Absent Friends

Marian's lips play with Jimmy's, but she does not embrace him: she snakes her arms around him, slips her hands into the back pockets of his jeans, moves him toward her that way.

Oh God, thinks Jimmy.

After, they lie in the darkness for a while, just together. This is not a deep, heavy darkness, like the smoke at the center of a fire, all directions the same and the blasting air itself almost solid, itself your enemy; not like your dreams, where your eyes are open, wide open, but you can't see anything and you try to shout, scream, tell someone but you make no sound. This is just the apartment in the basement of where the Cooleys live, the apartment that's Jimmy's now. It doesn't get dark that way here.

Beyond the swaying, half-closed curtains, the soft glow from the Cooleys' porch light is backed up by lights from other porches and yards, by lit windows in the neighbors' places, and by streetlights that rise over the rooftops. The place is quiet, but the silence never gets so huge you could wander around lost in it. It's bordered, hemmed in, by a dog's bark, someone's laugh, the left-to-right flare of a car radio in the street out front.

So, Superman, Marian says to Jimmy, and her voice close to his ear sounds to him the same way her skin feels, satin with metal under it, though he doesn't think it's iron under her voice like under her skin, he thinks it's silver, maybe gold. She asks him, How many people did you save today?

'Bout a hundred, says Jimmy.

Marian gives him a poke in the ribs. You weren't even on duty today.

That's how I saved them. Stayed out of their way.

Marian laughs, nibbles on his ear.

How about you, he says, you save anyone?

Nope, slow day. She rearranges the sheet they're under, smooths it. I tutored that little Jeanine, worked on her reading, but that kid, she doesn't even need me, Jimmy. She'll do great, no matter what.

Jimmy grunts. Wasn't for you, she'd end up like her old lady. Any chance that kid has, it's because you made a project out of her.

Well, she's a good kid. She can't help it if her whole family is bums.

I know, Jimmy says. It's not that. It's more like, on one side is you, on the other side is her whole family and her whole life. Jimmy's hands, palms up, balance above the sheet like scales; one rises, one falls.

Yes, I know. Marian nods. But you can't tell. One little pebble might do the trick. You can't tell unless you put it there.

The tip of Marian's finger barely touches the palm of Jimmy's up hand. She draws little delicate circles. Then she presses, pushing down.

Jimmy's hand resists. What if it doesn't? he asks. Do the trick?

Marian keeps pushing, Jimmy resisting. She smiles. Her other hand grabs at Jimmy's down hand, lifts it high in the air. Then it'll do some other trick, she says. In surprise, Jimmy laughs. Marian laughs with him. He wraps his hands around hers, wraps himself around her.

Jimmy knows Marian's right. Little Jeanine, Marian can't just give up on her. But if Jimmy told the truth, it would be this: Marian's kind of saving, he's not really sure about it, if it ever works, if it's even right.

Marian's sure. She's sure about little Jeanine: People aren't born to be one thing or another, she tells Jimmy. People decide. Jeanine can go anywhere she wants to go.

Jimmy doesn't argue. But he thinks about himself and fires. Markie and cars. Tom and quiet talks at Flanagan's with suit-coated men who come and go. He thinks about Mrs. Molloy's eyes when she looks at Jack, always the same look since they were kids, like she sees something bad standing behind him that the rest of them can't see. He's not really sure how many choices any of them has, about which way to go.

But Marian's sure. She wants to do it for her job, help people find their ways to go. A career of saving people. That's what Marian went to college for, saving people.

Business, she tells him, laughing, the first time he says this to her. Business administration, Jimmy, that never saved anyone. But Jimmy knows what she wants, he knows why she's doing it the whole time she's in college, the only one of them to go. It's so she can work at one of those places, the Red Cross or someplace, when she's finished, an important job where she can save people.