Absent Friends

So many crowded into St. Ann's that day, the faces and voices from her childhood. Marian knew why they had come, why her father had wanted her to come: just to be there, together.

A memory bloomed in Marian's mind: a windy autumn Sunday when Sister Hilda, the squeaky-voiced nun they had loved because she laughed and knew what was important, had ordered the whole Sunday school class into their jackets, marched them to the park, and taught them to make Indian tepees out of sticks and tablecloths. Each leaning stick would fall, she showed them, but for the others (and the kids all tried to make one stand alone, or two; Tom had three briefly motionless, but then they clattered down). But together, Sister Hilda told them, united (as we are united in faith) and supporting each other (as we do with our prayers and our service), they created shelter.

In St. Ann's five days after the world had changed, Marian tried to feel sheltered. So many steps along her path had been marked here, so much joy and sorrow shared, so much comfort offered, taken, given. She tried to feel that comfort now.

Though even then—long before Harry Randall began his relentless excavating of their days and nightmares—even then, Marian could not rid herself of the exhausting weight of what she had never shared.

And as her clear low voice rose to join the others, filling the church with safeguarding song, she felt it, this secret, not as she always had—as a burden she could never put down—but as empty space, a tear in the fabric of protection, leaving her open to the terrifying sky.

PHIL'S STORY

Chapter 5

The Way Home

October 31, 2001

Tired of sitting, Phil swiveled off the diner stool, scooped up his papers, and dropped them on the pile by the door for other people to read. He exchanged ¿Qué pasas? with Francisco, working the register. Phil spoke passable Spanish. He'd learned it after he realized you were limiting yourself in criminal practice in New York if you didn't. He paid his bill and picked up another cup of coffee to go.

Three blocks south he stopped on the corner, took out his cell phone. The cell phones went dead and live now in a contorted checkerboard as you moved through the city. He'd searched out and found the places on his usual routes that were most likely to work: more and more of those every day, this was one of the things people meant when they said things were getting back to normal.

Back to normal.

The walk to this corner took Phil past a bus shelter, its glass walls covered, as all the bus shelters were downtown, as the blank walls of buildings were, and fences, and newsstands, and mailboxes, with wind-tattered, rain-wrinkled Xeroxes: smiling people, at birthday parties, at graduation, holding beer bottles, holding babies; height and weight, tattoos and tiny birthmarks all detailed, and long lists of phone numbers, home, work, cell, brother's cell, daughter's cell, so you could call if you saw any of these people who would never be seen again. On the sidewalk at the base of the bus shelter, a muddled rainbow of melted wax clutched candle ends. Flames shivered on two red candles in tall glass holders painted with images of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, and also on a Yahrzeit candle, plain white wax in a round squat glass. Flowers, some fresh, some withered, lay among the candles, below the pictures. And embedded flat in the wax, a small pewter cross on a ribbon. You had to look closely for that; it was hard to see.

Back to normal.

Standing on the breezy corner where transmission was good, Phil finished his coffee. He squashed the cup into the overflowing trash can and wished, not for the first time, that he still smoked. He thumbed the phone's speed-dial button and lifted it to his ear.

Sally's “Hello?” was quiet and low, the voice of a woman unsurprisable, not strong, but determined.

“It's me.” So many years he had been saying this to her, just this, It's me. Before that, It's Phil; before that, briefly, Phil Constantine, and early on, once or twice, Hello, Mrs. Keegan, this is Phil Constantine, your husband's lawyer.

So many years.

But the silence that answered him now was new.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You heard the news? That reporter?”

After the silence: “Last night. I thought you'd call then.”

“I didn't know if you wanted me to.”

“I didn't. But I thought you would.”

“I want to see you.”

“You can't come out here.”

“I'll meet you on the ferry.”