Absent Friends

“Whatever was going on—” Marian had to pause, to force her ragged heart to slow. To cover this need she sipped her tea. Chamomile, a common weed that flourished in cold dry air. Its fragrant white flowers blanketed alpine meadows in Switzerland, whose mountains were famously its source; but Marian, attending a conference in Anchorage a few years earlier, had come upon a miniature forest of it growing through the cracked, oil-spattered asphalt of a parking lot.

“I think,” Marian said, “I think something happened back then that we still don't know. Maybe you're right about the money, Sally. But whatever was going on, it's clear that”—tread carefully, Marian—“that Phil wasn't the only person hiding something. Jimmy was, too. No, Kevin, let me go on.”

Kevin had begun, “Aunt Marian—” but Marian was suddenly using her conference-table voice, and like most people who heard it, he stopped midsentence.

“I don't care what happens to Phil—I'm sorry, but you guys know how I feel—but Jimmy's reputation is something else.” She shot Kevin a look; a lifetime of meetings had honed her instinct for impending interruptions and how to quash them. “Whatever happened back then, maybe it was what we always thought, and maybe it was something different. If it was something Jimmy . . . something he felt bad about, then it seems to me he spent a lot of money and a lot of his life making up for it.”

“Wait,” said Sally. Marian heard a world of uncertainty in that one word. “You can't believe the money came from Jimmy. . . ?”

“Sally?” Oh God, Marian thought, why do I have to do this? “Sally, it did.”

Sally stared. “What are you—”

“Phil told me.”

A pause. “Phil?” Sally spoke Phil's name as though it were a word whose meaning had changed without warning. “Phil told you?”

“I'm sorry, honey. God, I'm sorry. That's what he said.” Marian put her hand over Sally's. “From Jimmy. All these years.”

“But he—I don't believe it.”

“I don't know,” Marian said helplessly, “whether it's true. But it's what he said.”

“To the reporter? Phil told him that?”

“He says not. He says he never told anyone but me.”

“Why . . .”

“Why did he tell me? I got the feeling he wanted me to help make it all right with you.”

Sally was shaking her head, back and forth, back and forth. “It's just not true.”

“Maybe not,” said Marian. “Maybe it isn't. But, Sal? Phil and Jimmy, they didn't like each other, but they got together, lots of times, over the years. Why?”

“Aunt Marian?” Kevin's voice was insistent, angry. “You can't be saying you believe that?” With that he stabbed a finger at the Tribune, at the serpent-filled world of distortions and half-truths and real truths crowded into a two-inch-wide column of type.

Marian shook her head. Not that. She was not taken in by that. That was manufactured, a Frankenstein monster cobbled out of whatever fragments of truth a reporter had dug out of the smoking rubble. Salamanders, she thought. Weren't those the lizards that rose mythically from fire, indestructible, crawling out of the ashes when all else had been consumed? Yes, salamanders. The old firehouses sometimes had them carved on the beams above the doors. Engine 168 had them; Jimmy had shown her.

Marian could hear that salamander truth hissing now. She forced herself to speak above it. “What they're implying, most of it's probably lies. About Jimmy, and about Phil, too.” She added that without believing it, but it was possible, and it would help win Sally over. Although the hope that flooded Sally's eyes when she said it was almost unbearable to see.

“Jimmy's a hero,” she said softly. “He was always a hero, except, if anything in the Tribune's right, except maybe once. Somehow. I don't know how.” Oh God, she thought, how can I be lying like this? She continued bitterly, punishing herself. “Something. It changed him, whatever it was.”

Suddenly her words began to come fast. She felt like a machine caught and racing, unregulated, unstoppable. “But now, now he's a symbol. Of courage, sacrifice, things people need to believe in. Whatever the truth is, what people need now to help them through what happened is more important. I think Jimmy would think so, too. I think he always thought that, or he'd have told the truth—all the truth—back then. You can't change the . . . mistakes of the past. You can only build the future.”

She was dismayed, yes, even frightened, to see the storm still raging in Kevin's eyes. What do you believe? What do you know?

But Marian did not ask, and Kevin did not speak.

“Marian?” Sally said. “You really think, you think whatever happened then . . . Markie and Jack . . . you think it wasn't what they told us?”

All Marian could do was nod her head and wish she were somewhere infinitely far away.

“And that's what you think Jimmy . . . what he wrote down?” Sally's question was so hushed Marian could barely hear it.