The Submission - Amy Waldman [26]
Nearly two years later, the attack site was a clean-swept plain. Across the river in Brooklyn, the Gallagher house hummed like a campaign headquarters. Ten members of Sean’s family and as many of his Memorial Support Committee were crammed around the table, all its Thanksgiving leaves in use. Copies of the Post splayed under legal pads and two laptop computers. The poster board had been hauled out, the Marks-A-Lot marshaled for duty. Sean’s mother, Eileen, and his three sisters cleared empty plates and refilled coffee cups with grim efficiency.
Frank, Sean’s father, was on the phone with a reporter: “Yes, we plan to fight this until our last breath. What? No, sir, this is not Islamophobia. Because phobia means fear and I’m not afraid of them. You can print my address in your newspaper so they can come find me.” A pause. “They killed my son. Is that reason enough for you? And I don’t want one of their names over his grave.” Another pause. “Yes, we found his body. Yes, we buried him in a graveyard. Jeez, you’re really splitting hairs here. It’s the spot where he died, okay? It’s supposed to be his memorial, not theirs. Is there anything else? I’ve got a long line of calls to take …”
A voice from below: “You heard anything, Sean?” Mike Crandall was stretched out on the floor, his back having given out again. Retired from the fire department, he never missed a meeting, although sometimes Sean wished he would. His committee was a motley crew of former firefighters, along with the fathers of dead ones.
“Nothing,” Sean said. He hated to say it. He was supposed to be the one with the lines into the governor’s office, to Claire Burwell. That those lines had gone dead convinced him, suspicious of power by nature, that the story was true, and to his shame this relieved him. A Muslim gaining control of the memorial was the worst possible thing that could happen—and exactly the rudder Sean, lately lacking one, needed. Catastrophe, he had learned, summoned his best self. In its absence he faltered.
The decade prior to the attack had been a herky-jerky improvisation, a man lurching wildly through the white space of adult life. Each bad choice fed off the last. He cut up in school, dropped out of junior college. Absent other options, he started a handyman business. He drank because he hated bending beneath the sinks of people he’d grown up with. And because he liked to drink. He married because he was too tanked to think straight, then fell out with his parents over his marriage.
Five months before the attack, Sean got a little sloppy, a little loud, over dinner at Patrick’s, or maybe he was lit when he arrived. He roared about their parents’ dislike of his wife, Irina; he cursed profusely, creatively, when he dropped a bowl of soup. A stony Patrick pocketed his car keys and drove him home, and when Sean went to retrieve his beat-up Grand Am the next day, Patrick intercepted him outside and told him not to come around for a while. “You can’t just expect people’s respect,” Patrick said, by way of saying Sean had lost his. To this day Patrick’s three children treated him with the politeness of fear.
On that insultingly beautiful morning, though, Sean’s first thought was of Patrick, whose engine company wasn’t far from the site. Sean raced to his parents’ house, trying not to be hurt that they seemed surprised to see him, then went with his father to look for Patrick.