Unrevealed

insensitive. But why are you here?”
    “I needed you to hear my story. We’re anonymous at the meetings. But I wanted you to know about me and what happened to Marge. I’ve never told anyone about it.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “I’m not. They tell us at AA to make amends for past wrongs. To face people you’ve hurt and let them know that you weren’t thinking clearly when you were using and that,” she choked on her tears, “that I shouldn’t have let Marge die.”
    “But you didn’t have any control over that. Marge called Frank from the tower. Not you.”
    “What I mean is I should have helped her more. I should have believed in her more. I should have filled her up with hope instead of…” Her thoughts drifted.
    “Instead of what?”
    “Making her think she wasn’t worth saving!”
    And that, I decided, was why Ellen looked like she was fifty. She and her sister obviously had a falling-out, with
probably minimal contact toward the end of Marge’s life. Although, I recalled, Ellen said she did talk to her a few days prior to the job interview. I ruminated on it and deduced that the inevitable guilt and all the what-if’s had flooded Ellen’s head for six painful years. At that moment, I realized that Ellen wasn’t talking to me because she needed a PI. Ellen needed someone to confess to. I was a priest and Ellen was confessing her sins. I took a breath and did my best to assume the role. “So, if Marge was alive today, what do you think she’d be doing?”
    Ellen looked at me with soulful eyes. “She’d be clean and sober. I’d make sure of that. She’d still be searching but she’d be trying to get her life together. She’d be…reaching out to people, like I’m reaching out to you.” Ellen considered the question further. “Frank wouldn’t be dead either.”
    “How’s that possible? He died in a car crash.”
    Ellen’s gaze moved from me to the side. “Well, after Marge died, Frank got preoccupied a lot. His mind wandered and, well, her death impacted him. I’m sure that’s why he wasn’t paying attention when he slid on the ice.”
    “Where’d he live?”
    “Vermont.” Ellen smiled at a pleasant memory. “He was an award-winning photographer .” She said that to me almost like she wanted to make damn sure I heard her. Tears welled in her eyes. “So, if Frank wasn’t dead and Marge was alive and clean and sober, I know he would be so proud of her. So proud. And he’d know that all those late-night phone calls with her finally paid off and that she was figuring out that she did deserve to have a good life.” Ellen looked at me with near desperation. “I wish to God Frank could know that, Jane. It’d mean the world to me.”

    “If there’s a heaven, Ellen, then they’re together and he knows how much he helped Marge.” Shit, now I really did sound like a goddamn priest.
    “Right,” she whispered, as if she didn’t believe that Marge and Frank were shooting the breeze in the afterlife. “I just wish…”
    “What?”
    She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. “I just wish.”
    It was an odd statement, but I let it go. Ellen closed the blue binder and put it back in her bag. “Thank you for listening to me.” She squashed out the spent cigarette in my ashtray.
    “Sure.”
    “What do I owe you?”
    “Nothing.”
    Ellen looked a bit shocked. “Wow. Thank you.” She got up and walked toward the door, let out a nervous long breath and then turned back to me. “What if she got out? What if she walked away from the towers and kept walking? What if she’s out there, scared to death and wishing she could make everything right?”
    Ellen sounded delusional at that point. But I was also sure that the same thought had crossed the minds of others who lost family on 9/11, since they never saw their loved one’s body and had closure. For them and for Ellen, there was the comforting fantasy that somehow their nearest and dearest were out there, lost but alive.
    She stared at me, and it seemed she was trying to get me to understand something with her mournful gaze. But all I could see then was regret and sorrow.

    I couldn’t shake Ellen’s visit for five days. There was something about her that haunted me. I picked up the AA member phone list once with the idea of calling her but she wasn’t on it. Maybe she didn’t have a phone, although that would complicate her life when she had to reach her sponsor. But sponsors certainly weren’t