Absent Friends

Harry waited politely, but Laura could find no words. He resumed: And then Owen McCardle gave me Jimmy McCaffery's papers. I read them, as you have. And I could see. Yes, the scales fell from my eyes, the clouds lifted, the floodwaters of illusion receded. Write it however you want. I saw the harm I'd done and the harm that was coming. I saw my selfishness and my guilt. So much destroyed, so that a washed-up drunk could keep a love that was never really his.

“It was yours!”

No. The man you loved died long ago. He should never have returned. Look at the mess he made.

“But couldn't . . . Couldn't you have . . . Once you knew . . . A retraction . . . ?”

You said it yourself, Harry's voice came sadly. “First in, last out.” A retraction wouldn't have mattered. Or even been read. I'd destroyed a hero. I'd deliberately broken hearts. Given people who never even knew Captain McCaffery one more reason for hopelessness in a season of despair. Harry, invisible in the clear autumn air, spread his arms wide.

“You can't have known. You can't have seen this coming.”

The shrug. Harry's shrug. Not this exactly. Something like it. It doesn't matter.

“Harry?” Laura's throat hurt so much, ached so badly, she hoped, after this, to never have to speak again. But she had to ask: “What they said. It was true?”

What I said—what I said and you, my love, echoed and elaborated after I was gone—was not true. What they said was.

Laura, speaking what felt like her last words: “You jumped.”

Harry, replying, confirming, pronouncing sentence: I jumped.

BOYS' OWN BOOK

Chapter 18

The Invisible Man

Steps Between You and the Mirror

September 11, 2001

Jimmy folds his T-shirt and shorts into his gym bag, slings it over his shoulder as he leaves the basement apartment that's been his for twenty years. Since spring he's been going to yoga classes at a place around the corner from the firehouse, will be heading there today at the end of his shift. Needs to stay flexible, Jimmy does: he's forty-six, and though he's got his eye on a Battalion Chief's spot in the next year or two (and been told over the back fence he has a good shot at it), at Ladder 62 he's Captain. He's got to be ready, when the bell rings, for the ax, the flames, the smothering smoke and heat like a wall. He's got men depending on him, men who follow him.

Some of the guys, they rag on him about it—Hey, when you do the stork one, they give you a baby to deliver?—but the guys rag on the officers anyway, it's part of what makes the firehouse what it is, your brothers yanking your chain. And Jimmy has to admit, you need a good laugh, you could do worse than watch him try to stand on his head. But, he tells the guys, there's a dozen twenty-five-year-old girls there standing on their heads, so maybe it's not so bad.

And delivering babies, he's done that seven times already since he came on the Job.