Absent Friends

MARIAN'S STORY

Chapter 12

image

Turtles in the Pond

October 31, 2001

Marian walked with Tom along the streets of Pleasant Hills. He wasn't telling her something, and she didn't know what it was. That was almost funny, not funny but almost, considering what he had told her, and how much she had not wanted to hear it.

When they'd first left the bar (it was all a little runny to Marian, like a watercolor, but she did not think Tom had paid for their meal and drinks, just signaled to the bartender and pointed to the table as he rose from his chair), she had been glad of the cool and the quiet and the dark. Tom had his hand on her arm, and he'd steered her off the avenue at the first corner they came to, so even the thin traffic and unambitious neon of a Pleasant Hills evening was behind them. Quiet streets, cars in the driveways, yellow glows from the windows. On porches, carved pumpkins sneered. The flickering candlelight inside them made them seem to move their mouths, whispering terrible things. Ghosts swung from tree limbs, but these were just cloth, not the real ghosts of Pleasant Hills.

This was the oldest section of town, not far from where they'd grown up. Marian knew whose houses these were, and if she didn't, she knew whose they had been: the Leslies, old man Callahan, the crazy Curren sisters. Marian knew which of these trees were good for climbing and what birds sang in them, though no birds sang now, this dark, this late. What she did not know was what the secret was that Tom was keeping.

Tom had always had secrets, well, of course he had, he was Tom Molloy, so many things his family knew and did that the rest of them did not know. And he had secrets now that Marian would not think of trying to unearth. How hard it had been to have his children grow up around the corner with Vicky instead of under his own roof. How Mike the Bear had felt when Tom sold or gave away or let fall into ruin or burned down the disparate parts of the empire Big Mike had built. Whether Tom thought he had ever brought a smile, a real smile, to his mother's sad eyes.

About some things, Marian would never ask.

Tom had secrets; she had a secret, too, one she'd been hiding forever. That hideous knife-scaled thing had crawled out between them in Flanagan's, fouled the air, driven them outdoors, and was now following them, hissing, through the streets. (Marian shivered, was barely able to keep from looking behind; Tom put his arm across her shoulders.) And so she wondered, What other secret could there be? What else was worth hiding, once this truth was out?

“Tell me,” she said.

“Tell you what?” Tom pulled her closer to him. She was grateful. She wanted to answer him, but she did not know how to demand his secret, how to shrilly insist, when it was his arm that was keeping her warm. So she asked something else.

“Why did—did Jimmy”—she stumbled, and it made her stammer, or maybe it was the other way—“why did he let Markie say it was him? Markie went to jail—” To her horror, she started to cry.

Tom gave her a handkerchief, Tom gave her time. “It wasn't supposed to happen the way it did.” Marian scrubbed at her eyes. Tom said, “He was supposed to serve maybe five months, get paroled, everything would be fine.”

“What do you mean, ‘supposed to'?”

“It's what we thought,” Tom said, looking as they passed the McCrae house with its big new addition.

“When did you think that? Who said to think that?”

She knew her voice was rising. Tom's was patient. “Markie had no priors, he had no sheet. He was going to keep his head down inside. It shouldn't have been a problem.”

“That lawyer bastard, it was all his idea, right?”

Tom turned his face to her. Even in the dark she could see the blue of his eyes. No, she couldn't. It was just that she knew about his eyes, with Tom she believed things without having to see them. “Constantine?” he said. “He didn't even get the case until way after we'd worked it out. He came in after Markie was arrested. He believed the story the way Markie told it.”

She wasn't sure what Tom was saying: on these quiet streets there was too much noise, though maybe it was in her head, what sounded like sobbing. Tom was likely to be right. Yes, of course. But it could not be that Phil was innocent in all this.

“‘Worked it out,'” she said. “What does that mean?”

“Markie and Jimmy and me. Our story. We worked it out together.”

“Why did he let him?”

“Who let who?”

“Why did Jimmy let Markie!”

Tom said, “Because Markie wanted to.” Tom stopped and faced her, in front of the house that used to be the O'Briens', five kids, they were fun to play with but they moved away. “Jimmy was always saving Markie's ass. You remember how it was. Markie wanted to be the hero, just for once.”

A breeze rustled the leaves above them. Someone's cat trotted across a lawn, stopped and froze when it saw them, then hissed and scooted back.

Marian felt strange. If she and Tom were telling secrets on the streets of Pleasant Hills, they shouldn't be adults. When they were all children and they did this, whispered to each other, everything they said was important, of course it was, but there was another thing they knew. They never said it, but they knew it and that was that no matter how serious something was, it could all be made right again. Somebody could make it right.



Even when Marian's mother died.

Marian had felt very bad. All the kids tried hard to be nice to her. Everyone invited her to their houses to play and the moms gave them extra cookies. Marian knew everyone was trying to make her feel better, but she didn't want to play. She wasn't sure she wanted to feel better. She just wanted to sit scrunched up in the corner of the fence in her own backyard and think about her mom.

