“It’s fine.” I clinked against their glasses. “This is great. Thanks.”
We sipped our beers and looked around the open-air room, the Atlantic pounding against the shoreline. Bare bulbs had been strung over the raw wood dance floor where a barefoot girl in bikini top and cut-offs danced, and the rest of the room swayed along.
“Hey Mac,” Jean called to a guy threading himself through the crowd of bathing suits. Mac squinted into the afternoon sun and gave Jean a quick kiss on the cheek, then extended his hand to Timmy.
“Mac Davis, this is Kathy, Timmy’s sister.” At first I thought it was Mac Davis, the country singer with the telltale dark, curly hair and magic blue eyes. But when he extended his hand, I saw this guy was younger.
“Jim Moran.” His blue t-shirt matched his eyes, “but you can call me Mac.” He grinned.
The place filled with beachgoers waiting in line for drafts, and we were pushed into a corner with a Space Invaders machine. Mac bet he could beat me. I didn’t tell him I had two boys who regularly tried to take down my armies of aliens. Still, he won two out of three before he said, “Best of five buys dinner.”
I gave it my best shot but came up short. “All right. I’ll buy.”
“No, no, just kidding.” His eyes twinkled. “I would love to buy you dinner.”
We made it a foursome, and Jean gave me a little hug on our way out of the Cat. “What do you think?”
I grabbed her arm, and we walked ahead. “He seems real nice.”
She squeezed my shoulder. “I kinda thought you two would like each other,” she said.
Indian Cove Restaurant jutted out on the Shinnecock Canal with a view of the marina and hundreds of sailboats. Mac and I fell into easy conversation about boats and Hampton Bays. He was a plumber, starting his own business, and I liked the way his hair fell onto his forehead, dark curls with a touch of gray, and those eyes, which made me think of Frank Sinatra. I told him about going back to school, that I was taking a photography class, how I had grown up in the Bronx. But I omitted the dreaded word widow, and the fact that I had two children, and kept feeling twinges of guilt. Am I really laughing with another man?
Jean was right. I did like him, his easy smile and dark good looks. By the end of the weekend, he invited Timmy, Jean, and me to a backyard party. His rental house was a palace compared to Timmy’s. He was the only male among eight airline hostesses. They scrubbed the house and cooked for and doted over the easy-going guy who could fix anything. There was an ex named Kathy in that mix of women, but she didn’t appear to mind my presence.
While we leaned against the railing, sharing a paper plate of shrimp, Jim asked, having just ended a relationship with a Kathy, “Can I call you Kathleen?” A name he said he always loved.
“Kathleen it is, if I can call you James.”
In the next few months while my mother and Gracie invented things to do with the boys—a trolley ride up Northport’s Main Street, a trip to the sweet shop, dinner at McDonalds—I hitched a ride to the Hamptons with Timmy and Jean.
James was more carefree than Brian, who had been a city kid like me. James was raised on Long Island. He rode his bike to the docks at Bay Shore, and his skin turned brown during summers of scraping barnacles and climbing sailboat masts. He didn’t have the cynicism that crept up on some policemen who saw the most debased of human nature. Brian had tried to hide that side, but he sometimes woke up in a sweat after bad dreams, and it showed in his eyes when he came home from a particularly gruesome scene.
The late summer day was brilliant with sunshine, and Hot Dog Beach was packed with sunbathers. James and I weaved around blankets and umbrellas. Humidity had turned my hair into a mass of curls, but I wasn’t thinking about frizzy hair or a flat chest. The rhythm of the surf, the smell of lotion, and the strong man walking next to me erased everything but the moment.
We walked out to the barrier rocks across sparkling sand laced with star fish skeletons and watched a dad toss a lime-green Frisbee to a little boy who ran backward to make the catch. James took my hand to climb the rocks.
“How long until you graduate?” The stones were hot under my bare feet. The air smelled gloriously of summer, bright and shimmery. I lifted my face and felt the sun, hot and languorous, and sensed something special happening.
“Two more years.”
His hand felt rough, a workingman’s hand. A plumber wasn’t who I thought I would date the second time around. I pictured a white-collar worker or an academic. But holding his hand was comfort, the weight of his fingers an anchor holding me down to the here and now, not what came before, or what might lie ahead.
“What then?” he asked. I didn’t know what then, but I did know what now, and that was in the weekends we had spent together, James had taught me to laugh again. That was all I wanted right now, to hold a calloused hand, to let my hair fly in the wind, and to laugh with the man who looked like Mac Davis.
__________
I was afraid to introduce the boys to another man. I didn’t want to raise their hopes of a new dad, or worse, a man who would come in and then out of their lives. But at summer’s end, when James asked to pick me up in Northport for dinner, I said yes.
My stomach did a little flip when he rang the doorbell of the house in Northport. Morty barked like a maniac while Chris chased him around the dining room. Keith was in the den playing the same keys of “Frere Jacques” over and over. My mother folded a towel and placed it in the laundry basket. From the threshold of the kitchen I watched as she raised her eyebrows, considering the man I brought home to meet my sons. I could tell she liked what she saw.
