S. J. Rozan

by Absent Friends

  Vicky asks, Do you know how to go home? And when Tom nods, she smiles at him, a big beaming smile.

  And Jack does know how to get there. They come to the end of a block none of the others have been on before, a dead end at some unfamiliar trees, and Jack plunges straight in. They follow him, and he goes this way and that way and they come out at the top of a ridge, and when they look down, there's the pond and the trees they know and the path that usually takes them there, when they're with their moms and dads.

  Everybody says, Hey, Jack! and Markie slaps Jack on the back, and then Tom and Jimmy do, like they're grown-ups and Jack just won a bet on the Mets. Everyone slaps Jack until Jack has to say, Hey, you guys, knock it off, but he's laughing when he says it.

  But, says Sally, after everyone's through telling Jack how smart he is, but how do we get down there? Because Sally still wants to see the baby turtles.

  Easy, says Jack. He sits and with his heels digging in and his hands grabbing tree roots, he half-climbs, half-slides down the steep woodsy hill, splashing at the bottom into a pile of wet leaves. Vicky's eyes are shining as she watches Jack climb down. The other kids all look at each other. It's pretty far down, but there's Jack yelling, Come on, you guys, come on! Then Markie drops down and does what Jack did. He loses his grip and tumbles the last part, and Sally puts her hand on her mouth, but Markie's laughing when he stands up from the leaves. Quickly, Vicky goes, and Jack catches her at the bottom. Come on, Vicky yells to the kids still at the top, it's easy! Then Sally goes, and Marian, who isn't sure what to do, but Jimmy helps her; and after everyone else makes it all the way down, Tom goes, and soon everyone's standing and laughing in the wet, smelly leaves at the bottom of the hill.

  Then Sally holds her finger to her lips and tiptoes to the pond. The other kids quiet down and follow her. Sally points, and everyone follows her finger, and they see a little sharp rock sticking out from the water, and she whispers, That's its nose. When they stare harder, they can see it's not a rock, it really is a nose, and under the water they can see the rest of the turtle, its shell and its little feet, just floating there. No one's sure it's a baby turtle, it looks big enough to be a grown-up one, but then Markie whispers, There's another one! and when they look where he's pointing, they see that one, too, and then Jimmy sees one, and soon everyone's found one or two, Jack sees three sitting over on a rock and they're real little. Everyone agrees probably they're baby ones.

  A rumbling sound comes from far away, they almost don't hear it, or they think it's a jet plane way high up. But Tom looks around at how dark it is and says, You guys, it's going to rain.

  The rumbling happens again, and of course it's thunder, and the tops of the trees are moving and a swish of wind sends leaves skittering across the dirt. Look! says Markie. A snake in the water! but no one looks except Jack.

  Tom says, Come on, we better go. He heads around the pond to the path they usually come on. Jimmy and Marian and Sally follow him, Sally turning her head to keep looking at the turtles.

  Jack says, I'm going back that way, where we came down. It's so cool, climbing up that!

  Markie looks at Tom, and then at Jack, and says, Me too, Jack, I'm coming that way, too. Jack says, Cool! And he says, Vicky, you want to come with us?

  Vicky looks at the slope, all tangled with roots. Her eyes light up again, and she takes a step that way. But she stops. She looks at Jack and then at Tom, waiting on the path. Her face turns a little bit sad, just for a second, and then she smiles at Tom. Jack, she says, as she walks toward the path, come this way. I don't think we'll get home before the storm, if we go your way.

  It's true that, for a time, after Jack comes back from New Haven, his dark eyes linger on Vicky, he winks at her when someone says, Hey, sorry New Haven didn't work out, and he always answers, Hey, it's okay, I won't be here that long, and besides, they got things here they don't have in New Haven. Vicky smiles and blushes. But that passes. And had you asked her then, she'd have told you this: it was like new fashions in the magazine pages. Startling ideas, answers to questions you had never asked, so you try them on in your head. And then realize they're absurd. And discard them. Sometimes maybe you turn back to one of those pages again, take another look . . . but no, still no. Vicky will marry Tom. After the wedding she'll stay in her job at the sewing store—trimmings, notions, exotic fabrics, Vicky's good with those, all the things that make what you expected into something different, special, and sparkling—just for a while, until she leaves to have their babies.

