S Rozan - Absent Friends

And, yes, for Jimmy.

Marian went to church in Manhattan now, at Holy Innocents, and had for many years; not every week, but often. She had not been to St. Ann's back home since she'd left, except for a few weddings, a few funerals. Until last month, when she had crossed the choppy water back to Staten Island the first Sunday after the attacks to attend mass with her father because he'd asked her to.

In the echoing dimness of St. Ann's, where she had spent each Sunday morning of her childhood (Jimmy sometimes there, more often not, his devoutness being of a different nature), Marian had sat beside her father and waited for comfort: if not the comfort of God, at least the comfort of the familiar. Through the ponderous swells of organ music, through the homily, through the prayers spoken together and those whispered alone, she waited. She did not take communion, having not been to confession. Her father's face showed his disappointment. Watching the patient, shuffling communion line, Marian wondered why she had not been to confession since the attacks. She had, through the years, permitted herself confession and therefore communion: her doubts allowed it. Because she had never been certain that keeping her dark secret was wrong (had never been sure, she reminded herself strictly, that the secret was the truth), she had released herself from the obligation to confess it. But in these times, even to prepare for this morning's mass-even to prepare for coming back here-she had found confession impossible.

Nevertheless, she prayed from the heart, as was required. Faith was a compact, like anything else, and Marian was prepared to uphold her part of the bargain. She prayed and waited.

But the music remained just sound, the smoke clouding from the bronze censers mere fragrance. Father Connor's earnest sermon was nothing but words, and Marian found herself not listening to them, hearing instead the soft weeping of people at the first of what would now be a lifetime of Sunday masses without the husbands, wives, sons and daughters, fathers and friends they were accustomed to have beside them. She saw a tear on her father's cheek. Awkward, she patted his hand. “I miss your mother,” he whispered, though it was nearly four decades since Marian's mother had passed away.

So many crowded into St. Ann's that day, the faces and voices from her childhood. Marian knew why they had come, why her father had wanted her to come: just to be there, together.

A memory bloomed in Marian's mind: a windy autumn Sunday when Sister Hilda, the squeaky-voiced nun they had loved because she laughed and knew what was important, had ordered the whole Sunday school class into their jackets, marched them to the park, and taught them to make Indian tepees out of sticks and tablecloths. Each leaning stick would fall, she showed them, but for the others (and the kids all tried to make one stand alone, or two; Tom had three briefly motionless, but then they clattered down). But together, Sister Hilda told them, united (as we are united in faith) and supporting each other (as we do with our prayers and our service), they created shelter.

In St. Ann's five days after the world had changed, Marian tried to feel sheltered. So many steps along her path had been marked here, so much joy and sorrow shared, so much comfort offered, taken, given. She tried to feel that comfort now.

Though even then-long before Harry Randall began his relentless excavating of their days and nightmares-even then, Marian could not rid herself of the exhausting weight of what she had never shared.

And as her clear low voice rose to join the others, filling the church with safeguarding song, she felt it, this secret, not as she always had-as a burden she could never put down-but as empty space, a tear in the fabric of protection, leaving her open to the terrifying sky.

October 31, 2001

Tired of sitting, Phil swiveled off the diner stool, scooped up his papers, and dropped them on the pile by the door for other people to read. He exchanged ¿Qué pasas? with Francisco, working the register. Phil spoke passable Spanish. He'd learned it after he realized you were limiting yourself in criminal practice in New York if you didn't. He paid his bill and picked up another cup of coffee to go.

Three blocks south he stopped on the corner, took out his cell phone. The cell phones went dead and live now in a contorted checkerboard as you moved through the city. He'd searched out and found the places on his usual routes that were most likely to work: more and more of those every day, this was one of the things people meant when they said things were getting back to normal.

Back to normal.

The walk to this corner took Phil past a bus shelter, its glass walls covered, as all the bus shelters were downtown, as the blank walls of buildings were, and fences, and newsstands, and mailboxes, with wind-tattered, rain-wrinkled Xeroxes: smiling people, at birthday parties, at graduation, holding beer bottles, holding babies; height and weight, tattoos and tiny birthmarks all detailed, and long lists of phone numbers, home, work, cell, brother's cell, daughter's cell, so you could call if you saw any of these people who would never be seen again. On the sidewalk at the base of the bus shelter, a muddled rainbow of melted wax clutched candle ends. Flames shivered on two red candles in tall glass holders painted with images of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, and also on a Yahrzeit candle, plain white wax in a round squat glass. Flowers, some fresh, some withered, lay among the candles, below the pictures. And embedded flat in the wax, a small pewter cross on a ribbon. You had to look closely for that; it was hard to see.

Back to normal.

Standing on the breezy corner where transmission was good, Phil finished his coffee. He squashed the cup into the overflowing trash can and wished, not for the first time, that he still smoked. He thumbed the phone's speed-dial button and lifted it to his ear.

Sally's “Hello?” was quiet and low, the voice of a woman unsurprisable, not strong, but determined.

“It's me.” So many years he had been saying this to her, just this, It's me. Before that, It's Phil ; before that, briefly, Phil Constantine, and early on, once or twice, Hello, Mrs. Keegan, this is Phil Constantine, your husband's lawyer.

So many years.

But the silence that answered him now was new.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You heard the news? That reporter?”

After the silence: “Last night. I thought you'd call then.”

“I didn't know if you wanted me to.”

“I didn't. But I thought you would.”

“I want to see you.”

“You can't come out here.”

“I'll meet you on the ferry.”

They had done that before: Phil took the boat to Staten Island, Sally boarded on that side, and they were together for a stolen hour in neither her world nor his. In this itinerant province, Phil and Sally angled toward each other on a worn wooden bench or stood close at the rail. No matter the weather, they never rode inside. And while Phil took pleasure from Sally's warmth when stars burned fiercely through painful winter air, he favored still more the heat that radiated from her on high-summer noons, when other pairs of lovers stood not touching, or vanished into the boat's cooled interior, when the sky was hazed over and he could hear thunder rumbling.

On these trips they would cross the water without leaving the boat, as many times as time allowed. The harbor itself was no-man's-land, but their corner of the boat was their private country, their commonwealth of two.