That night we sat at the Clam Shack and ordered soft shell crabs and a bottle of chardonnay, and I told him the story I had been avoiding for three months. It was always a cruel telling, no matter how the words were phrased, and I worried most that my terrible history might drive him away. Why would anyone want to get involved with a widow and two kids, especially one who had suffered such a disturbing loss?
His first question was about the boys and how they were taking Brian’s death, and I felt my shoulders relax. I had expected him to ask about whether I was ready to date. And then we talked. We talked about death, what it meant, how mysterious and confounding it was, we talked about my mother helping with the boys and the boys themselves, who they were, what they loved, how they spent their time.
“I would like to take them for a ride in my new truck.” As he told me about the truck, his schedule, when might be a good time, I tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but instead I watched the tendon in his neck pulse with life and imagined running my finger along its path, thought of his kiss, soft and sweet, pictured what it might be like to spend a weekend together. The idea of waking up next to James was both terrifying and exhilarating.
After dinner and a lingering kiss in the car, I told him I would make dinner for him the following week. He smiled. I didn’t need to say the words. We both knew what that meant.
At my house, my mother sat at the dining room table where the piles of newspapers about Brian’s death had been replaced by textbooks, and where she now had spread out the Northport Observer. I sat down in the chair across from her. “I would like to get to know him better,” I said.
She stopped reading. She had a faraway look in her eyes. “Good,” she said. “That will be good for you.” More than anything, I knew she wanted me to have a second chance, something she never had, and that helped the memory fade of those missing photos.
__________
Gracie babysat that Friday night. She was smoking a cigarette when James drove up, and her charm bracelets tinkled as she pulled the curtain aside to peek out at him. She whistled low.
“Wowee,” she said. “He does look just like Mac Davis.” She called up the stairs. “Boys.” She winked at me. “We’re leaving. Your mom has a date with destiny.”
“Desperado,” the Eagles sang, as I dressed a salad and James put a steak on the BBQ. After dinner we weren’t awkward or hesitant. It felt like the most natural thing in the world when I took his hand and led him to the bedroom.
“I’ve wanted to feel you in my arms since the day I met you,” he whispered in my ear. His white shirt smelled of clean laundry, his breath of after-dinner coffee.
I had forgotten what it was like to run my hand over the hard muscles of a man’s chest. He was incredibly gentle as his fingers explored my naked skin. I thought about how wonderful it was to once again be touched—hot and electric—and let myself drift away from the last few years when I could not see beyond my sorrow. I explored the curve of his thigh and held on to the tenderness of his touch. When it was over, we were both breathless and smiling, my skin stinging in his absence. I could hear acorns falling from the tree outside my window, blown from the tree by the wind. Then the light patter of raindrops that became louder and stronger until the window was a sheet of rain.
__________
In the morning James made bacon and eggs, and we considered taking a bike ride but went back to bed instead, where we stayed until it was time for Gracie to drop off the boys.
The next weekend we took the boys to Skippers Restaurant, a walk up Main Street, ending at the harbor. It was our first outing together.
“I have a twenty-one foot Cabin Cruiser,” James told them. “I hope you’ll come out with me.”
Chris let go of my hand and skipped next to him. “Can we fish?” James took his hand and they walked ahead.
“We’ll catch lots of Snapper,” James said, and Keith caught up.
“Can we try for Bass too?”
We walked out to the end of the dock and watched a fishing boat crawl across the sound, lobster traps stacked high, ready for their prey, its motor rattling the air. “Those are lobster traps,” James told the boys. “Lobstermen mark their territory, and everyone knows not to pull someone else’s traps.” He had each boy by the hand, natural and easy.
“Do the lobsters bite the fisherman?” Keith wanted to know.
James leaned down to his level. “They wear protective gloves,” he said. “And then put rubber bands around their claws so they can’t bite.”
Chris nodded. “I know. My friend’s dog Max wears a muzzle so he doesn’t bite anyone.” He smiled at James, his eyes bright and sharp.
“Yes, exactly right,” he said.
We ordered hamburgers, and Chris shook salt on his fries and then licked the top of the shaker before passing it along to James. James looked at me, his face a puzzle.
Embarrassed, I asked Chris, “Do you know you’re not supposed to lick the salt shaker?” Chris lowered his eyes.
“Yes,” he said, his face turning red. I tried not to laugh.
“But do you know why you shouldn’t lick the salt shaker?” He looked up with a bright smile.
“Yes, because when the next person licks it he’ll get my germs.”
__________
That fall, James docked his powerboat in Northport Harbor where the boys threw nets for bait and fished for Blues. We went to Skippers once a week, he took them out in his truck, and when winter came, he taught them to ski. James was hardier than I thought, and stayed even after his family suggested he keep walking, told him that raising someone else’s kids came with a shitload of trouble (his father), and he should find someone to have kids of his own (his mother).
I watched him teach the boys how to use carpenter tools, build furniture, fix plumbing. I loved the nearness of him. He felt so there, after the looming empty space Brian left in our lives. It had taken me a long time to imagine myself with someone else, but even in my most vivid imagination I could not have conjured up someone as understanding and sincere as James. I never thought I would find someone else who made me feel so special.
