Absent Friends

The construction trailers belligerently displayed World Trade Center posters, American flags, patriotic bumper stickers. God Bless America. United We Stand. These Colors Don't Run.

Laura clomped across plywood sheets laid over the mud, followed by the appraising territorial stares of dirt-streaked men in hard hats.

In Lower Manhattan men just like these were heroes now. They were given thumbs-up signs and bottles of water, flowers and applause as they rode in pickup trucks or wearily walked away from Ground Zero, after a day or a night—the work on the site was around the clock—spent burning through twisted steel columns and clawing with backhoes at chunks of concrete, moving the gigantic bulk of the rubble aside so the inch by inch search for the lost could go on.

The Tribune had run stories, and would run more, about these men. The nobility of manual labor. The courage and dedication of the workers who climbed the tangled, smoking wreckage. The drained and driven men who slept on church pews and ate at the tent they called the Taj Mahal, who asked for extra shifts and objected, refused, when ordered to take a day off, ordered to go home. Rescue workers, they were still called, though there was no one to rescue anymore, there was no one to save.

Laura stopped in the sunlight to study Chapel Pointe. She watched the rumbling earth movers, gazed at the wooden homes-to-be rising against the hard blue sky. She smelled sawdust and mud, heard the percussion of hammers, the whine of drills; and was caught off guard by an emotion she hardly dared look at straight-on. In front of her were things being built. Built. Not dismantled, bucket of dust by chunk of concrete, not untangled, uncompounded, lifted and removed, not disassembled but created. Yes, they were ugly. That didn't matter. What mattered was that the way they were was the way they were intended to be.

Hope. Laura, whose religion had always been truth, whose prayers were always words, named what she was feeling and then caught her breath. She waited for horror and fear, despair and loneliness and anger, to flood her heart and drown this once-familiar, lately unknown sensation. It didn't happen. Hope shrank and retreated, but remained: glowing, she thought, in an eerie, hypnotic way, like a light underwater. Laura, amazed, walked tentatively forward, seeing something she'd thought she'd never see again: possibility.

She squinted in the sun, eager to move. Eager to finish this work. She scanned the trailers for the one that belonged to the Chapel Pointe Development Corp. She climbed its stairs and knocked on its door. Her headache had started, but that was good. Now she'd speak to Eddie Spano.

Now she'd find the truth.

MARIAN'S STORY

Chapter 15

A Hundred Circling Camps

November 1, 2001

In the sun-drenched silence of Sally's kitchen Marian tried to find a way to say what she had come for, some way better than she had planned. But there was no good way.

Marian had never permitted herself the luxury of shrinking from difficult duties. She sipped her tea and she said, “Jimmy.” Her voice shocked her; it boomed in the silence, was harsh in the sunlight. She'd meant to speak softly; she'd thought she had. She went on before one of the many reasons not to go on could find her. “Jimmy left papers. Something he'd written.”

Sally nodded. “That's what the Tribune says. Do you think he did?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think is in them?”

Marian said, “The truth.”

Kevin's head snapped her way, and his eyes locked on Marian's.

Marian met them and saw there a storm that she had never seen before. Oh my God, she thought, wanting to look away and finding she could not. Oh my God. He knows.

“The truth?” Sally said. “About the money?”

The cozy sunlight pouring into Sally's kitchen, the smell of tea and toast and the presence of two people she had always loved: these things should have made Marian feel embraced. At home, and safe. Before, they always had. But now, locked onto Kevin's eyes, she had a sense she was stumbling, directionless, through smoking, twisted ruins.

With difficulty, she said, “And more.” She answered Sally without looking away from Kevin, because she could not.

Kevin could have held Marian there, staring into her eyes, as long as he wanted, all day, all night, there would have been nothing she could do. But instead he broke his grip. He flung the newspaper onto the counter and went back to his eggs, jabbing the yolks with toast, spearing the whites with a fork as though this was something they deserved.

“What more?” Sally asked. “What more?”