Absent Friends

Marian had never permitted herself the luxury of shrinking from difficult duties. She sipped her tea and she said, “Jimmy.” Her voice shocked her; it boomed in the silence, was harsh in the sunlight. She'd meant to speak softly; she'd thought she had. She went on before one of the many reasons not to go on could find her. “Jimmy left papers. Something he'd written.”

Sally nodded. “That's what the Tribune says. Do you think he did?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think is in them?”

Marian said, “The truth.”

Kevin's head snapped her way, and his eyes locked on Marian's.

Marian met them and saw there a storm that she had never seen before. Oh my God, she thought, wanting to look away and finding she could not. Oh my God. He knows.

“The truth?” Sally said. “About the money?”

The cozy sunlight pouring into Sally's kitchen, the smell of tea and toast and the presence of two people she had always loved: these things should have made Marian feel embraced. At home, and safe. Before, they always had. But now, locked onto Kevin's eyes, she had a sense she was stumbling, directionless, through smoking, twisted ruins.

With difficulty, she said, “And more.” She answered Sally without looking away from Kevin, because she could not.

Kevin could have held Marian there, staring into her eyes, as long as he wanted, all day, all night, there would have been nothing she could do. But instead he broke his grip. He flung the newspaper onto the counter and went back to his eggs, jabbing the yolks with toast, spearing the whites with a fork as though this was something they deserved.

“What more?” Sally asked. “What more?”

“Whatever was going on—” Marian had to pause, to force her ragged heart to slow. To cover this need she sipped her tea. Chamomile, a common weed that flourished in cold dry air. Its fragrant white flowers blanketed alpine meadows in Switzerland, whose mountains were famously its source; but Marian, attending a conference in Anchorage a few years earlier, had come upon a miniature forest of it growing through the cracked, oil-spattered asphalt of a parking lot.

“I think,” Marian said, “I think something happened back then that we still don't know. Maybe you're right about the money, Sally. But whatever was going on, it's clear that”—tread carefully, Marian— “that Phil wasn't the only person hiding something. Jimmy was, too. No, Kevin, let me go on.”

Kevin had begun, “Aunt Marian—” but Marian was suddenly using her conference-table voice, and like most people who heard it, he stopped midsentence.

“I don't care what happens to Phil—I'm sorry, but you guys know how I feel—but Jimmy's reputation is something else.” She shot Kevin a look; a lifetime of meetings had honed her instinct for impending interruptions and how to quash them. “Whatever happened back then, maybe it was what we always thought, and maybe it was something different. If it was something Jimmy . . . something he felt bad about, then it seems to me he spent a lot of money and a lot of his life making up for it.”

“Wait,” said Sally. Marian heard a world of uncertainty in that one word. “You can't believe the money came from Jimmy. . . ?”

“Sally?” Oh God, Marian thought, why do I have to do this? “Sally, it did.”

Sally stared. “What are you—”

“Phil told me.”

A pause. “Phil?” Sally spoke Phil's name as though it were a word whose meaning had changed without warning. “Phil told you?”

“I'm sorry, honey. God, I'm sorry. That's what he said.” Marian put her hand over Sally's. “From Jimmy. All these years.”

“But he—I don't believe it.”

“I don't know,” Marian said helplessly, “whether it's true. But it's what he said.”

“To the reporter? Phil told him that?”

“He says not. He says he never told anyone but me.”

“Why . . .”

“Why did he tell me? I got the feeling he wanted me to help make it all right with you.”

Sally was shaking her head, back and forth, back and forth. “It's just not true.”

“Maybe not,” said Marian. “Maybe it isn't. But, Sal? Phil and Jimmy, they didn't like each other, but they got together, lots of times, over the years. Why?”

“Aunt Marian?” Kevin's voice was insistent, angry. “You can't be saying you believe that?” With that he stabbed a finger at the Tribune, at the serpent-filled world of distortions and half-truths and real truths crowded into a two-inch-wide column of type.

Marian shook her head. Not that. She was not taken in by that. That was manufactured, a Frankenstein monster cobbled out of whatever fragments of truth a reporter had dug out of the smoking rubble. Salamanders, she thought. Weren't those the lizards that rose mythically from fire, indestructible, crawling out of the ashes when all else had been consumed? Yes, salamanders. The old firehouses sometimes had them carved on the beams above the doors. Engine 168 had them; Jimmy had shown her.

Marian could hear that salamander truth hissing now. She forced herself to speak above it. “What they're