It helped that James looked different than Brian. He was taller, more muscular, his eyes a more vivid blue. “Frank Sinatra eyes,” Gracie said. I knew he would never replace Brian, no one would, but he was charming, fun to be with, and I began to fall in love with this happy-go-lucky man and the risk he was willing to take with a widow and her ready-made family. It was a different kind of love. Brian, in his way, had saved me, had been my hero. But James was not saving me. I had been raising two boys alone, had gone back to school, figured out how to fight City Hall. I felt different stepping into this love—stronger, an equal.
__________
In February, when the only tracks in the snow on Vista Drive were from James’s F150, he unpacked his size large clothes into dresser drawers that once held mediums. He stacked his Jimmy Buffett cassettes on a shelf next to his shoes and sneakers and put on hangars his one suit and half dozen dress pants and shirts.
Snow blocked the sliding doors, and I stood watching Keith and Chris dig a tunnel, and Morty jump over drifts, puffs of white breath trailing into the frigid air. We had celebrated Keith’s sixth birthday last month, and James had bought him a fishing pole that waited in the corner of his room.
“As soon as it gets warmer we’ll go fishing together,” James promised.
We took them to Disney that winter. Sunshine, after months of cold feet and slippery roads, was a perfect elixir. A half an hour after we arrived at the Lake Buena Vista Hilton in Orlando, James and the boys were in the pool, Keith on his back, Chris hanging from his neck.
I sat at the edge of the pool, my feet in the warm water. Chris swam over, water dripping into his eyes. “Can we call James ‘Dad’?”
I wasn’t surprised. While we were on the beach the first summer Brian was gone, Chris had asked a total stranger to be his dad.
“Why don’t you ask him?”
He swam back to James and said loud enough for everyone in the pool to hear, “Mommy said we can call you Dad.”
“I would like that.” James splashed his two little boys, and they splashed him back, and all was right with the world.
When the sky was laced with pink and the boys tucked in, James and I sat on the balcony overlooking thousands of lights that illuminated the Disney village.
“Will you marry me?” It was the ending of a perfect day.
“Yes,” I said, “I will marry you.” The sun was just setting, a promising streak of purple.
It’s only after we’ve lost everything
that we’re free to do anything.
— Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Murray vs. The City of New York
While I had been discovering James, the trial had waited. Now, just when I was getting my life back together, it was upon me. In his wisdom, Phil DeCicco moved aside and suggested Thomas Stickel to represent me in the case against New York City. He didn’t have the expertise Thomas could provide. “He’s an Army man,” Phil told me. “A criminal attorney who knows his way around explosives.”
Thomas was different from Phil, like night is to day, and when I complained to Phil about his gruff manner, he said, “You don’t have to like him. You just have to trust him.”
Thomas Stickel had filed the papers without fanfare. And the Daily News had run a headline.
City: It’s Not Our Fault Bomb Squad Cop Died!
“Bomb squad policeman Brian Murray, 27, who was killed September 11th trying to defuse a Croatian terrorist bomb, accepted danger as a ‘risk of employment’ and the city does not accept liability. It is manifest that the tragedy of the death of her husband in the course of his known extremely hazardous duty was a risk of employment. There is no suggestion beyond speculation that any negligence was involved.”
“It’s just a tactic,” Thomas said. “They will say he accepted the danger of his job, and we will say they did not provide the equipment to keep him safe. We will make them turn over all the evidence from the explosion and then you will have answers.”
__________
When I w
alked from the parking lot to the Bronx County Courthouse, I passed young men waiting on street corners and remembered passing similar men as the subway sped by 161st Street on my way to Walton High School. I wondered then what they were waiting for. And I wondered again heading to court that day, seeing a similar group huddled together, smoking cigarettes, eyeing long legs in mini-skirts. Freezing cold, or blazing hot, year after passing year they were fixtures on the corners of New York.
The glistening steps and marble columns in front of the courthouse made the rest of the neighborhood look forgotten, tenement buildings marred by rusting fire escapes, sidewalks blackened with a million pieces of bubble gum. When I was a kid, I wanted to climb those steps and stand in the cool halls and listen in on cases where people were made to pay for their crimes. Now it was my turn to make someone take responsibility and learn the truth. And I was going to do it, I realized as I kept up my purposeful stride, no matter how much my childhood memory of Calvin Lin being bullied plagued me, or how afraid I was of alienating myself from the city I loved, the city that raised me.
Thomas was on the front steps waiting for me as I crossed the street that first morning. “Park in the Municipal lot,” he warned me, “and do not wear jewelry or drive a flashy car. No mini-skirts.” When I came up the steps, I saw he had a frown on his face, and I thought something bad had happened since our phone call the night before. But he said, “Your dress should have sleeves. I told you to dress conservatively.” No good-morning, no how-are-you. I looked down at my navy dress that I thought was the picture of conservative, its knee-length longer than anything else I owned, a red belt softening the line. Without apology I fished the lightweight sweater from my purse, something I threw in at the last minute, although I guessed the courtrooms would not be air-conditioned against the summer heat. “Good,” he said. “Let’s go.” I wondered if he was this gruff with all his clients.
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