Sometimes she did that. Other times she went to the other kids' houses, because her dad was very sad, too, and she could tell he liked it for her to go to play. And sometimes she stayed home and helped Aunt Fiona look after her sisters and her baby brother. Aunt Fiona, who came from someplace far away, was very nice, but she didn't know things like where the Band-Aids were, or that Betty cried if you let her applesauce touch her peas.

One day when Marian was sitting against the fence with her knees pulled up tight she heard scratchy footsteps on the gravel driveway. Tom slipped through the secret passage between the house and the garage.

“Hi,” Tom said.

“Hi.”

She waited for him to say something else but he just sat down next to her. Marian first thought she wanted Tom to go away, but then when he was just quiet and she went back to thinking about her mom she thought maybe she liked it that he was there.

After a while Tom turned his head to look at her. “You know what my mom says? She says your mom went to Heaven.”

Marian nodded. She didn't want to talk because her throat felt sore.

“She says, the way you and your dad and everyone, the way you feel all sad and lonely? She says that's how God felt. Your mom was on earth and God got lonely. He missed her so much he asked her to come to Heaven.”

God was lonely? He missed her mommy? That made Marian very sad, and she started to cry.

“But,” said Tom fast, “but Heaven's beautiful. It's got clouds and flowers and oceans and stuff, pretty music, too, my mom says, and she says your mom likes it. She's just waiting for you to come.”

Marian sniffled. Her mom liked pretty music. “Waiting for me?”

“Uh-huh,” said Tom. “If you're good you go to Heaven when you die. Don't you know that?”

Marian thought maybe she did, but she wasn't positive. “I can go to Heaven?” she asked, just to make sure. “Where Mommy is?”

“Uh-huh.”

Marian wiped her eyes and thought about this, about the clouds and flowers and oceans. “Can Daddy go there, too?”

“Everybody who's good.”

“Betty? And Eileen and Patty? And Davey?”

“Everybody.”

“And Aunt Fiona?”

Tom grinned and poked her in the ribs. “Everybody.”

Marian squirmed; it tickled where Tom poked her. “You?” she asked. “And Jimmy? And Jack? And Sally, and Markie, and Vicky?”

Every time Marian said a name, Tom poked her. She kept saying more names—“Your mom? Your dad? Sister Hilda?”—and then she poked him, too, and then they were saying everyone's name they could think of and poking each other and squirming and giggling.

When they ran out of names they both plopped back against the fence, tired from giggling. Tom was still smiling but something Marian thought of made her sad again.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Know what?”

“About going to Heaven?” What if Tom was wrong, that was the thing she'd thought of.

“My mom says God promised.”

God promised. God already thought about this and had it all planned, and Tom's mom knew about it; probably the other grown-ups did, too, her dad and everyone.

She thought of something else about Heaven. “Do everyone's dogs and cats go there, too? And the elephant from Spivey's Circus? Are there animals in Heaven?”

“If they're good. You just have to be good, then you can go.”

Marian thought about the elephant sitting on a cloud, and she smiled, but Tom wasn't smiling, he had a serious face, even kind of sad. “What's the matter?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

She leaned against him, and then he smiled.

The sun lit up the lilies her mom had planted along the fence. There was grass growing in with them. Her mom always said grass belonged on the lawn. When it grew where the flowers were, it needed to be pulled out so the flowers could get big. Marian knew how to do that. Maybe later she would, maybe after lunch. She wasn't less sad when she thought about her mom now, or less lonely. But she hadn't known she was scared until now. Now that Tom had told her about Heaven, she thought she might not be scared anymore.

“Are you sure?” she asked Tom, one more time.

Tom nodded and told her he was sure.



That was how it used to be. God had thought about everything, and even the things the grown-ups couldn't make better, God had planned out. Everything was under control even if you didn't understand it. Even if you didn't like it, there was a reason.

Marian still believed in God. She still believed, she tried her hardest to believe, that the world was unfolding according to His plan. She had always done her best to try to understand her part in that plan. The work she had made her life—MANY, her volunteer work, the boards on which she served, and now, God help her, the McCaffery Fund—was the way she tried to follow the path God had chosen for her.

She'd done this although, from the night Jack died, that path—always so bright before, so straight and wide—had twisted and darkened, plunging into thickets, thorns, and shadows. She'd kept on following, growing more determined as the way became more difficult: as Markie died, and Jimmy left her, and she moved away from Pleasant Hills.

On September 11, the path had vanished altogether. Still she'd gone on blindly, hoping to break into a clearing and find it again, shining ahead. And now with no path to guide her, she stood on the sidewalk in Pleasant Hills with Tom, stalked by a terrifying truth.



“Markie,” she said to Tom. It had gotten cooler while they stood, facing each other, and she shivered. “He wanted to save somebody?”

Tom nodded.

“How?” And also she meant, From what?

Tom said, “It was Markie's fault that Jack was so pissed off. It was his fault, everything that happened, Markie said. He said if anyone even knew Jimmy was there, just if he was even there, he'd get kicked off the Job.”

Off the Job. Out of the department. If Jimmy got in trouble, they wouldn't let him be a fireman. That would have been like not letting him breathe.

