Absent Friends

Sally came around the table to slip into the chair next to Marian. She picked up a teaspoon and turned it over between finger and thumb. “He always wanted to give me money. I never let him. I never wanted him to think it was that.” She stopped the spoon in midtwirl as if catching herself in a bad habit she'd meant to break. She put it gently down. “Phil always wanted to take care of us. He wanted me to marry him.”

Kevin lifted his eyes to her. “He asked you? When?” His voice was uneven.

“Over and over. Honey, I'm sorry. I know you'd have liked that, to have a dad. But he wouldn't move here.”

“Move here?”

When Kevin asked that, Sally frowned, as if she'd heard something untrue, as if someone had said something she could not let pass. “No,” she said. “No, that's not fair. It wasn't . . . Phil said he'd buy us a house anywhere, in Manhattan, or Brooklyn Heights, or maybe up in Westchester. Just not here. I said, only here.”

Marian had a feeling there was something she should do, say, right now, some step she should take, but how could you take steps on such treacherous, shifting soil? Kevin was watching his mother with his lips pressed tight.

“When I said I'd only marry him if he moved here, he said it wouldn't be good for you, for me, if he did that. Because he'd been Markie's lawyer. Because he's Jewish. And it's true, those things would have made it hard. But it wasn't that.”

“Then what was it?” Kevin asked.

“It was—that we had to live here—I said it because I knew he'd say no.”

Kevin's forehead creased. “I don't get it.”

“No, I don't suppose you do,” Sally said softly. She reached across the table to touch Kevin's cheek, as though her hands could tell him something words never could. “The way we lived, Kev, I don't know if you can understand this, but it's the only way we could have lived. I love Phil. I do. I gave him everything I could. But not everything I had. There was always Markie. Still. Always.

“So I . . . it was like in a fairy tale. Do something impossible, and you win the princess's hand. But you know what happens in fairy tales. Only the right prince can do it. The monster kills the other ones when they try.

“Phil knew that. He knew I made it impossible on purpose, and he knew he wasn't that prince. So he . . . you could say he agreed. To call it impossible. He agreed not to try. So that we could go on. So that we could have as much as we had.”

The teakettle began to whistle. Marian started to rise, but Sally was there before her. She turned off the burner, poured steaming water into Marian's cup, and returned the kettle to the stove. When she sat again, she picked up her coffee and said, “I thought, all these years . . . it was somehow like Markie was still taking care of us. I was grateful for the money, of course I was. It meant I could stay home when you were little. But even more, it was something Markie was still giving us, every month, and that made it so precious. . . .

“But it wasn't. Now it turns out it wasn't. Do you see?”

Sally asked that of Kevin. He didn't answer. She turned to Marian. The question hung in the air.

“Of course,” Marian whispered. This wasn't true. Marian did not know what she saw. She had stepped through a familiar gate into a landscape so alien, it might have been on a different world or from another time. She did not understand what she was seeing, but she knew what Sally had to hear. “Of course.”

“I wish Phil hadn't done this,” Sally said. “I wish he'd been straight with me. All those years . . . But what the paper's saying about Jimmy? That just can't be true.”

Marian wanted to leap up, to take Sally in her arms and protect her forever from evil, from disappointment and truth. But it was too late for that, far too late.

She kept her seat. She looked from Sally to Kevin, wondering what the right thing was. To hold her tongue? Or to say what she had come to say?

How could she, now?

But how could she not?

LAURA'S STORY

Chapter 13

Breathing Smoke

November 1, 2001

In the office, Laura typed up notes, checked her e-mail, made a list. She waited for the morning meeting to start so it could end so she could get to work. She was close, very close, she could feel it. And the story in this morning's edition, already tucked into briefcases and open on breakfast tables all over New York, should, if things went right, bring her much closer, work like a depth charge, blasting to the surface all the ugly bottom-feeders that scuttled through the dark.