S Rozan - Absent Friends

“To build themselves up so they can feel important again?” Harry wanted to know.

“No, I don't think so,” she had answered. “More because, why not? You can see from up there how little really matters.”

Laura knew the World Trade Center well, then, from the days when it had been a gleaming array of sharp-cornered buildings standing over a weave of train lines. And knew it well from the last seven weeks, since it had become Ground Zero, an alien, incomprehensible place with a horrifying new name. She had watched from behind the fence and sometimes, because she was a reporter, from inside it, as torches sliced through twisted steel and trucks carted it away, as masked firefighters threw wreckage aside to reveal yet more wreckage. And she'd been taking notes and climbing mounds of destruction once as all work stopped and steelworkers and firefighters stood in silent lines, saluted the flag-draped body carried past them, wiped tears away with filthy gloves, and returned to work.

And Laura had seen the countless aerial photos, in her own paper as well as the others, starting from the day itself.

But still.

Still, as she stared at the looming skyline, the long low rays of sun and the piercing searchlights, she felt disoriented, and wrong, and stupid. And guilty, for being wrong.

Everyone knew the towers had been on the tip of Manhattan. The island, New York City itself, culminated in them, grew and swelled and pushed them soaring into the air when the unstoppable energy of Manhattan had rolled south to the water and could go no farther.

But that wasn't true. Of course it wasn't. As she stared at the place now, it was clear the lights and the cranes and the smoke were uptown from the end of the island, west of it, visible only between and above the crowd of buildings that occupied Manhattan's tip and always had. Her memory of leaning on the rail with Harry, sipping coffee and sailing from Staten Island straight toward the gateway of the towers was wrong, and if she thought back more carefully, if she meticulously unbraided meaning from fact, she knew that, and had always known it.

Harry would have laughed. Laura shivered as she heard a sound like the chortle that so often preceded a hug from Harry; but it was someone else, and impatient with herself, she shook off the idea, which was really a hope, that Harry was on the boat with her as he always had been, every time, before.

So I'm confused, so what? she demanded, of herself, the water, the gulls. The gulls just wheeled, looking for another boat to follow, and the water just flowed. This close to Manhattan the salt aroma on the wind was mixed with smoke from Ground Zero. As the ferry's engines cut to ease into the pier, Laura stared at her coffee cup. Carefully peeling back the plastic top, she upended it, pouring untouched coffee into the dark harbor water.

October 31, 2001

Marian sat in Flanagan's with Tom, in a swirl of unfamiliar people, sounds, sights. His mother was well, Tom told her, in answer to a question she must have asked. Peggy went to mass almost every day, he said, as she had for many years, and she did what she could to offer solace to others, those whose recent losses were greatest, most heartbreaking (though in Pleasant Hills, Marian knew, everyone's heart was broken). Peggy took great comfort in the company of her grandchildren, said Tom, his own two sons and daughter. It was like Tom, Marian thought as she drank from a second glass of wine, not to say how comforted his mother surely was by his own presence, as she always had been, even when Peggy Molloy was the reigning queen and the royal family was whole. In the odd light and strange colors that made up this new Flanagan's, the Molloys shimmered and appeared before Marian as though in a posed photograph. In the center sat Peggy, with her straight back, her smile, and her worried eyes. Big Mike stood behind her, stolid and strong. At Mike's side, looking squarely into the camera, was Tom; and next to Peggy, grinning, shoulders forward, as though he was ready to race somewhere else as soon as the photographer was finished, Jack.

The autumn night when Jack died had been sticky and hot, a night of slamming doors, screeching brakes, and lovers' quarrels. Because he had not died naturally (though there were those who muttered that death from a gunshot wound was a natural one for Jack Molloy), because an investigation was under way, criminal charges pending, the laws of the city demanded that the Medical Examiner conduct an autopsy. Thus the wake and funeral were delayed by days, and the weather turned colder. The morning the bells tolled to summon them to St. Ann's, a raw wind marauded through the streets, driving before it a thin cruel rain. Marian walked to church beside Jimmy. All of Pleasant Hills was scurrying along the sidewalks, shivering in hastily unearthed coats and dark wool suits, converging on the vortex of St. Ann's, with their umbrellas held like shields.

Marian clutched an umbrella with two hands, unreasonably angry with the wind for coveting it, for attempting to wrench it from her and leave her unprotected. Jimmy carried no umbrella, and he wore no hat. The rain darkened his hair and ran in glistening trails down his cheeks, and it occurred to Marian that rain like this was a perfect disguise for hiding tears. Jimmy's hands, for warmth on this bitter day, were thrust deep, deep into the pockets of his good coat, and Marian struggled with the umbrella, and so perhaps it was not surprising that he had not put an arm around her shoulder or taken hold of her elbow to steer and steady her. Or perhaps it was.

From the night Jack had been killed, and Markie arrested, Jimmy had spoken little. Marian sat with him in soft silence over their morning coffee, kissed him, and smiled into his eyes when he left for his shift at 168. At night she held him, and he nestled tight to her both awake and asleep, though she knew he slept very little, and not deeply. Once, in a night syncopated with bursts of lightning and rumors of thunder but without rain, he turned suddenly (did he know she was awake also, waiting for the storm?) and made love to her with a furious urgency she had not known in him before. Afterward the thought came to her that this might be what it was like for him in a fire: to act before thought prevented action, to seize the chance before the chance was gone.

So Marian held Jimmy close, and lay awake, and the weather changed. The authorities, their work complete, released Jack's body for burial. The police made their arrest, and after an unexplained delay-but the police never explained, and who could insist?-charges were filed and a lawyer assigned. Jimmy traded shifts with a fireman brother to be free for Jack's funeral.

The day was dark, and the church was dark. Watery trails crisscrossed the tile in the echoing entryway. Parishioners plunged umbrellas into brass stands as though they were swords thrust into rock to attest to an oath (of community? of justice?) that everyone had sworn.

Marian furled her umbrella and placed it with the others, though gently. She reached for Jimmy's hand as they walked toward the front pews where the Molloy family already sat. Peggy Molloy's head was bent forward; black lace hid her face. Vicky, married to Tom in this same church, as Sally had been to Markie, sat beside Peggy, whispering something, holding her gloved hand. Tom and Big Mike stared straight ahead, their unblinking eyes keeping watch over the bronze-handled coffin before the altar. The air smelled of damp wool, of cedar and camphor. Jimmy's hand in Marian's was rough and cold, as though he had been laboring for hours in the icy morning.