S Rozan - Absent Friends

It was on the boat, in the early years, that their treaties were forged, that the decrees they had issued over and over against each other were broken again and again. Until finally they admitted that though the way they lived was impossible, they could not stay apart.

Sally had never accused Phil of anything but this: not wanting to live in her world. Preferring their secret country, their world of stars and fog where even Kevin was a foreigner.

Part of this was true. And an important part was wrong. As life without Sally was unbearable to Phil, life without Kevin had quietly (Phil unable to say exactly when this happened) become unthinkable.

There had been about Kevin, always, the kind of sweet, breezy innocence that adults claim for children but that Phil didn't remember from his own childhood in himself, his cousins, his friends. Kevin's eyes always lit when Phil walked through the door.

Phil knew that light, saw it every day. His clients looked at him that way the first few times he entered the visiting rooms in their jails. They smiled expectantly, waited for the magic, and nine times out of ten he disappointed them. He couldn't get them out. Couldn't send them home. Couldn't tell them it was going to be okay. The light would fade, smothered by bewilderment and the start of despair.

“But you're supposed to be a hotshot,” the client would complain, always that, some variation of that.

“Right,” he'd say. “That's why you got three years instead of twenty.”

Phil would leave, but never before he saw the new understanding dawning in their eyes: that bars, guards, and exercise yards were their lives now. That Phil Constantine hadn't been able to save them. But what Kevin wanted-candy, a kite, someone to push his fire truck around-that was easy. Phil loved Kevin because he never had to disappoint him.

Sally said: Stay. Nothing else, nothing so difficult. The ferry would become Phil's commuter route; they would no longer need it as their Shangri-la. Sunny summer afternoons and frosted winter mornings would belong to them, to be added to their long collection of whispered nights.

Pleasant Hills would welcome him, Sally assured him, circling him in the warmth of her arms one spent evening years ago, when they were still almost new to each other.

“Sure.” He'd kissed her. “As soon as they forget who I am.”

They'd had this dialogue before, and most of the time her soft pressure and his refusal closed the question. But this time Sally's face took on the distant, clouded look it always had when she talked about Markie. She held Phil closer, her red hair drifting around her shoulders, and said, “It wasn't your fault.”

Phil had heard Sally tell him this before. It had been the first thing she'd said to him when they'd faced each other on the steps of St. Ann's after Markie's funeral mass.

An irreverent breeze was snapping the flag on the firehouse, trying to get a game going with the treetops, tossing grit in the pallbearers' faces. The hard glances that shot Phil's way when he entered the church told him how Pleasant Hills felt about him and his being there, but he'd known that even before he'd boarded the ferry. He found a place in a rear pew. As the unfamiliar service progressed, he sat, stood, read silently and aloud, though he didn't kneel, and not knowing the hymns, he didn't sing.

Filing with the other mourners from the gloom of the church after the coffin had passed, Phil squinted in the thin, bright sun. He looked for the widow, spotted her by the line of black limousines. Beside her a little boy, his hair red like hers, dug furiously in the dirt with a stick. Phil had glimpsed the boy in church. The child had squirmed and jiggled and had had to be quieted. Not quite three, Phil thought, though Phil was no judge of children's ages. He'd met the boy just once or twice before, though Markie had talked about him all the time. His name was Kevin. Why hadn't he ever asked his age?

Phil watched as the boy sat, as a dark-haired young woman bent to speak to him. Marian Gallagher, that's who she was. Worked for some tenants' rights group, a rising star in the nonprofit world. He'd talked to her. He'd been ready to put her on the stand, a character witness, if Markie's case had gone to trial, if there hadn't been a plea. The book on her: she never lied. A useful reputation for a witness to have, if she's on your side.

Marian Gallagher lifted the child to his feet, brushed dirt from his bottom. The boy scowled, tugged; she wouldn't let him go. Forget it, pal, Phil thought. There's always someone who gets in the way of your work. But take it from me: she's doing you a favor. That hole you were digging, it'll be deeper and wider and better in your head than it ever would've been, if she'd left you alone to dig it.

He waited at the top of the steps for the press of neighbors and family to thin. When it did, he walked down to Sally Keegan, took her black-gloved hand, and told her he was sorry.

She said, “Thank you,” and then she said, “It wasn't your fault.” Behind her black net veil her eyes shone a deep emerald. He was surprised at their color, expecting a paler green, and then surprised at his surprise. They'd only met twice before; when had he noticed her eyes?

She squeezed his hand and held it, though having said what he came to say, he had been about to turn and walk away, leave her to those who loved her. Instead, she bent to the child, truculent in the dark-haired woman's grip, and said, “Kevin, this is Mr. Constantine. He was a friend of your daddy's.”

The child stared up at Phil, eyes narrowed, looking to see if anything about him was interesting at all.

Phil was hit with a gust of childhood memory: his neck aching after Saturday morning services as, not yet allowed to go home and change into jeans and grab his comic books or his basketball, he stood around the anteroom where they made kiddush, looking up at one adult after another, wondering how so many people could find so many stupid things to say to a kid.

Crouching outside St. Ann's, Phil didn't say anything. He met Kevin's eyes; they were the same green he remembered Sally's being, the gray-green he must have been wrong about. Without smiling, he winked. From his pocket he retrieved a roll of LifeSavers. He pried the red one off the top and offered it to Kevin.

Kevin stopped squirming, and his face glowed in an instant three-year-old grin. As he popped the candy in his mouth, Phil heard and ignored a disapproving click of the tongue from Marian Gallagher. He saw and ignored the protesting look she gave Sally. He knew and ignored what it meant: You let your child-Markie's child-take food from the hand of this man?

She never lied, and he guessed she wasn't much on hiding her feelings, either.

Phil winked at the boy again. Kevin squeezed both eyes shut, trying to respond. They grinned at each other, and Phil straightened up. Sally reached for Phil's hand. “Thank you,” she said again.

They hardly knew each other, and she owed him nothing. Yet the morning she buried her husband, standing on the steps of the church surrounded by people staring at Phil in silent accusation (he was an outsider, he was the hired professional who'd failed, he was so easy to blame), Sally Keegan cleared her throat and said again, quietly and forcefully so everyone would hear, the one thing he could not say to himself: “It wasn't your fault.”

A few years later, in the soft darkness, six-year-old Kevin asleep across the hall, she was saying the same thing again.

Phil rolled onto his back. “Your neighbors disagree.”

“They'd get used to you.”

“Oh, I don't think so.”

“Kevin would like it if you were here more often.”

He turned his head to her. “Kevin gets a kick out of Uncle Phil because I bring him funny presents and take him to the ball game. If I lived here, everything would be different.”