Absent Friends (27 page)

B
OYS
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B
OOK

Chapter 13

Turtles in the Pond

September 2, 1979

It's Sunday, it's Labor Day weekend, summer's turning to fall. Jimmy and Marian show up at noon at Markie and Sally's place, the apartment they rent from the O'Neills, who live upstairs. Marian's got her arms around a paper bag: franks, buns, and sauerkraut. Jimmy's hefting a couple of six-packs. Marian goes inside with Sally, to talk about potato salad and nail polish and whatever girls talk about; Jimmy roots in the garage for the basketball, bangs layups into the hoop over the driveway while Markie fires up the grill. That hoop, all the O'Neill boys played there, their little sister, too, right with them. Danny, the youngest, he's the one Mr. and Mrs. O'Neill fixed up the downstairs apartment for; but Danny went off to Vietnam, and when he came back he didn't stay long. He's in Alaska now, working on the pipeline: says he wants to be as far away from the jungle as he can get, for the rest of his life.

Smoke from the grill suddenly switches direction, trying to ambush Jimmy, but he's too smart, dribbles the ball up the driveway to get away. Markie jumps back, too, but not fast enough, coughs and wipes his eyes. Through the kitchen window, Jimmy and Markie hear the girls hooting with laughter about something.

Must be a potato escaped, Jimmy says to Markie, while the cloud of smoke swoops like a flock of pigeons and soars over the next-door fence. Potato's probably running all over your house, man, tearing up the place.

Yeah, probably, says Markie. Think we should go in and rescue the girls?

Potato rescue, says Jimmy, I'm great at that.

But they don't have to, because Marian and Sally come out the back door and down from the porch, Marian with two big bowls, Sally with Kevin. She puts Kevin in his crib on the grass, but the kid's too big for a crib and he knows it. He wails, so Jimmy goes and picks him up. Right away Kevin giggles, grabs for Jimmy's nose, looks in his baby hand to see if it's there.

Markie, man, says Jimmy, this kid's so big and good-looking, if it wasn't saying something bad about Sally, I'd just
know
he wasn't yours.

Because he's smart, too, says Markie, knows enough to take after her side of the family. He lays the franks on the grill, grins at Kevin in Jimmy's arms.

They eat franks, cole slaw, potato salad, pop open beers, watch Kevin stomp around the tiny yard in that funny kid walk. You'd think he'd tire himself out, but he can't sit still. When he falls, his eyes get wide like he can't believe it, then he just laughs. Sally and Markie take turns jumping up and grabbing him back from crawling through the bushes, running up the driveway, chewing on sticks; he's just like Markie, Jimmy thinks, the kid'll try anything, never thinks ahead. Then laughs at himself: for Pete's sake, he's a
baby,
how's he gonna think ahead? Jimmy and Marian jump up after Kevin, too, because Kevin, it's like he's everyone's first kid.

Marian doesn't say she got a promotion at work, so Jimmy does. Oh, Jimmy, it's no big deal, Marian protests, but Jimmy says, Come on, you've only been there two months, I mean, come on. Markie and Jimmy talk about cars: Sally tells them that Steve Fagan at the repair shop says Markie's got the best hands of any mechanic ever worked there. Jimmy tells funny stories about the firehouse. Sally says, The Chinese restaurant fire, Jimmy, I heard you were a big hero in that one.

Yeah, well, says Jimmy. I mean, the pressure was on. You save a Chinese restaurant from burning down, you know they send free egg rolls to the firehouse for the rest of your life?

Everyone laughs, and no one asks anything else about the Chinese restaurant fire, what it was like in the greasy black smoke, how it felt to grab that guy with flames all over him, roll him over and over in that tablecloth, save his life. No one asks about the fire under Jimmy's skin. No one knows anything about it, to ask.

Marian says to Sally, I'm glad your dad's better; Sally's dad's been sick on and off all summer. Everyone toasts Marian with beer cans because her middle sister, Eileen, just left to go to college. Not in New York like Marian; Eileen's going away, she got a scholarship to a fancy school in Boston. Oh, come on, you guys, I didn't do anything, says Marian, Eileen's just smarter than anyone.

Yeah, you only brought them up, your sisters and Davey, says Markie.

Well, Davey can take care of himself. But the girls, someone had to keep guys like you away from them. Marian says this and everyone laughs, but they all can see how proud Marian is.

