Absent Friends

by S. J. Rozan

  When she says things like that, Jimmy can't argue.

  But still.

  His kind of saving, it's different. Buildings are going to burn, he puts the fires out. People inside are going to die, he fights a tug-of-war with death, and if he wins—so far, he's usually won—they live. There's not much to figure out: not burning is better than burning, living is better than dying.

  Anyone knows that.

  When they leave Montezuma's, Jimmy puts his arm around Marian. Her shoulders are warm under her soft sweater, and he has to stop and kiss her. The way she holds him when she kisses back, he almost abandons his plan so they can go straight home. Instead he takes her hand and leads her downhill.

  Where are we going?

  You'll see.

  They wind up at the terminal. Jimmy pays two nickels, and they're on the ferry. As the boat starts to move, he unslings his backpack on the deck, pulls out a bottle of real champagne from France, and two glasses. Marian laughs, like music. Jimmy pops the cork. Champagne fizzes up, spills over his hand and tickles. She holds the glasses while he pours, and they drink champagne all the way to Manhattan, watching the towers with their sparkly lights get closer, get bigger. And then, all the way back home.

  That night, Marian's graduation night, summer was starting; tonight it's close to ending.

  In bed in the Cooleys' basement apartment, Marian walks her fingers along Jimmy's ribs as though she's counting them. Superman, she says, something on your mind?

  Me? No, uh-uh. Jimmy smiles. Only you.

  Seems like you're worried about something.

  Jimmy's surprised. On his way home he was thinking about Markie, about Jack, about Mr. Molloy asking for help over a beer in Flanagan's. He was trying to figure what to do. But when Marian opened the door, kissed him in the doorway under the stairs, well, that was the end of that.

  Just stuff, says Jimmy.

  He could tell her: what Mr. Molloy's problem is, what he wants Jimmy to do. But there's two things about that. One is, Marian gets mad at Jack a lot these days. Grow up! she tells him. Anyone else saying the kinds of things to him that Marian does, Jack would blow up. But Marian always had special ways she could talk to Jack, ways no one else could. And Jack could always make Marian laugh. Always before; but not now. Now when Jack's wild, when he does his stupid stuff, Marian gets mad.

  And even though it's kind of impossible not to like Tom, she doesn't want to be around him a lot, not for a while now. Not since they were all too old not to know what Mr. Molloy does, what Tom now does. Jimmy doesn't push it when Marian says she has to work the night Tom has Mets tickets (though Marian loves baseball) or when she drops by only long enough for one quick eggnog at Tom and Vicky's Christmas party and spends most of that time talking quietly with Peggy Molloy. Sometimes Jimmy wonders what he'd do, himself, if he and Tom weren't part of each other's first memories. But they are.

  Tom goes far back in Marian's life, too, of course, as far as he goes in Jimmy's, and Jack does, too. But with girls it's different. The girls see this kind of thing, see most things, a different way.

  For the girls, Jimmy thinks, it's not just who people are. Not just that they've all always known each other, been in the middle of each other's lives like all the different colors making up the same picture, all the different sounds in the same song. That's not enough. For the girls, it's the kinds of things you do, too. For them, those can change how they think about people. For him, for the other guys, what you do, that's one thing, but who you are, that's another.

  Maybe the way the girls see things is right, and his is wrong. That wouldn't surprise Jimmy. But whose way is right, he thinks, that's not what matters sometimes.

  And there's the other thing, too: Marian wouldn't get it, why Jimmy can't just go to Jack and tell him what's going to happen, tell him he has to cool it or he'll be screwed. But if it's the truth, Jimmy, she'd say. Why can't you just tell him, if it's the truth?

  Jimmy knows having the truth is only part of the answer, but he doesn't know how to tell this to Marian.

  So when Marian asks what's on his mind, Jimmy says, Just stuff.

  Nothing I can help with?

  Jimmy smiles and says, You are. You're helping.

  Marian smiles, too. She says, Okay. She kisses him, says, It's Saturday night. Do you want to go out?

