Absent Friends

toward the conference room.

Midmorning, Laura standing at the ferry's front rail, watching the hills on Staten Island become larger and clearer. A beautiful day. Another beautiful day.

Laura was headed out to one of Eddie Spano's construction sites, the address he'd given her. According to Jesselson, Spano was connected to more than a dozen Staten Island businesses, all of them dirty or, if clean, fronts for dirty ones. “Spano? Hands-on. A headquarters-in-the-saddle type,” Jesselson had told her.

“This place,” Laura asked, “where he told me to come. Harry went there. What's it like?”

“His project du jour. Luxury development. Chapel Pointe.”

What chapel? Laura wondered. And when her cab left her at the gate in a chain-link fence around acres of mud in the center of Staten Island, as far from the water in every direction as you could get, she also wondered, What pointe?

Laura had not met Eddie Spano. Her one conversation with him had been by phone. Harry, though, had been to Chapel Pointe and—just a week ago? in her last lifetime?—had described the place to her.

“Very biblical,” Harry had said, raising his gin bottle high above his glass to make a dramatic waterfall. “‘Every valley shall be exalted and every hill made low.' Also every tree chopped down and every blade of grass bulldozed into eternity. Thus shall the dwellings of men be created. They may be luxurious, but I promise you, when our Mr. Spano's Townhomes at Chapel Pointe are finished, they will be ugly.” He took a drink. “And his coffee's bad.”

“So's the Tribune's.”

“The Tribune”—Harry had wagged his finger at her severely—“is not Italian. It has no cultural responsibility to serve drinkable coffee.”

“You're in a good mood.” Laura had sidled over to him, kissed him, gin and all.

He had kissed her back but then said, “To the contrary. I have work to do.”

“Can't it wait?”

“The man who loves you would be only too happy to let it wait. However, the man you love had better get back to work.”

“They're the same man.”

“No,” Harry said softly. “I think not.”

And Harry, glass in one hand, bottle in the other, had taken himself to his desk to work on his story, the work Laura had been so sure was the right thing for him to do.

The construction trailers belligerently displayed World Trade Center posters, American flags, patriotic bumper stickers. God Bless America. United We Stand. These Colors Don't Run.

Laura clomped across plywood sheets laid over the mud, followed by the appraising territorial stares of dirt- streaked men in hard hats.

In Lower Manhattan men just like these were heroes now. They were given thumbs-up signs and bottles of water, flowers and applause as they rode in pickup trucks or wearily walked away from Ground Zero, after a day or a night—the work on the site was around the clock—spent burning through twisted steel columns and clawing with backhoes at chunks of concrete, moving the gigantic bulk of the rubble aside so the inch by inch search for the lost could go on.

The Tribune had run stories, and would run more, about these men. The nobility of manual labor. The courage and dedication of the workers who climbed the tangled, smoking wreckage. The drained and driven men who slept on church pews and ate at the tent they called the Taj Mahal, who asked for extra shifts and objected, refused, when ordered to take a day off, ordered to go home. Rescue workers, they were still called, though there was no one to rescue anymore, there was no one to save.

Laura stopped in the sunlight to study Chapel Pointe. She watched the rumbling earth movers, gazed at the wooden homes-to-be rising against the hard blue sky. She smelled sawdust and mud, heard the percussion of hammers, the whine of drills; and was caught off guard by an emotion she hardly dared look at straight-on. In front of her were things being built. Built. Not dismantled, bucket of dust by chunk of concrete, not untangled, uncompounded, lifted and removed, not disassembled but created. Yes, they were ugly. That didn't matter. What mattered was that the way they were was the way they were intended to be.

Hope. Laura, whose religion had always been truth, whose prayers were always words, named what she was feeling and then caught her breath. She waited for horror and fear, despair and loneliness and anger, to flood her heart and drown this once-familiar, lately unknown sensation. It didn't happen. Hope shrank and retreated, but remained: glowing, she thought, in an eerie, hypnotic way, like a light underwater. Laura, amazed, walked tentatively forward, seeing something she'd thought she'd never see again: possibility.

She squinted in the sun, eager to move. Eager to finish this work. She scanned the trailers for the one that belonged to the Chapel Pointe Development Corp. She climbed its stairs and knocked on its door. Her headache had started, but that was good. Now she'd speak to Eddie Spano.

Now she'd find the truth.

MARIAN'S STORY

Chapter 15

A Hundred Circling Camps

November 1, 2001

In the sun-drenched silence of Sally's kitchen Marian tried to find a way to say what she had come for, some way better than she had planned. But there was no good way.