They finish the franks and start to play a little ball, the girls against the boys like back in grade school, but Kevin tries to play. Jimmy bends down and hands the ball off to him. The kid takes it in both arms and lifts it toward the hoop, hops up, and lets it go with a big grunt like he really expects it to fly up there. Sally starts cracking up, and then Markie does, too, and then they're all laughing too hard and they have to stop. Jimmy, sitting in a rickety lawn chair, sips a cold beer, swears he can feel the heat from the sun leaning on him like it weighed something, thinks he could just sit here like this forever.

But he can't. The sun keeps moving, gets to where half the yard's shaded by the branches of the big oak tree old man O'Neill's father planted when he bought the place. Marian needs to drop in on her dad and her two sisters who still live at home, just to check up. And Kevin's getting cranky: he needs his nap, says Sally. She scoops him up, tells him to wave bye-bye to Uncle Jimmy. Marian goes in with her, carrying the bowls and plates they used. Jimmy hears the water running in the kitchen, thinks, Well, now's the time.

Markie, man, he says, just him and Markie in the yard now, the shadow of the oak tree's trunk dark on the grass between them, Markie, you seen Jack around lately?

Jack? Yeah, around, sure. How come? Markie looks away from Jimmy when he says this, quick and then back at the grass, like there's something he wants to see. But there's nothing there, and in that looking-away and looking-back Jimmy knows he's right.

Tom and Big Mike, they know enough to keep away from Markie. Whatever Markie thinks he wants, it wouldn't work out, and Tom and Mike know it even if he doesn't. But Jack thinks differently. Like always, Jack will try something just to see what happens. If trouble comes, well, that'll be what happened. Markie's always had that in him, too, though more than once Jimmy's seen on Jack's face that the trouble, for Jack, sometimes that can be the good part. For Markie, it's not that. It's more he never sees the trouble coming.

L
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TORY

Chapter 8

Leaving the Cat

October 31, 2001

In the late afternoon Laura stood at the bow of the Staten Island ferry, heading back to Manhattan. She shut her eyes and breathed moisture and salt. It was a scent that from the first had smelled like home to her, though it was not. She had grown up in a state where all water was sweet. She had never known this scent until she came to New York at seventeen, a late-summer visit to serve as the border between childhood and the adult life she could not wait to live: she was on her way to college the following week.

From that weekend until she found this scent again was, in her memory, yet another lifetime. It was Harry who, hearing her confess she had never been to an ocean beach, declared himself shocked and appalled and hauled her off the next morning on the Long Island Rail Road for a Jones Beach picnic. She had protested that it was December. December 1999, he'd said, and she could not afford to enter a new millennium with such deficits of experience as she was clearly suffering from.

And from that day to this was, again, a lifetime. Gulls screeched and the ferry's engine growled. Laura opened her eyes. Manhattan grew steadily in the late autumn sunlight as though its towers were marching forward and Laura's boat were standing still. The arched sky ran from cobalt above the hulk of Brooklyn, through lighter blues, to the first hints of what would soon be strips of glowing salmon and gold behind the machinery of the New Jersey waterfront.

Travel on the Staten Island ferry had been another of the experiences Harry had determined that she required, and they had crisscrossed Staten Island many times, Harry hailing cabs at the terminal and taking Laura on eccentric journeys: to a Tibetan museum in the island's eastern hills, riding stables in the south, a day of fishing under the bridge. These trips were all occasions of giddy laughter, of teasing and touching. (And once, on a sultry June day, of lovemaking on slippery black rocks, spreading their blanket in a hidden cove like teenagers. “What if the regulars want to use this place and we're already here?” Laura had fretted, pointing out beer cans and cigarette butts, proof of recent occupation. “It's a school day.” Harry smiled, pulling her toward him. “We have until two.”)

But her most profound joy had always been found on the trip back, when she and Harry, tired and at peace in each other's company, would lean on the rail to watch Manhattan swell toward them. Silent, they would sip at their drinks (for her, the ferry's strong coffee; for Harry, of course, the gin from his pocket flask) and breathe this salt scent.

Before this trip, Laura had only once been on the ferry without Harry, and that was earlier this same day, on her way to interviews in Pleasant Hills. She was not finished there, but she had enough for now, enough to file a story tonight in case Leo wanted something for tomorrow. She had not found the answer to who killed Harry. But all Leo had asked was that she show him there was a story.

