Absent Friends
Page 14
Laughing, giddy at her success, she reminded him that that sort of paranoia seemed to be out of fashion at the Tribune. Harry, one arm around her waist, had pointed to one of the eyebrow-lifters hard at work across the room. “That bozo,” he said mildly, speaking as if he and Laura were at the zoo and he knew an interesting fact about a creature, “doesn't shred his notes. That's all right; he'll never write anything worth a subpoena. You, my little oyster, will. Keep the quotes, to protect the Tribune's ass. Destroy all else.” He looked at her gravely. “The great and powerful Oz has spoken.”
Laura had spent the rest of that afternoon sorting and shredding her notes.
So she was not holding out much hope for Harry's files, his notebooks or computer. But there would be something. Someplace to start: a question between the lines, a name she didn't know, a call Harry had made that had never been returned. To find that starting point was why she had come.
But first, for the hundredth time, she had reread the story that had begun, and now, she thought, ended, everything.
And been stopped, frozen, by the story's final line.
The investigation is continuing.
Continuing. Laura stared at that word, unable to move her astounded eyes from such an outrageous lie. Continuing? Nothing was continuing. Everything now was new. Everything had to start over.
She shoved Harry's chair away from the desk, paced the room with her hands deep in her back pockets. Whenever she was stuck, this was Laura's way, to stride back and forth frowning at the carpet as though whatever word, phrase, fact, she needed were hiding there.
Sit down, Stone, Harry would tell her. You're driving me crazy. Come have a drink.
No, you drink, she used to answer, I'm working.
Harry would shrug and drink. Laura would go on pacing; or she would storm out the door, run down the nine flights to the lobby, and head uptown on Broadway and then, eventually (and it never took long), back again. Sometimes she stopped at Starbucks for mocha cappuccinos, extra whipped cream. Harry would accept his gravely, savor it slowly, and, when finished, go back to his bottle.
And always, somewhere on the sidewalks, like a dropped quarter, Laura would have found the word she needed. Her cappuccino would sit, cooling and untouched, as she returned to work.
Harry's advice to her: Join a gym.
Now Laura stood at the window. Blades of sun glinted off the river's silver. She didn't like the river to be silver, she never had; she couldn't see anything in water this color. She'd been crying again; she was through with that now, her cheeks sticky and dry, but she was stopped, frozen. These had been tears not of grief but of fury. The floodwaters of her rage had astonished her.
The anger, she now saw, had been building all the time she'd been reading, but she hadn't felt it, the way you might not feel the current changing as you drifted downstream until, too late, you heard a new roar and without warning found yourself crashing over the falls.
After she'd read the article, she'd begun to pace, striding the length of Harry's living room, toward the window, spin, away, toward again, back and forth as though she were in a jail cell. As she made a turn, the silence was splintered by a sudden shout: “Goddamn you, Harry!” She stopped, terrified. Then she realized the voice was her own, and that frightened her more.
And then another voice, mild and amused: Me?
Harry. She spun wildly, but of course he wasn't there. He was dead, he was gone. The hell with him, though: she wasn't letting him off that easily.
“Yes, you!” she hissed raggedly. “Why didn't you leave that story alone?”
Why didn't I—? Please, my little minnow.
Strange how she could hear him so clearly but not see him at all. But she didn't have to see him. She knew that tone, and the infuriating half-smile that went with it.
He asked, Was it I who was spouting that bilge about the north star and the noises in the dark?
“It was dangerous!” she shouted. “I didn't know that!”
Would it have mattered?
“Of course it would have!”
Of course it wouldn't have. Except to make it more exciting.
“Exciting?”
But she was pretending she didn't know what he meant, so he pretended he hadn't heard her.
Quietly, standing in his empty living room, she said, “Couldn't you have been careful?”
I was very careful.
“Then why are you dead?”
The savagery of her anger rolled right off Harry. Ah, he said indulgently. That's the ticket to your Pulitzer, isn't it?
“My what?”
You can't not have thought of that.
“Thought of what?”
Tsk, tsk. The truth about what happened to Harry Randall: that's a very big story.
“You can't think that's why I'm going after it?” Laura was aghast. “Harry, I'm going after it for you. To get justice for you.”
Of course you are. You're going after it because, story or not, it's the truth and the truth matters.
“I don't like the way you said that.”
No, why should you? You're still dew-bedecked enough to believe it. But I was old enough to know better. In fact, until you came along, I did know better. My mistake was listening to you.
“To me?”