  Jimmy wraps his own hand around hers, kisses each of her fingers separately. The curtains shimmy, someone's screen door creaks. Not tonight, Jimmy says. He slides closer to her under the sheet, folds his arms around her from behind. He kisses her ear, her throat. He parts her hair and kisses the back of her neck. Not unless you can think of somewhere to go, Jimmy says, somewhere we would go that would be better than here.

  Marian turns to face Jimmy and her answer is her smile, and the slow way she circles her arms around him.

  So why doesn't Jimmy marry Marian, why hasn't he asked her? He knows she'd say yes. He knows how he feels.

  But sometimes when she looks at him—and he sees this most when he's coming off his shift, when they've had a big job and one of the guys, maybe, has almost fallen, almost been lost—the way she looks at him, Jimmy's not sure it's for him. It's for what he does, but not even that: it's for what Marian thinks he does, and for the man she thinks he is for doing it.

  That look, that's what's been stopping Jimmy. He needs to be sure of what he is not sure of now: that Marian knows the man who is asking her, the man she'd be marrying, is Jimmy.

  Not Superman. Just Jimmy.

  MARIAN'S STORY

  Chapter 8

  The Way Home

  October 31, 2001

  Marian hesitated outside. She had always disliked Flanagan's. She had been the one to call; but now, standing on the sidewalk in the amethyst hour when day surrenders to night, she wondered why she had agreed to have this encounter here. She could have demurred when Tom suggested it. (Though suggest was wrong: “Meet you at Flanagan's, five-thirty,” was what he'd said, and she'd said, “Fine, see you there,” as though Flanagan's ponderous furnishings and hushed talk had not, from the first, given her the uncomfortable feeling that something was happening just beyond the borders of her experience, something she was not welcome to know.) She could have requested another location. He would have consented, perhaps even apologized for not remembering how she felt, she who had not been inside Flanagan's for twenty years. But truly, how could he be expected to remember? You should have said something, she admonished herself, you should have spoken up if it mattered to you. It was not Tom's responsibility. People do not read minds.

  Though Tom did, Tom sometimes did. She wished he had, on this occasion as so many times when they all were young, read hers. They might have met at the chrome-wrapped little diner, or they might have sat together in the Hilltop Café, finally somewhere to go in Pleasant Hills for a latte and a croissant. But it was as it had always been: what Tom offered sounded right, and without even considering another possibility (and in truth this was what most unnerved her: not that she had compromised, for Marian had built her life around her belief in the value of compromise; but that she had assumed without question that what he wanted was what she wanted also), she had agreed.

  Impatient with herself, she pulled the door open into a room so startlingly unfamiliar that at first she was afraid she had somehow come to the wrong place; and then, for a brief time, she wanted the old Flanagan's back.

  Dark, that tavern had been. Its linoleum floor stuck to your shoes, and its ancient jukebox throbbed with music from the days before your parents were old enough to drink. What had covered the walls? Stories clipped from newspapers, photographs behind glass. Horses, now she remembered, horses in the photos, trotting with sulkies behind. (Marian had always thought sulky races eerie and graceful, a little frightening. A trotter was expected to win, was cajoled and lashed by the man in the carriage behind, but could not run. How must that feel for the horses, she worried, what must it be like trying to do your best, having your best demanded
of you, while forced to hold back?) There had been mirrors on the walls then, too, “Schlitz” or “Miller” scrawled across them in chipped gold leaf. Seeing in her mind the places where the mirrors had been, Marian realized that they had been set on the walls in such a way that from every part of Flanagan's, a customer could see the door.

  She wondered whether she had always known that.

  The mirrors were gone. The dark furniture and the sticky linoleum and the jukebox, the trotting horses locked behind glass, all had been replaced. Bentwood chairs, light and cheaply elegant, sat on a patterned tile floor beneath glass lamps that glowed seductively. Two television sets above the bar and three more by the green vinyl booths broadcast college football (one team a local one, their helmets bearing FDNY and NYPD logos alongside their tiger mascot's image), stock car racing (each car painted with its sponsor's name and colors and a large Stars and Stripes), and a sports interview show (tiny flag pins in everyone's lapel). You could swivel your head and take your choice. (Did they ever tune in Yonkers Raceway or the Meadowlands now, Marian wondered, where the trotters ran?)