  Vicky's happy.

  LAURA'S STORY

  Chapter 6

  The Women in the Tent

  October 31, 2001

  Laura had made phone calls (a task that had once been so simple, that since September 11 demanded patience, ingenuity, dedication). Now she had appointments.

  Almost everyone had agreed to speak with her, even the people with the most reasons to hate Harry: Kevin Keegan, Edward Spano, Marian Gallagher. Well, why not? she thought as she gathered her notebooks and pens. She was offering them the opportunity to comment on Harry's death. They probably had a lot to say, each one of them.

  The lawyer, Phil Constantine, the one Harry had said was a bagman for the Spano organization—said this to Laura; merely insinuated it in print—he was the only one who'd refused. Constantine had been hard to reach; his office phone was still out, and Laura had left three messages on his cell phone before she reached him. Horns honking and a general background din had told Laura he was on the street, but she didn't think that was what accounted for the way he barked his name when he answered his phone, or for the coldness of the silence with which he listened, or for the terseness of his “no comment” when he hung up. She wasn't surprised at Constantine's refusal, nor particularly thrown. Reporter-Laura knew how to handle this. You wait until one of the others says something new about him, something that's not in print yet, something even worse than what is. Then you call him back and invite him to comment on that.

  It almost always worked.

  And besides, Laura thought, snapping her tape recorder shut, zipping her bag, how much could you expect to learn about the truth from talking to a lawyer anyway?

  She made a trip to the bathroom mirror, checking to see how red her eyes were, giving her hair a comb. While she did this she resolutely did not look at Harry's shaving things on the sink, his bathrobe hanging on the back of the door. Her pale brown hair, straight and sleek and lustrous in good times, lank and sullen now, could have used a little more work, but she stuck the comb back in the cabinet when she felt the lump start building in her throat again. You can't do interviews with a lump in your throat.

  Normally, of course, Laura would never chase all over town for interviews like these. There was no time. This was work you did over the phone, in the days, so recent but in another life, when the phone was just another tool you never even thought about, you just picked it up and someone was there. You did interviews over the phone so you could write the story yourself and grab the byline, not the “reported by” that came when you phoned a story in.

  Normally, you sat at your desk, scribbling as fast as you could, and you asked people, What did you think when you heard? (The river, my God, how can it be that the river just keeps running under the burning blue sky?) When was the last time you spoke to Harry Randall? (Yesterday, early morning, no time for coffee, dashing out the door, hasty kiss.) What was the substance of that conversation? (Stone [already at elevator, jabbing button]: “Aren't you working today?” Randall [rumpled, preoccupied, but offering that ever-amused smile]: “I have something to check out first. I'll be in later.”) What was your relationship with Harry Randall? (Stone: The ocean with its shores? The ship with its anchor? Randall: Where do you get these things?) Do you have anything to add? (Long, long silence.)

  But normally, when Laura asked what someone thought about a death, a disaster, that was what she wanted to know: what they thought. Today what she was going to be asking was, Did you do thi
s? Did you kill Harry?

  Not literally, of course. Reporter-Laura would be asking the questions, and she was too cool, too professional, to make a dumb mistake like that. She would be cunning and clever. She would wait and watch and listen, study them, how they sat and spoke and looked at her, when they talked about Harry. Her years in school, her years in Des Moines and St. Paul, and these years on the New York Tribune: Reporter-Laura had paid attention, she'd been working hard, she had learned a lot. And now she knew: it was all for this.

  For this one story.

  Laura walked out of Harry's apartment without looking back. She meant to continue purposefully down the hall—she was a reporter, on her way to cover a story—but she was engulfed, staggered, by a wave of panic when she heard Harry's door click shut behind her. She plunged her hand into her pocket, terrified she'd forgotten the key, and when she felt it, she dug it out to make sure that's what it was, not a whistle or a penknife or some other hard object masquerading as the way back into Harry's place. She stared at it, cold silver on her palm. Then, clutching it, she ran down the hall, chased by her echoing footsteps, and punched the elevator button, willing the elevator to come fast, fast, fast.