She could do that.

She could have done that without going out to Staten Island at all.

Marian Gallagher was hiding something; that had been obvious from the way the color had risen in her face, from her attempts to divert the course of Laura's questions. It was possible—likely even, because she had appeared to Laura as essentially a kind woman, warmhearted and hurt—that Marian Gallagher did not know anything directly about Harry's death. But that she knew something about McCaffery and the events of years ago, Laura did not doubt.

And Phil Constantine? That interview had been more complicated. The crushing headache that had come on as she sat watching his glittering eyes and his grin had been even worse than the one Marian Gallagher had brought her. But Reporter-Laura had chosen well. She'd thrown at him trick after subtle trick; he'd seen through them all, as she'd thought he would, and it had made him cocky. He'd given her more than she'd had coming in. Whether it was more than he knew he was giving her, she wasn't sure, but she didn't care. He too was hiding something, and if she could show Leo there was something to hide, Leo would be happy.

Usually on her way back to the office Laura would have her tape recorder pressed to her ear. She'd be making notes, trying out leads, referring to her spiral pad when muddied words came up on the tape. Review when fresh, one of Laura's many mottoes. (Not Harry. Harry liked to let things settle, to come back to them. Whatever surprises you when you hear it the second time, he told her, that's what's important.)

But right now she couldn't move. Outbound, she'd turned her back on Manhattan. She couldn't afford to attend to what was behind her.

She was paying for that now.

It wasn't the bright glow from the recovery lights, just coming on now as daylight started to fade. Not the cranes, or the still-rising smoke. Not quite. As the shore moved toward her at a measured pace, Laura stared at the Manhattan skyline. She'd been to the site, to Ground Zero, how many times since it happened? And how many times in the years before, for interviews, to change subways, for a drink with a source at Windows on the World? Laura's theory, which she shared with Harry, was that the grandeur of the view from the 107th floor made people feel insignificant, and so more willing to talk.

“To build themselves up so they can feel important again?” Harry wanted to know.

“No, I don't think so,” she had answered. “More because, why not? You can see from up there how little really matters.”

Laura knew the World Trade Center well, then, from the days when it had been a gleaming array of sharp-cornered buildings standing over a weave of train lines. And knew it well from the last seven weeks, since it had become Ground Zero, an alien, incomprehensible place with a horrifying new name. She had watched from behind the fence and sometimes, because she was a reporter, from inside it, as torches sliced through twisted steel and trucks carted it away, as masked firefighters threw wreckage aside to reveal yet more wreckage. And she'd been taking notes and climbing mounds of destruction once as all work stopped and steelworkers and firefighters stood in silent lines, saluted the flag-draped body carried past them, wiped tears away with filthy gloves, and returned to work.

And Laura had seen the countless aerial photos, in her own paper as well as the others, starting from the day itself.

But still.

Still, as she stared at the looming skyline, the long low rays of sun and the piercing searchlights, she felt disoriented, and wrong, and stupid. And guilty, for being wrong.

Everyone knew the towers had been on the tip of Manhattan. The island, New York City itself, culminated in them, grew and swelled and pushed them soaring into the air when the unstoppable energy of Manhattan had rolled south to the water and could go no farther.

But that wasn't true. Of course it wasn't. As she stared at the place now, it was clear the lights and the cranes and the smoke were uptown from the end of the island, west of it, visible only between and above the crowd of buildings that occupied Manhattan's tip and always had. Her memory of leaning on the rail with Harry, sipping coffee and sailing from Staten Island straight toward the gateway of the towers was wrong, and if she thought back more carefully, if she meticulously unbraided meaning from fact, she knew that, and had always known it.

Harry would have laughed. Laura shivered as she heard a sound like the chortle that so often preceded a hug from Harry; but it was someone else, and impatient with herself, she shook off the idea, which was really a hope, that Harry was on the boat with her as he always had been, every time, before.

So I'm confused, so what? she demanded, of herself, the water, the gulls. The gulls just wheeled, looking for another boat to follow, and the water just flowed. This close to Manhattan the salt aroma on the wind was mixed with smoke from Ground Zero. As the ferry's engines cut to ease into the pier, Laura stared at her coffee cup. Carefully peeling back the plastic top, she upended it, pouring untouched coffee into the dark harbor water.