  Marian strained to hear the music. Over a lifelessly exact electronic beat a sad and sexy woman warned her man that he'd hurt her too often, and one day soon he'd find her gone. The rhythm and the melody were new, the sentiment the same as in Marian's youth, and her parents', and forever before. The raucous voices of the young crowd slammed the music down. A table or two, a booth here and there, were occupied by people Marian's age or older, resolutely eating burgers or plates of linguini, drinking their beers and watching the game. They sat in the date-night crowd like stolid old trees in a tangle of wild new growth. It was the kind of landscape, it occurred to Marian, that springs up after a forest fire. Most of Flanagan's patrons were kids, kids the age she and Jimmy had been when, finally legally permitted to drink—meaning, able to drink in public, not just in the woods or in the parking lot at Eisenhower or on the rocks under the bridge—they had only rarely chosen to come in here.

  Tom, of course, had come here often; and he was here now. It was like Tom to be early, to be waiting so that she would not feel uneasy, alone in what had always been foreign territory and was now a numbingly unfamiliar country.

  He stood when he saw her, and eyes in the crowd lifted to him as he rose. The plaintive woman quavering from the jukebox could be heard more clearly as conversation faltered and people glanced at one another. Tom walked to where Marian stood, just inside the door. He kissed her cheek and led her through the room.

  He was no longer what he had been in days of old, the crown prince; and the kingdom he was to have inherited, he had dissolved. The young people in this new Flanagan's might not even know his name, not know what it was about him that drew and held their glances. But the older ones surely knew. They nodded to him as they had nodded to his father, smiled back when he smiled at them as though they shared a secret.

  Tom led her to his table. Nothing in the new Flanagan's was familiar to Marian except this table of Tom's. Set for two and holding a half-drained pilsner of beer, it breathed an inch or two easier than the crowded tables around it and stood in precisely the spot on the floor where his father's table had always been.

  And he was still Tom Molloy. His blue eyes were still clear, and his thick short hair was dark as a boy's. He still walked like a warrior, and his smile still told you that seeing you was the best thing that had happened to him all day.

  Over the music, Marian said, “It's changed.”

  Tom shrugged, and his smile turned rueful. “What hasn't?” He looked around, and she did, too, her head full of the past twenty years, the leisurely, incremental, inescapable alterations of time; and the last six weeks, the violent flashes of disaster.

  “They still make a great cheeseburger, though,” Tom said, bringing them back to the solid world, the facts of the moment, and Marian, surprising herself, nearly laughed with delight at the persistent memory and hope of a world in which cheeseburgers were worth discussing.

  She did not laugh, though, only smiled, and Tom did, too. She examined the menu and chose a pasta primavera. She also ordered wine, excusing herself for thinking this might be a difficult conversation to get through without something to encourage her. The new Flanagan's apologized for having no sauvignon blanc (the old Flanagan's would have laughed in her face), but the chardonnay, when it came, was surprisingly good.

  Marian sipped at her wine, Tom at his beer. Tom brought up the Fund, only to say the board was still a hundred percent behind Marian, every step of the way. Marian smiled and didn't tell him that long, weary experience told her what that meant: someone on the board—at least someone, though most likely an entire faction—had questioned her decision-making, and probably her overall suitability in light of the Tribune's allegations, and had no doubt urged her replacement. If the board was still behind her, it was only because Tom and his faction had prevailed.

  Marian thanked him and asked after his children. All were doing well. Michael, the oldest, who looked so like Tom had when they all were young, was home. He'd been in his senior year at college, in Syracuse; after the attacks, he'd rushed home and would finish school somewhere else, somewhere near. “He wants to stay in New York,” said Tom. “He doesn't want to be one of those people.”

