Absent Friends

Sit down, Stone, Harry would tell her. You're driving me crazy. Come have a drink.

No, you drink, she used to answer, I'm working.

Harry would shrug and drink. Laura would go on pacing; or she would storm out the door, run down the nine flights to the lobby, and head uptown on Broadway and then, eventually (and it never took long), back again. Sometimes she stopped at Starbucks for mocha cappuccinos, extra whipped cream. Harry would accept his gravely, savor it slowly, and, when finished, go back to his bottle.

And always, somewhere on the sidewalks, like a dropped quarter, Laura would have found the word she needed. Her cappuccino would sit, cooling and untouched, as she returned to work.

Harry's advice to her: Join a gym.

Now Laura stood at the window. Blades of sun glinted off the river's silver. She didn't like the river to be silver, she never had; she couldn't see anything in water this color. She'd been crying again; she was through with that now, her cheeks sticky and dry, but she was stopped, frozen. These had been tears not of grief but of fury. The floodwaters of her rage had astonished her.

The anger, she now saw, had been building all the time she'd been reading, but she hadn't felt it, the way you might not feel the current changing as you drifted downstream until, too late, you heard a new roar and without warning found yourself crashing over the falls.

After she'd read the article, she'd begun to pace, striding the length of Harry's living room, toward the window, spin, away, toward again, back and forth as though she were in a jail cell. As she made a turn, the silence was splintered by a sudden shout: “Goddamn you, Harry!” She stopped, terrified. Then she realized the voice was her own, and that frightened her more.

And then another voice, mild and amused: Me?

Harry. She spun wildly, but of course he wasn't there. He was dead, he was gone. The hell with him, though: she wasn't letting him off that easily.

“Yes, you!” she hissed raggedly. “Why didn't you leave that story alone?”

Why didn't I—? Please, my little minnow.

Strange how she could hear him so clearly but not see him at all. But she didn't have to see him. She knew that tone, and the infuriating half-smile that went with it.

He asked, Was it I who was spouting that bilge about the north star and the noises in the dark?

“It was dangerous!” she shouted. “I didn't know that!”

Would it have mattered?

“Of course it would have!”

Of course it wouldn't have. Except to make it more exciting.

“Exciting?”

But she was pretending she didn't know what he meant, so he pretended he hadn't heard her.

Quietly, standing in his empty living room, she said, “Couldn't you have been careful?”

I was very careful.

“Then why are you dead?”

The savagery of her anger rolled right off Harry. Ah, he said indulgently. That's the ticket to your Pulitzer, isn't it?

“My what?”

You can't not have thought of that.

“Thought of what?”

Tsk, tsk. The truth about what happened to Harry Randall: that's a very big story.

“You can't think that's why I'm going after it?” Laura was aghast. “Harry, I'm going after it for you. To get justice for you.”

Of course you are. You're going after it because, story or not, it's the truth and the truth matters.

“I don't like the way you said that.”

No, why should you? You're still dew-bedecked enough to believe it. But I was old enough to know better. In fact, until you came along, I did know better. My mistake was listening to you.

“To me?”

To you, quoting me. So really, it's all my fault, you see.

Laura didn't see.

For believing such claptrap in my own misguided youth, Harry patiently explained. And going on to fill young minds with it. Specifically, yours. So you could pour it on thick at a later date. Sucking me back under when in fact I'd escaped. Yes, my sweet octopus. My fault entirely.

“Harry?” Laura had only one thing to say, only one thing she meant. “Harry, please. Don't leave me.”