  MARIAN'S STORY

  Chapter 6

  Secrets No One Knew

  October 31, 2001

  Marian had had a heavy morning of meetings: the Downtown Council, among others. There, the topics of the Fund, of Harry Randall's poisonous story, of Jimmy, of Marian's association with what had gone before, pulled at everyone's words, at their thoughts, like tree roots clutching at travelers attempting to pass through a cheerless forest.

  She spoke twice, to averted eyes and yes-fine-let's-get-on-with-it nods, and after that she kept silent, one hand conscientiously taking notes on a yellow pad, the other in her lap twisting a scrap of paper into a tight hard knot. She swept from that meeting as soon as it broke, though she herself had always been the first to say the business of a meeting is truly conducted before it begins and after it ends. One or two of the others started to say something as she passed by them, but she did not stop.

  The other two meetings had gone better. The downtown arts organizations involved were, in the wake of the attacks, in desperate need of money, and the MANY Foundation had money. Marian's questionable morality, her sordid past—well, that was the way Harry Randall's third story had made things appear, there was no use pretending otherwise—these things, it seemed, were important to people in absolutely inverse proportion to how much they felt she could do for them.

  Marian was disappointed by this reaction, but not surprised. She'd been in the nonprofit world, cajoling money out of Peter to give away to Paul, for too long to find herself caught off guard by anyone's agenda, anyone's motives.

  But she was tired. Tired from her morning, from all the other mornings this autumn, from the phones that didn't work and the diverted subways and the dust and the children's drawings from South Dakota and Virginia that were taped to schoolyard fences and announced “We Love You, New York.” She was tired from the list of times and places of firefighters' funerals, half a dozen a day, that scrolled silently down her TV screen when she watched the evening news. Tired of having to fight for a place for the Downtown Council at the Lower Manhattan redevelopment table. Of acting strong so that her weary staff would take courage and be able to go on. Of declaring, over and over, that the Jimmy McCaffery she had known—the Captain McCaffery, Marian was always careful to say, to whom so many owed their lives, not just on the basis of his heroic and ultimately self-sacrificing actions in this unprecedented disaster but because of his breathtaking bravery over the years—that this man would never have been a part of any scheme of corruption or cold betrayal, as some were hinting now.

  Marian wondered what would happen if she stood and walked out the door. Now, before Laura Stone arrived. She would smile at Elena. Elena would smile back, expecting Marian was going on an errand and would presently return. But she would not. She'd make her way to Grand Central Station and board a train heading north. After a day of sitting perfectly still watching the trees and the towns and the river flash by, she would get off at some nowhere stop in the Adirondacks, find a one-room cabin no one else wanted in the dense shadows of pungent pine trees that blocked the sun. She would clear a patch of earth, turning the worm-rich, fragrant soil so she could plant a garden for next spring. She'd sit wrapped in sweaters and shawls drinking herbal tea as winter shortened the days. She would give up coffee, give up wine and flesh, subsist on the bounty of the earth, which she would nurture, returning, in her labor and husbandry, more than she took away.

  And who would miss her, really? Sam? He was wrapped up in the pretty actress he'd met in June—and what a relief that had been, his mooning over Marian having gone on far too long after she had ended their lovely but, from the beginning, finite affair. (She'd seen the potential, and the limits, from their first flirtatious glance; he obviously hadn't. But that was the way it had always been with Marian, since Jimmy. Jimmy was the only lover who had ever left her.)

  Her friends—Jeana, Tomiko, Ulrich? Yes, of course, they'd miss her, wonder why she did it, why she'd given up so much, to go live where was that again? and in not very long she'd be more valuable as a topic of endless speculation, conversation, head-shaking, than she'd ever been as a dinner companion, a pal.