  Marian knew who those people were: the ones who ran from what had happened and what might happen, who deserted, escaped to other, less endangered cities. Or to cabins in the woods. “But he could come back next year,” Marian said, as though next year were something that could be counted on, as though next year would for certain come and be different from now. “Don't you think he should go back now and finish?”

  “I'm his father. He doesn't ask me what I think.”

  “You could tell him anyway. That's what my father does.”

  Tom smiled at her again and looked down, and she thought he must be remembering his father, Mike the Bear, gone just over seven years now. How long that seemed! And yet it was not the Mike Molloy of seven years ago, or seventeen, whom Marian suddenly longed to see come striding through Flanagan's door. That had been a diminished and weary man, the exhausted king who had not fought his son's determination to democratize the kingdom and give away its wealth. No, the Mike Molloy whom Marian wished for was the Big Mike of her childhood, the old-time boss of Flanagan's. In charge, running things, and obeyed.

  But she was being foolish. Big Mike was gone. And when the world had been his, it had not been a good world, not a fair one, and that world had ended badly, and that was why she was here with Tom right now. Tom had said it on the steps of St. Ann's in September: There are no grown-ups, only us. If Marian, and Tom, and everyone else who had been placed in positions they had not asked for, did not accept their situations, take responsibility, do what they had to do, they would find that no one was in charge.

  Oh, Marian knew how much was in her hands. Still, reluctant to begin, to open a conversation she had avoided for twenty years (though it could not be that Tom did not know why they were here, so why did he not help her, why did he not begin?), Marian twirled her pasta, drank more wine, and asked after Tom's mother. “I saw her in September,” she told Tom. “At St. Ann's. But I didn't have a chance to talk to her.”

  “That's too bad,” Tom said. “She'd have liked to see you.”

  Marian had not spoken to Peggy Molloy at the mass she had come back to Pleasant Hills to attend, five days after the attacks. But not really because she had not had the chance.

  Everyone, that day, was stunned and confused and trying to manage. All around her Marian had seen people working, for their own sakes and the sake of others, to hold themselves together, and she'd seen the different small things that made each fall apart. The sight of the empty apparatus floor through the open door at Engine 168 had been too much for one friend; another broke down sobbing as she spoke of talking to her neighbor while he watered the vegetable garden that now he would never harvest.

  For Marian, strong and useful for those p
ast five days, offering support to those weaker than she, volunteering late into the night and bearing up, that small thing had been the sight of Peggy Molloy. Seeing her shoulders bent as though carrying weight, her head covered in the old style with a black lace shawl, had brought Marian to unexpected tears.

  If Tom was the abdicated prince, living now by choice as a commoner, Peggy Molloy, widowed seven years, was still the sad queen she had always been. She dressed as other women did, and walked like them, sat and talked among them in the same gentle voice she had always used; her grandchildren's friends adored her as her sons' friends always had. Others in church that day had lost loved ones; Peggy Molloy had not. But seeing her clothed in mourning out of respect for other mothers' sons had swept Marian back through years, to another mass, also at St. Ann's, when the loss had been all of theirs but Peggy's more than anyone's: the funeral mass for Jack.

  PHIL'S STORY

  Chapter 10

  Sutter's Mill

  October 31, 2001

  The phone again. Goddamn it. There might be something to be said, Phil thought, fumbling for the damn thing in his pocket, for a city where the phones don't work.

  “Constantine.” More of a threat than a greeting, but screw whoever it was if they couldn't take a joke.

  “It's Kevin.”

  Shit. Good going, Phil. Courtroom technique, swift softening of voice: “Hey, Kev. How're you doing?”

  “You need to come out here. I need to talk to you.”

  “I've been wanting to. But your mother—”

  “Mom doesn't want to see you. We'll meet somewhere. You and me.” Kevin was on edge, his voice tight and cold, but at least he was calling.

  “Wherever you say.”

  “I'd come in—”

  “No, no problem.” Come in, Kev—on the crutches, with the pain pills every four hours. “Where's good?”

  “There's a bar called the Bird.”