Absent Friends

When they'd first left the bar (it was all a little runny to Marian, like a watercolor, but she did not think Tom had paid for their meal and drinks, just signaled to the bartender and pointed to the table as he rose from his chair), she had been glad of the cool and the quiet and the dark. Tom had his hand on her arm, and he'd steered her off the avenue at the first corner they came to, so even the thin traffic and unambitious neon of a Pleasant Hills evening was behind them. Quiet streets, cars in the driveways, yellow glows from the windows. On porches, carved pumpkins sneered. The flickering candlelight inside them made them seem to move their mouths, whispering terrible things. Ghosts swung from tree limbs, but these were just cloth, not the real ghosts of Pleasant Hills.

This was the oldest section of town, not far from where they'd grown up. Marian knew whose houses these were, and if she didn't, she knew whose they had been: the Leslies, old man Callahan, the crazy Curren sisters. Marian knew which of these trees were good for climbing and what birds sang in them, though no birds sang now, this dark, this late. What she did not know was what the secret was that Tom was keeping.

Tom had always had secrets, well, of course he had, he was Tom Molloy, so many things his family knew and did that the rest of them did not know. And he had secrets now that Marian would not think of trying to unearth. How hard it had been to have his children grow up around the corner with Vicky instead of under his own roof. How Mike the Bear had felt when Tom sold or gave away or let fall into ruin or burned down the disparate parts of the empire Big Mike had built. Whether Tom thought he had ever brought a smile, a real smile, to his mother's sad eyes.

About some things, Marian would never ask.

Tom had secrets; she had a secret, too, one she'd been hiding forever. That hideous knife-scaled thing had crawled out between them in Flanagan's, fouled the air, driven them outdoors, and was now following them, hissing, through the streets. (Marian shivered, was barely able to keep from looking behind; Tom put his arm across her shoulders.) And so she wondered, What other secret could there be? What else was worth hiding, once this truth was out?

“Tell me,” she said.

“Tell you what?” Tom pulled her closer to him. She was grateful. She wanted to answer him, but she did not know how to demand his secret, how to shrilly insist, when it was his arm that was keeping her warm. So she asked something else.

“Why did—did Jimmy”—she stumbled, and it made her stammer, or maybe it was the other way—“why did he let Markie say it was him? Markie went to jail—” To her horror, she started to cry.

Tom gave her a handkerchief, Tom gave her time. “It wasn't supposed to happen the way it did.” Marian scrubbed at her eyes. Tom said, “He was supposed to serve maybe five months, get paroled, everything would be fine.”

“What do you mean, ‘supposed to'?”

“It's what we thought,” Tom said, looking as they passed the McCrae house with its big new addition.

“When did you think that? Who said to think that?”

She knew her voice was rising. Tom's was patient. “Markie had no priors, he had no sheet. He was going to keep his head down inside. It shouldn't have been a problem.”

“That lawyer bastard, it was all his idea, right?”

Tom turned his face to her. Even in the dark she could see the blue of his eyes. No, she couldn't. It was just that she knew about his eyes, with Tom she believed things without having to see them. “Constantine?” he said. “He didn't even get the case until way after we'd worked it out. He came in after Markie was arrested. He believed the story the way Markie told it.”

She wasn't sure what Tom was saying: on these quiet streets there was too much noise, though maybe it was in her head, what sounded like sobbing. Tom was likely to be right. Yes, of course. But it could not be that Phil was innocent in all this.

“‘Worked it out,'” she said. “What does that mean?”

“Markie and Jimmy and me. Our story. We worked it out together.”

“Why did he let him?”

“Who let who?”

“Why did Jimmy let Markie!”

Tom said, “Because Markie wanted to.” Tom stopped and faced her, in front of the house that used to be the O'Briens', five kids, they were fun to play with but they moved away. “Jimmy was always saving Markie's ass. You remember how it was. Markie wanted to be the hero, just for once.”

A breeze rustled the leaves above them. Someone's cat trotted across a lawn, stopped and froze when it saw them, then hissed and scooted back.

Marian felt strange. If she and Tom were telling secrets on the streets of Pleasant Hills, they shouldn't be adults. When they were all children and they did this, whispered to each other, everything they said was important, of course it was, but there was another thing they knew. They never said it, but they knew it and that was that no matter how serious something was, it could all be made right again. Somebody could make it right.