To you, quoting me. So really, it's all my fault, you see.
Laura didn't see.
For believing such claptrap in my own misguided youth, Harry patiently explained. And going on to fill young minds with it. Specifically, yours. So you could pour it on thick at a later date. Sucking me back under when in fact I'd escaped. Yes, my sweet octopus. My fault entirely.
“Harry?” Laura had only one thing to say, only one thing she meant. “Harry, please. Don't leave me.”
Too late. The familiar faint amusement and the unseen shrug. And silence.
And the tears of fury, then, like the cataclysmic breaking of a dam.
Now Laura stood lost, staring down at the river. She realized she was furious with it, too. Goddamn Harry, and goddamn the river!
Hating the river, she watched it flow, all that charging, hurtling water, not making a sound.
She coughed; she was thirsty, from the crying. She drank three glasses of water as she stood at Harry's ancient sink. Maybe, she thought as she gulped, maybe this water was like the river water, all water in the end the same. Maybe, once the water was part of her, its need for movement would teach her how to move.
She put her glass carefully in the dish drainer; it clinked on Harry's black mug. She squeezed her eyes against new tears. An enormous powerful need surged in her, the need to be gone, to get out of this place Harry was also gone from.
Fear rose in Laura, flowed around her, threatened to cut off her breath. She swallowed, walked tentatively back into the living room as though wading into a stream whose depth and speed she didn't know.
She could make a break for it: throw open the door, dash through the hall, circle down the stairs, and come bursting onto the sidewalk as she had done so many times.
And then what? Would she find anything, any words or ideas, lying on the sidewalk now, waiting for her to pick them up? And who would she buy cappuccino for, on her way back?
Would she come back?
Laura turned away from the door—she wasn't sure she could keep from plunging toward it, as long as she could see it—and pulled the chair up to Harry's desk. She sat at the edge of it, not her full weight, ready to leap up at any moment. Heart racing, she opened the first of Harry's files. She took from her bag a fresh new pad and two of her own new pens. She didn't touch Harry's sharpened pencils.
An hour later all she had was a list of names and numbers.
It wasn't really right to say there was nothing here. Harry's contact lists; pages torn from notebooks to preserve attributed quotes; Xeroxes of periodicals he'd researched and quoted or used for background. All these filled Harry's neatly piled files.
But what she was looking for: it wasn't here.
&
nbsp; Harry's death hadn't been payback for anything he'd written: she was sure of that. Anyone ruined (or about to be ruined) by Harry's stories might have thought murderous thoughts, made muttered threats, nursed dark dreams. But once the cat was out of the bag, what was the point of going after the man who'd untied the string?
Poetic metaphors, Stone, the mark of an amateur, Harry would have scolded.
Laura smiled at that; then she froze as it hit her for the first time that there were people who had had nothing to do with Harry's death who were glad it had happened. People who right now, this moment, might be raising a glass to their hero, his unknown killer.
She hated them.
But those glitter-eyed vultures, feasting on Harry's death, they hadn't killed Harry. It was axiomatic in the news business: the safest time to be an investigative reporter, they told one another cynically, is the day your story runs. The story that's dangerous is the one you're working on for tomorrow.
And McCaffery's papers: that's what Harry had been working on. The new thing he'd found, just yesterday. Hot stuff, McCaffery's papers, Harry had said. That probably meant: dangerous to someone.
And Laura knew what was dangerous: the truth.
But about McCaffery's papers, there was nothing here.
She'd checked Harry's e-mail, his voicemail. She hadn't found his cell phone. Had he remembered, as he so often didn't, to take it with him? She'd studied every scrap of paper, each note she'd found. She'd gone through the pockets of the slacks and jackets left behind, in case he'd been planning to wear a thing and then changed his mind. These, of course, were his summer jackets, linen, seersucker. Harry's wool suits were in storage. Recently he'd said, as they walked home from dinner through an evening chill, that it was time to ransom them out.
When was that, that Harry had told her this? Three days ago. What had happened in between? She had no idea, except for brief, bright flashes: Georgie's face yesterday, reflected in the window above the river when she turned away from him, from what he'd told her. Herself staring at her computer screen while she waited for Leo to arrive this morning. Why hadn't she memorized every second of those days, Harry's last days, written them down, filmed and recorded them, drawn pictures, so she could have them now, so she could look at him, hear him talk, laugh with him? What had she been doing that was so damn important, what memories did she have now that she'd made in these last few days instead of the ones she ached to have?
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!
PHIL'S STORY
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.
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.