Absent Friends

Phil kissed Sally goodbye before he opened the front door. As he passed the driveway, he spotted Kevin squatting there. He would have spoken to him, said goodbye a second time, but Kevin was busy sneaking Socks an unauthorized can of sardines.

That circus afternoon, just before he left, Sally said, “Move in with us.”

Phil didn't answer, but as though he had, she smiled and said, “I know. I just thought I'd try again.”

It was also true that Sally had never given a moment's serious thought to the idea that she and Kevin might leave Pleasant Hills, might move across the water into Phil's world.

When he'd first suggested that, Sally's answer was that she wanted Kevin to live somewhere he belonged, not a place—Phil's downtown loft, she meant—where things had been pushed aside and room made for him.

So Phil offered neutral addresses, worlds they could create together: a co-op on the Upper West Side, and Kevin could go to private school; or a house on Long Island with a pool in the backyard. Sally smiled at these ideas, the same smile Phil had seen her give Kevin when, at six, he brought home a Valentine's Day heart, painted red and stuck with sequins and plastic pearls. And Phil came to understand that “somewhere he belonged” meant only one thing to Sally: it meant Pleasant Hills.

And so the years reeled slowly out, so many years. Sometimes Phil found himself looking around, surprised to be where he was, wondering where those years had gone, wondering sometimes if Sally wondered, too. So many years, when their lives had been locked together while their worlds, to each other, were mist-shrouded, hidden.

That was before.

And since?

Phil had seen little of Sally since September 11. Not even spoken to her as often as he'd wanted. Not since those first frantic hours when they were desperate to find Kevin, Phil calling Sally over and over as the connection broke and came back, Phil jogging thirty blocks uptown to the office of a friend whose power had not gone out so he could scan the names of missing firefighters on website lists as they were updated and grew ever longer.

Jimmy McCaffery's name was one of the first posted. Phil read it with disbelief but no other emotion; that all came later.

Kevin's name never appeared. Phil had called everyone he could think of, everyone he could reach, all of them equally despairing, no one able to help. He had been useless, come up with nothing, but another firefighter, someone Sally didn't know, called Sally in the late afternoon. He told her Kevin was at NYU Hospital, hurt but all right. Sally had called Phil, weeping a mother's tears of relief.

That day Sally couldn't cross the harbor from Staten Island to be with Kevin at the hospital: all ferries were moored, all bridges closed, all trips canceled. So she had gone to church. She wanted, she told Phil on the crackling cell phone, to give thanks for the life of her son, and to pray for the lost.

Phil, sitting at that point on a curb in a milling crowd of strangers, smoke stinging his eyes, said, Good, said, Being with people, the comfort of the church, that's a good idea. I'll go up to the hospital, he promised, I'll go see Kevin. Weeping, she said to tell Kevin she'd come as soon as she could. She asked Phil to call from the hospital. She asked him if he'd be all right. Automatically, he said he would. Maybe she believed him; maybe she just knew there was nothing she could do for him. She told him she loved him and said goodbye. He thumbed off his phone, hearing the echo of Sally's voice, the joyful catch in it. He wondered what was in the voices of the hundreds, thousands, of other mothers, wives, children, clutching for that same golden ghost, hope. What would be in their voices after the phantom flashed and vanished, leaving empty hands, empty air? Or lingered, laughing, just beyond reach, disturbing sleep, distracting days, for a long, long time? And faded, finally disappearing, after that.

Now, on this bright corner six weeks later, it was again Sally's voice that riveted Phil. This time, no joy, no warmth: just cold, windswept distance.

He said again, “I'll meet you on the ferry.”

She said, “No.”

“There's another reporter,” he said. He felt like he was warning her. Against what? He didn't know.

“I don't want you calling me.”

But she didn't hang up.

And this was his chance. To explain, persuade, to show her, tell her: it had all been for her, everything had been for her. A wizard, his opponents called him, one of the Dark Side's best, words his weapon, wielded with a wild, sweeping daring and a jeweler's precision. He could use that weapon now, surely, he could win this battle.

But she was the one to find words first, and those words were only “Goodbye, Phil,” and he was left alone.

MARIAN'S STORY

Chapter 5

The Bodies of the Birds

October 31, 2001