Absent Friends

“No, I don't think so,” she had answered. “More because, why not? You can see from up there how little really matters.”

Laura knew the World Trade Center well, then, from the days when it had been a gleaming array of sharp-cornered buildings standing over a weave of train lines. And knew it well from the last seven weeks, since it had become Ground Zero, an alien, incomprehensible place with a horrifying new name. She had watched from behind the fence and sometimes, because she was a reporter, from inside it, as torches sliced through twisted steel and trucks carted it away, as masked firefighters threw wreckage aside to reveal yet more wreckage. And she'd been taking notes and climbing mounds of destruction once as all work stopped and steelworkers and firefighters stood in silent lines, saluted the flag-draped body carried past them, wiped tears away with filthy gloves, and returned to work.

And Laura had seen the countless aerial photos, in her own paper as well as the others, starting from the day itself.

But still.

Still, as she stared at the looming skyline, the long low rays of sun and the piercing searchlights, she felt disoriented, and wrong, and stupid. And guilty, for being wrong.

Everyone knew the towers had been on the tip of Manhattan. The island, New York City itself, culminated in them, grew and swelled and pushed them soaring into the air when the unstoppable energy of Manhattan had rolled south to the water and could go no farther.

But that wasn't true. Of course it wasn't. As she stared at the place now, it was clear the lights and the cranes and the smoke were uptown from the end of the island, west of it, visible only between and above the crowd of buildings that occupied Manhattan's tip and always had. Her memory of leaning on the rail with Harry, sipping coffee and sailing from Staten Island straight toward the gateway of the towers was wrong, and if she thought back more carefully, if she meticulously unbraided meaning from fact, she knew that, and had always known it.

Harry would have laughed. Laura shivered as she heard a sound like the chortle that so often preceded a hug from Harry; but it was someone else, and impatient with herself, she shook off the idea, which was really a hope, that Harry was on the boat with her as he always had been, every time, before.

So I'm confused, so what? she demanded, of herself, the water, the gulls. The gulls just wheeled, looking for another boat to follow, and the water just flowed. This close to Manhattan the salt aroma on the wind was mixed with smoke from Ground Zero. As the ferry's engines cut to ease into the pier, Laura stared at her coffee cup. Carefully peeling back the plastic top, she upended it, pouring untouched coffee into the dark harbor water.

MARIAN'S STORY

Chapter 9

The Old Masters

 (Sailing Calmly On)

October 31, 2001

Marian sat in Flanagan's with Tom, in a swirl of unfamiliar people, sounds, sights. His mother was well, Tom told her, in answer to a question she must have asked. Peggy went to mass almost every day, he said, as she had for many years, and she did what she could to offer solace to others, those whose recent losses were greatest, most heartbreaking (though in Pleasant Hills, Marian knew, everyone's heart was broken). Peggy took great comfort in the company of her grandchildren, said Tom, his own two sons and daughter. It was like Tom, Marian thought as she drank from a second glass of wine, not to say how comforted his mother surely was by his own presence, as she always had been, even when Peggy Molloy was the reigning queen and the royal family was whole. In the odd light and strange colors that made up this new Flanagan's, the Molloys shimmered and appeared before Marian as though in a posed photograph. In the center sat Peggy, with her straight back, her smile, and her worried eyes. Big Mike stood behind her, stolid and strong. At Mike's side, looking squarely into the camera, was Tom; and next to Peggy, grinning, shoulders forward, as though he was ready to race somewhere else as soon as the photographer was finished, Jack.