had hoped for, what he had feared, over the years, but she did not imagine that since those nights his sleep had been untroubled.

Marian was not sure that the dead looked down from Heaven, or that they benefited from prayers rising or actions taken on their behalf, though Father Connor had always told them this was one of the purposes of worship. She did not know if Jimmy had made it to Heaven, was not sure what kind of heroism outweighed which sins. She did not know whether good done by a person in this life could redeem the darkness of a life gone before.