“And me,” Tom said, “who I was, if they found me there, they'd have thrown a party.”

Tom looked down. Marian suddenly wanted to take him in her arms, to hold him and say, Who you were, Tom, not who you are. But she couldn't move.

“Markie said he wanted to be the one. No way Markie was taking this fall, Jimmy said, he could forget that. Markie had a wife and kid. A manslaughter sentence, it was years.

“Markie said, No, not manslaughter, he'd tell them Jack was shooting, they'd see it was self-defense, he'd get off.

“But not from the gun, I told them. The gun wasn't licensed, there was no way out of the gun.

“But that could be a good thing. It could give the cops something to convict Markie on, so they'd look good. And it would be a short sentence. Maybe even no jail time, a guy like Markie.”

A vision flashed in front of Marian, so complete and real it stopped her breath: how it would be if Markie hadn't gone to jail. He and Sally would have a house, maybe right on this street; close, anyway, to where she and Jimmy lived. She'd have watched from the kitchen window as her kids, hers and Jimmy's, grew up playing with Kevin and his red-haired brothers and sisters in each other's backyards. With Tom and Vicky's kids, too, Tom and Vicky probably never breaking up because if Markie hadn't gone to jail, hadn't died, the world would not have changed. Everyone would miss Jack, but Jack would have gone away anyway, to Atlanta, someplace, Jack wouldn't have been one of them now, no matter what.

“You couldn't—you couldn't have just run away?” Why was she asking Tom that? What did it matter what they could have done? And that would have been wrong, so wrong. But the beautiful world of her vision was fading, and she grasped for it. “Couldn't you all just pretend you weren't there? Why did anyone have to know?”

“Because it was Jack. The cops would've thought some Molloy-Spano thing was going on. They'd have leaned on everyone. They'd have found witnesses who saw the four of us together, they'd have dug up evidence. It would have all come out, that we were there. No, someone had to step up, to stop any of that.”

“And you decided it would be Markie.”

“It was what Markie wanted. The way we talked about it, in the end that's how it went down, except Constantine couldn't get him out of doing jail time, but the sentence was short.”

“Did he know?” Marian whispered. “Did Phil know it wasn't Markie?”

“I don't think he bought the whole thing, but Markie never changed his story.” Tom looked across the street, to a white house, its windows dark. Marian couldn't remember who lived there. “It was a stupid prison fight,” Tom said softly. “It all worked so well, and then that.”

Marian looked at Tom in the streetlit night but didn't see him. She saw instead Jimmy's face turning white as he listened on the phone, heard him asking, What? What? as though the person on the other end were babbling. She saw Jimmy's eyes when he slipped the receiver down and stood there empty-handed. His eyes terrified her. They looked as though they had seen something he wanted very very much, watched it vanish away.

Tom put his arm around Marian's shoulders. “You're so cold,” he said. “Come on.” Marian didn't think she could move. But she was surprised and grateful to find that her immobility could not withstand Tom's decision that they should walk.

They stepped over tree roots that had years ago tilted the sidewalks up. They turned left at this corner and right at that, and now Marian saw that the house at the end of the block was Tom's. Tom's new house. No, that was silly. Tom had lived here for thirteen years.

With his arm still around Marian, Tom took out his keys. They jingled as he unlocked the door, and they clinked when he dropped them on the shelf. He stepped aside for her to go before him, pressing his hand lightly on her back to guide her to the kitchen. “I'll make coffee,” he said. “Then I'll take you home.”

“I can take the ferry.” It was a long drive to her loft from here. Especially now, with so many streets and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel still closed. The bridge, the expressway, another bridge, north on the East Side, across Manhattan, south on the West Side. Why should Tom have to do that? The ferry, which she could take alone, was much more direct.

Tom's mouth turned up at the corner. “Not in your condition.”

I'm in a condition? Marian was surprised. Had she had too much to drink? Could that explain the feeling she had that the ground was shifting, that dark, unexplained things were happening just beyond where she could see?

She watched Tom as he reached into the cabinet for the can of coffee, watched him spoon grounds into the basket. She loved the smell of ground coffee. She inhaled deeply; he looked up and caught her at it, and they both smiled. Why had Tom never remarried? Marian wondered while he ran water into the pot, while he poured it right out again into the machine. Or why hadn't Vicky? Or Marian's dad? Or, for that matter, after Jimmy left her, why hadn't she ever married at all? Why the crowded days, the busy evenings, the travel and concerts and meals and all the young men, no house, no garden, no pets, no children, nothing of the life she'd been sure she'd have when she was lying awake in the basement apartment in the Cooleys' house and listening to the beat of Jimmy's heart?

The coffeemaker began to gurgle.

Tom took two mugs from the drainboard, from the refrigerator a quart of milk. The milk was for her: Tom always remembered things about you. Steam rose from the coffee as he poured it from the pot. He glanced at her and smiled again, that smile that said every smart thing Tom Molloy did was partly yours and that seeing you was the best thing that had happened to him all day.

Marian smiled back.

How blue his eyes were.