  Sally? Kevin? Yes, they would feel a loss, an empty place in their lives, if she were gone. But Kevin was young; his life spread boundlessly before him, an infinite number of beckoning choices. She was his aging aunt, and not even that by blood: treasured, to be sure, but occupying a place in his life smaller and less vital with each passing year. And Sally had so many friends, and Sally had Phil. And perhaps—Marian was startled to find she was permitting herself this thought; it was a sign of the difficulty of the times that her self-discipline had not been powerful enough to forbid it—perhaps Sally would be in a small way relieved to have the twenty-year war between Marian and Phil finally ended, as Marian ceded the territory and went into exile.

  And her work? Well, it was true some of the projects she was involved in would crumble without her. MANY might even collapse. That thought stirred her, made her sit up, straighten her shoulders. That would be bad. Clearly, bad. This was important work. Helping. Giving. Saving. She left her desk, went to get more coffee. And stood holding her mug at the coffee machine, confused as to which pot to take from, the fresh or the old, the decaf or the strong, and what to put in it, and how much she'd been intending to have.

  Marian was halfway through her coffee when Elena buzzed to tell her Laura Stone had arrived. Marian put down the proposal she had been reviewing (a graphic artist who had escaped from the south tower's sixty-third floor with his life but none of his materials was asking for a grant to rent new space and to restock; Marian was inclined to approve the application provided the space he selected was below Canal Street). She shrugged on her suit jacket, gave her glasses a quick polish, and arranged the muscles of her face into a comforting, reassuring smile, but not one too broad or welcoming. Laura Stone knew that Marian had not wanted to give this interview and would not trust her if Marian pretended to be pleased that she was there.

  So she put on a smile that said, We can agree that truth is important, and the search for it equally so; come, let us reason together.

  Marian led Laura Stone into the small conference room. Someone else might have a meeting that required the large one, and while, as director, Marian's needs trumped everyone else's, she did not approve of such flagrant assertions of power and avoided playing that card whenever she could.

  And also: the windows of the smaller room faced west. From here, in the gap between the buildings, you could see the smoke crawling skyward, see the dinosaurlike cranes, see the smoldering, twisted ruins where so many—and one was Jimmy McCaffery—had died. Marian seated Laura Stone so that Stone would have that view. Elena, warmly efficient, followed them into the room with a carafe of coffee, fresh mugs, three kinds of
cookies arranged on a tray. Laura Stone turned down an offer of coffee, but the carafe and the mugs and the tray remained. Marian made the small bet with herself that she always made: how long it would take a guest who had gained an upper hand by refusing hospitality to decide her point had been made and give in to covetous tastebuds or falling blood sugar or the very human hope for reassurance through food. In the case of this thin, harried-looking young reporter, Marian predicted it wouldn't be ten minutes.

  “Well.” Marian nodded as Elena withdrew and she and Laura Stone arranged themselves. The reporter, not looking at Marian, rooted in her large canvas shoulder bag, retrieved a notebook, two ballpoint pens, one of which she frowned at and tossed back, and a tape recorder the size of a cigarette pack.

  “Is this all right?” Laura Stone asked, lifting the recorder.

  “Yes, of course,” Marian said placidly; what had Marian Gallagher to hide? She went on, silkily seizing the high ground. “I was sorry to hear about Mr. Randall's death,” she said. “As you might imagine, I'd been . . . dismayed . . . to read some of the things he'd written. About me and about people I know. Still . . .” She shook her head, leaving the rest unspoken, because some people were superstitious about the word suicide.

  “Mr. Randall was a major figure at my newspaper,” Laura Stone said, flipping the notebook open. “I'd like to ask for your comments about him—the stories he was working on, his approach when he interviewed you and your friends. His death. Anything you'd like to say.”

  A ragged edge to Stone's clear midwestern voice pricked Marian's awareness. Her sympathetic smile still lingering and her eyes still frank, Marian reinventoried the reporter's looks. Thin, she'd thought on first seeing her; but perhaps the word was drawn. No makeup, but that might be a statement, something political: Marian had gone makeupless herself when younger. Eyes dark-circled, restless. The way all New Yorkers' eyes were these past weeks.