Absent Friends

They had done that before: Phil took the boat to Staten Island, Sally boarded on that side, and they were together for a stolen hour in neither her world nor his. In this itinerant province, Phil and Sally angled toward each other on a worn wooden bench or stood close at the rail. No matter the weather, they never rode inside. And while Phil took pleasure from Sally's warmth when stars burned fiercely through painful winter air, he favored still more the heat that radiated from her on high-summer noons, when other pairs of lovers stood not touching, or vanished into the boat's cooled interior, when the sky was hazed over and he could hear thunder rumbling.

On these trips they would cross the water without leaving the boat, as many times as time allowed. The harbor itself was no-man's-land, but their corner of the boat was their private country, their commonwealth of two.

It was on the boat, in the early years, that their treaties were forged, that the decrees they had issued over and over against each other were broken again and again. Until finally they admitted that though the way they lived was impossible, they could not stay apart.

Sally had never accused Phil of anything but this: not wanting to live in her world. Preferring their secret country, their world of stars and fog where even Kevin was a foreigner.

Part of this was true. And an important part was wrong. As life without Sally was unbearable to Phil, life without Kevin had quietly (Phil unable to say exactly when this happened) become unthinkable.

There had been about Kevin, always, the kind of sweet, breezy innocence that adults claim for children but that Phil didn't remember from his own childhood in himself, his cousins, his friends. Kevin's eyes always lit when Phil walked through the door.

Phil knew that light, saw it every day. His clients looked at him that way the first few times he entered the visiting rooms in their jails. They smiled expectantly, waited for the magic, and nine times out of ten he disappointed them. He couldn't get them out. Couldn't send them home. Couldn't tell them it was going to be okay. The light would fade, smothered by bewilderment and the start of despair.

“But you're supposed to be a hotshot,” the client would complain, always that, some variation of that.

“Right,” he'd say. “That's why you got three years instead of twenty.”

Phil would leave, but never before he saw the new understanding dawning in their eyes: that bars, guards, and exercise yards were their lives now. That Phil Constantine hadn't been able to save them. But what Kevin wanted—candy, a kite, someone to push his fire truck around—that was easy. Phil loved Kevin because he never had to disappoint him.

Sally said: Stay. Nothing else, nothing so difficult. The ferry would become Phil's commuter route; they would no longer need it as their Shangri-la. Sunny summer afternoons and frosted winter mornings would belong to them, to be added to their long collection of whispered nights.

Pleasant Hills would welcome him, Sally assured him, circling him in the warmth of her arms one spent evening years ago, when they were still almost new to each other.

“Sure.” He'd kissed her. “As soon as they forget who I am.”

They'd had this dialogue before, and most of the time her soft pressure and his refusal closed the question. But this time Sally's face took on the distant, clouded look it always had when she talked about Markie. She held Phil closer, her red hair drifting around her shoulders, and said, “It wasn't your fault.”

Phil had heard Sally tell him this before. It had been the first thing she'd said to him when they'd faced each other on the steps of St. Ann's after Markie's funeral mass.

An irreverent breeze was snapping the flag on the firehouse, trying to get a game going with the treetops, tossing grit in the pallbearers' faces. The hard glances that shot Phil's way when he entered the church told him how Pleasant Hills felt about him and his being there, but he'd known that even before he'd boarded the ferry. He found a place in a rear pew. As the unfamiliar service progressed, he sat, stood, read silently and aloud, though he didn't kneel, and not knowing the hymns, he didn't sing.

Filing with the other mourners from the gloom of the church after the coffin had passed, Phil squinted in the thin, bright sun. He looked for the widow, spotted her by the line of black limousines. Beside her a little boy, his hair red like hers, dug furiously in the dirt with a stick. Phil had glimpsed the boy in church. The child had squirmed and jiggled and had had to be quieted. Not quite three, Phil thought, though Phil was no judge of children's ages. He'd met the boy just once or twice before, though Markie had talked about him all the time. His name was Kevin. Why hadn't he ever asked his age?